Menlo Park

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The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross

Albert Einstein, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cotton gin, death of newspapers, distributed generation, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Livingstone, I presume, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, plutocrats, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, urban renewal, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers

William Preece, a telegraph engineer for the British Post Office, happened to pay a visit to Edison’s new Menlo Park laboratory in May 1877 when the rest of the world knew nothing about Edison’s existence, nor Menlo Park’s. The town was too small to merit its own identifying sign at the train stop, and Preece almost missed it, hurriedly hopping off the train after it was in motion again. When he did so, he found himself at a desolate station in rural New Jersey. It was a blazing hot day and no porters were on hand. Preece provides a unique account of one not-famous Englishman paying a call on a not-yet-famous American and fellow telegraphy expert. Before taking the train to Menlo Park, Preece had been most entertained in New York City by the nineteenth-century version of The Fast and the Furious, illegal street racing with lightly harnessed horses, roads lined with spectators, and frequent “collisions and rows” that brought unwanted attention from the police.

Fortunately, Grosvenor Lowrey knew that this was the time to step forward and propose a modus vivendi that did not involve bribes, but did involve currying of favor from political operators. Lowrey obtained Edison’s consent to provide a special performance of the Menlo Park magic light show for the New York Board of Aldermen. It’s impossible to determine whether Lowrey was supernaturally savvy, or just plain lucky, but the evening he set for the demonstration in Menlo Park for New York’s City Fathers was 20 December, the very same evening that Broadway would be transformed into the Great White Way by Brush Electric. The aldermen missed the spectacle in New York, pulling in to Menlo Park on a private train provided by the Pennsylvania Railroad exactly at the moment when Brush Electric made its Broadway debut.

In the age of the computer, different companies at different times—for example, Apple in the early 1980s, Microsoft in the early 1990s, Google in the first decade of the twenty-first century—inherited the temporary aura that once hovered over Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, attracting young talents who applied in impossibly large numbers, all seeking a role in the creation of the zeitgeist (and, like John Ott, at the same time open to a chance to become wealthy). The lucky ones got inside (Lawson got a position and worked on electric light). Menlo Park became the iconic site for American ingenuity, but it was a highly burnished image that floated free of the actual place. Edison did not stay in the actual Menlo Park for very long—only four years after the phonograph was invented in 1877, he moved to New York City to be close to the work on the electric light system and would never return.


pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

A frustrated Engelbart began to explore the idea of remotely connecting to the SDC computer from the Control Data minicomputer in Menlo Park using an early modem. Unfortunately his engineers were never able to make the system communicate reliably. As a result, for the next two years Engelbart’s fledgling Augmented Human Intellect Research Center began to build his system on a computer that had far less processing power than an Apple II of a decade and a half later. The Menlo Park computer used the magnetic-core memory that Engelbart, Crane, and English had all worked on improving in the fifties. It had a capacity of eight thousand twelve-bit characters—a little more than three pages of typed text—in its main memory.

He also soon became the youngest researcher at the newly founded International Foundation for Advanced Study, Myron Stolaroff’s project for continuing his research on the uses of LSD. When Stolaroff and Harman set up shop in Menlo Park in March 1961, they weren’t the only ones on the Midpeninsula exploring the therapeutic uses of LSD. Experiments were already being conducted at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute had also begun introducing local psychiatrists and psychologists, and even writers such as Allen Ginsberg, to psychedelic drugs.15 But the foundation was something new.

Later, when the researcher told one of SRI’s accountants that he had ARPA’s blessing for the huge expense, he had been told that it was okay to go ahead, but if the venture failed, SRI planned to deny any knowledge of its approval. From his platform behind the audience, English served as the link between Engelbart onstage and the laboratory researchers who were connected from Menlo Park to the auditorium by two video microwave links and two modem lines. English served as the director, talking by telephone to Menlo Park and by a communication link to a speaker in Engelbart’s ear, cuing each part of the demonstration and controlling the camera views. The researchers had placed a truck at a strategic point on Skyline Boulevard, high above the Peninsula, to relay the microwave links to the city, and they had built two homebrew high-speed modems—1200 baud was high speed in 1968, and each modem carried data in only a single direction—to connect Engelbart’s keyboard, mouse, and key set to the SDS-940 in Menlo Park.


pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

Edison soon realized that for his central station he needed a bigger dynamo and a better steam engine than the Porter-Allen version he had used for the Menlo Park demonstration. A Menlo Park veteran, Charles Dean, took charge of the work. For months experiments went on to improve the original large Menlo Park dynamo. The armature posed the thorniest problem; Jehl recalled that to reshape it took fifty-five men working eight solid days and nights. From their labors emerged the giant “C” model dynamo.29 The first tests took place in January 1881; a month later the machine succeeded in powering all 426 lamps at Menlo Park. Gleefully Edison led a late-night parade to the neighborhood saloon for a round or three of drinks.

When Jehl received orders in May 1881 to move himself and his testing instruments to Goerck Street, it hit him like a bombshell. “I had always thought,” he recalled, “that Edison would never give up Menlo Park, that he would return when the urgencies of affairs in New York were over.”49 More than half a century later, through the mists of memory, Menlo Park’s image still evoked in Jehl a mixture of sorrow and pride. “Menlo Park with its laboratory was a shrine,” he wrote, “Edison was the high priest, and we ‘boys’ were his followers. I had devoted all my energies in loyal obedience to the cause.”50 Menlo Park faded into the realm between history and myth because Edison had outgrown it. Despite the demands of business, he never stopped being an inventor.

During the summer of 1880 Maxim visited Menlo Park, where Edison devoted an entire day and evening to showing him the lamp and the works. It was a courtesy he showed any electrician who came to learn, but Maxim took more than the usual advantage of it. He sent an emissary back to Menlo Park to persuade Ludwig Boehm, Edison’s glassblower, to visit him secretly at his New York shop. When these trips were discovered by Edison’s men, Boehm abruptly left Menlo Park and turned up in the employment of Maxim. Humorless and forever the butt of practical jokes, Boehm had never been happy at Menlo Park. At United States Electric Lighting he became the invaluable informant that Maxim needed to emulate Edison’s lamp.5 In October 1880 Maxim announced his new lamp, which bore a striking resemblance to Edison’s 1879 version.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

He had recently dived into Zen Buddhism, and he had been reading about its influence on art; he wrote that his increasing interest in Zen assumptions, approaches, and values was one of the reasons he wanted to try psychedelics. When, in March of 1961, Stolaroff and Harman set up the International Foundation for Advanced Study on a quiet street in downtown Menlo Park, just two miles from the Stanford campus, they weren’t the only ones exploring the therapeutic uses of LSD on the San Francisco Peninsula. Experiments were going on at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute had already begun introducing local psychiatrists and psychologists and even poets such as Allen Ginsberg to psychedelic drugs. But the foundation was something new.

He stood frozen as it receded, transforming itself into three separate dancing images. To the Menlo Park foundation researchers, Brand had proved a tough nut to crack. Their analysis was that he was stuck in here-and-now concepts and resistant to fully “letting go.” They saw him as the model of the uptight, intellectual guy who depended on logical analysis for emotional defense. Even the LSD injection “booster” had been unable to shake his defenses. Although he had been pushed into more inner-generated symbolism, he still kept “one foot on the ground.” It would only be later, during several follow-up sessions, that the Menlo Park psychologists noticed he softened, becoming less defensive, less concerned about how he was perceived, and more accessible and easier to be with.

Like Brand, he had recently taken LSD. Kesey, who was three years older than Brand, had been introduced to the drug when, to supplement his income, he had participated in government studies at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. On a whim, Brand mailed some of the photographs he had taken in Oregon to Kesey, who was in the process of moving over the hill to the small mountain community of La Honda because his cottage on Perry Lane in Menlo Park was being torn down. Brand added a short note: “Pictures were taken this May on the first stage of a brochure job for the Warm Springs Indians. They’re spelling out what they plan to keep, not lose any more of.


AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War by Tom McNichol

computer age, electricity market, experimental subject, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Menlo Park, popular electronics, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thales of Miletus

In the week following Christmas 1889, hundreds of visitors made a pilgrimage to Menlo Park to see the marvel for themselves, so many that the railroad had to run extra trains to Menlo Park. On New Year’s Eve, the throng grew to several thousand, including a New York Tribune reporter, who described the scene: “By eight o’clock the laboratory was so crowded that it was almost impossible for the assistants to pass through. The exclamation, ‘There is Edison!’ invariably caused a rush that more than once threatened to break down the timbers of the building.” Those who came to Menlo Park never forgot the sight of the glowing lamps, even if many didn’t understand how they worked.

Had he been born twenty years earlier, he would have found few opportunities as an inventor; had he come along twenty years later, he might have ended up a frustrated researcher at one of the large industrial corporations. Edison was at the right place at the right time with the right mind. In 1876, Edison built a state-of-the-art “invention factory” where he could continue his work. He set up shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, about twenty miles outside New York City, constructing what could be considered the first modern research and development center in the world. The Menlo Park laboratory employed dozens of workers, and later hundreds, all toiling on various Edison projects. His men soon learned to adapt themselves to their boss’s trial-and-error methods. As one of his workers recalls, “Edison seemed pleased when he used to run up against a serious difficulty.

For a more manageable introduction to the life and work of Edison, Matthew Josephson’s Edison: A Biography (Wiley, 1959) is the classic standard biography, and still holds up. It’s a bit uncritical in parts, but it does a nice job of capturing both Edison the man and his inventions. 187 bfurread.qxp 188 7/15/06 8:44 PM Page 188 FURTHER READINGS IN ELECTRICITY Francis Jehl’s Menlo Park Reminiscences (Edison Institute, 1938) is an endearingly fusty account by one of Edison’s laboratory assistants at Menlo Park. It’s not always reliable on chronology, but it offers a rare view over Edison’s shoulder as he works in his lab. The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (Abbey, 1968) is a collection of articles Edison wrote for popular magazines and newspapers of the day, along with a brief diary extract from 1885.


pages: 403 words: 87,035

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Visalia was predominantly a farming community with a large population of laborers but also a sizable number of professional, middle-class families. Menlo Park had a largely middle-class population but also a significant number of working-class and low-income households. The two cities were not identical—the typical resident of Menlo Park was somewhat better educated than the typical resident of Visalia and earned a slightly higher salary—but the differences were relatively small. In the late 1960s, the two cities had schools of comparable quality and similar crime rates, although Menlo Park had a higher incidence of violent crime, especially aggravated assault. The natural surroundings in both places were attractive.

HD5706.M596 2012 331.10973—dc23 2012007933 Printed in the United States of America DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Ilaria Introduction Menlo park is a lively community in the heart of Silicon Valley, just minutes from Stanford University’s manicured campus and many of the Valley’s most dynamic high-tech companies. Surrounded by some of the wealthiest zip codes in California, its streets are lined with an eclectic mix of midcentury ranch houses side by side with newly built mini-mansions and low-rise apartment buildings. In 1969, David Breedlove was a young engineer with a beautiful wife and a house in Menlo Park. They were expecting their first child. Breedlove liked his job and had even turned down an offer from Hewlett-Packard, the iconic high-tech giant in the Valley.

Breedlove liked his job and had even turned down an offer from Hewlett-Packard, the iconic high-tech giant in the Valley. Nevertheless, he was considering leaving Menlo Park to move to a medium-sized town called Visalia. About a three-hour drive from Menlo Park, Visalia sits on a flat, dry plain in the heart of the agricultural San Joaquin Valley. Its residential neighborhoods have the typical feel of many Southern California communities, with wide streets lined with one-story houses, lawns with shrubs and palm trees, and the occasional backyard pool. It’s hot in the summer, with a typical maximum temperature in July of ninety-four degrees, and cold in the winter.


pages: 372 words: 100,947

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

He assured her that he could handle the controversy by convening a meeting of top conservative media executives, think tank leaders, and pundits in Menlo Park. It was critical, however, that Zuckerberg agree to play a prominent role in the event. On May 18, sixteen prominent conservative media personalities and thought leaders—including Glenn Beck of Blaze TV, Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, and Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots—flew to Menlo Park for the afternoon gathering to air their concerns of political bias. Only Republican Facebook staff were allowed in the room, a former Facebook official said.

These people provide a rare look inside a company whose stated mission is to create a connected world of open expression, but whose corporate culture demands secrecy and unqualified loyalty. While Zuckerberg and Sandberg initially told their communications staff that they wanted to make sure their perspectives were conveyed in this book, they refused repeated requests for interviews. On three occasions, Sandberg invited us to off-the-record conversations in Menlo Park and New York, with the promise that those conversations would lead to longer interviews for the record. When she learned about the critical nature of some of our reporting, she cut off direct communication. Apparently the unvarnished account of the Facebook story did not align with her vision of the company and her role as its second-in-command.

But despite being household names, Zuckerberg and Sandberg remain enigmas to the public, and for good reason. They are fiercely protective of the images they’ve cultivated—he, the technology visionary and philanthropist; she, business icon and feminist—and have surrounded the inner workings of “MPK,” the shorthand employees use to describe the headquarters’ campus in Menlo Park, with its moat of loyalists and culture of secrecy. Many people regard Facebook as a company that lost its way: the classic Frankenstein story of a monster that broke free of its creator. We take a different point of view. From the moment Zuckerberg and Sandberg met at a Christmas party in December 2007, we believe, they sensed the potential to transform the company into the global power it is today.4 Through their partnership, they methodically built a business model that is unstoppable in its growth—with $85.9 billion in revenue in 2020 and a market value of $800 billion—and entirely deliberate in its design.5 We have chosen to focus on a five-year period, from one U.S. election to another, during which both the company’s failure to protect its users and its vulnerabilities as a powerful global platform were exposed.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, September 1969. Brand, Stewart, Joe Bonner, and Ann Helmuth, eds. The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, January 1969. ———, eds. The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, July 1969. Brand, Stewart, Ann Helmuth, Joe Bonner, Tom Duckworth, Lois Brand, and Hal Hershey, eds. The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, March 1969. Brand, Stewart, Lloyd Kahn, and Sarah Kahn, eds.

