Letter From Silicon Valley
09.11.06, 6:00 AM ET
BURLINGAME, CALIF. -Tim O’Reilly has invented a time machine. Not the H.G. Wells version, but an intellectual time shifter that briefly brings back some of the inventive magic of Silicon Valley’s past. Last month he offered me a ride. It was a vivid reminder of what made Silicon Valley great--and a tempting promise of things to come.
For the past 28 years, O’Reilly has run a privately held publishing and conference company located in Sebastopol, Calif., a 45-minute drive north of San Francisco. Many of the books published by O’Reilly are intensely geeky: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is among its top sellers. O’Reilly doesn’t care about becoming a media mogul. Instead, he continues to feed the old home-brew spirit of innovation, while providing savvy commentary on the state of techdom.
In 2003, O’Reilly kicked off a series of conferences, mischievously called “Foo Camps" (the name is a tribute both to programmers, for whom “foo” is a placeholder word like “whatchamacallit," and to himself, as in “Friends of O’Reilly"). The camps--which sometimes actually take place in an old apple orchard outside O'Reilly's Sebastopol woods--are purposely not about business plans and marketing proposals. That's where the time travel comes in: The gatherings are a throwback to Silicon Valley's early days, when it was populated by dreamers who reveled in building stuff and did only what they had to do to
pay the bills.
The Internet changed all that, raining so much money on the Valley that business plans washed away chip diagrams. But O’Reilly is still inspired by ideas, not cash. And so he’s made his Foo Camps a place for starting conversations, not generating business leads.
In August, O’Reilly, in conjunction with Nature magazine and with support from
SciFoo was held at the memorably indulgent Googleplex, in Mountain View, Calif., where the cafeteria is lavish, the bathrooms feature high-tech toilets with warm seats and nozzles for squirting water at delicate spots, and a glassed-in laundry room offers employees a chance to take a personal hygiene break.
Many of the SciFoo “campers” were the people that other conferences are built around: Bill Joy, co-founder of
O’Reilly’s team plopped a big whiteboard in a common area just outside the Google cafeteria and suggested that people sign up to give presentations on their work or host a session on a topic they find interesting. The board filled quickly with topics such as managing enormously complex datasets, fighting pandemic diseases, teaching science to children, building robots and studying the history of technology. Some sessions attracted dozens of people, others just a handful. In every case, however, I saw some of high-tech’s big names listening and brainstorming with people they had never met before the conference.
One researcher described the change in the way the World Health Organization tracks emerging potential epidemics, due in part to a tiny Canadian organization called Global Public Health Intelligence Network. Since the most effective way to derail an epidemic is to catch it early, the WHO relies on countries to report the health trends they’ve detected within in their own borders. But GPHIN has sped up detection enormously by also sifting stories and Web sites from global media sources, using carefully chosen keywords. Stories that use the term “dead birds” and “dead nurses," for instance, may indicate an outbreak of avian flu.
Now imagine expanding that kind of Internet trolling to include many more sources, starting with personal blogs. What would researchers see? Who should get the findings? How reliable would they be? What if people tried to send out misleading information?
Another researcher proposed creating an even earlier flu warning system by using low-cost sensor chips to test for a thousand strains of different viruses. The chips could be put in health clinics around the world and the data could be fed into a central organization. Could that kind of mesh help researchers catch--and quash--epidemics? Again, who would get to see the data? What if it missed a virus?
In another conversation, researchers described projects that collect information from webs of tiny sensors, measuring everything from ocean currents to lightning strikes, and then plot the data on global maps, such as Google Earth. (For example, see Biltzortung.org for data on lightning strikes in Europe or Ogle Earth for a blog about using Google Earth maps.) What else could be mapped? Where else are people gathering data? What happens when databases are fused together--say, mapping demographic or income tax data onto local maps?
Getting nonscientists excited about science was another favorite topic. One intriguing approach is a new series of comic books, slated to come out early next year. Saul Griffith, an alum of the Media Lab at M.I.T., has been developing what he calls “HowToons,” an adventure series in which kids design cool gadgets. (See Instructables or check Amazon.com.) Griffith gives kids, with a bit of help from adults, step-by-step instructions on how to make cool gadgets, including marshmallow shooters and rocket ships. Will Griffith’s work inspire kids to detach themselves from computer monitors and head to the garage?
The conversations continued long into the evening. Future collaborations were forged; proposals began to germinate. Guessing what real change might come from such a meeting is harder than pinning down a cloud. But surely, without such conversations, innovation would happen more slowly.
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/2006/09/08/conference-science-google_cz_ec_0911valleyletter.html--##-- Sphere: Related Content
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