Technology review: 大发明家谈发明之道

兹韦尔（Ray Kurzweil）
13/10/2008

本文作者库兹韦尔（Ray Kurzweil）曾发明第一种供盲人使用的阅读机、第一种词汇量庞大的商用语音识别软件及许多种其他技术。他指出，对发明家来说，今天的一切事物都在迅速变化。他在本文中提出了一些建议，指点同行如何赶上时势。

常常有人问我，怎样才可以成为一位成功的发明家。我从事发明30 多年，已明白了一些道理：从事发明颇象玩冲浪游戏，你必须在适当的时间冲上浪头。这就是我热中于研究科技趋势的理由。现在我有一组研究人员负责收集各种不同科技的数据，而我则利用数据制造数学模型，用来显示科技在不同的领域中如何发展。从这些模型可以看出，创新本身的速度每10 年增快一倍。

当一种技术的飞速发展期渐近尾声时，我们能在适当的时候发明出另一种新技术至关重要。你必须让你的发明着眼于未来的世界，而不是你的研究项目开展时的世界。将来你的发明问世时，这个世界肯定不再是今天的模样了。到时候一切都已经改变，市场需求、竞争、分销渠道、研发工具和辅助技术等都会不同了。为了能在适当的时间发明，首先必须了解一种发明的整个生命周期。一种技术的发展过程可以分为7 个阶段：设想、发明、发展、成熟、出现虚假的威胁、过时、成为古董。必须在几个关键阶段（即设想、发明、发展和成熟阶段）做得较好，一项发明才可能广受欢迎，最终演变为成功的产品。

发明的生命周期

在设想阶段，有助于发明出新技术的因素已基本具备，甚至有些设想还可能包括了运作情况和目标，但新技术还有待发明。例如，达芬奇（Leonardo da Vinci）曾描述过飞行机器，但我们不会认为他是飞机的发明者。我们的社会特别称颂发明，然而发明阶段仅仅具有承前启后的作用。发明家必须兼具科学知识和解决实际问题的技巧。显然，他们还必须坚强不屈。例如，爱迪生（Thomas Edison）在找到令人满意的灯泡灯丝之前，曾试验过几千种材料。此外，就象我说过的那样，发明家必须善于审时度势，并具备推销技巧来吸引必需的资源，其中包括投资、合作者、客户等。

第三个阶段是发展。一项新发明刚问世时，通常只是笨拙且缺乏实用价值的装置。如果要以莱特兄弟（Wright brothers）所发明的飞机为中心发展出一套有效的商业模式将会十分困难。飞机经过许多改进之后，我们才真正进入航空时代。

发展阶段之后是成熟阶段。在一种技术的整个生命周期中，这一阶段占据了大部分时间。一种新技术进入这个阶段之后，它已成为人们日常生活中不可缺少的部分，而且看起来似乎永远不可能被其他技术取代。不过，一种技术普及之后，它总会受到攻击，这就形成了第五个阶段，即出现虚假的威胁。这时，一种更新的、具有潜在威胁的技术会来势汹汹，似乎很可能取代原有的技术。与旧技术相比，尽管新技术在某些方面略胜一筹，但几乎毫无例外地会发现它总是缺少了某些突出且关键的特点。结果，新技术失败了，徒然促使那些在技术方面的守旧者更加确信旧秩序将能永世无穷。

但随着时间的流逝，新一代发明家找到了方法来弥补新技术的缺点，从而将旧技术推入了过时阶段。在整个生命周期中，过时阶段占了5%～10%。一种技术的最终结局就是成为古董。今天的马和马车、手动打字机等都是例子，而音乐CD 很快就会步其后尘。

我曾经参与发明一种新技术来取代另一种已成熟了很久的技术：钢琴。钢琴的前身是羽管键琴（Harpsichord）。但音乐家对羽管键琴并不满意，因为它发出的声音在强度上没有变化。于是，意大利人克利斯托弗利（Bartolomeo Cristofori）发明了一种能做到这一点的琴。他将这种琴叫做“Gravicembalo col piano e forte”（能发出弱音和强音的大键琴），简称“钢琴”（Piano）。起先钢琴并不普及，但经过改进之后，它终于在整个19 和20 世纪成为了西方人最喜爱的键盘乐器。