The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. San Francisco: Point Foundation, 1974. ———. “We Owe It All to the Hippies.” Time 145, special issue, Spring 1995. ———, ed. Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, Spring 1969. B i b l i o g ra p h y [ 295 ] ———, ed. Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, Fall 1969. ———, ed. Whole Earth Catalog One Dollar. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, January 1971. ———, ed. Whole Earth Epilog: Access to Tools. San Francisco: Point Foundation, 1974. ———. Whole Earth Software Catalog. Garden City, NY: Quantum Press/Doubleday, 1984. ———.

In The Seven Laws of Money, edited by Michael Phillips, 121–27. Menlo Park, CA: Word Wheel; New York: Random House, 1974. Anderson, Philip W., Kenneth Joseph Arrow, David Pines, and Santa Fe Institute. The Economy as an Evolving Complex System: The Proceedings of the Evolutionary Paths of the Global Economy Workshop, Held September, 1987, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1988. Aneesh, A. Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Ashby, Gordon, ed. Whole Earth Catalog $1. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, July 1970. Aufderheide, Patricia.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

Instead, employees gathered in the mall of Facebook’s new Menlo Park campus, where Zuckerberg would ring the bell remotely. It was just as well he stayed in California. At the moment the stock was about go on sale, NASDAQ, which prides itself on being the tech-savvy alternative to its more prestigious rival, the New York Stock Exchange, had a computer meltdown. Despite several test runs in the previous few days, the volume of requests overwhelmed its system. NASDAQ postponed the opening, but even when the stock went on sale more than an hour late—to hugs and whoops of joy in Menlo Park—transactions were still delayed.

Facebook claimed, “The errors we made in our 2014 filings were not intentional.” Zuckerberg kept pushing. In early 2017, he insisted that WhatsApp move to the Menlo Park campus. The move was as harmful to WhatsApp’s culture as Acton and Koum feared. The WhatsApp people were accustomed to a different atmosphere from the boisterous, close-quartered dorm-room spirit permeating Facebook’s offices. Porting WhatsApp’s more heads-down vibe to Menlo Park created friction. To Zuckerberg’s credit, he allowed WhatsApp employees to keep their larger desks, and even had the bathrooms remodeled to accommodate them—the privacy-obsessed WhatsApp folk wanted stall doors that reached the floor.

Straight from the airport, he headed to the gritty Yaba neighborhood and CcHUB. The Lagos start-up culture careens between an improbable optimism and a gallows humor regarding the monumental obstacles to success or even survival. But these were the people Zuckerberg wanted to meet: nerds with dreams. In the giant headquarters he built in Menlo Park, California, among the posters festooning the walls like a giant confetti blast of techno-propaganda were dozens that read BE THE NERD. So while other tech magnates devoted their initial African venture to philanthropic themes, Zuckerberg scheduled no time to hug undernourished infants in remote villages.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

The canonical story goes something like this: after a triumphant start to his career inventing the phonograph and the stock ticker, a thirty-one-year-old Edison takes a few months off to tour the American West—perhaps not coincidentally, a region that was significantly darker at night than the gaslit streets of New York and New Jersey. Two days after returning to his lab in Menlo Park, in August 1878, he draws three diagrams in his notebook and titles them “Electric Light.” By 1879, he files a patent application for an “electric lamp” that displays all the main characteristics of the lightbulb we know today. By the end of 1882, Edison’s company is powering electric light for the entire Pearl Street district in Lower Manhattan. Thomas Edison It’s a thrilling story of invention: the young wizard of Menlo Park has a flash of inspiration, and within a few years his idea is lighting up the world.

After a year of experimentation, bamboo emerged as the most durable substance, which set off one of the strangest chapters in the history of global commerce. Edison dispatched a series of Menlo Park emissaries to scour the globe for the most incandescent bamboo in the natural world. One representative paddled down two thousand miles of river in Brazil. Another headed to Cuba, where he was promptly struck down with yellow fever and died. A third representative named William Moore ventured to China and Japan, where he struck a deal with a local farmer for the strongest bamboo the Menlo Park wizards had encountered. The arrangement remained intact for many years, supplying the filaments that would illuminate rooms all over the world.

The definitive history of Bell Labs, Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory, reveals the secret to the labs’ unrivaled success. It was not just the diversity of talent, and the tolerance of failure, and the willingness to make big bets—all of which were traits that Bell Labs shared with Edison’s famous lab at Menlo Park as well as other research labs around the world. What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted. Employees install the "red phone,” the legendary hotline that connected the White House to the Kremlin during the Cold War, in the White House, August 30, 1963, Washington, D.C.


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

“It’s great to be able to have conversations about threats and risk and people say, ‘Well, here’s how we think about threats: we talk about the capabilities and the motives of the actors, and we talk about the vulnerabilities,’” Lavin said. I had never before heard the words threats, vulnerabilities, and motives uttered in Menlo Park. Speaking of Menlo Park, Facebook has made it a point to hire people outside it, seeking to get away from the homogeneous thought and techno-optimism prevalent in Northern California. “We don’t actually have lunch together because most of us are not in California,” Lavin said. “We’re in Dublin, Singapore; I’m in Austin, Texas.

The Leader of the Future “Something New Wouldn’t Hurt” The New Education Caring Watching the AI The Case for Thoughtful Invention Onward ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR To everyone out there trying to make it PREFACE THE ZUCKERBERG ENCOUNTER In February 2017, Mark Zuckerberg summoned me to his Menlo Park, California, headquarters for a meeting. It was my first time sitting down with the Facebook CEO, and it didn’t go as anticipated. His company, per usual, was enveloped in controversy. Pushing hard to grow its products but reluctant to moderate them, it had allowed them to fill with misinformation, sensationalism, and violent imagery.

But look at Zuckerberg and his counterparts—Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft—and you’ll see trained engineers more eager to facilitate than to dictate. Instead of answers, they have questions. Instead of pitching, they listen and learn. Following that meeting in Menlo Park, I began digging into the tech giants’ inner workings more broadly—looking at their leadership practices, their cultures, their technology, and their processes—wondering if there was a link between their success and the unique way they operate. As common patterns emerged, that link became impossible to deny.


pages: 352 words: 96,532

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

By examining the data, BBN could sometimes predict that a line was about to go down. The phone company’s repair offices had never heard of such a thing and didn’t take to it well. When BBN’s loopback tests determined there was trouble on a line, say, between Menlo Park (Stanford) and Santa Barbara, one of Heart’s engineers in Cambridge picked up the phone and called Pacific Bell. ”You’re having trouble with your line between Menlo Park and Santa Barbara,” he’d say. “Are you calling from Menlo Park or Santa Barbara?” the Pacific Bell technician would ask. ”I’m in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” “Yeah, right.” Eventually, when BBN’s calls proved absolutely correct, the telephone company began sending repair teams out to fix whatever trouble BBN had spotted.

., June 1990. BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation. “Annual Report of the Science Development Program.” Cambridge, Mass., 1988. Bhushan, A. K. “Comments on the File Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 385. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., August 1972. ———.“The File Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 354. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., July 1972. Bhushan, Abhay, Ken Pogran, Ray Tomlinson, and Jim White. “Standardizing Network Mail Headers.” Request for Comments 561. MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 5 September 1973. Blue, Allan. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 12 June 1989.

After all, if people were going to share resources, it was important to let everyone know what was available. At the Michigan meeting, Engelbart volunteered to put together the Network Information Center, which came to be known as the NIC (pronounced “nick”). Engelbart also knew that his research group back home in Menlo Park would be equally enthusiastic about the network. His colleagues were talented programmers who would recognize an interesting project when they saw it. The conversation with Scantlebury had clarified several points for Roberts. The Briton’s comments about packet-switching in particular helped steer Roberts closer to a detailed design.


pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

Snapchat will keep experimenting, pivoting, and evolving as it figures out an ideal content strategy. But Snapchat is not the only tech company trying to convince media outlets that it is the future of publishing. Snapchat has competition from Facebook on every front. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE FEAR AND LOATHING IN MENLO PARK MARCH 2016 MENLO PARK, CA Just before Facebook went public in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg had a bound red book titled Facebook Was Not Originally Created to Be a Company placed on every employee’s desk. The book’s penultimate page offered a grave rallying cry: If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.

Duplan received some money from his parents and a $15,000 grant from a summer program at the venture capital firm Highland Capital. It had become quite easy for students to raise initial funding for their startup ideas. Venture capitalists were frequently on campus, often as professors or guest lecturers. Sand Hill Road, which runs from the 280 highway right past the edge of Stanford University in Menlo Park bordering Palo Alto, is home to the world’s major venture capital firms; think of it as Wall Street for venture capital. In the summer of 2011—the same summer that Evan, Reggie, and Bobby moved in to the Spiegels’ house to start Picaboo—Lucas and ten members of team Clinkle rented a house in Palo Alto to build the company’s first product.

During his speech he again suggested to the students that if a venture capitalist offered “standard” terms, they should in turn offer merely standard performance. Afterward, he went to dinner with General Catalyst’s contingent (Bonatsos, Jon Teo, Hemant Taneja, and Joel Cutler) at the Dutch Goose, a dive bar and burger joint in Menlo Park that is as popular with venture capitalists as it was with Stanford frat guys. The evening went so well that the General Catalyst group left the Dutch Goose thinking they had won the deal. But the next morning, Evan called and told them he was going with Benchmark as the lead investor. Several partners from Benchmark, primarily Peter Fenton and Matt Cohler, had maintained a relationship with Evan and Snapchat since they passed on the seed round the previous winter.


pages: 239 words: 74,845

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Carl Icahn, contact tracing, data science, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, gamification, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Hyperloop, meme stock, Menlo Park, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, security theater, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Two Sigma, value at risk, wealth creators

And sometimes, to the outside observer, maybe it could appear that a similar attitude extended all the way to Menlo Park. You didn’t get more “arm’s length” from Silicon Valley than Orlando without hitting ocean. And the attitude made sense; you might carry on a pleasant conversation with the plumber while he was fixing your sink, but you didn’t often invite him to dinner afterward. But this past week—culminating in this crazy Friday afternoon—was one of those rare moments when the plumber hung around, at least until the main course. Jim had been on the phone with Menlo Park a number of times over the past few hours. What was going on in the market, and particularly on Robinhood, wasn’t an emergency—but it was concerning, and more than that, it was strange.

Wall Street, simplified and digitized and shrunk down so small, you could fit it in your goddamn purse. Chapter Five Christ, I hate unicorns, Emma Jackson thought to herself as she tried to find a comfortable sitting position on the ultramodern sofa in the center of the vast waiting area of the shiny, absurdly modern, brand-spanking-new Menlo Park headquarters of one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley. It was a difficult task, considering that the sofa was way too short, which meant Emma’s knees were almost to her shoulders. She’d never thought a piece of furniture could be pretentious before she’d started working with Valley Internet companies, but by her sixth year in the rapidly growing fintech industry, she’d visited enough headquarters to know that anything—and she really meant anything—could be pretentious.

Ceilings could be pretentious, like the vaulted wooden one above her head, with its exposed beams and deep tones that would have been more suited for a ranch-style country estate or a fancy beach house than a tech company’s lobby. Courtyards could be terrifyingly pretentious—like the one on the other side of those windows, paved in wood and cobbled in stone, complete with a fire pit surrounded by a phalanx of potted plants. Even so, Emma supposed, the Menlo Park offices were a step up from the company’s previous headquarters in Palo Alto, basically a carved-out shell squatting near a strip mall, just a stone’s throw from where the two young unicorn foals had been roommates at Stanford, before they’d grown their rainbow-spewing horns. Those offices had been warren-like and undoubtedly lower-rent—and yet somehow, Emma had been just as intimidated when she’d visited, back in early 2016.


pages: 293 words: 91,110

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, George Gilder, Guggenheim Bilbao, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Turing machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

And that seems to explain why the important principle of thermionic emission came to be known as the Edison Effect. Thermionic emission was observed for the first time in March 1883 in Thomas A. Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, when the inventor and his associates noticed something strange going on inside one of his first light bulbs. In addition to the electric current flowing through the carbon filament, there seemed to be another, separate current flowing through the vacuum inside the glass bulb—something quite impossible, under contemporary explanations of electricity. Nobody at Menlo Park understood what was happening (the current was eventually found to be a flow of electrons boiling off the white-hot filament).

When the New York Daily Graphic reported that Edison had invented a machine that spun food and wine from mud and water, many newspapers failed to notice the April 1 dateline and ran the story straight—just one more miracle from Menlo Park. When Edison died, at eighty-four, in 1931, someone proposed that all the lights in the world be turned out for two minutes as a memorial. The idea was dropped on the ground that it would be impossible for the world to function that long without the electric light. Despite fame and fortune, Edison remained an uncouth hay-seed who flaunted his disdain for cleanliness, fashion, order, religion, and science. A journalist touring the famous Menlo Park laboratory in 1878 described the proprietor this way: “The hair, beginning to be touched with gray, falls over the forehead in a mop.

