In talking with Andy Revkin of NYT (Views on Fueling an Energy Quest), I threw out an informal statistic that has been talked about on our campus regarding the number of doctoral students in science and engineering who take jobs in academia versus industry, and questioned whether their graduate training gives them the right skills to generate scientific findings that address (or can feasibily be applied to) real world problems.

So how many of the 30,000 graduating PhDs in Science and Engineering each year are going into academia?

According to a survey by the NSF, approximately 26% have secured tenure-track appointments 4-6 years after graduation.  This number is skewed by the high number of social scientists included,  If we look at engineering and the life sciences, those numbers drop, respectively, to 16% and 21%.  Approximately the same number are holding postdoctoral and research staff appointments in universities.

Assuming a reasonably steady-state situation, that would suggest that somewhere between 60-70% of graduating PhDs in the life sciences and engineering are going into jobs outside of academia.  This number jibes with a survey of graduating UC doctoral students conducted by  Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden (UC Doctoral Student Career Life Survey, 2006) that found only 36% of male and 27% of female doctoral students wanted university research positions.

Essentially, the majority of graduating PhDs in life science and engineering are pursuing jobs outside of university research labs. Their training, however, comes from those who remained.

One of the big challenges for universities over the next several decades is to prove their value in a world that has fewer resources to devote to greater social and environmental crises.

A century ago, the federal government established the land grant universities with an explicit mission of helping address real and pressing problems.  Researchers worked closely practioners (mostly farmers, as the economy was dominated by agriculture) to ensure best practices were identified and shared, and new technologies diffused rapidly where they would help.  In the time since, federally-funded research has made such industry interactions unnecessary. Research funding (and overhead) came to depend on the peer-reviewed grant process, in which scientists evaluated the value of their colleagues’s work and helped allocate research dollars across the field.

The links between the needs of society and of science weakened, and the need to train scientists to understand and work effectively with others outside the academe went away.  So here we are, with pressing social and environmental problems, and a system that has undermined science’s ability to lead in the changes we desparately need.

Perpetuation is the ultimate objective of all organizations.  This is one of the more important but under-appreciated insights to come from the study of organizations, as it explains the behaviors of small organizations to large organizations and entire fields.

The perpetuation instinct is a powerful one, and understanding it is critical to understanding the challenges of pursuing innovation in established industries.

The insight was developed by three social psychologists, Leon Festinger, Henry Reicken, and Stanley Schachter, who in the early 1950s decided to study a Chicago cult that prophesied the upcoming end of the world.  History is replete with examples of doomsday cults, as Robert Cialdini notes, in his brilliant book (Influence):

Consistent across all of these cults is the finding that, after the prophesied end has come and gone, they didn't despair and disband. On the contrary—their conviction was often strengthened.  So found Festinger, Reicken, and Schachter, who infiltrated the Chicago cult and studied them before, during, and after the end of their world. For these social psychologists, the reasons these groups chose to perpetuate themselves long after the original reasons for organizing had been proven wrong were psychological. While we like to think beliefs drive actions, the opposite is just as often true. Cult members had to re-align their beliefs to justify their own actions of quitting their jobs and selling their worldly possessions. 

For large organizations or fields facing the threat of an end, add to those individual psychological convictions the potential loss of respected professional identities, careers and, not insignificantly, money. With psychological, social, and economic forces working to make any organization or field that comes into existence fight to perpetuate itself, it's a small wonder we ever put down our old tools to pick up new ones. This is what's happening now to research programs engaged in the development of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. 

Today's WSJ reports on Energy Secretary Steven Chu's attempts to kill the research and development spending on Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), calling them "an impractical technology for vehicles, partly because they would require the creation of a network of hydrogen fueling stations" (Energy Secretary, Congress Collide Over Hydrogen Car Funds).  I happen to agree that the chances of developing cost-effective mass production, distribution, and storage technologies for hydrogen simultaneous with mass-produced, distributed, and adopted fuel cell vehicles are slim. 

That said, the response to Chu's attempt to end investments in this field provides some insights into the long-term effects of major research and development investments: namely, the creation of organizations and fields that, in short order, exist to perpetuate themselves.