在20 世纪80 年代初期，电子钢琴成为虚假的威胁。电子钢琴有很多优点，例如不需要调音、能发出全套声音、自动伴奏等。但电子钢琴缺少了一个最重要的特点：真正的钢琴音。后来，通过使用先进的信号处理技术和模式识别技术弥补了这种缺陷。今天，电子钢琴的音质已经超越立式钢琴（这种钢琴曾在传统钢琴市场中居于主导地位）。如今电子钢琴销售量与日俱增，正渐渐主宰钢琴市场，传统钢琴的销售量则持续下降。

发明的3 个步骤

想成为一位成功的发明家，第一步是尝试预测你要发明的那种技术的生命周期，以及可能被你的发明取代的那些技术的生命周期。不过，在促进一种新技术的几个关键发展阶段时也必须注意到细节问题。关于推进这一过程的方法，我从自己的经验中总结出一些心得。

第一个心得是：大多数现代技术是跨学科的。例如，语音识别（我曾涉足的另一个领域）就涵盖了语音科学、声学、心理声学、信号处理技术、语言学和模式识别技术。

对于跨学科技术的发展来说，一个主要的障碍就是不同的学科往往使用不同的术语来代表同一个概念。美国数学家维纳（Norbert Wiener）在他写于1948 年的名著《控制论》（Cybernetics）中曾针对这个问题作出过一番评论：“科学工作有很多领域⋯⋯分别从纯粹数学、统计学、电机工程学和神经生理学等不同的方面进行探究⋯⋯每一个概念都在不同的小组中有不同的名字，有一项重要的工作重复做了三四次，另一项重要的工作则因为在某个领域中尚未得出结果而被耽误，其实，这些结果可能在另一领域中早已存在。”

在我的公司里，我们已经通过自创术语解决了这个问题，从而在实质上创造了新的跨学科领域。我们的目标是消除一种外界很普遍的做法，即不同的人以不同的方式描述同一事物，然后互相协调，慢慢找出一个人人同意的词语。自创术语还有一个好处，就是它有利于将工作保密，因为别人即使听到了我们讨论的问题，也无法明白我们在说些什么。我们将所有必需的学科知识灌输给团队里的每一位成员。而为了促进跨学科知识的交流并发掘解决问题的新方法，我们会作特别安排，例如将一个声学问题交给一位模式识别专家来解决，或者相反。

这带来了另一个关键问题：建立一支忠诚且充满热情的团队是很重要的。想要建立这样的团队，一个有效的方法就是选定某个能产生激励作用的目标。在我的发明生涯中，我一直通过选择一些有助于实现我的社会及文化目标的项目来设法做到这一点。在组织一支团队时，我除了重视团队成员的科技知识外，同样重视他们的个性及待人接物的技巧。

更重要的是，我设法招揽一些将受惠于我准备发明的那种技术的专家加入团队并成为主要成员。例如，我在20 世纪70 年代研发供盲人使用的阅读机时，聘请了美国全国盲人联盟（The National Federation of the Blind）的失明科学家和工程师。又如，我在20 世纪80 年代研发音乐合成技术时，要求团队里的每一位工程师都精通音乐。对于一种技术中的微妙问题，该技术的使用者会很敏感，而非使用者则无法察觉。

我根据这些心得并针对发明过程的开头部分在这里提供一个分为３个步骤的方案，相信它对独立的发明家及大公司的研发部门都会有所帮助。

第一步是编写宣传小册子。这可能不大容易。在这本小册子里，你必须列出发明本身具备的特点、好处和受益者。如果你的构想尚不完整，你会发觉你不可能把这本小册子完成。

第二步是利用小册子帮你招募未来的使用者。如果这些受益者并没有立即对你的计划产生兴趣，那么你可能走错路了。邀请他们参与发明，要是他们很需要某种技术，就让他们帮你发明出来吧。