Had the early work on these materials been continued, it is not too great a flight of fancy to suggest that the modern semiconductor revolution might have come a half century or more earlier than it did. But after the discovery of the Edison Effect, electronics research took a new direction—with dramatic results. The work at Menlo Park led, fourteen years later, to the experiment known as “the zero hour of modern physics”—the discovery of the electron—and from there, along a more or less straight line, to wireless telegraphy, radio, television, and the first generation of digital computers. It was all a digression, but a glorious one.


pages: 381 words: 112,674

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

Stross Copyright The Cast The Benchmark Partners Dave Beirne previously, founder of Ramsey Beirne Associates, an executive search firm in Ossining, New York Bruce Dunlevie previously, general partner at Merrill Pickard, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Bill Gurley previously, general partner at Hummer Winblad, a venture capital firm in San Francisco, California; joined Benchmark in 1999 Kevin Harvey previously, founder of Approach Software, in Redwood City, California Bob Kagle previously, general partner at Technology Venture Investors (TVI), a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Andy Rachleff previously, general partner at Merrill Pickard, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Selected Individuals Mentioned Bill Atalla son of TriStrata founder John Atalla John Atalla founder, TriStrata Louis Borders founder and CEO, Webvan Eric Greenberg founder, Scient Bob Howe CEO, Scient Jerry Kaplan CEO, Onsale Bill Lederer CEO, artuframe/Art.com Burt McMurtry general partner, Technology Venture Investors Pete Mountanos CEO, Charitableway Pierre Omidyar founder and chairman, eBay Tom Perkins retired general partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Danny Shader Benchmark entrepreneur in residence; founder and CEO, Accept.com Rob Shaw founder, Newwatch/Ashford.com Jeff Skoll cofounder and vice president, eBay Paul Wahl CEO, TriStrata Jay Walker chairman, Priceline Steve Westly vice president, marketing, eBay James Whitcomb president, Newwatch/Ashford.com Meg Whitman president and CEO, eBay Selected Companies Mentioned (Partner representing Benchmark) Accept.com (Bruce Dunlevie) payment systems for electronic commerce Ariba (Bob Kagle) online ordering of materials and supplies for businesses Art.com [originally named artuframe] (Bob Kagle) posters and frames sold via the Web Ashford.com [originally named Newwatch] (Kevin Harvey) watches, pens, leather bags, and other luxury goods sold via the Web Charitableway (Andy Rachleff) online for-profit solicitor for nonprofit organizations Critical Path (Kevin Harvey) hosts e-mail services for large organizations eBay (Bob Kagle) online person-to-person auctions via the Web ePhysician (Dave Beirne) prescription ordering for doctors via a PalmPilot Juniper Networks (Andy Rachleff) manufacturer of high-speed routers for the Internet Newwatch [renamed Ashford.com; see above] Priceline (Dave Beirne) online bidding for airline tickets and hotel rooms Red Hat (Kevin Harvey) distributor of Linux, an alternative operating system to Windows Scient (Dave Beirne) technical consulting services to e-tailers Toysrus.com (Bruce Dunlevie) aborted joint venture to sell toys via the Web; to have been cofunded by, but organizationally separate from, Toys “R” Us TriStrata (Dave Beirne) security software for data networks within large corporations Webvan (Dave Beirne) groceries sold via the Web and delivered to the home Introduction When eBay, a small Internet auction company based in San Jose, California, sought venture capital, it had to pass an informal test administered by the venture guys before they would consider making an investment: Was there a reasonably good likelihood that the investors could make ten times their money within three years?

So at least it seemed to me, a historian who was struck by how that moment appeared to mark the apotheosis of the entrepreneur, the first time since the arrival of Big Business in the post–Civil War years that small business, in the form of high-tech start-ups, had regained the preeminent position of status in the business world. This was new and piqued my curiosity. The offices of venture capitalists are concentrated in my hometown of Menlo Park, California, and I sought an inside vantage point so that I could observe at close range the financial alchemy at the heart of venture capital and determine which parts should be credited to human agency and which to impersonal forces at work in the larger financial environment—that is, sort out skill from luck.

Xerox called, seeking help in its search for a new president. The retainer was a crisp million dollars—something of an improvement over the $5,000-a-pop contingency-fee business where he’d begun. At the same time that Ramsey Beirne’s business was flourishing, a group of three young venture capitalists in Menlo Park—Bruce Dunlevie, Bob Kagle, and Andy Rachleff—decided to step free of their old firms, and with software entrepreneur Kevin Harvey they set up Benchmark Capital. In the spring of 1997 Bruce Dunlevie, whom Dave Beirne had come to know in the course of search assignments, dropped by the Ramsey Beirne office in New York, ostensibly to meet the newly hired Ramsey Beirne associates.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The company was made up of about half suburban stiffs (older, married, childrened) who lived on the Peninsula, in “bedroom communities” like Menlo Park or Mountain View, depending on how early they had joined and how wealthy they were. The other half (young, hipster, fresh out of school) lived in the trendy and expensive parts of San Francisco. The latter were trucked in on company buses. That’s right, Facebook ran a pool of shuttles that carted people either the thirty miles from SF to Menlo Park, or from downtown Palo Alto.* These buses were a metaphor for what was happening in the Bay Area (and, I’d venture, the entire economy), a symbolism not lost on the antitechie protesters, given their penchant for smashing the buses’ windows occasionally.

IPA > IPO The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world. —Stefan Zweig, Chess Story MAY 17, 2012 Time to call Jimmy. Jimmy was my exotic beer dealer at Willows, the local family-owned grocery store in Menlo Park, which had survived the chain-store assault of Whole Foods by developing a thriving sideline in craft beer. The market was on Willow Road, which started just outside 24-karat Palo Alto, then wended its way through equally gold-plated Menlo Park and past the VA hospital that Ken Kesey once worked in and that inspired One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Almost as if on an exotic safari, Willow Road then traversed East Palo Alto, the local slum that once had the highest murder rate in the Bay Area (two of the local schools are named after César Chávez and Ron McNair, an African American astronaut), before ending at Facebook’s entrance gate, complete with Like sign ringed by an ever-present scrum of tourists.

I found us a cheap one-bedroom apartment to serve as an office three blocks west of Castro Street, the main drag in Mountain View. Other than serving as Google’s hometown, Mountain View is just one more in the string of towns dotting the 101 and the Caltrain line from San Francisco to San Jose. More down-market and working-class than posh Palo Alto or Menlo Park, it housed a couple of startups, as well as the law firm Fenwick & West, an entity we would, sadly, come to know well. Smack in the middle of downtown was Red Rock Coffee, about the most hacker and startup-y café on the Peninsula, whose weaponized sugar-and-caffeine mochas would keep us going through the coming weeks.* I had just moved out of my Mission bachelor pad in SF and in with British Trader and little Zoë (at this point our relationship situation was tenuous but hopeful), and had furniture to spare.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

See, for example, Edward A. Torrero, Next-Generation Computers, Spectrum Series (New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1985), 146.   45.   Peter E. Hart and Richard O. Duda, PROSPECTOR—A Computer Based Consultation System for Mineral Exploration (Menlo Park, Calif.: SRI International, 1977).   46.   Peter E. Hart, Artificial Intelligence (Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, 1976).   47.   Leslie, The Cold War and American Science, 252.   48.   Edwards, The Closed World, 18.   49.   Robert Trappl, Impacts of Artificial Intelligence (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1986), 6.   50.   

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. London: Minor Compositions, 2013. Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91. Hart, Peter E. Artificial Intelligence. Technical Note No. 126. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, February 1976. Hart, Peter E., and Richard O Duda. PROSPECTOR—A Computer Based Consultation System for Mineral Exploration. Technical Note No. 155. Menlo Park, Calif.: SRI International, October, 1977. Harwell, Drew. “Defense Department Pledges Billions Toward Artificial Intelligence Research.” Washington Post, September 7, 2018. Hassein, Nabil. “Against Black Inclusion in Facial Recognition.”

Nilsson, Nils J. “Artificial Intelligence: Employment, and Income.” In Impacts of Artificial Intelligence, ed. Robert Trappl, 103–23. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1986. ________. Artificial Intelligence—Research and Applications. Vol. 2. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, May 1975. ________. A Mobile Automaton: An Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, 1969. ________. The Quest for Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Noble, David F. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention New York: Knopf, 1997.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Engelbart pulled up an imaginary shopping list and showed how he could reorder and reorganize it with the click of a mouse. He opened a link to a map. About halfway through the presentation, he explained that he wanted to connect to his lab team at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. He had been remotely using the computer at the lab, an impressive feat in itself, and now he wanted to bring in video images. “Come in, Menlo Park,” he said. The entire audience could hear him inhale and hold his breath. Engelbart knew that connecting with Menlo Park required the perfect synchronization of two custom-built modem lines and two video microwave links relayed to San Francisco from a truck parked on a hilltop midway between the city and the laboratory.

Only after a new image flickered onto the screen—a young man’s well-manicured right hand, grasping a mouse, hove into view—did Engelbart exhale and resume his talk: “Okay, there’s Don Andrew’s hand in Menlo Park.” And he was off again. He introduced the mouse (“I don’t know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologize. It started that way, and we never did change it.”). He showed the hardware that was driving the system. He demonstrated how someone in Menlo Park could see the same document that Engelbart had on his screen and how, if the man in Menlo Park moved his mouse, the cursor (Engelbart called it a “tracking spot” or “bug”) moved on Engelbart’s own screen projected for the auditorium.

NIELS REIMERS Some three hundred people, most of them Stanford students, had shown up by 7:30 on that May morning in 1969, determined to shut down a satellite office of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) a day after the People’s Park protests had rocked Berkeley. SRI’s much larger headquarters facility, where Doug Engelbart had done the work unveiled six months earlier in the Mother of All Demos, was four miles north, in Menlo Park. This satellite office, located only a few blocks from the southern edge of the Stanford campus, housed a computer that protesters claimed was analyzing activities of Communist insurgents in Southeast Asia. The protesters, many from a radical Stanford student organization called the April Third Movement, wanted that analysis—and any other work associated with the war in Vietnam—stopped.1 The group dragged signs, sawhorses, and a steel crane boom from a nearby construction site onto Oregon Expressway, a major east–west thoroughfare.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Recently became known as Silicon Valley: in 1971, the journalist Don Hoefler popularized the term “Silicon Valley” in a series of articles for Electronic News, an industry trade publication. 4, The first computer sat … The computer in the van was an LSI-11; the custom packet radio equipment was built by Collins Radio. The location of the repeaters in the Bay Area packet radio network is shown in a map provided by the Computer History Museum. The Menlo Park building was the headquarters of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). For a diagram that shows the path of the packets in the 1977 experiment, see Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000 [1999]), 132. 4, In Menlo Park, the packets underwent … At the SRI headquarters in Menlo Park, the packets hopped from the Bay Area packet radio network (PRNET) to the ARPANET, and then traveled to the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) facility in Kjeller, Norway.

It transformed the words being typed on the terminal into discrete slices of data called “packets.” These packets were encoded as radio waves and transmitted from the van’s antennas to repeaters on nearby mountaintops, which amplified them. With this extra boost, they could make it all the way to Menlo Park, where an office building received them. In Menlo Park, the packets underwent a subtle metamorphosis. They shed their ethereal shape as radio waves and acquired a new form: electrical signals in copper telephone lines. Then they embarked on a long journey, riding those lines all the way to the East Coast before sailing via satellite over the Atlantic Ocean.

This is the dream of a networked military using computing to project American power. This is the dream that produced the internet. ARPANET had been a major breakthrough. But it had a limitation: it wasn’t mobile. The computers on ARPANET were gigantic by today’s standards. That might work for DARPA researchers, who could sit at a terminal in Cambridge or Menlo Park—but it did little for soldiers deployed deep in enemy territory. For ARPANET to be useful to forces in the field, it had to be accessible anywhere in the world. This required doing two things. The first was building a wireless network that could relay packets of data among the widely dispersed cogs of the US war machine by radio or satellite.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York University Press, 2007), p. 83. 71. Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000), p. 50. See also Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, “Thomas Edison and Menlo Park,” 2009 (www.menloparkmuseum.org/thomas-edison-and-menlo-park). 72. Bender, The Unfinished City, p. 83. 73. See Edison Center at Menlo Park, “Thomas Edison and Menlo Park.” See also Bender, The Unfinished City, p. 87. CHAPTER 3 1. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The City in American History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (June 1940), p. 64. 2. Ibid., pp. 43–66. 3.

Edison was not alone in exploiting the resources of the region. Between 1866 and 1886, 80 percent of the inventors with five or more telegraph-related patents resided in or within commuting distance of New York.70 Edison perfected the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb in 1879 in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. But his work in rural Menlo Park was the culmination of years of effort that started in New York City, where Edison had secured space in the Laws’ Gold Indicator 02-2151-2 ch2.indd 39 5/20/13 6:48 PM 40 NYC: INNOVATION AND THE NEXT ECONOMY Company in 1869, and continued in Newark, where Edison moved in 1870.71 The power of Edison’s light bulb was not just that it could illuminate but that it could do so on a grand, commercial scale.

The early, highly recognizable model for networked workplaces is the newspaper newsroom, but these principles have been implemented in places ranging from Michael Bloomberg’s bullpen in New York’s city hall to the campuses of Silicon Valley technology firms. Facebook and Google, for example, have embraced “hackable buildings,” in the words of Randy Howder, a workplace strategist at the design and architecture firm Gensler, who led the design of Facebook’s recent Menlo Park, California, offices. These offices have open floor plans that can be easily reconfigured to create dense, collaborative spaces for new teams and projects.18 The line between private and public spaces is now blurred. When Zappos, the online retail giant that grew to scale in suburban Las Vegas, was looking for new headquarters in 2010, the company’s CEO Tony Hsieh decided to create a denser workplace to increase interaction and collaboration.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Another, Jay Last, came from a family of Pennsylvania schoolteachers. A third, Eugene Kleiner, arrived in the U.S. as a teenage refugee from war-torn Europe. Only one was actually from Northern California, the shy and detail-obsessed Gordon Moore, who had grown up in a modest clapboard cottage in nearby Menlo Park.22 The young recruits quickly concluded that Shockley was going about building his semiconductors in a wrong-headed way. He was committed to an expensive and laborious process called the four-layer diode, and refused to be persuaded that cheaper, simpler silicon chips were the way to go. Jim Gibbons showed up at the storefront just weeks before these Shockley lieutenants—Noyce, Last, Moore, Kleiner, plus four others—quit to start a company of their own called Fairchild Semiconductor, which quickly surpassed and outlasted Shockley’s operation.