The roots of investments in HFCVs are suspect to begin with. In 2001, HFCVs promised not only a cleaner car in short order, but also the ability to avoid making any current changes to fuel efficiency standards since a better solution was just around the corner anyway.  Politicians and incumbent auto manufacturers supported this bird-in-the-bush strategy:

Former President George W. Bush championed the development of
hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, saying they could reduce U.S. dependence
on foreign oil. The federal government has spent roughly $1.5 billion
since 2001 on hydrogen fuel-cell research.

Among those fighting to keep federally funded hydrogen-vehicle research alive are General Motors Corp., Daimler AG, Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor
Co. The companies, which are in various stages of developing hydrogen
fuel-cell vehicles, say the U.S. needs a broad range of technologies to
combat climate change.

But since HFCVs are no closer, Secretary Chu is looking to spend that money on more realistic near-term opportunities for hydrogen fuel cells, including stationary back-up power and fork lifts.  And the response?

Some lawmakers fear cuts in hydrogen-car subsidies would translate
into job losses at university and corporate labs in their states.

"The department's made a significant mistake here," Sen. Byron
Dorgan (D., N.D.) told Mr. Chu at a recent hearing of the Senate
Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development. Mr.
Dorgan, the panel's chairman, has steered millions of federal dollars
over the past five years to the National Center for Hydrogen Technology
at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.

The field of HFCV research now exists to perpetuate itself.  The objectivity of scientists in pursuit of better understanding of hydrogen fuel cell technologies has been buried under layer upon layer of careers, identities, commitments, organizational relationships, actual buildings, money, and political power.  All surrounding a technology that may never actually exist in wide-spread practice. 

As we invest federal funds into science to develop new energy technologies (or anything else for that matter) we must realize we're risking the objectivity that fuels and legitimizes science in the first place. 

In a WSJ article on the Waxman-Markey bill (discussing the incentives
for bringing more renewable power and energy efficiency online), there
was a throw-away line at the end that spoke volumes:

This new product research by Whirlpool is most likely referring to that corner of the smart grid that involves demand response—the ability of utilities to turn off (and on) energy loads at the appliance level in an effort to manage their own aggregated demand.

Peak demand, as it’s known, is a real problem.  The daily demand for power fluctuates considerably, with peak demand usually coming in the late afternoon and early evening when the lights, air-conditioning of commercial buildings are still operating, the motors of manufacturing facilities, and yet people are returning home to turn on their own lights and AC.  The combined demand forces utilities and power providers to fire up older, more inefficient power sources and at times pay exorbitant prices for power that they can’t pass along to their consumers.

Peak demand has been a problem from the beginning of the electric age. In fact, one of Edison’s contributions was to create a light bulb with such high resistance that the user could turn it on or off without blowing out the other bulbs on the circuit.  And as soon as Edison Electric brought the first utility-scale networks on line, they found that aggregated demand forced them to build the capacity to provide enough power to meet peak demand, and then not use it the rest of the time. Interestingly, peak demand came in the first few weeks of January, when lighting was needed.  Not until the advent of air-conditioning did peak move to the summer.

But I digress.  The interesting point of this throw-away line about Whirlpool’s visionary product research is that it captures a real, if seemingly small, challenge to our best laid plans.

The demand response technologies of a smart grid promise utilities the ability to manage demand at the consumer level, turning off dryers in the afternoon and turning them on again at 3am, when the utilities are begging for demand.  They can already turn smart thermostats up a few degrees to offset, and the entire electric vehicle effort is predicated on the notion that these drivers will come home and not plug in their cars right before turning on their lights and lowering the AC back down a few degrees to its original level. Or, more accurately, plug in their cars but let the utilities decide when to charge them (and maybe, at this peak time of the day, to draw the batteries down further to offset others’ demand (something known as vehicle-to-grid energy).

For want of a nail

At an aggregate level, this demand response enable utilities to be both more carbon-efficient, by taking offline their inefficient power generators, and more capital-efficient, by optimizing the use of what’s left. But many things that would appear to work at the aggregate level somehow get snagged on the small details of everyday life.

Whirlpool recognizes that if you put wet clothes in the dryer in the afternoon and then don’t dry them for 12 hours, they start to smell and get wrinkles.  I know this from personal, if unintended, experimentation. In other words, people will be forced to choose between global warming and wrinkles.