最后，运用一点幻想力。坐下来，闭上眼睛，想象几年后你在演讲，细说你在发明新技术的过程中如何将那些大难题一一解决。你会说些什么？你必须说些什么？想好了，就开始工作吧。

库兹韦尔以他自己的发明为基础创建了9 家企业。美国国家杰出发明家纪念馆（The National Inventors Hall of Fame）已将他列入名人录

摘自：http://www.mittrchinese.com/zh/2008/1013/article_35.html

路透社:一心多用者一事无成

nucifera: At last, 大家可以把目光回到佛陀教育理所说的“戒、定、慧”。无戒不生定，无定慧不存。

另一方面，借此nucifera提出两个有待科学论证的hypothesis。第一，观赏/消费多媒体的总时间和个人心思状态混乱的程度成正比例关系。第二个人心思状态混乱的程度和控制情绪的能力成反比关系。

如果以上两个hypothesis都为真，我们就可以一窥新时代人类抗压性低和情绪控制能力低的一个重要原因：消费过多多媒体。

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By Clare Baldwin
AUGUST 24, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Multitaskers of media activities like watching YouTube, writing e-mail and talking on the phone are not very good at any of their tasks, according to a Stanford University report on Monday.

Researchers who published the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said the results had surprised them. They were looking for the secret to good media multitaskers but instead found broad-based incompetence.

“Heavy multitaskers are lousy at multitasking… The more you do it, the worse you get,” said Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass.

Compulsive media multitaskers are worse at focusing their attention, worse at organizing information, and worse at quickly switching between tasks, the Stanford scientists wrote.

After testing about 100 Stanford students, the scientists concluded that chronic media multitaskers have difficulty focusing and are not able to ignore irrelevant information.

Nass said that multitasking is becoming more widespread — some jobs require workers to keep an instant message window open — and the scientists were surprised at the results.

“We knew that multitasking was difficult from a cognitive perspective. We thought, ‘What’s this special ability that people have that allows them to multitask?’ … Rather than finding things that they were doing better, we found things they were doing worse,” Stanford symbolic systems professor Eyal Ophir said.

A bright side to such distraction may mean that the media multitaskers will be first to notice anything new, Ophir said.

(Reporting by Clare Baldwin; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

Yasmin Ahmad的Chocolate

Yasmin Ahmad的chocolate试图描写一种脆弱。这脆弱源于我们逃脱不了的现实。社会的现实，竞争的现实，或者说是生存的现实。

当那男生失魂地拿起小奶瓶，我们沐浴在温馨和安详中。在那短暂的时刻，我们人内心最高贵和真挚的情感少有地超越了现实；在那刻，我们忘记了自己的处境、自己的肤色。哦，还有对方的肤色。这不免使人想起马丁路德金的I have a dream：有一天黑人能牵着白人走进教堂。

一个人和另一个人相处，本不是一件复杂的事；一个人喜欢另一人，本是件简单的事；一个人爱上另一个人，这本是幸福的事。但是，严峻的现实，在爱和互信难得发芽没多久就把它们给全毁。

母亲的吆喝，还有接踵的心烦，是现实的归位。那刻终究太短暂，太脆弱。掷下那颗巧克力，这难道不是年少的主体就现实对真心的掠夺所表达的一种无声抗议？

NYTimes: A Doctor by Choice, a Businessman by Necessity

July 7, 2009
By SANDEEP JAUHAR, M.D.

To meet the expenses of my growing family, I recently started moonlighting at a private medical practice in Queens. On Saturday mornings, I drive past Chinese takeout places and storefronts advertising cheap divorces to a white-shingled office building in a middle-class neighborhood.

I often reflect on how different this job is from my regular one, at an academic medical center on Long Island. For it forces me, again and again, to think about how much money my practice is generating.

A patient comes in with chest pains. It is hard not to order a heart-stress test when the nuclear camera is in the next room. Palpitations? Get a Holter monitor — and throw in an echocardiogram for good measure. It is not easy to ignore reimbursement when prescribing tests, especially in a practice where nearly half the revenue goes to paying overhead.