The decision disappointed the students, who had hoped that SRI would be shut down altogether.2 Had that happened, Stanford would have squelched an operation that was building an entirely new universe of connected, human-scale computing—the home of Shaky the Robot, of Dean Brown’s education lab, and of Doug Engelbart’s “research center for augmenting human intellect.” In Engelbart’s emphasis on networked collaboration, this low-key member of the Greatest Generation was completely in sync with the radical political currents swirling around the Stanford campus and the bland suburban storefronts of the South Bay. Just down the road from SRI’s Menlo Park facility was Kepler’s Books, which owner Roy Kepler had turned into an antiwar and countercultural salon. Beat poets, Joan Baez, and the Grateful Dead all made appearances at Kepler’s, and the store’s book talks and rap sessions became can’t-miss events for many in the local tech community. That included members of the Engelbart lab, who’d drop in on their way to catch the commuter train home.

She should just start one herself. First, she embarked on her own crash course in building hardware and programming software. Her hands-on computer experience hadn’t gotten much further than keypunching those IBM cards at Cornell. She did all she could to learn on her own, subscribing to the PCC and going down to Menlo Park to visit the new “People’s Computer Center” that had spun off from Albrecht’s operation, where both adults and kids could come in to learn how to program and play. She learned BASIC. In order to draw the scattered and reclusive local population of hackers out of their basements and garages, she started her own group: the Sonoma County Computer Club.


pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Stanford alumni Jerry Yang and David Filo had already started Yahoo, a wildly popular compilation of searchable Web pages. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford graduate students fiddling with an algorithm that would soon become Google. The world’s leading venture capitalists, investors who make risky bets on unproven technology companies, nearly all had their offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, minutes from the Stanford campus. The proximity was no coincidence: the financiers recognized the value of staying close to the people dreaming up investable ideas at Stanford’s venerable computer science and engineering schools. This isn’t to say UCLA’s programs were an engineering backwater.

“Then I could pay people again,” says Kalanick. And so it continued. In early 2002, Kalanick says he succeeded in attracting the interest of August Capital, which planned to invest $10 million in Red Swoosh. August was the type of firm Kalanick had long coveted. An established, pedigreed firm on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, August was best known for having made an early and extremely lucrative investment in Microsoft. Landing an investment from August would confer legitimacy on the upstart company. But August had two conditions in return for its investment. First, it wanted Red Swoosh to find another, similar firm to coinvest alongside it.

These included Hewlett-Packard (in Palo Alto), Intel (Santa Clara), Apple (Cupertino), and Cisco Systems (San Jose). The first crop of major Internet companies hunted for engineering talent in its natural habitat, in “the Valley,” and they started there too. Yahoo (Sunnyvale), Google (Mountain View), and Facebook (Menlo Park) all followed this playbook. San Francisco wasn’t a complete tech wasteland. A large handful of smaller Internet companies, most with some connection to media or advertising technology, had formed in San Francisco during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Most vanished just as quickly. Then, in the depth of one of the tech industry’s periodic down cycles, something changed.


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

In 1960, the same year Leary tried psilocybin and launched his research project, Ken Kesey, the novelist, had his own mind-blowing LSD experience, a trip that would inspire him to spread the psychedelic word, and the drugs themselves, as widely and loudly as he could. It is one of the richer ironies of psychedelic history that Kesey had his first LSD experience courtesy of a government research program conducted at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, which paid him seventy-five dollars to try the experimental drug. Unbeknownst to Kesey, his first LSD trip was bought and paid for by the CIA, which had sponsored the Menlo Park research as part of its MK-Ultra program, the agency’s decade-long effort to discover whether LSD could somehow be weaponized. With Ken Kesey, the CIA had turned on exactly the wrong man. In what he aptly called “the revolt of the guinea pigs,” Kesey proceeded to organize with his band of Merry Pranksters a series of “Acid Tests” in which thousands of young people in the Bay Area were given LSD in an effort to change the mind of a generation.

In his highly deliberate, slightly obsessive, and scrupulously polite way, Jesse contacted the region’s numerous “psychedelic elders”—the rich cast of characters who had been deeply involved in research and therapy in the years before most of the drugs were banned in 1970, with the passing of the Controlled Substances Act, and the classification of LSD and psilocybin as schedule 1 substances with a high potential for abuse and no recognized medical use. There was James Fadiman, the Stanford-trained psychologist who had done pioneering research on psychedelics and problem solving at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, until the FDA halted the group’s work in 1966. (In the early 1960s, there was at least as much psychedelic research going on around Stanford as there was at Harvard; it just didn’t have a character of the wattage of a Timothy Leary out talking about it.) Then there was Fadiman’s colleague at the institute Myron Stolaroff, a prominent Silicon Valley electrical engineer who worked as a senior executive at Ampex, the magnetic recording equipment maker, until an LSD trip inspired him to give up engineering (much like Bob Jesse) for a career as a psychedelic researcher and therapist.

For Hubbard, psychedelic therapy was a form of philanthropy, and he drained his fortune advancing the cause. Al Hubbard moved between these far-flung centers of research like a kind of psychedelic honeybee, disseminating information, chemicals, and clinical expertise while building what became an extensive network across North America. In time, he would add Menlo Park and Cambridge to his circuit. But was Hubbard just spreading information, or was he also collecting it and passing it on to the CIA? Was the pollinator also a spy? It’s impossible to say for certain; some people who knew Hubbard (like James Fadiman) think it’s entirely plausible, while others aren’t so sure, pointing to the fact the Captain often criticized the CIA for using LSD as a weapon.


pages: 501 words: 145,097

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Donner party, estate planning, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, James Watt: steam engine, Joi Ito, Khyber Pass, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, plutocrats, safety bicycle, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

The filament would be fragile, of course; but its lifetime could perhaps be extended and preserved by enclosing it in a vacuum in a specially blown glass bulb. Thus was born—allegedly, supposedly—the idea of the incandescent lightbulb, in the up-country wilds of Carbon County, Wyoming Territory, in the summer of 1878. But skeptics abound. Most suggest that the nation’s inventor-in-chief experimented in his laboratory in Menlo Park with scores of potential illuminating candidates—strands of burned baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo among them—before finally settling on the carbonized cotton thread from which he made his famous first-ever patented lightbulb in 1879. Bamboo was but one of some six thousand vegetable products that he tried.

On his birthday each February, the speakers sound with encomiums to the man who, as they say in these parts, “invented today.” The motto of Edison Township is “Let there be light,” and not without reason. During the summer of 1879 he saw to it that lamps were erected along the byways of the township’s thirty-six acres of Menlo Park, where he had sited his laboratory. They were an exhibition of his abilities and his vision, an exhibition he would employ to persuade those who mattered in New York to allow him to use the city as his first test market for lightbulbs and for the generation and distribution of the electricity to illuminate them.

Although everyone agreed that the security the lights offered to businesses and people late at night promoted the twenty-four-hour economy that still defines Manhattan today, no one liked arc lighting, not one bit. Edison hoped New Yorkers would turn instead to his smaller, softer, more human-scale incandescent vacuum-tube illuminations—bulbs his company promised would offer “milder” light. He consequently invited all manner of grandees over to Menlo Park to demonstrate what he had in mind. It was quite a show. On his thirty-six-acre spread, he had laid out whole streets, each lined with wooden poles topped with glass lanterns, inside each of which was an incandescent bulb. Imaginary houses, designed to look like those in lower Manhattan, were also staked out, and they were lighted, too, and this whole unreal New York City was connected to an array of batteries with feeder cables (which took the power to the streets), mains wires (which took it into the houses), and service wires (which went to the individual house lamps).


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation. —Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841 INTRODUCTION MAKE A DUCK On a Wednesday morning in June 2017, I find myself in Menlo Park, California, sharing a small table in a faux European coffee shop with a woman I’ll call Julia—and I’m making a duck out of Legos. Outside, it’s sunny and warm. A late-morning breeze ruffles the big bright-colored umbrellas above the tables in the plaza. Inside, young techies gaze up at the chalkboard menu above the counter and sit at tables clicking at laptops.

They seem to believe that some magic elixir exists here, some recipe for innovation that floats in the air and can be absorbed if you drive around with your windows open, smelling the eucalyptus trees. They see people getting rich on things they don’t even understand. Blockchain? Ethereum? Initial coin offerings? So they fly out and have drinks at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where venture capitalists hang around, as do expensive “companions,” many with Eastern European accents. They eat lunch at the Battery, a members-only private club for social-climbing parvenus in San Francisco. They wangle an invitation to a Bitcoin party and rub shoulders with the scammers, hustlers, Ponzi schemers, and obnoxious knobs who are trying to cash in on a modern-day tulip mania based around a cryptocurrency that Warren Buffett describes as “rat poison squared.”

In fact, some of what ails us today actually began more than a century ago. CHAPTER THREE A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCE (AND WHY YOU SHOULDN’T TRUST IT) Making a duck out of Legos may seem a perfect example of today’s workplace zeitgeist, but the exercise I was doing in that Menlo Park café was actually just a new manifestation of an old belief, one that sprang to life in the early years of the twentieth century and came to be known as management science. The term hinges on the belief that the art of managing people can be reduced to science. Nowadays management science is something you can get a degree in, at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

They came up with the answer down the road, in the heart of Silicon Valley—in a basement, in fact. Only Connect For a couple of years at the beginning of the millennium—during the quiet time after the Internet bubble burst but before it inflated again—I lived in Menlo Park, California, a supremely tidy suburb in the heart of Silicon Valley. Menlo Park is a place rich in a lot of things, Internet history among them. When Leonard Kleinrock recorded his first “host-to-host” communication—what he likes to call “the first breath of the Internet’s life”—the computer on the other end of the line was at the Stanford Research Institute, barely a mile from our apartment.

Just as Wall Street, Broadway, or Sunset Boulevard each contain a dream, so too does this corner of Silicon Valley. Most often, that dream is to build a new piece of the Internet, preferably one worth a billion dollars. (Facebook, by the way, recently moved into a fifty-seven-acre campus, back in Menlo Park.) An economic geographer would describe all this as a “a business cluster.” Silicon Valley’s unique combination of talent, expertise, and money has created an atmosphere of astounding innovation—as well as what the local venture capitalist John Doerr once described as the “greatest legal accumulation of wealth in human history.”

See Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange Gates, Bill, 57 Gilbert, John, 174–75, 176, 177–78, 179–80 Global Crossing, 125, 153, 183, 202–3, 208, 209–10, 253 Global Internet Geography “GIG” (TeleGeography), 14, 27 Global Switch, 183 globalization of “peering,” 125–26 undersea cables and, 197 Goldman Sachs, 261 Google Cerf at, 45 in China, 257 as content provider, 79 data centers/storage for, 229, 231, 234–35, 237–50, 254, 255, 257, 258, 261 and Internet as series of tubes, 5 invisibility of political borders and, 147 IPO for, 69–70 Menlo Park location of, 69 mission statement of, 248 as most-visited website, 127 NANOGers at, 120 New York City location of, 163–64, 172 number of daily searches on, 231 peering and, 122–23, 125–26 privacy issues at, 258 secrecy/security at, 242–50, 254, 257 Gore, Al, 63 government, Dutch, AMS–IX and, 147 government, US, role at MAE-East of, 62–63.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Picture my constrictions.’ They were to do this whilst singing, to the tune of ‘Row, Row Your Boat’, ‘Now let’s swim ourselves up and down my streams/Touch and rub and warm and melt the plaque that blocks my streams.’ It didn’t work. As the vote in the Senate was taking place, Vasco found himself in a bed in Menlo Park recovering from seven-way coronary bypass surgery. Unable to personally shepherd in all the votes, his dream failed. It was a time of anguish and blackness through which he was helped by Carl Rogers, who, following Vasco’s release from hospital, treated him to a seafood buffet at his favourite La Jolla restaurant then took him home, where the great psychologist listened to his tales of loneliness and depression.

They had no idea he had, upon his desk that day, pieces of technology that were as if from a time machine. Engelbart was touching the future, and he was about to show them it. ‘I hope you’ll go along with this rather unusual setting and the fact that I remain seated when I get introduced,’ he said, up on the screen. ‘I should tell you I’m backed up by quite a staff of people between here and Menlo Park where Stanford Research is located, some thirty miles south of here and, er,’ he smiled anxiously and glanced upwards at some unseen person or thing, ‘if every one of us does our job well, it’ll all go very interesting.’ He looked up again. ‘I think.’ Another nervous pause. ‘The research programme that I’m going to describe to you is quickly characterizable by saying if, in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsible.’

Even the experts in the Valley, many clustered around Stanford University, saw the future as one in which computers would replace humans, believing true artificial intelligence was coming soon. But Engelbart’s vision was radically different. And so was the technology he was about to demonstrate to the stunned crowd. The glare from his monitor glowed onto his face as he explained that they’d been developing this new form of computing at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. ‘In my office I have a console like this and there are twelve others that have computers and we try, nowadays, to do our daily work on here.’ He smiled as if in acknowledgement of how eccentric all this sounded. ‘So this characterizes the way I could just sit and look at a completely blank piece of paper.


pages: 459 words: 140,010

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

It turned out it was in a tiny building next to a laundromat in a shopping center. There were two or three rooms. All they had was a box full of parts.” He picked up some of those parts and returned to San Francisco. On April 16, 1975, Dompier reported on MITS at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, a pioneering microcomputer club in Menlo Park, California. Dompier drew an attentive audience. MITS, he told his listeners, had 4,000 orders and couldn’t even begin to fill them. The thousands of orders, more than anything else, sparked people’s interest. What they had been waiting for had happened. They were going to have their own computers.

