September 5, 2005 By Christine A. Ehlig-Economides The Way Ahead "All the problems of the world could be settled if people were only willing to think. That is what makes a problem important. A major benefit of R&D, then, is in laying fallow until the ripe time when they can be immediately exploited in previously-unpredictable ways; applied R&D or VC strategies should focus on maintaining diversity of investments, while continuing to flexibly revisit previous failures which forecasts indicate may have reached ripe time. Bourdet showed me the pressure and pressure-derivative type curves he had developed8 (Fig. Ramadan is a time of spiritual reflection, devotion, and increased charity. Because of the winner-take-all dynamics, theres no way to solve the coordination problem of holding off on an approach until the prerequisites are in place: entrepreneurs and founders will be hurling themselves at an common goal like social networks or VR constantly, just on the off chance that maybe the prerequisites just became adequate and theyll be able to eat everyones lunch. In this regard, it is amusing to note the exponential growth of conferences like NIPS or ICML20102019.). How often did I read in the 90s and early 00s about how amazing Japanese cellphones were and how amazing a good smartphone would be, even though year after year the phones were jokes and used pretty much solely for voice? (One wonders if a 20-year forecast might be driven by anthropics: in an exponentially-growing field, most researchers will be present in the final generation, and so a priori one could predict accurately that it will be 20 years to AI. Err 3). Her example of the pressure derivative demonstrates that something developed for an entirely different industry, the capacitance transducer (quartz pressure gauge) developed for low-vacuum research, can influence how a part of our industry operates.Andrew Lambert, Pillars of the Industry Editor. But enough time has passed since 1988 to enable us to judge the basic truthfulness of the predictions and expectations held by the dreamers such as Nicholas Negroponte: they were remarkably accurate! : Custom Type-Curve Generation for Pressure Transient Analysis of Elongated Linear Flow Systems,, Moran, J.H., and Finklea, E.E. and what it isn't. Learning for the sake of learning. I think most people are aware of fads/stampedes in investing, but the latter error is not so commonly discussed. Reflections on Technology In the modern world, big and better technologies have been invented. During a recession and a cleantech backlash. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. Early PC history is rife with examples of the prescient failing. You should maintain a formal tone, but it is acceptable to write in the first person and to use personal pronouns. But to come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two very different things, as the history of science teaches us. In what I would call, in a nod to Thiels definite vs indefinite optimism, definitely-maybe optimism. Remember, you dont know anything else about the tech landscape in the 2000s, like that Google will go way up from its IPO, you dont know about Apples revival under Jobsall you know is that a social network will exist and will grow hugely. After solving a problem, humanity imagines that it finds in analogous solutions the key to all problems. And the next Mark Zuckerberg wont create a social network. Overall, the odds of success are low, and the rewards are not great for mostdespite the skewed distribution producing occasional eye-popping returns in a few cases, the risk-adjusted return of the technology sector or VC funds is not that much greater than the broader economy. "They say, timing is everything. In essence, this means that usually the time isn't right for most innovations. Since then, Mach continued this work and was instrumental in Yukos achievements to increase production by 20% per year for several consecutive years without drilling new wells. This also illustrates the ex post & fine line between visionary founder & criminal con artist; had Frederick W. Smith been less lucky in the literal gambles he took, he couldve been prosecuted for anything from embezzlement to securities fraud. Gates, however, proved the market, and refined the Gates strategy to perfection, using up the trick; no one can get historically rich off shipping an OS plus some business productivity software because there are too many competitors and too many players interested in ensuring that no one becomes the next Gates, and so opportunity has moved on to the next area. Nanosystems on a chip, is said to be able to provide critical foundation to diagnostics biomarkers and point-of-care technologies as well as detection of pathogen. This overall problem falls under the reinforcement learning paradigm, and successful approaches are analogous to Thompson sampling/posterior sampling: even an informed strategy cant reliably beat random exploration which gradually shifts towards successful areas while continuing to take occasional long shots. Time and race number: done. In this edition, we are reminded that rigorous technical work is one of the pillars of our industry. Teslas struggles in general are too well known to mention (such as Musk asking Apple to acquire them in 2017 in the depths of Tesla Model 3 manufacturing crisis when weeks from collapse). We ultimately chose to abandon our word choice, but the principle remains today: You have to be partly delusional to start a company given the prospects of success and the need to keep pushing forward in the wake of the constant stream of doubters. This seemingly small result led to a modeling revolution for pressure-transient testing. Reflection can be valuable when the workgroup uses it to learn more about impact and to catalyze action toward a destination. But equally, anything with that much potential has a high likelihood of failureif it was obviously a good idea with no risks, everyone would be doing it. You however know what ignorance can trigger and how to deal with ignorance and purpose. The Educational Technology course is designed to prepare teachers for all different grade levels with skills, concepts and understanding among other skills to integrate technology in their lessons to enhance learning as well as to make learning more effective. The Japanese government in general was funding research, building huge research complexes just to focus on this. Someone could have built