Silicon Valley Musings

I can’t believe it has been a month. It has gone by so fast. The first couple of weeks have been orientation, introductions, and settling in at Stanford.

For those who don’t know, the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program is open to anyone who wishes to submit their project proposals. Reuters pays the housing and expenses for two fellows, Cisco and Microsoft pays for a couple more. The rest are sponsored by their respective employers or come on their own accord.

I am humbled by the amazing talent Reuters has assembled this year.

Every Tuesday and Thursday for the last couple of weeks, each fellow has been presenting their project. I want to describe a few here.

Rafael is from Kenya. His part of the country is very arid grass lands. The people primarily raise sheep or cattle. There has been a problem of livestock theft. It first started as an political act by rebels to cause unrest.

Rafael wants to use a new technology called Radio Frequency (RF) ID tags to uniquely identify all livestock. RF ID tags have been used in pets for a couple years here in America. Just recently they have gotten so inexpensive, that they will be putting them on most of the items you buy and will used for inventory tracking.

He wants to place RF ID on all of Kenya’s livestock. This will allow law enforcement to track stolen livestock when it comes to the central markets or watering holes. It will also allow veterinarians to track animals that have received their vaccinations. This is important if Kenya wants to continue to export its beef to the Middle East or EU.

Michael has worked all over the world for thirty years with Bechtel. He lives in Mill Valley and comes down four days a week. He is building a network of corporate fellows to coordinate their talents and energy and apply them to the developing world’s problems.

Brig is from India. He has an amazingly simple idea that is significantly increasing the literacy of millions of Indians. India has a very large film and television industry called “Bollywood”. Almost every Indian movie or TV show is a musical and contains at least six songs. Brig persuaded his state’s TV station to subtitle the songs in its top rated TV program. It has increased literacy particularly in young girls and woman who don’t get to attend school.

He will be spending the next year building an interactive website of songs that have enhanced subtitled content.

Heather is a white woman from South Africa that describes a vivid memory she has from one day in fifth grade. It was during the last days of Apartheid. Her teacher took all the white students from her class to a quiet corner of the library. He explained that the Blacks were going to take over the government and that she and her classmates should do everything that that could to stop them. She has gone on to become a journalist and web designer.

Her project is to build an online interactive game to teach high school kids about racial diversity and tolerance.

Joe is working with the World Health Organization (WHO) to quickly replicate the “best practices” used by successful HIV/AIDS treatment facilities in Africa to other facilities. His project is part of the WHO’s “3 by 5″ project. The WHO hopes to get three million people on AIDS treatment by 2005. A big task since the current number of people on treatment today is 300,000 in the US and 400,000 others worldwide.

Edgardo works for the World Food Program. From Rome, he coordinates the delivery of food to thousands of sites in over a hundred countries. To effectively distribute food, Edgardo and his team has had to build global satellite communication network. He will be spending the year building an automated delivery truck servicing system using this network.

What will I be doing? Well, I am what we call “a hammer looking for a nail.” I will be lending my experience in application design and project management to the others.

In addition, I have latched onto a particular problem called adherence. It turns out, the WHO ranks tuberculosis the world’s second most pressing disease after HIV/AIDS. About two million people a year die from tuberculosis and another eight million a year contract it.

The thing that intrigues me the most about tuberculosis is that it is easy to detect, cheap to treat (just over ten dollars worth of drugs), and the drugs are over ninety percent effective. The problem is that you need to take a pill once a day for six months.

TB patients usually feel better after two months and without direct medical observation, many stop taking the pills. This leads to eventual relapse and to drug resistant strains of TB.

So I will be looking at the seemingly simple problem of getting someone to take a pill a hundred and eighty days in a row.

I am also looking for someone at the WHO to work with on this project.

The good news is everyone here in the program and at Stanford is extremely helpful. I recently met with Professor Dan Schwartz in the Education department. He is studying among other things games and learning.

He and his students recently studied hobbyists. They observed hobbyists voluntarily spend a great deal of time and energy learning new information and skills. Here is the website that describes some of his team’s findings.

He had another very interesting and useful observation. If you really want to ensure you have learned something, teach it to someone else. They did a study where half the group would answer questions directly and the other half would teach someone the topic and have them answer the questions for them. They found the students could provide more correct answers.

In addition to meeting all the other fellows and starting to refine my project, I have been auditing two classes. I am taking the introductory course in Communications called Communications Technology, People, and Society. It is taught by Professor Nass. He has the distinction of creating the infamous “Paperclip” Agent in Microsoft Office.

He is currently working with Toyota because they found their new sleepy driver detection system actually caused more accidents when it told drivers, “Please pull over and get some sleep.”

On the first day, he asked the class of a hundred and fifty students who hadn’t used email? No hands. Who hadn’t used instant messaging? No hands. Who hadn’t played music on their computer? Only one hand.

I am also taking an Introduction to Bioinformatics, the management of information in medicine or biomedical research. Medicine and biomedical research have lots of big numbers in it: billions of people, millions of medical articles, millions of genes, billions of dollars spent, etc.

Today we reviewed two competing goals in test design: sensitivity and specificity. Dr. Musen used an simple example, when would you say someone had a fever? At 98.9? 100? 102? 98.9 would be the most sensitive; in that it would detect all fevers, but it is the least specific meaning it would also generate the most number of false positives. 102 would have way fewer false positives, but would also leave some sick people undetected.

As I was setting my cell phone to silent mode just before class I realized that we didn’t have cell phones last time I attended a college course. Now, all the students have cell phones.

Cell phones aren’t the only change. Dr. Musen’s class has a large projection screen instead of a chalk board. He presents his lecture using PowerPoint slides. Each student has a microphone at their desk. This is to ensure their questions are recorded as part of the lecture video. The lecture is being simultaneously broadcast via the Internet.

About a fifth of the students now watch the lecture on their computers in their dorms. The video is archived, so students can watch the lecture at any time.

I have a personal course material Web portal. I can access my class’ syllabi, all the presentations, homework assignments, and assigned reading from the website. Each student is added to a course email mailing list. The professor and TA’s use the mailing list to distribute announcements. There is a class online discussion forum to ask questions between lectures. The professor and TA’s have email addresses. Professor Nass, for example, answers his email within twenty four hours.

Some of the classrooms have wireless Internet access. I have seen students reading their email and surfing the Web during lecture.

Some things are the same. The freshman ride nice shiny new bikes while the seniors ride rusty old bikes with sqeaky chains. They are some of the brightest people on the planet, but they can’t obey simple traffic rules. I will definitely walk the first couple of days when it rains.