(Courtesy of Ted Nelson) Albrecht was a passionate promoter of computer power to the people. He wanted to teach children, in particular, about the machines. So, he split off from the Portola Institute to form Dymax, an organization dedicated to informing the general public about computers. Dymax gave rise to a walk-in computer center in Menlo Park and to the thoroughly irreverent PCC. Computers had been mainly used against people, PCC said. Now they were going to be used for people. Albrecht was never paid, and others worked for little. The 1960s values that pervaded the company exalted accomplishing something worthwhile beyond attaining money, power, or prestige.

–Keith Britton, Homebrew Computer Club member Early in 1975, a number of counterculture information exchanges existed in the San Francisco Bay Area for people interested in computers. Community Memory was one, PCC was another, and there was the PCC spin-off, the Community Computer Center. Peace activist Fred Moore was running a noncomputerized information network out of the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park, matching people with common interests about anything, not just computers. A Place to Come Together Moore became interested in computers when he realized he needed computing power. He talked to Bob Albrecht at PCC about getting both a computer and a base of operations. Soon Moore was teaching children about computers while learning about them himself.


pages: 224 words: 91,918

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Asilomar, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Menlo Park, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen

Lovell could point out in the most persuasive way how mundane character traits and minor hassles around Perry Lane fit into the richest, most complex metaphor of life ever devised, namely, Freud's... . And a little experimental gas . . . Yes. Lovell told him about some experiments the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park was running with "psychomimetic" drugs, drugs that brought on temporary states resembling psychoses. They were paying volunteers $75 a day. Kesey volunteered. It was all nicely calcimined and clinical. They would put him on a bed in a white room and give him a series of capsules without saying what they were.

—see each muscle fiber decussate, pulling the poor jelly of his lip to the left and the fibers one by one leading back into infrared caverns of the body, through transistor-radio innards of nerve tangles, each one on Red Alert, the poor ninny's inner hooks desperately trying to make the little writhing bastards keep still in there, I am Doctor, this is a human specimen before me—the poor ninny has his own desert movie going on inside, only each horsehair A-rab is a threat—if only his lip, his face, would stay level, level like the honey bubble of the Official Plaster Man assured him it would— Miraculous! He could truly see into people for the first time— And yes, that little capsule sliding blissly down the gullet was LSD. VERY SOON IT WAS ALREADY TIME TO PUSH ON BEYOND another fantasy, the fantasy of the Menlo Park clinicians. The clinicians' fantasy was that the volunteers were laboratory animals that had to be dealt with objectively, quantitatively. It was well known that people who volunteered for drug experiments tended to be unstable anyway. So the doctors would come in in white smocks, with the clipboards, taking blood pressures and heart rates and urine specimens and having them try to solve simple problems in logic and mathematics, such as adding up columns of figures, and having them judge time and distances, although they did have them talk into tape recorders, too.

It was quite a little secret to have stumbled onto, a hulking supersecret, in fact—the triumph of the guinea pigs! In a short time he and Lovell had tried the whole range of the drugs, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, IT-290 the superamphetamine, Ditran the bummer, morning-glory seeds. They were onto a discovery that the Menlo Park clinicians themselves never—mighty fine irony here: the White Smocks were supposedly using them. Instead the White Smocks had handed them the very key itself. And you don't even know, bub . .. with these drugs your perception is altered enough that you find yourself looking out of completely strange eyeholes.


pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

The great transformation “Revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense…that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately” Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Seventeen years after Sergey Brin and Larry Page first launched Google in their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California, HBO released the second season of Silicon Valley, its fictional comedy parodying the thriving industry that had grown out of those early garage start-ups. In the third episode, Gareth Belson – CEO of a company that has more than a few parallels with the one that Brin and Page had created – rather grandiosely likened Silicon Valley to Europe in the Renaissance.

The rise of social economics 1. Generation why “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook When Sergey Brin and Larry Page first set-up Google in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park in the autumn of 1998, they were very clear why they were doing it: “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They also had a great tool to achieve this: a search engine they had developed while they were PhD students, which used very different algorithms to any other on the market.

It created a very clear demarcation between its system and any commercial advertising, putting the wants and needs of its users above everything else. In 1999, Google’s revenues were $200,000. Two years later, they had increased to more than $700 million. Ten years after Brin and Page first moved Google into the garage in Menlo Park, the company’s revenues hit $21 billion. By 2018, they will exceed $100 billion. This is the power of social economics. 2. Your stand is your brand “I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state – the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech.


pages: 352 words: 120,202

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

"So my deal with Hewlett-Packard was called off," Doug says, wrapping up the reminiscence with one of his famous wry smiles, adding: "the last time I looked they were number five in the world of computers." Doug kept looking for the right institutional base. In October, 1957, the very month of Sputnik, he received an offer from an organization in Menlo Park, "across the creek" from Palo Alto, then known as the Stanford Research Institute. They were interested in conducting research into scientific, military, and commercial applications of computers. One of the people who interviewed him for the SRI job had been a year or two ahead of Doug in the Ph.D. program at Berkeley, and Doug told him about his ideas of getting computers to interact with people, in order to augment their intellect.

In a matter of months, the SRI Augmentation Research Center was due to become the Network Information Center for ARPA's experiment in long-distance linking of computers -- the fabled ARPAnet. In the fall of 1968, when a major gathering of the computer clans known as the Fall Joint Computer conference was scheduled in nearby San Francisco, Doug decided to stake the reputation of his long-sought augmentation laboratory in Menlo Park -- literally his life's work by that time -- on a demonstration so daring and direct that finally, after all these years, computer scientists would understand and embrace that vital clue that had eluded them for so long. Those who were in the audience at Civic Auditorium that afternoon remember how Doug's quiet voice managed to gently but irresistibly seize the attention of several thousand high-level hackers for nearly two hours, after which the audience did something rare in that particularly competitive and critical subculture -- they gave Doug and his colleagues a standing ovation.

State-of-the-art audiovisual equipment was gathered from around the world at the behest of a presentation team that included Stewart Brand, whose experience in mind-altering multimedia shows was derived from his production of get-togethers a few years before this, held not too far from this same auditorium, known as "Acid Tests." Doug's control panel and screen were linked to the host computer and the rest of the team back at SRI via a temporary microwave antenna they had set up in the hills above Menlo Park. While Doug was up there alone in the cockpit, a dozen people under the direction of Bill English worked frantically behind the scenes to keep their delicately transplanted system together just long enough for this crucial test flight. For once, fate was on their side. Like a perfect space launch, all the minor random accidents canceled each other.


pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

* * * A few blocks away, around noon, a dozen Instagram employees slipped through their back door and walked down an alley to avoid the press out front. They boarded a shuttle bus that brought them thirty miles south to the vast parking lot encircling Facebook’s headquarters, at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park. The buildings were their own industrial island, abutted on one side by an eight-lane highway and on the other by salt marshes at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. Marked by a giant blue thumbs-up “like” sign, the headquarters had so much employee traffic, it was funneled and directed by an army of valets and guards.

People got booted from the suggested user list, for example, or had their accounts canceled without warning or explanation for violating ambiguous content rules. Few people realized that choosing to build a business on Instagram meant placing one’s future at the mercy of a small handful of people in Menlo Park, California, making decisions on the fly. The only way to be certain nothing bad would happen was to build a relationship with an Instagram employee like Porch or Toffey. As Facebook would say, the strategy didn’t scale. Instagram employees disliked their one automated machination of buzz, the “Popular” page, which circulated posts that got a higher-than-average number of likes and comments.

Worse, Spiegel still felt pretty strongly that Facebook was inherently evil and uncreative. Khan decided to start with his Facebook counterpart, Sheryl Sandberg. He reached out asking if it was possible to repair the relationship, and she agreed to meet at Facebook’s headquarters. In the summer of 2016, Khan made the trip from LA to Menlo Park. Sandberg had made some arrangements up front to keep his visit confidential. He took a secret entrance, avoiding the general security check-in, so employees wouldn’t recognize him and get the wrong idea. That was perhaps the first sign that Facebook had a different agenda than he did. Sandberg had invited Dan Rose, Facebook’s partnerships head, to join the conversation.


Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

He finally fessed up to something that I've known a long time - that nobody really knows where the Silicon Valley is - or what it is. Abe grew up in Rochester and never came west until Microsoft. My reply: Silicon Valley Where/what is it? Its a backward J-shaped strand of cities, starting at the south of San Francisco and looping down the bay, east of San Jose: San Mateo, Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Ritos, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Saratoga, Campbell, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, San Jose, Milpitas and Fremont. I used a map for this. They don’t actually MANUFACTURE much by way of silicon here anymore . . . the silicon chip factories are mostly a thing of the past . . . it's no longer a cost effective thing to do.

* * * E-mail from Abe: Im re-reading all my old TinTin books, and I'm noticing that there are all of these things absent in the Boy Detective's life . . . religion, parents, politics, relationship, communion with nature, class, love, death, birth . . . it's a long list. And I find that while I still love TinTin, I'm getting currious about all of its invisible content. * * * The Valley is so career-o-centric. So much career energy! There must be a 65-ton crystal of osmium hexachloride buried 220 feet below the surface of Menlo Park, sucking in all of the career energy in the Bay Area and shooting it back down the Peninsula at twice light speed. It's science fiction here. * * * Mom's signed up for a ladies 50-to-60 swim meet. It's next week. * * * Susan bought a case load of premoistened towelettes at Price-Costco. She's mad at the rest of the Habitrail because it's such a pigsty.

When nobody was looking, I hucked some fallen tangerines at the Valotas' house down below ours. Mr. Valota is this Gladys-Kravitz-from-Bewitched type guy who somehow taps into all of the misinformation, apocrypha, and bad memes floating about the Valley and feeds them back to Mom in the aisles of Draeger's in Menlo Park. He's always saying discouraging things about Oop! to Mom. Gee thanks, Mr. Valota. I liked hearing the tangerines go thunk as they hit the cedar shingles of his lanai. It's never the Mr. Valotas of this world whose houses burn down. I was breathing really hard as I was carrying the Rubbermaid Roughneck containers to the end of the driveway.


pages: 285 words: 91,144

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman

airport security, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, data science, Day of the Dead, fake news, Frank Gehry, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Googley, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Khan Academy, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, microaggression, move fast and break things, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, the High Line, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Every week, as I later learned, Zuckerberg gave a talk to his employees and sometimes, to close out the event, he would show a video of some regular person raving about one of Facebook’s products. Parse had been acquired by Facebook months before, and it was their turn to be featured—in my video, as it turned out. So, Zuckerberg streamed me in my pajamas to his entire company. In Menlo Park and Austin and Dallas and Seattle and London and all around the world, every single Facebook employee saw me talking about my app. I later learned from the Parse CEO, Ilya Sukhar, that Zuckerberg turned to him while the video was playing and said, “Hey, I think we should hire this kid.” Chapter 7 Big in Peru About a week after Zuckerberg saw my pajama video, I was sitting in my precalculus class, not listening to my teacher, when an email came in from Facebook, inviting me to apply for an internship.

Days before the meeting, she’d quickly Googled Zuckerberg’s name; the only detail that stuck out to her was the fact that he was Jewish, like my father. We took an Uber straight from the airport to the campus, where we were met by a recruiter named Emily and two intern coordinators. Walking onto the Facebook campus in Menlo Park was like walking into Disney World, my favorite place on earth: there were colorful buildings; basketball courts; restaurants serving every kind of food; vending machines stocked with battery chargers, cables, headphones, and keyboards—all of it free for employees. There were gyms with personal trainers; complimentary dance, yoga, and aerobics classes; barbershops and hair salons offering high-end haircuts; on-campus doctors and dentists who could see you at any point during the day; and complimentary nutritionists to help you find a balanced diet.

The rent was $1,350, which I thought sounded very steep, but I was getting anxious to nail down my living situation, so a week before heading back to California, I confirmed with the guy that I would like to move into the hacker house. One week later, I flew back to San Francisco and Ubered straight from the airport to my new home in the city at around ten p.m. It was in the center of the Castro District, a two-hour commute in rush-hour traffic to Facebook in Menlo Park. Most young Silicon Valley workers lived in the city and took the free Facebook and Google shuttles to and from work every day. I wasn’t looking forward to commuting, but I figured everyone my age lived in San Francisco for a reason, so it must be worth it. Regret kicked in the second I stepped out of the car.


pages: 286 words: 94,017

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Goldblith, Science Journal, January, 1966, p. 41. 28 The Lynn study is reported briefly in "Our Accelerating Technological Change" by Frank Lynn, Management Review, March, 1967, pp. 67-70. See also: [64], pp. 3-4. 28 Young's work is found in "Product Growth Cycles—A Key to Growth Planning" by Robert B. Young, Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute. Undated. 30 Data on book production are drawn from [206], p. 21, [200], p. 74, and [207], article on Incunabuli. 31 The rate of discovery of new elements is given in [146], Document I, p, 21. 34 Erikson's statement appears in [105], p. 197. CHAPTER THREE 38 Data on the brain drain is from "Motivation Underlying the Brain Drain" [131], pp. 438, 447. 39 The passage of time as experienced by different age groups is discussed in "Subjective Time" by John Cohen in [342], p. 262. 40 Author's interviews with F.