Few people believed the recent pledge by leaders of the hospital, insurance and drug and device industries to cut billions of dollars in wasteful spending. We’ve heard it before. Without fundamental changes in health financing, this promise, like the ones before it, will be impossible to fulfill. What one person calls waste, another calls income.

It is doubtful that doctors and other medical professionals would voluntarily cut their own income (even if some of it is generated by profligate spending). Most doctors I know say they are not paid enough. Their practices are like cars on a hill with the parking brake on. Looking on, you don’t realize how much force is being applied just to maintain stasis.

I recently spoke with a friend who dropped out of medical school 20 years ago to pursue investment banking. Whenever we meet, he finds a way to congratulate me on what he considers my professional calling. He often wonders whether he should have stuck with medicine. Like many expatriates, he has idealistic notions of the world he left.

At our most recent meeting, we talked about the tumult on Wall Street. Like many bankers, he was worried about the future. “It is a good time to be a doctor,” he said yet again, as I recall. “I’d love a job where I didn’t have to constantly think about money.”

I didn’t bother to disillusion him, but the reality is that most doctors today, whether in academic or private practice, constantly have to think about money. Last January, Dr. Pamela Hartzband and Dr. Jerome Groopman, physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine that “price tags are being applied to every aspect of a doctor’s day, creating an acute awareness of costs and reimbursement.” And they added, “Today’s medical students are being inducted into a culture in which their profession is seen increasingly in financial terms.”

The rising commercialism, driven in part by increasing expenses and decreasing reimbursement, has obvious consequences for the public: ballooning costs, fraying of the traditional doctor-patient relationship. What is not so obvious is the harmful effects on doctors themselves. We were trained to think like caregivers, not businesspeople. The constant intrusion of the marketplace is creating serious and deepening anxiety in the profession.

Not long ago, a cardiology fellow who had been interviewing for jobs came to my office, clearly disillusioned. “I was naïve,” he said. “I never thought of medicine as a business. I thought we were in it to take care of patients. But I guess it is.”

I asked him how he felt about going into private practice. “I’ll be too busy vomiting for the first six months — I won’t have much time to think about it,” he replied.

Of course, there has always been a profit motive in medicine. Doctors who own their own imaging machines order more imaging tests; to take an example from my moonlighting work, a doctor who owns a scanner is seven times as likely as other doctors to refer a patient for a scan. In regions where there are more doctors, there is more per capita use of doctors’ services and testing. Supply often dictates demand.

But financial considerations have never been as prominent as they are today, probably because so many hospitals and doctors, especially in large metropolitan areas, are in financial trouble. More and more doctors are trying to sell their practices, or are negotiating with hospitals for jobs, equipment or financial aid.

At hospitals, uncompensated care is increasing as patients suffering from the economic downturn lose health insurance. Admissions and elective procedures — big moneymakers — are declining. Hospitals are cutting administrative costs, staff and services.

“More and more you’ll see people in medicine get M.B.A.’s,” a doctor told me at a seminar, in a prediction borne out in my experience. “We are in a total crisis, and I don’t know the answer.”

I must admit that part of me wants to see doctors master the business side of our profession. When I hear about executives at health companies getting tens of millions of dollars in bonuses, I am nauseated by the blatant profiteering. As a loyal member of my guild, I want to see doctors exert more control over our financial house.

And yet the consequences of this commercial consciousness are troubling. Among my colleagues I sense an emotional emptiness created by the relentless consideration of money. Most doctors went into medicine for intellectual stimulation or the desire to develop relationships with patients, not to maximize income. There is a palpable sense of grieving. We strove for so long, made so many sacrifices, and for what? In the end, for many, the job has become only that — a job.

Until I went into practice, I never had an interest in the business side of medicine. I sometimes yearn to be a resident or fellow again, discussing the intricacies of a case rather than worrying about the bottom line. “You need to learn a little of the private-practice mind-set,” a doctor friend recently advised me. “You can’t survive with your head in the clouds.”