the Rift in mid-to-late 2007 for a few thousand dollars, and they could have built it in mid-2008 for about $673.5$500.02008. : Testing and Interpretation in Layered Reservoirs,, Ehlig-Economides, C.A. For example, even if online pizza delivery has failed every time its tried, it still seems like a good idea that people will want to order pizza online via their smartphones, so one could try to do a pizza startup 2.5 years later, then 5 years later, then 10 years, then 20 years, or perhaps every time computer costs drop an order of magnitude, or perhaps every time the relevant market doubles in size? The challenge had always been to come up with a closed-form solution that related to time. If convicted, he would have faced a prison term of up to five years. Is there a sustainable development reason to reduce our consumption? and simple to express: This includes timers, clocks and etc. Its not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. Here again we must be pessimistic. If an hour of reflection seems like too much, try 10 minutes. Informatio: The new language of science ( Hans Christian von Baeyer) 14-15 Ehlig-Economides, C.A., Mowat, G.R., and Corbett, C.: Techniques for Multibranch Well Trajectory Design in the Context of a Three-Dimensional Reservoir Model, paper SPE 35505 presented at the European 3D Reservoir Modeling Conference in Stavanger, 1617 April 1996. Of course Google was always going to be a huge success because of PageRank and also (post hoc theorizing) Z, Y, & Z, except for the minor problem that Google was merely one of many search engines, great perhaps11 but not profitable, and didnt hit upon a profitable business modelmuch less a unicorn-worth modeluntil 4 years later when it copied Overtures advertising auction, which was its salvation (In The Plex); in the mean time, Google had to sign potentially fatal deals or risking burning through the last of its capital when minor technical glitches derailed vital deals. One reason is that our form of energy, oil, is misunderstood by most people, including many of us in the petroleum industry. If you were sure of that back then, or even mostly persuaded, and if a lot of others were as well, what good fortune you could have harvested. And Lanier implies that Japan alone spent a lot of money: Jaron Lanier: The components have finally gotten cheap enough that we can start to talk about them as being accessible in the way that everybodys always wantedMoores law is so interesting because its not just the same components getting cheaper, but it really changes the way you do things. But it is by no means obvious that it was unripe for Babbages research and development effort, if only it had been conceived in terms of a more severely delimited objective: the construction of a working model. The possibility of broadcasting radio waves across the Atlantic was convincingly excluded by theoretical analysis. It can reasonably be said that time was unripe for digital computing as an industrial technology. The progress in technology has good impacts as well as bad implications to people. I basically think all the ideas of the 90s that everybody had about how this stuff was going to work, I think they were all right, they were all correct. Only Apple can build apps for it. So for the most part, traders clone popular strategies, but with certain probabilities, theyll randomly explore rarer apparently-unsuccessful strategies. One idea is that a VC firm could explicitly track ideas that seem great but have had several failed startups, and try to schedule additional investments at ever greater intervals (similar to DS-PRL), which bounds losses (if the idea turns out to be truly a bad idea after all) but ensures eventual success (if a good one). This is a very firms, technology is one of the main forces powerful tool for the assessment of technol- important question of strat- which operates in the business arena. All the problems of the world could be settled if people were only willing to think. Another time, we had to ask our employees to hold their paychecks while we waited for the next wave of financingFred dumped his entire inheritance into the company and was full speed ahead without concern for his personal finances. The road to wisdom?Well, its plain and less. They were correct, but many of them would be surprised & disappointed how long it took., #326, Part II. In the U.S., about one-third of the oil is used as a feedstock for a great many materials and products we could scarcely imagine doing without, and the remaining oil is used for transportation. Returning to Donald Michie: one could make fun of his extremely overly-optimistic AI projections, and write him off as the stock figure of the biased AI researcher blinded by the Maes-Garreau law where AI is always scheduled for right when a researcher will retire19 but while he was wrong, it is unclear this was a mistake because in other cases, an apparently doomed research projectMarconis attempt to radio across the Atlantic oceansucceeded because of an unknown unknownthe KennellyHeaviside layer20. This balances overall exploitation & exploration to progress as fast as possible, showing the usefulness of technological forecasting on a global level despite its uselessness to individuals. Every authentic solution brings in its wake a train of grotesque solutions. Theyd been known for decades. All major success stories overshadow their long list of predecessors who did the same thing, but got unlucky. Through it all, he had to take a long view of the value of research, not insisting on immediate results of medical or commercial value. Freeman Dyson, Freeman Dysons Brain 1998 (cf. The timeliness of your word is surely on point.". Perhaps had Kelleher known intimately of all the challenges of entering the airline business, he would have run screaming from the challenge versus deciding to take on the full set of risks. Three decades later, the book is highly dated, and the descriptions are of mostly historical interest for the development of various technologies (particularly in the 1990s). We wanted the reflections to be as close to the learning experience as possible, both in terms of the timing of the reflections and where the reflection would take place. Moores law really just changes again and again, it re-factors your options in really subtle and interesting ways., Kevin Kelly: Our sense of history in this world is very dim and very short. 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