Category: Google

The value proposition of unplanned social interactions….

The Blogosphere remains in its extended excitable state over the announcement from Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer on working from home (for background see here). The conventional wisdom on the reasoning behind her edict lies in the notion that somehow physical proximity among co-workers promotes productivity–a meme that is also central to the Bell Labs myth, recently chronicled expertly by Jon Gertner in his book, the Idea Factory: Bell Labs and The Great Age of American Innovation.

Today, this idea of a creative soup coming out of random physical human interactions was taken a step further in John Kay’s FT opinion piece, where he posits that New York City’s greatness comes as a result of the density of those human face-to-face moments.

In science, the empirical evidence does seem to support this notion of synergies arising out of researchers working closely in the same space. The entire village of Woods Hole, with its illustrious contributions to biological discovery over the last century bear witness to this idea. The Bethesda intramural campus of the National Institutes of Health and the relatively new Janelia Farm Campus of HHMI also have a similar cultural norms embedded in their scientific DNA.

And certainly the same is true for George Mason’s Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study. Our beautiful facility’s great room was designed with the goal of bringing our diverse scientific staff together. Many of the break out spaces throughout the Institute have the same idea in mind, although they are certainly less formal. The new Phase III addition of the Institute will take this notion even further.

From a theoretical standpoint, the key insights that lead to consequential scientific discovery are usually serendipitous. They arise, often not from a deductive logical progression, but rather from clues distributed like a trail of breadcrumbs. Those clues, many times, come from the laboratories of other investigators–and when those laboratories are physically close, the frequency of “clue exchange” goes way up. The analogy of genetic recombination seems particularly appropriate when thinking about the advantages of such unintended scientific sociality.

On the other hand, I am not convinced that if you build it, they will come. There needs to be a scientific culture which explicitly rewards such exchanges and both the inputs and outputs of such a scientific system need to be measured–I’m convinced this was one of Bell Lab’s secrets. Here at Krasnow, we are working to reify the reward-side of that equation.

Top down directives of the type Ms. Mayer gave at Yahoo seem to be less successful in science. At least one of our sister scientific centers existed for years with the rule that all scientific staff were required to dine with one another under the watchful eye of the famous founder. That place is now winding down with not so much to show for the luncheon kabuki theater.

Instead, what seems to work, is an enjoyable (and dense) workplace environment that allows for lots of unstructured work experimentation in combination with unstructured play. Google’s campus jumps to mind in this respect, but also too Woods Hole (again). Under these circumstances, there are lots of opportunities to sample the breadcrumbs of ones colleagues…

So to sum up: yes physical proximity is good, but only if it happens organically from the bottom up. I’m skeptical about the Yahoo story…

Science: hobby for the wealthy?

That’s what it was often in the 19th century before public funding took root. And that’s what it may be again if such funding collapses in the future. Docked at the WHOI pier this morning is this research vessel owned by the Schmidt Ocean Institute…as in Eric Schmidt of Google fame. Typically this class of research vessel would have been paid for by a government research agency such as the National Science Foundation–no longer. The RV Falkor is perhaps a window into the future of science: back to the future.

Google: the non-technology company

The debate between Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt is summarized over at Marginal Revolution. Alex’s conclusion is that Google’s cash hording is the best evidence there is for The Great Stagnation. I see it as more as evidence that Google has no faith in the stability of the global economy–it’s best to hoard cash if you think the deluge is almost upon us….

Money quote:

PETER THIEL: …Google is a great company.  It has 30,000 people, or 20,000, whatever the number is.  They have pretty safe jobs.  On the other hand, Google also has 30, 40, 50 billion in cash.  It has no idea how to invest that money in technology effectively.  So, it prefers getting zero percent interest from Mr. Bernanke, effectively the cash sort of gets burned away over time through inflation, because there are no ideas that Google has how to spend money.

Cultural neuroscience

This is a potentially very controversial term that I first learned about in Singapore, about a year ago. The notion is that culture has the ability to affect our neurobiology. This is not so far off from the question Nicholas Carr as asking a bit back–can Google make us stupid? Clearly, there’s a valid line of research on adult brain plasticity driven by our environment. My own research and that of many other colleagues completely supports this idea.

The above intriguing idea is whether a culture, in the anthropological sense, has the ability to influence brain connectivity above the between- and within-subject variability of a population?

Putting it another way, given the fact that any two of us (from the same culture) have differently wired brains, can our shared culture influence both of our brains in some measurable way that rises above the threshold of natural variance in the cultural group to which we both belong?

My gut sense is no. But as far as I can tell, there is no data out there to make a scientific case upon, one way or the other.

Note above all, that this is not the same question of whether population genetics can influence brains. Although without a doubt culture is an emergent of many brains, and the instruction manual for constructing those brains is in our genes.

But to learn more, next June in Ann Arbor….

Pearson and Google taking on Blackboard?

From the Chronicle, here. As I mentioned in a recent post, I’m getting geared up to use Facebook for the course I’m teaching next semester. But these two companies collaborating are going to present a real challenge to Blackboard.

From my viewpoint, the key advantage to using Facebook to teach is that there is virtually no learning curve for your undergraduate students and very little for faculty.

But we’ll see….

Fear of Google

From the London Review of Books, a review by Daniel Soar, here.

Money quote:

Of course, the better it gets at what it does the more money it makes, and the more money it makes the more data it gathers and the better it gets at what it does – an example of the kind of win-win feedback loop Google specialises in – but what’s surprising is that there is no obvious end to the process.