See also: Supplement to Chapter Five, "Les Moyens de Regulation de la Politique de l'Emploi" by Thérèse Join-Lambert and François Lagrange in Review Française du Travail, January-March, 1966, pp. 305-307. 81 Intra-US brain drain is examined in "An Exploratory Study of the Structure and Dynamics of the R&D Industry" by Albert Shapero, Richard P. Howell, and James R. Tombaugh. Menlo Park, California: Stanford Research Institute, June, 1964. 82 Whyte is quoted from [197], p. 269. 82 Jacobson story from Wall Street Journal, April 26, 1966. A more recent study of executive mobility has found that a middle manager can anticipate being moved once every two to five years. One executive reported moving 19 times in 25 years.

., for the idea of occupational trajectories. 110 The quote from Rice is from "An Examination of the Boundaries of Part-Institutions" by A. K. Rice in Human Relations, vol. 4, #4, 1951, p. 400. 112 Job turnover among scientists and engineers discussed in "An Exploratory Study of the Structure and Dynamics of the R&D Industry" by Albert Shapero, Richard P. Howell, and James R. Tombaugh. Menlo Park, California: Stanford Research Institute, 1966, p. 117. 112 Westinghouse data from "Creativity: A Major Business Challenge" by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Columbia Journal of World Business, Fall, 1965, p. 32. 112 British advertising turnover rates from "The Rat Race" by W. W. Daniel in New Society, April 14, 1966, p. 7. 112 Leavitt quoted from "Are Managers Becoming Obsolete?"


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

In Proceedings of the AFIPS Spring Joint Computer Conference. New York: ACM Press, 1967. Anderson, M., S. L. Anderson, and C. Armen, eds. Machine Ethics Technical Report FS-05-06. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2005. Anderson, M., S. L. Anderson, and C. Armen. “An Approach to Computing Ethics.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 21, no. 4 (2006). . “MedE-thEx.” In Caring Machines Technical Report FS-05-02, edited by T. Bickmore. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2005. . “Towards Machine Ethics.” In Machine Ethics Technical Report FS-05-06. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2005. Anderson, S. L. “The Unacceptability of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics as a Basis for Machine Ethics.”

Alibaba sold to 515 million customers in 2017 alone, and that year its Singles’ Day Festival—a sort of Black Friday meets the Academy Awards in China—saw $25 billion in online purchases from 812 million orders on a single day.40 China has the largest digital market in the world regardless of how you measure it: more than a trillion dollars spent annually, more than a billion people online, and $30 billion invested in venture deals in the world’s most important tech companies.41 Chinese investors were involved in 7–10% of all funding of tech startups in the United States between 2012 and 2017—that’s a significant concentration of wealth pouring in from just one region.42 The BAT are now well established in Seattle and Silicon Valley, operating out of satellite offices that include spaces along Menlo Park’s fabled Sand Hill Road. During the past five years, the BAT invested significant money in Tesla, Uber, Lyft, Magic Leap (the mixed-reality headset and platform maker), and more. Venture investment from BAT companies is attractive not just because they move quickly and have a lot of cash but because a BAT deal typically means a lucrative entrée into the Chinese market, which can otherwise be impossible to penetrate.

Bell Telephone Laboratories Murray Hill, NJ Miller, George A. Memorial Hall Harvard University Cambridge, MA Harmon, Leon D. Bell Telephone Laboratories Murray Hill, NJ Holland, John H. E. R. I. University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI Holt, Anatol 7358 Rural Lane Philadelphia, PA Kautz, William H. Stanford Research Institute Menlo Park, CA Luce, R. D. 427 West 117th Street New York, NY MacKay, Donald Department of Physics University of London London, WC2, England McCarthy, John Dartmouth College Hanover, NH McCulloch, Warren S. R.L.E., MIT Cambridge, MA Melzak, Z. A. Mathematics Department University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI Minsky, M.


pages: 280 words: 71,268

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

She’s played a central role at Google from the start, even before becoming employee No. 16 and the company’s first marketing manager. In September 1998, days after Google was incorporated, Susan rented out her Menlo Park garage for the company’s first office. Eight years later, as analysts doubted that YouTube would survive, she was a leading voice in persuading Google’s board to acquire it. Susan had the vision to see that online video was about to disrupt network television—forever. Susan Wojcicki and her Menlo Park garage, where it all began. By 2012, YouTube had become a market leader and one of the biggest video platforms in the world. But its furious pace of innovation had slowed—and once you brake, it’s not easy to reaccelerate.

Their PageRank algorithm was that much better than the competition, even in beta. I asked them, “How big do you think this could be?” I’d already made my private calculation: If everything broke right, Google might reach a market cap of $1 billion. But I wanted to gauge their dreams. Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google’s birthplace, the garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park, 1999. And Larry responded, “Ten billion dollars.” Just to be sure, I said, “You mean market cap, right?” And Larry shot back, “No, I don’t mean market cap. I mean revenue.” I was floored. Assuming a normal growth rate for a profitable tech firm, $10 billion in revenue would imply a $100 billion market capitalization.

And so: On that balmy day in Mountain View, I came with my present for Google, a sharp-edged tool for world-class execution. I’d first used it in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where Andy Grove, the greatest manager of his or any era, ran the best-run company I had ever seen. Since joining Kleiner Perkins, the Menlo Park VC firm, I had proselytized Grove’s gospel far and wide, to fifty companies or more. To be clear, I have the utmost reverence for entrepreneurs. I’m an inveterate techie who worships at the altar of innovation. But I’d also watched too many start-ups struggle with growth and scale and getting the right things done.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

It’s a reminder of Silicon Valley all-nighters during the late 1990s dotcom boom when China’s entrepreneurial boom was only percolating. “China and the US are at different points of economic development and motivation. China’s entrepreneurial culture does make Silicon Valley look sleepy,” says Hans Tung, managing partner at leading venture investment firm GGV Capital in Menlo Park. Mike Moritz, partner at top-tier Sequoia Capital, can’t help but agree. He points out that Chinese entrepreneurs who routinely work 80 hours per week are making their Silicon Valley peers look “lazy and entitled.” “China’s entrepreneurial culture does make Silicon Valley look sleepy.” —Hans Tung Managing partner, GGV Capital When traveling to China, as I’ve done more than 100 times for work, I’ll often have breakfast or lunch meetings on weekends in Beijing or Shanghai.

They’ve invested in US ride-hailing leaders Uber and Lyft, electric-carmaker Tesla, and augmented reality innovator Magic Leap. These Chinese tech titans have taken their cues directly from Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They’ve scoured the Valley for promising startups and based their operations not far from Menlo Park’s storied Sand Hill Road firms that backed winners Google, Facebook, and eBay. Tencent opened an office in a converted church in tech-wealthy Palo Alto, home to Stanford University, and has expanded nearby to a much larger California base. Alibaba keeps an office in San Mateo on California byway El Camino Real, in sight of venture capitalist Tim Draper’s entrepreneurial school Draper University.

It may sound cushy, but it takes hard work, commitment, and determination. Crosscurrents and Synergy China’s Silicon Valley owes much of its initial magic to a reliance on the United States for a cross-border flow of ideas and capital. A two-way highway runs from Beijing’s Zhongguancun Software Park to Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, raising capital and funding startups hinged from both coasts of the Pacific Ocean. This two-way channel creates synergy and speeds up startup launches, innovation, and scale across the United States and China, as well as globally. The tech investing pipeline from China into the United States has been increasing, even though tensions from Washington are rising.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

In September, Shriram was asked to join Page and Brin as one of three Google directors, a seat he continues to hold on a board that now consists of ten members. For $1,700 a month, the just-formed company sublet new office space: the two-car Menlo Park garage and two downstairs spare rooms of an 1,800-square-foot house in Menlo Park. The owners were friends: Susan Wojcicki, an engineer at Intel, and her husband Dennis Troper, a product manager at a tech company. The newly constituted Google had found its way to them because Sergey had dated Susan’s roommate at Stanford Business School. The house was not located in the upscale sections of Menlo Park, near the Sand Hill Road offices made famous by the venture capitalists whose offices are there, or in nearby Atherton, where many of these venture capitalists live and in 2008 an acre of land could sell for $3 million.

He enjoyed a privileged childhood—Collegiate, Phillips Exeter, Yale philosophy major—that suggested a life on Wall Street, or the CIA. His ponytail did not. He cut it, though, for his first job as an analyst for Morgan Stanley’s Capital Markets group, in 1994. But computers and technology were what really inspired him. He moved the next year to the technology group in Menlo Park, under Frank Quattrone. He worked on the 1995 Netscape IPO, going on the road with cofounders Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, and with CEO James Barksdale. In October 1995, he joined Netscape as their chief deal maker and Wall Street liaison. He helplessly watched as Microsoft bundled the free Internet Explorer browser in with its dominant operating system, weakening Netscape.

Likewise, most traditional media companies in the Google era concentrated more on defending their turf rather than extending it. Belatedly, most have begun to dip their toes, and in some cases entire feet, into new media efforts, hoping that technology could also be their friend. In the summer of 2008, CBS became the first full-scale traditional media company to open a Silicon Valley office in Menlo Park. Quincy Smith, who had been promoted to CEO of CBS Interactive, supervised the office and averaged two days a week there. Under his prodding, CBS made a number of digital acquisitions. The biggest was the $1.8 billion CBS spent to acquire CNET, whose online networks generated revenues of $400 million.


pages: 478 words: 131,657

Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney

Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dematerialisation, fudge factor, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, scientific management, VTOL

At the time, Edison was spread uncomfortably thin, even for a genius. He had opened the Edison Machine Works on Goerck Street and the Edison Electric Light Company at 65 Fifth Avenue. His generating station at 255–57 Pearl Street was serving the whole Wall Street and East River area. And he had a big research laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where a large number of men were employed and where the most astonishing things could happen. Sometimes Edison himself could be seen there, dancing around “a little iron monster of a locomotive” that got its direct current from a generating station behind the laboratory, and which had once flown off the rails at a speed of forty miles per hour to the delight of its creator.1 To this laboratory, also, Sarah Bernhardt had come to have her voice immortalized on Edison’s phonograph.

In addition to redesigning the twenty-four dynamos completely and making major improvements to them, he installed automatic controls, using an original concept for which patents were obtained. The personality differences between the two men doomed their relationship from the start. Edison disliked Tesla for being an egghead, a theoretician, and cultured. Ninety-nine percent of genius, according to the Wizard of Menlo Park, was “knowing the things that would not work.” Hence he himself approached each problem with an elaborate process of elimination. Of these “empirical dragnets” Tesla later would say amusedly, “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.

Of the circumstances in which his widowed mother then lived or whether he ever contributed to her support once he began to earn money in America, unfortunately no records have been found. That she often dominated his thoughts, however, future events were to disclose. Edison felt a flood of outrage when he first heard the news of Tesla’s deal with Westinghouse for his alternating-current system. At last the lines were clearly drawn. Soon his propaganda machine at Menlo Park began grinding out a barrage of alarmist material about the alleged dangers of alternating current.4 As Edison saw it, accidents caused by AC must, if they could not be found, be manufactured, and the public alerted to the hazards. Not only were fortunes at stake in the War of the Currents but also the personal pride of an egocentric genius.


pages: 558 words: 175,965

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

He’d also been involved with some very successful online dating and gaming sites and business software companies. The public résumé, though, did not really explain how he’d made enough money to bankroll a rocket company or provide many clues to what type of man Polyakov was. My initial visit to Polyakov’s office in Menlo Park revealed a man in his early forties of slightly above average build with a dad paunch, closely cropped light brown hair, and a face that oscillated between cherubic and mischievous. Polyakov greeted me at the door and showed me around his building. The man clearly liked sci-fi art and had a sense of humor.

“You just wake up and you feel the energy that you shall do something, right?” he said. “But you shall do something for good. For better.” Chapter Thirty-One These Rockets: They’re Expensive A couple months after our 2018 trip to Ukraine, Polyakov threw an Oktoberfest party at his house in Menlo Park, California. Many of his business lieutenants were there. So were some space people. And so were some neighbors from what’s one of the wealthiest suburbs in Silicon Valley—and thus one of the wealthiest suburbs in the world. Polyakov had bought the mansion a few years earlier on a whim. He’d wanted to move his family to California and had hired a real estate agent to scout some Silicon Valley locations.

Drive and warned the Polyakovs that real estate moved fast in the Valley. Max had told him to buy it at whatever price seemed appropriate and then rushed to the airport to catch a flight back to Ukraine with his wife. A couple days later, the deal had gone through, and a story had appeared in Palo Alto Weekly: “Home Sells for $7.6 Million, Record for Menlo Park.” The real estate agent had failed to tell Polyakov that he would be setting the market rate for an entire city. The house looked like a minicastle. It had a huge backyard with a pool and guest quarters. Still, Polyakov wanted more privacy and convinced an older woman who owned the house next door to sell him her house, too.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

In July 2017, Facebook, facing pressure from employees who were exhausted from long commutes and from neighbors in East Menlo Park who’d grown fed up with congestion around its growing campus, proposed developing a campus extension. The “village,” designed by star architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA New York, would link new offices with housing, retail outlets, parkland, and, crucially, a grocery store for an area that, despite Facebook’s massive presence, remains a food desert. Zuckerberg hopes to open the extension by 2021, but—if the comments they’ve made in public forums and news articles are any indication—residents of East Menlo Park would prefer that the municipal government slow down and address their concerns first.

What can Facebook do to make sure that its plans are good for the community, and not just the company? Does Facebook really care? Facebook’s attempt to win over local support for its new developments has been unsuccessful in part because the company has done so little to improve the local social infrastructure since it moved into Menlo Park. Although people who purchased houses before the tech companies arrived would surely profit if they wanted to sell and move out of the region, rising real estate prices don’t do anything to improve the lives of residents and workers. For them, the biggest daily impact of being close to corporations like Facebook is being stuck in traffic, often behind the private buses that shuttle workers to and from campus.