I am also not sure how many people will willingly give utilities control over the charge-status of their electric cars. Imagine deciding to go out at night and finding your battery lower than when you came home.  Actually, just imagine imagining that possibility, and ask how many people in that situation would give up control of recharging their car.

One response to this nagging question of market acceptance is that smart meters (another piece of the smart grid vision) will enable the utilities to charge consumers based on their time of use. Consumers would pay more for drying their clothes in the afternoon, and less at night: the invisible hand of the market will change consumer behavior.

This is a nice thought if only it was borne out in consumer behavior, energy costs in the US are still so cheap that fluctuations in pricing have little effect on demand.  Only when gas nudges against $5/gallon did we see true behavioral change.  What additional cost per kilowatt-hour would it take to cede control of your car’s charge schedule?  Assuming, of course, that people know what price per kWh they’re paying now.

Whose smart now, b%$#%?

Proponents of the smart grid point to the myriad ways in which control over today’s electrical production, distribution, and consumption could bring huge efficiency gains.  There are two problems with this approach.  The first, which I’ll save for another post, is about trying to improve complex systems by making them more tightly-interconnected.  The second, and related, is the notion that top-down control can actually be achieved in soci0-technical systems.  And believe me, the electric grid is as much social as technical.

In other words, many aspects of the smart grid promise efficiencies by concentrating control in one set of actors.  For example, the utilities get to decide when you run your dryer or recharge your car. As a people, the United States is not particularly good at handing over that control–indeed, a very similar debate rages around the internet.

Right now, that internet is a very dumb grid–packets of information go in one corner and come out the other, whether they are video, email, websites, credit-card transactions, what have you. The TelCos, among others, would like to prioritize the packets–for example, more important messages would get through while others would get side-tracked.  Side-tracked, of course, referring to those low-priority trains that are pushed to the side to let the high-priority ones keep to schedule. In California, the passenger trains are side-tracked to the freight trains, with the result that commuting by train requires planning for up to an hour delay on a 2 hour trip. But now I’m side-tracking my point.

The point being, people are not keen on the idea that their internet usage is somehow less important then their neighbor’s. The Telcos envision a world in which they are more than happy to oblige by offering you premium (higher priority) service for a premium price. Since the Telcos are only operating the last mile of the internet connection to your home, where this priority is not as critical to the smooth operation of the entire network, this is a bit of a challenge to accept. Net neutrality is the term used to argue that we should avoid allowing some corporate actors to gain control over the internet network

Right now the electric grid is dumb.  Making it smart refers, in many ways, to giving control of this dumb grid to somebody who is supposedly smarter than others and will determine the best ways in which to route energy, to recharge cars, and to dry clothes. When it comes to re-routing around a faulty transformer, this is good (and the transformer won’t complain).  When it comes to re-routing your daily routines, this may not fly so well.

The smart grid vision borders dangerously on techno-utopianism. To work, it requires people to dramatically change their behaviors, which is something people do not do well. In fact, it brings to mind one of my advisor, Bob Sutton‘s, favorite quotes:

This isn’t to say we should not try to change consumer behavior. On the contrary, we need to understand it so that our investments—and investments in the smart grid are massive—are effective.  Right now, the policies around energy and climate change are driven by engineers and scientists on one side and economists on the other.  Neither side has variable in their models accounting for wrinkled clothes–but these are just the things that get tangled up in the machinery.

GTEA09 concluded with final presentations around potential new ventures based on real technologies, developed by real scientists, and meeting the real world (for most) for the first time:

1. A cheaper, recyclable catalyst for biofuels production.
2. Solar materials for surfacing consumer electronics.
3. High efficiency diesel gensets aimed at cost-effectively irrigating sub-2 acre farms (which provide 60% of the world’s agricultural production).
4. Clean solvents for pesticide and cleaning solutions.
5. Solar thermal-generated hot water for the food processing markets and cost-competitive with natural gas water heaters.
6. Chemical catalyst for creating new fuels derived from cellulosic feedstock (woodchips, rice husks, etc…) that have energy density rivaling petroleum.
7. Toxic compound exposure monitoring for hazardous work environments.
8. Environmentally-friendly plastic resins derived from methane from landfill gas (or other sources).
9. A solar thermal desalination technology with a proprietary heat exchanger design.
10. A heat pump system which cuts electricity costs in half by simultaneously producing hot and chilled water.
11. Internet router energy management software that reduces energy consumption by up to 50%
12. A bicycle/e-vehicle hybrid that competes with small electric cars for in-town errands and commuting.