But something fundamental is lost when doctors start thinking of medicine as a business. In their essay, Dr. Hartzband and Dr. Groopman talk about the erosion of collegiality, cooperation and teamwork when a marketplace environment takes hold in the hospital. “The balance has tipped toward market exchanges at the expense of medicine’s communal or social dimension,” they write.

How this battle plays out will determine to a great extent what medicine will look like in 20 years. This is about much more than dollars and cents. It is a battle for the soul of medicine.

Sandeep Jauhar is a cardiologist on Long Island and the author of the recent memoir “Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation.”

NYTimes: Testing Evolution’s Role in Finding a Mate

nucifera: 原来公主等待白马王子的降临，还真是场白日梦——科研如是说。

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July 7, 2009
By SARAH ARNQUIST

Scientists have long observed that women tend to be pickier than men when choosing a mate. The usual explanation is evolutionary: because women have a bigger investment in reproduction — they are the ones who have to endure pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding — they need to hedge their bets against selecting a dud to be the father.

In recent years, the emergence of speed dating has given psychologists, economists and political scientists new ways to test this and other hypotheses about mating. Because participants can be randomly assigned to groups and have no prior information about other participants, three-minute speed-dating sessions are about as close to a controlled experiment as researchers are likely to get.

Now, two scientists at Northwestern University have published an experiment that challenges the evolutionary hypothesis. The study by Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick was published last month in the journal Psychological Science.The experiment looked at speed-dating sessions to determine whether men or women were choosier. The answer, it turned out, was neither. Regardless of gender, people who were instructed to approach other daters were less selective — that is, they were more likely to ask to meet later for a date.

Dr. Finkel and Mr. Eastwick write that this does not mean men were just as selective as women. But the scientists suggest that the explanation for the gap lies in social conditioning rather than evolution.

By making the first move, a person gains confidence and then finds more people attractive, the theory goes. Culturally, men are expected to approach women more often, which may boost their confidence and make them less selective. Citing what social psychologists call the scarcity principle, Mr. Eastwick and Dr. Finkel write that “individuals tend to place less value on objects or opportunities that are plentiful than those that are rare.” By contrast, they say, women are accustomed to being approached, which may make them feel more desirable and thus more selective.

Scientists have also used speed-dating experiments to examine the tendency for people to mate with people like themselves. A 2006 paper by economists at the University of Essex in England analyzed data from 3,600 male and female speed daters to see if people selected mates with similar traits, like height and education, because that is what they prefer or because they are most likely to encounter them in the dating market.

The economists, Michèle Belot and Marco Francesconi, found that men’s preferences for occupation, height and smoking had little effect on whom they asked out. Those factors also did not matter to women, but age did.

In homogeneous environments, Dr. Belot and Dr. Francesconi wrote, people are more likely to marry others like themselves, while more diverse communities are likely to produce more varied pairings.

“Mating requires meeting,” they wrote. “The pool of potential partners shapes the type of people to whom subjects propose and ultimately with whom they form long-term relationships.”

People narrow their market opportunities, the economists suggested, by selecting for height, weight and age, which tend to be proxies for socioeconomic status.

So how does a person increase the odds of crossing paths with someone who matches his or her preferences? Maybe by tapping into social networks. In “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives,” a book to be published in September, Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, argue that dating is not a random process.

They cite a landmark 1992 Chicago sex survey of 3,432 adults ages 18 to 59, which found that 68 percent of married people in the survey reported meeting their spouse through a friend, family member or other mutual acquaintance.

“If you are single and you know 20 people reasonably well, and if each of them knows 20 other people, and each of them knows 20 other people,” Dr. Christakis and Dr. Fowler write, “then you are connected to 8,000 people who are three degrees away. And one of them is likely to be your future spouse.”

P. Krugman: That ’30s Show

From The New York Times
July 3, 2009

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Let’s do the math.

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.

And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?

Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.

So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.

So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.

Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.

There won’t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That’s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn’t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: “Where are the jobs?”

It’s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate “centrists,” who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed. I’d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.

And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.

It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)

Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.

So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.

Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.

What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.

So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.