When our children were little we made a habit of taking them to a place in the Flatiron District called Books of Wonder, which, for good or ill, sold cupcakes and coffee along with every picture book we wanted. As they got older we took them on outings to places where they couldn’t help but notice that the world is full of people who love books—and bookshops—as much as we do: the Strand in Greenwich Village, McNally Jackson in SoHo, Kepler’s during our sabbatical year in Menlo Park. The visits could be expensive, but there aren’t many more worthwhile ways of spending what we have. These days, of course, there are cheaper and more efficient ways to buy books (and everything else), and my family is hardly immune to their appeal. No matter how much we love bookshops, we often opt to make purchases on the Internet when we’re in a hurry or looking for a better price.


pages: 274 words: 81,008

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

But they wanted some deal partners with real-world experience instead of just fancy MBAs, and Calbert fit the bill. Once on board, he started ginning up retail ideas, the highest-profile being the 2005 takeover of Toys R Us, with Bain Capital and Vornado. The Dollar General deal was percolating inside KKR for at least a year before the company sprang its offer in the fall of 2006. From his perch at KKR’s Menlo Park office, Calbert marshaled a group of analysts to come up with a thesis around dollar stores. Running numbers only gets you so far, so Calbert went on the road himself. He enlisted industry contacts, including former Dollar General executives, to visit stores with him, usually down South, where Dollar General stores were concentrated.

“There’s no agenda between Henry and me,” he said. “That reinforces everything we’re trying to do at the firm.” With two long-standing founders so in synch, and still firmly in control of their creation, the culture is thus undoubtedly a reflection of them. And that culture is a serious, driven one, with 9 West, Menlo Park, and every KKR office living shrines to overachievement. They preach discipline, and “relentless” is a word I heard over and over again. While the RJR deal turned out to be an outlier in terms of size for that period, the notion of Doing The Big Deal is quintessential KKR. The firm has underscored that in the decades hence by buying big-ticket, high-profile companies.

The gift was designated to fund the construction of a new home for the business school, part of a $6.3 billion project to create a new Columbia campus in West Harlem.2 Kravis told me he’s opted to focus his philanthropy on groups tied to education, culture, and medicine, three categories that obviously give him a huge set of options. He’s increasingly interested in applying lessons learned in his day job to charity. “I love starting something new or fixing something,” he said. KKR’s Menlo Park office sits in a tidy low-rise building along Sand Hill Road, the thoroughfare where the world’s best-known venture capital firms are tucked into similarly unassuming structures, minutes from Stanford University, and less than an hour’s drive from San Francisco. The echoes of 9 West are unmistakable throughout, the office itself feels like the more relaxed California cousin to its New York counterpart.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

So it’s important to remember that psychedelics were once invested with the hopes of a generation as a serious, mind-expanding, “technology”. In 1968, Brand had been one of over 150 test subjects detailed in the first-ever published research into the effects of LSD produced by the International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS), Myron Stolaroff’s Menlo Park-based research centre. But it was a different kind of research that was going on in sixties West Coast America that ultimately turned Brand’s head. “The difference between drugs and computers,” Brand tells me, “was that drugs levelled off and computers didn’t. I mean, technology is supposed to come in S-curves.

Engelbart’s voice echoes across the fuzz of the broadcast audio, giving him an Orson Welles quality which is only augmented by the vision of his disembodied head, cradled in a headset and microphone, fading in and out of the main camera shot which is pointed directly at the computer screen he has projected in front of the audience. Shots too, of his team, including Brand, stationed live at Menlo Park, orchestrating parts of the demonstration, fade in and out. Because it’s the sixties, the whole film has a sci-fi quality to it, a feeling which must have been shared by the audience at the time, but for opposite reasons. On occasion, the film shows only a flat blinking cursor, awaiting commands while a second green-on-black dot flits around the screen, controlled by Engelbart’s mechanical mouse, which he directs with his right hand.

For Brand, and for the hippies who bought into his “Whole Earth” enthusiasm, the idea of the earth as a system was a powerful one. And it was also seductive: it certainly looked like a better system than the military industrial complex they had fled back to the land from. Later in 1968, back in Menlo Park, Brand began preparations for the first print run of the Whole Earth Catalog, a Sears catalogue for hippy communards that juxtaposed practical advice and tools for back-to-the-landers with intellectual stimulation in the form of reviews of books Brand and his fellow editors thought should be informing the ideals of their peers.


pages: 482 words: 147,281

A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asilomar, butterfly effect, California gold rush, content marketing, Easter island, Elisha Otis, Golden Gate Park, index card, indoor plumbing, lateral thinking, Loma Prieta earthquake, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, place-making, risk tolerance, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, supervolcano, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

Once the rock had ruptured the shocks then travelled, and at a fantastic speed, in a north-westerly direction, disturbing people – Mr Miller and Miss Gieseke among them – in the myriad ways that a shock as impressive as this one can. The formal classifying number of the event (or the eq, as such happenings are generally known in the seismological community) was NC51147892, with the NC being the internationally recognized two-letter code for the Northern California Regional Seismic Network, based at the USGS headquarters at Menlo Park, at the upper end of Silicon Valley. The regional moment magnitude of the quake, which is what is usually calculated and released to the press, was 6.0.* No one was hurt by it, nor was there any but the most mildly inconvenient damage. In normal circumstances, and in most places, this would merely have been a moderately significant event.

A photocopied guide handed to visitors relates the kind of thing: ‘on your right, look for a 4' × 4' × 4' structure… this contains a seismometer’, ‘on the south side of the road there is a piece of PVC pipe sticking out of the ground with the letters JPL-GPS – this belong to the Jet Propulsion Lab’, ‘on the left side is a USGS creep-meter… do not touch the thin metal wire’. The information gathered by the machines is broadcast to thousands out in the seismically fascinated world. Some is sent via tiny satellite aerials over to Colorado, some goes to a university near San Diego, still more to the Geological Survey’s regional headquarters at Menlo Park, while other parcels of information are 12. Drilling equipment in a rancher’s field outside Parkfield, California. Measuring devices being placed at the base of the drill hole are expected to give vital information about what exactly happens at the very edge of the earthquake-triggering San Andreas Fault.

Wolfeboro, NH: Bowers and Marina Galleries, 1987 Lockwood, Charles. Suddenly San Francisco: The Early Years of an Instant City. San Francisco: The San Francisco Examiner Division of the Hearst Corporation, 1978 Longstreet, Stephen. The Wilder Shore. New York: Doubleday, 1968 McDowell, Jack (ed.). San Francisco. Menlo Park, CA: Lane Publishing, 1977 McGroarty, John S. California: Its History and Romance. Los Angeles: Grafton Publishing, 1911 McLeod, Alexander. Pigtails and Gold Dust. Caldwell, ID: The Caxton Printers, 1947 McPhee, John. Assembling California. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993 —Annals of the Former World.


pages: 733 words: 184,118

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

1960s counterculture, air gap, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, packet switching, Plato's cave, popular electronics, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable, yellow journalism

Since Ferenc had been a lieutenant in the Hussars, the light cavalry unit in which his uncle Pavle served, Tesla asked his uncle to recommend him to Ferenc so that he could get a job helping to build the new exchange.31 The Puskás family was part of the Transylvanian nobility, and Tivadar had studied law and technical subjects as a young man. A promoter and entrepreneur, Tivadar had traveled to America looking for opportunities. After trying his hand at gold mining in Colorado, he became interested in the telegraph and telephone.32 In 1877, Puskás visited Edison at Menlo Park where he made quite an impression, arriving in a fancy carriage and flashing a roll of thousand-dollar bills. Edison took a liking to Puskás and showed him all of his current inventions, including the phonograph. Thrilled with everything he saw, Puskás offered to take out patents in Europe for Edison’s telephone and phonograph at his own expense in return for a one-twentieth interest.33 With such a deal, one wonders whether Puskás was hustling Edison or Edison was hustling Puskás.

In this chapter we will look at how Tesla, with the help of his friends, shaped his reputation. He now cultivated an image of being a brilliant, even eccentric, genius. Tesla delighted in showing off his wireless lamps, and after dinners at Delmonico’s he would invite celebrities to late-night demonstrations in his laboratory. Just as newspaper reporters had covered Edison’s exploits at Menlo Park in the 1870s, they flocked to Tesla’s laboratory in the 1890s to cover his sensational discoveries. Like Edison, Tesla delighted in telling lively stories and promising great results for his inventions. T. C. MARTIN AND THE BOOK Tesla’s efforts at promotion were strongly shaped by his friendship with Thomas Commerford Martin (1856–1924), the editor of Electrical Engineer, one of the leading weekly electrical journals.

Martin functioned as Tesla’s publicity manager in the mid-1890s and did more than anyone else to help Tesla establish his reputation. Born in England, Martin spent part of his boyhood traveling aboard the massive steamship Great Eastern while his father helped lay the transatlantic telegraph cable. After studying theology, Martin immigrated to the United States to work with Edison at Menlo Park. Noticing that Martin had a gift for writing, Edison encouraged the young Englishman to publish stories about the telephone and phonograph in the New York newspapers. In 1882 he became an editor at the telegraph journal The Operator, which was soon renamed Electrical World. Along with his editorial work, Martin helped found the American Institute of Electrical Engineering in 1884 and served as the institute’s president in 1887–88.4 As we have seen, Martin first became acquainted with Tesla’s work in April 1888 when he was invited to see a demonstration of Tesla’s AC motor in the Liberty Street laboratory (see Chapter 5).


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

Although as tech VCs he and his brother weren’t going to be coming up with the next Facebook themselves, maybe they would find it. Maybe they would even find it here; Cameron could feel a familiar thrill rising inside of him. They were opening a new chapter in their lives, and he could think of no better starting place than Oasis, the hamburger joint right smack in the center of Menlo Park. He knew that Tyler, sliding out of the taxi behind him, carrying the folder stuffed with business plans of companies looking for venture cash, would have told him to take a breath, temper his optimism. Although most people thought the Winklevoss brothers were completely identical, in fact, they were mirror image twins, the result of a fertilized egg splitting later than usual in the process, around the ninth day, and then developing as two separate embryos.

In California, they launched revolutions from garages: Jobs and Woz building personal computers next to a rack of pocket wrenches in a garage in Los Altos, Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard making oscillators behind barn-like doors in a garage in Palo Alto, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin inventing Google as Stanford grad students in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. But in Brooklyn, there weren’t many garages; there were basements. And in the part of Brooklyn where Charlie grew up, those basements were crowded, dark, dingy, and usually smelled a little bit like brisket. From above, the urban neighborhood of narrow streets spanning Avenue I to Avenue V, Nostrand to West Sixth Street, might have looked like any other section of the borough, but in reality, Charlie’s home sat right in the center of the seventy-five-thousand-member-strong Syrian Orthodox Jewish community—an ethnic, religious, and cultural island unto itself.

His brother was ready with a line of his own: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars … in bitcoin.” Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had just officially become the world’s first known Bitcoin billionaires. 31 FROM DUMAS TO BALZAC January 4, 2018. 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California. A state-of-the-art campus in the heart of Silicon Valley, the headquarters of one of the biggest companies on earth. One might imagine a brightly lit corner of a vast, open floor of cubicles. A boyish man edging toward his midthirties. An expressionless face beneath a mop of slightly curly, auburn hair, caught in the glow of a laptop computer.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

ISBN 9780525573920 Ebook ISBN 9780525573937 Cover design: Lucas Heinrich Cover image: (gradient) A-Star/Shutterstock v5.4 ep To my mother, Connie Guthrie, an original Alpha Girl CONTENTS Prologue PART ONE: The Valley of Dreams PART TWO: Getting in the Game PART THREE: The Outsiders Inside PART FOUR: Survival of the Fittest PART FIVE: Girl Power Photo Insert PART SIX: Marriage, Motherhood, and Moneymaking PART SEVEN: Life, Death, and Picassos PART EIGHT: The Days of Reckoning PART NINE: The Awakening Author’s Note Acknowledgments PROLOGUE SAND HILL ROAD MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA Mary Jane Elmore was giddy as she looked down at the rusted-out floorboards of her old green Ford Pinto. She could see the road rushing by below. But she wasn’t driving on just any road. She was making her way up Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, about to start a new life intent on changing the world.

But the two were trying to save money, given that she was working for stock rather than salary. And she didn’t mind the bicoastal arrangement. Not having a husband around to worry about gave her more time to work. And that’s exactly what she did in her new job at the start-up Release, which had office space on the second floor of an old building called Casa Mills in Menlo Park. The company’s goal was to become the largest software distributor over the Internet. The building at 250 Middlefield Road frequently had brownouts, and a good Internet connection was as elusive as sleep. Theresia and the gang resorted to drilling a hole in the floor to siphon power for their servers from their neighbors below, who had the MacDaddy of high-speed Internet, T1 lines carrying digital data at 1.544 Mbps.

Trulia, one of the more recent companies Theresia had invested in, was in the news as it was being acquired by Zillow for $3.5 billion. Theresia and Jennifer planned to start by investing their own money, then raise funds from limited partners. They opened offices in San Francisco’s South of Market district and in Menlo Park. When the story on the founding of Aspect broke, Theresia told a reporter she wanted to invest in great companies, regardless of whether they were founded by men or by women. But she also said she wanted to be a part of creating more stories of successful women who raised capital and built companies.


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

After a meeting at the startup’s provisional headquarters in Menlo Park, Straubel agreed to incorporate his new electric car project into the company and was hired as its chief technology officer. Straubel in turn brought in several talented people he had met at Stanford and around Silicon Valley, adding to the team; Eberhard had previously talked a small but deeply talented group of engineers into joining the company while giving them exhilarating rides in his yellow tzero. The growing company moved from its tiny office space in Menlo Park to a workshop in San Carlos, and began converting a Lotus Elise into its first development prototype.

