January 19, 2008 – 11:06 am
Scientific American has finally posted my Science 2.0 story on its Web site. As the introduction explains, this is actually an experiment in getting reader feedback well before the print version appears. So I hope you will all take advantage of that opportunity. And I hope you will also publicize the link as widely as [...]
January 2, 2008 – 5:40 pm
Big changes in the offing: Starting February 4 I will be joining Nature magazine as their editorial editor, working out of the Washington, DC, office. I.e., I’ll be the guy in charge of those two pages of official Nature opinion in the front of the magazine (along with Philip Campbell, the editor-in-chief), as well as [...]
December 10, 2007 – 11:52 am
Maybe it’s because I have the subject of innovation on the brain these days, but I couldn’t help thinking about it as I read Atul Gawande’s article The Checklist in the December 10 issue of the New Yorker. Because Gawande is a practicing surgeon, as well as an amazingly gifted writer, he has always been [...]
November 8, 2007 – 3:39 pm
The Urban Institute recently released the report by Lindsay Lowell and Hal Salzman that I mentioned in my post on challenges to conventional wisdom on innovation—the one claiming that all the “gathering storm” concern about a declining U.S. science and engineering workforce is way overblown. Their title, appropriately enough, is “Into the Eye of the [...]
November 7, 2007 – 9:36 pm
One of the most frustrating things about our relentlessly partisan debate over health care is that the proposals on every side are so-linear. Are drugs too expensive, and do too many people lack insurance? Subsidize them. Are malpractice awards spiraling out of control? Cap them. Is the total cost of health care growing faster than [...]
November 2, 2007 – 12:21 pm
A couple of newspaper items caught my eye this week, both making the point that culture matters-whether we’re talking about scientific creativity, economic competitiveness, the spread (or non-spread) of democracy, or almost anything else.
You’d think this point would be blazingly obvious to everybody, but apparently not. On the left, it regularly gets denounced as being [...]
October 29, 2007 – 9:48 am
Last week I had another conversation about innovation with my editor friend—the same editor who had asked me earlier about challenges to the conventional wisdom in innovation policy. She pointed out that it’s very easy for the magazine to get articles and op-eds that diagnose the problems with our innovation system, but much harder to [...]
October 19, 2007 – 10:18 am
In response to yesterday’s post on challenging the conventional wisdom about innovation, with particular reference to the third point about the importance of “intangibles,” Phil Auerswald from the George Mason University School of Public Policy sent me the latest issue of the journal Innovations, which he co-edits. The theme of this issue is collaborative innovation [...]
October 18, 2007 – 10:01 am
I was recently chatting about innovation with an editor friend of mine, and she asked me what unexplored questions I thought should be addressed.
Well, I don’t know how “unexplored” they are, but here are the three questions I sent her:
October 11, 2007 – 12:21 pm
I’ve just gotten back from the town of Almen in The Netherlands, where I attended a symposium held by the Institute Para Limes: a new organization that is hoping to establish itself as a European counterpart of the Santa Fe Institute in the United States. (I described the founding of SFI at great length [...]
A narrative history of personal computing and the Internet.
The story of the Santa Fe Institute and the emerging science of complex adaptive systems.
My first book—a study of artificial intelligence.