Many thanks to everyone who took part–the investors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, industry partners, and especially participants who put a lot of work into advancing their ideas.

UC Davis Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy July 6-10 Draws International Researchers
Scientists Learn Lab-to-Market Paths to Make World a Better Place

(DAVIS, CA) – The Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of California, Davis, announced today that 45 students from around the world have been selected to attend the third annual Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy to be held July 6–10 in Incline Village, Nev.

The Academy is taught by experts from top venture capital firms, law firms and research institutions and gives attendees the knowledge and skills they need to commercialize their research.

The participants—graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty from a wide range of science and engineering fields—represent 20 U.S. and international universities. They will bring a wealth of knowledge about cutting-edge, sustainable and environmentally technologies.

“The Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy is focused on enabling the best science and technology, developed in our universities and national laboratories, to drive the next generation of innovative solutions in the marketplace,” said Andrew Hargadon, faculty director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and an associate professor at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management.

“The diverse student body at this year’s Academy will bring a fresh batch of ideas to the table, and will leave armed with the tools they need to propel their ideas forward.”

The five-day program covers the basics of entrepreneurship with sessions on intellectual property, elevator pitches, development strategies, market validation, business presentations, team building and establishing an organization.

The program also includes networking and mentoring sessions with venture capitalists, attorneys and research scientists on the Academy’s faculty. Serial entrepreneurs also share their experiences launching new ventures.

During the week, Academy participants work in teams to prepare a business concept. Each group’s work will culminate with a presentation to a panel of faculty members.

The Academy’s faculty includes venture capitalists from American River Ventures, CalCEF Clean Energy Angel Fund, DFJ Element, DFJ Frontier, Intel Corporate Ventures, Nth Power, Physic Ventures and Sierra Angels; attorneys from Morrison and Foerster, and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP; and representatives from Southern California Edison and Sempra Utilities.

Peter Santangeli, founder of Greenbox Technology and head of the company’s engineering division, will be the keynote speaker at a networking dinner on July 8. Santangeli is the former vice president of engineering at Macromedia, where he led development of the company’s Flash Media Server and Breeze Web conferencing solutions. Greenbox is creating an interactive energy management platform that enables households to save money and reduce their carbon footprint.

The Academy’s founding sponsor is the Kauffman Foundation. Major sponsors include Chevron, Pacific Gas and Electric and Sempra Energy Foundation. Additional sponsorship is provided by Mariah Power and the Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy Commercialization.

The Academy is held at the Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences, a UC Davis-affiliated, state-of-the-art research facility built using best practices in green construction.

For more details about the Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy:
http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu/green

About the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship

The UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship, a Center of Excellence at the Graduate School of Management, is dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship and innovation through educational programs that bridge science, engineering, and business. Under the faculty direction of Andrew Hargadon, the center provides gives MBA students, science and engineering researchers the skills, knowledge and tools they need move ideas out of the lab and into the world, where their solutions can directly address broader global issues. Whether for profit or for social benefit—or both—the center’s programs enable students to envision a better world and make it a reality.

http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu

Media Contact:

Nicole Starsinic
Associate Director
UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship
nstarsinic@ucdavis.edu
(530) 574-6531

Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni is the Founder of Balsamiq and tells a wonderful tale of the motivation for and launching of his company.  37Signals has a nice interview with him here.  Balsamiq enables rapid and collaborative prototyping of user interfaces for applications.  Peldi’s story clearly shapes his company and blog, which makes it all the more enjoyable.

And it’s a story that illustrates how close at hand is the entrepreneurial option, which makes it all the more applicable.  I like particularly Peldi’s explanation for why he decided to leave Adobe to start his own company: “What’s Your Story”

On a related note, his passion shows through not for the new technologies but rather for the ways in which those technologies are changing how people (his customers) work:

Call it Web Office, Enterprise 2.0, Work 2.0, this stuff is powerful.. It’s a new way to work and it makes everyone more productive and the resulting work is better, which I believe impacts the bottom line directly as well as everyone’s morale. I truly believe that we’re in front of one of those “no going back” techonologies like broadband, cell-phones, clothes dryers, etc. 

My brother, Steve Hargadon, works in and writes about the latent revolution in computing in schools–why kids take a 30-year step back in technological time when they set foot on K-12 campuses, and what happens when someone changes that situation.  It’s the same passion, and doing something about it is now within reach of so many others who, like Peldi, decide to make the leap. 

Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy

July 6 – 10, 2009 in Incline Village, Nevada
Tahoe Center for Environmental Science

The Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy (GTEA) provides science and engineering faculty, post-doctoral researchers and graduate students with the necessary knowledge and skills to move environmentally sustainable and green technology research out of the laboratory and into the world.

The one-week academy will be held July 6 – 10, 2009 at the Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences located at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, Nevada. Participants spend a week learning how to recognize, develop, and bring to market new ventures built on their sustainable technology research, in collaboration with some of the best investors, entrepreneurs, faculty, and industry executives from across the country.

Visit the Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy website for more information.

Apply by May 15, 2009

Apply online >>

Accepted participants receive fellowships to cover room, board and tuition for the week.

Hard to believe that a few years ago, we were marveling at the power that web2.0 was giving us to publish our own content.  Now we’re overwhelmed–at least I am–by not by the task of making sense of so much new content, but also the task of generating original content with any meaning or value to distinguish it from everything else.  Our posts, to paraphrase Roy Batty, are “like tears in rain.”

Merlin Mann, of 43 Folders, captures this sentiment wonderfully with his post/essay Better:

What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I’ve come to despise it.

With this diet metaphor in mind, I want to, if you like, start eating better. But, I also want to start growing a tastier tomato — regardless of how easy it is to pick, package, ship, or vend. The tomato is the story, my friend.

This doesn’t mean I’ll be liveblogging a lot of ham-fisted attempts to turn “everything” off. But it does mean making mindful decisions about the quality of any input that I check repeatedly — as well as any “stuff” I produce. Everything. From news sources to entertainment programming, and from ephemeral web content down to each email message I decide to respond to. The shit has to go, inclusive.

Personally, I have no idea how to cope with the downpour of information and insights and I suspect few others do either.  Which is why I really appreciated Mann’s recognition that, while there is no standard response, we each in our own way need to learn how to “start eating better” and, equally, fighting the urge for putting out faster and cheaper insights when the nutritional value all comes from the better.

a great video on rapid prototyping and collaboration from Paul Hudnut, BOPreneur extraordinaire, as well as board member at New Belgium Brewing Co…one of the coolest jobs.

Mark Twain said it best.  Statistics has become the weapon of choice these days in everything from science to stimulus (plans, that is).  Maybe because it is one of the most versatile of weapons.  You choose the data, you choose the methods of analysis, and you make claims about how doing things one way is "significantly" different than doing things another way. 

Significance here being the cutting edge of the weapon, by way of its double meaning. For statisticians, a (statistically) significant difference can be (relatively) insignificant because no matter how small the difference, the (statistical) significance is an internal measure related to differences within the data and unrelated to its importance on the outside.  Except, of course, that it allows one to claim they have found a significant difference.     

Two unrelated articles came my way this morning. The first is a recent study by MIT neuroscientist Edward Vul, who:

…analyzed 54 prominent studies that used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to identify the brain areas associated with specific emotions — and found that 28 of them used the statistical methods and filters that were most likely to yield data that would confirm the researchers’ hypotheses. According to Vul, this cherrypicking may have been inadvertent; nevertheless, it produced correlations that “exceed what is statistically possible” and are almost certainly false. (from VSL)

Just when your faith in science was lost, along comes a second article, in the NYT sports section, of all places, that restores it with one of the most interesting and (statistically and personally) significant non-findings I've seen in a long time.

It turns out that the average free-throw percentage in college and professional basketball has remained essentially unchanged for the last 50 years (Free Throws).  While every other sports statistic has fallen, this measure of performance has shown itself resistant to shoes, shoe contracts, performance enhancers, the hem length of shorts, ESPN, tattoos, and television contracts:

Basketball in the United States has changed in myriad ways over the decades, from flat-footed set shots to dunks, from crotch-hugging uniforms to baggy knee-length shorts, from the dominance of American players to the recent infusion of international stars.

But one thing has remained remarkably constant: the rate at which players make free throws.

It's nice to know the more things (significantly) change, the more they stay (significantly) the same.