As a result, its earliest hires were predominantly talented young engineers from top schools, generally with little or no manufacturing or operational experience. A member of Tesla’s Roadster production team, let’s call him Frank, was surprised to find that he was one of the few who did have prior auto manufacturing experience when he started building cars at the company’s Menlo Park facility. Stranger still, his colleagues didn’t show much interest in developing the TPS culture he had learned at his previous assembly line job. The brilliant young engineers tasked with building Tesla’s Roadsters were eager to throw themselves into finding creative solutions to problems, but they were far less interested in adopting Frank’s deliberate, process-driven approach.

Edwards, 56 Department of Energy (DOE) loans from, 68–89, 118, 120, 121 as shareholder of Tesla, 82–86, 90 detractors, 102–108 Detroit, Michigan, 2, 4 Detroit Auto Show, 68 disruptive innovator, Tesla as, 195–197 DOE. see Department of Energy doors falcon-wing, 137–141 gull-wing, 136–137 Downey, California, 76 Drori, Ze’ev, 49–50, 65 Dunlay, Jim, 58 E Eberhard, Martin as advocate of Tesla, 67 founding of Tesla by, 21–24, 27–31, 35, 37–40 ouster of, 44–48, 50, 79 EBITDA, 215 Eisner, Michael, 45 Electrek, 97–101 electric vehicles (EVs), 3, 12–14, 24, 77, 202, 207 Energy Independence and Security Act, 67 Enron, 105 environmental issues, 112–113, 119 Esquire, 61 e-tron quattro, 203 EV1, 13, 24, 34 EVs. see electric vehicles F Facebook, 41 Falcon One, 28 falcon-wing doors, 137–141 FCW (Forward Collision Warning), 125 Ferrari, 60, 200–201 Fiat, 11, 34 financial crisis (2008), 75–76, 105 fixed costs, 54 Flextronics, 47 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), 72, 131 Ford, Henry, 56, 194 Ford Focus, 159 Ford Fusion, 75 Ford Motor Company, 3, 4, 56, 75, 181, 194, 204, 216 Forward Collision Warning (FCW), 125 Founders Edition Roadster, 215 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 72, 131 Fremont, California, 53, 206, 218 funding (fundraising), 29, 40, 44–47, 50, 69–71, 85 G Gage, Tom, 27–29 Galileo Galilei, 105 Gao Yaning, 128 Gartner, 175 gas prices, 11, 14 General Motors (GM). see also specific models bankruptcy and bailout of, 2–3, 88 and electric cars, 11–13, 34 Impact concept car, 24 and Lotus, 36, 37, 53 OnStar system, 194 Germany, 203, 204 Ghosn, Carlos, 197–200 Gigafactory, 77, 183–184, 189, 218 GM. see General Motors G170J1-LE1 screens, 228 Goodwill Agreements, 149 Google, 44, 120–124, 171 Graham, Paul, 41 “A Grain of Salt” (blog post), 152–153 Grant, Charley, 100 “green car” companies, 11 GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT), 95–97 gull-wing doors, 136–137 H Harrigan, Mike, 30 Harris Ranch, 115–116, 119 Harvard Business School, 195 herd mentality, 96 Hethel, England, 49 Hoerbiger, 138–140 Holzhausen, Franz von, 137 Honda, 201 “How to Be Silicon Valley” (speech by Paul Graham), 41 Hyperloop, 16, 88, 217 I IDEO, 38 IGBT (insulated-gate bipolar transistor), 49 Impact concept car, 13, 24 imperfection, 55 incumbent companies, 196–197 innovation, 193–210 by Citroën, 193–195 disruptive, 195–197 by Carlos Ghosn, 197–200 by Tesla, 201–210 “Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things” (Christensen), 196–197 The Innovator’s Dilemma, 197 insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT), 49 internal conflict, 29–32 InvestorsHub, 99 Israel, 4, 12 J Jaguar I-PACE, 202–203 Jivan, Jon, 98 Jonas, Adam, 172 K kaizen, 58, 60 Krafcik, John, 176 L Lambert, Fred, 98–101 Lamborghini, 204 Land Rover, 60 lead-acid batteries, 23–24, 197 Leech, Keith, 146–147, 156 Level 4 autonomous cars, 175–176 Level 5 autonomous cars, 170, 172, 175–176, 178 Lexus, 204 lithium-ion batteries, 22–24, 26, 34 “long tailpipe,” 110 losses, 11 Lotus, 36–37, 38, 43, 44, 49, 59 Lotus Elise, 28, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43 Lotus Evora, 59 “Ludicrous Mode,” 16 Lyons, Dave, 64 M Mac, Ryan, 218 Magna Powertrain, 48–49 Magna Steyr, 202 manufacturing, 180–192 of batteries, 183–184, 188–189 and continuous reiteration of Model 3s, 182–192 Elon Musk on, 180–182 preproduction as, 187–188 Marchionne, Sergio, 11 market saturation, 10 Marks, Michael, 47, 48, 50 Mars, 25 “Master Plan, Part Deux” (blog post), 164 McLaren F1, 25–26, 39 media hype, 88, 90–91, 93–95, 97–102, 130, 211–224 and base version of Model 3, 220–224 Elon Musk as cause of, 217–224 at Semi/Roadster unveiling, 211–215 as stock price stimulant, 215–216 Menlo Park, California, 28, 58 Michelin, 194 Miles, 11 Mobileye, 167–170 mobility technology, 11 Model 3, 8–10, 180–182 base version of, 220–224 production of, 182–192 Model S, 15, 74–75, 81–84, 90, 99, 135–137. see also Whitestar Model T, 56 Model X, 101, 134–145 Model Year 2008, 69 Moggridge, Bill, 38–39 Montana Skeptic, 105–108 Morgan Stanley, 172 Morris, Charles, 43 Motley Fool, 98 Musk, Elon on belief, 21 and branding of Tesla, 16–17 as cause of media hype, 217–224 childhood and personality of, 25–26 clientele knowledge of, 60 “cluelessness” of, 33–35 and culture of Tesla, 60 and Daimler, 68 detractors of, 102–108 and electric cars, 25–28 and Elise-Roadster conversion, 38–39 on financial viability of Tesla, 72–73 and fundraising, 44, 69–71 and loans, 70, 78 on manufacturing, 180–181, 190 on Model 3, 8–9 on Model S, 74 on Model X, 144–145 on obstacles faced by Tesla, 46 offers of, to sell Tesla, 120–121 on price increases, 71 and production process, 142, 165 as public figure, 15 on Series D, 47 and JB Straubel, 26 and stress, 64–67, 77–78 and Superchargers, 109–119 and Tesla cofounders, 29–32, 45, 47–48 on Tesla’s master plan, 21–22, 30–31, 58, 163 at town hall meeting, 70–71 and Whitestar, 51 Musk, Errol, 25 Musk, Justine, 25–26 Musk, Kimball, 65 N National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 66 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 127, 131–132, 149–162 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 132, 167 NDAs. see non-disclosure agreements Neil, Dan, 59 Neuralink, 16, 217 New Mexico, 48, 67 New United Motor Manufacturing, 53 New York Times, 2, 30, 66 NHTSA. see National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Nissan Leaf, 198 Nissan-Renault Alliance, 197–200, 207 Noble M12, 27 nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), 5, 149–151, 152, 155–156 Norway, 12 NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), 132, 167 NUMMI plant, 76, 81 Nürburgring, 203 NuvoMedia, 23 O Occupy Wall Street, 80–81 Ohno, Taiichi, 57 OnStar, 194 Opel, 36 Opel Speedster, 36 OpenAI, 217 operating profits and losses, 89 P Packet Design, 23 Page, Larry, 44 Paine, Chris, 13, 64, 71, 73–74 Panasonic, 77 Pandora, 41 PayPal, 16, 28 Peak Oil, 11 Pinnacle Research, 25 platforms, 135–136 Porsche, 24, 26, 39, 203–204 Porsche 911, 39 power electronics module (PEM), 49 Powertrain Technology, 58 Prenzler, Christian, 100 preproduction, 187–188 price increases, 71 Prius, 24 profitability, 81–82, 89 Project Better Place, 4–5, 11–12 public, going, 80–81 Q quality, 55, 59–60 Quality Control Systems, 131 R Ranger, 60 Reddit, 97, 99–100 reliability, 143 Renault Kwid, 207 Renault Zoe, 198 Reuters, 66 Revenge of the Electric Car (film), 64 Roadster as Elise conversion, 37–39 launch of, 14–15, 29, 42, 47–51, 59–61 new model of, 211–215 profitability of, 71–72, 81 securing investments for, 44, 45 and Tesla startup, 2–3 robotaxis, 166–167 Rogan, Joe, 219 Rosen, Harold, 26 Rosen Motors, 26 S Saleen, 99–100 San Carlos, California, 28 San Francisco, California, 59 San Jose, California, 75–76 Santa Monica, California, 45 Saudi Arabia, 218–219 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 45 Scion xB, 27 Seagate, 23 “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan” (blog post), 21 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 67, 160, 219–220, 224, 234 Seeking Alpha, 103, 105–107 self-driving cars, 120–133 Semi, 211–215 Senate Finance Committee, 67 Series A funding, 29 Series C funding, 40, 44–45 Series D funding, 46, 47 Series E funding, 50 S 40 model, 84 Shashua, Amnon, 167–170 Silicon Valley, 4, 14, 15, 17, 45, 53, 54, 58 Siry, Darryl, 65, 73 60 Minutes, 66 S 60 model, 84 “skateboard” chassis, 134, 202 Skype, 41 Smart (Tesla car), 68 software startups, 54–55 SolarCity, 110–111, 164 solar power, 109–114 Sorbonne University, 66 South Africa, 25 SpaceX, 15, 16, 25, 28, 39, 66, 78, 100 Spiegel, Mark, 102–103 Stanford University, 4, 26, 27, 28, 121 startups, 41–43, 59, 62, 76 “stealth recalls,” 160–161 stock price, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100, 102–103 StockTwits, 98 Straubel, JB, 26, 28, 48 SunCube, 146–147 Superchargers, 109–119 SYNC, 194 T TACC (Traffic Aware Cruise Control), 125 Tama, 197 Tarpenning, Marc, 21–24, 27, 31, 37, 43, 113 Tea Party movement, 80–81 “Tesla Death Watch” (blog posts), 3 Tesla Energy Group, 68 Tesla Founders Blog, 50 Tesla Motors. see also specific headings and barriers to entry, 35, 56 branding of, 16–17, 18, 59–63, 225–234 and collisions, 127–133 concept of, 34–36 continuous improvement at, 58 culture of, 51–52, 60 detractors of, 102–108 as disruptive innovator, 195–197 EBITDA of, 215 and environmental issues, 112–113, 119 “factory-less” model of, 35–36 innovation by, 201–210 internal conflict at, 29–32 legacy of, 19 Model 3 introduced by, 8–10 personal approach to public relations, xii raising capital for, 44, 69–71, 85 “shaky ground” of, 4, 5 as startup, 2–3 stock price of, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100, 102–103 strategy of, 22 and Supercharger network, 109–119 and whistleblowers, xii Tesla Motors Club (TMC), 95–97 Teslarati, 100 “Tesla stare,” 60 “Tesla Suspension Breakage: It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Coverup” (blog post), 151 Thailand, 48, 218 Think Global, 11, 67 Thrun, Sebastian, 121 TMC (Tesla Motors Club), 95–97 Too Big to Fail, 91 Toyoda, Akio, 76 Toyoda, Sakichi, 57 Toyota, 184, 201. see also specific models auto sales, 11 contract with, 81, 83 electric vehicles of, 159–160 and 2008 financial crisis, 76–77 pragmatism of, 209 safety scandal, 149–151 Toyota Previa, 214 Toyota Production System (TPS), 56–60, 76–77, 142, 183 Toyota Way, 58, 77 TPS. see Toyota Production System Traction Avant, 193–194 trading volume, 89 Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC), 125 The Truth About Cars (TTAC) (blog), 1–3 Tse, Bernard, 67 turnarounds, financial, 83–87 Twitter, 41, 98, 104–108, 113, 152, 156, 217–220, 224, 236 tzero, 23–24, 26, 27, 31, 37 V Valor Equity Partners, 47 Vance, Ashlee, 38, 47, 66, 73, 84, 120–121, 137, 227–228 VantagePoint Capital Partners, 66 variable costs, 54 V8 engine, 62 Volkswagen, 11, 171, 203–205 W Wall Street Journal, 2, 18, 100, 129, 132, 168, 187 Waymo, 173–174 Web 2.0, 41 Weintraub, Seth, 97–98, 101 Wharton School of Business, 25 whistleblowers, xii Whitestar, 46–48, 51, 65, 67, 68, 73 Who Killed the Electric Car?


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

Gaining confidence, he invited visitors to his workshop at Menlo Park to witness his electric light. He also spent this time acquiring legal advice and securing a group of wealthy investors, including J. P. Morgan, to finance his experiments. Edison’s early bulb was plagued with problems of practicality, namely that most lamps could only operate for a limited amount of time. Edison’s early incandescent bulb only stayed lit for one to two hours. In response to this problem Edison tried to create a high-resistance light bulb by running a low current through thin copper wires. His team at Menlo Park also realized the importance of finding a resistant and durable filament that would not burn inside the glass bulb.

Although Edison did not invent the original light bulb, he strove to establish a system by which sustainable light could be transferred from generators to American homes and businesses. His incandescent light faced a number of obstacles, notably the existence of the powerful gas-lighting industry. With the help of his talented team of assistants, financial backing from investors, and his laboratories at Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison intended to create a viable alternative to gas lighting. Invented by William Murdoch in the early nineteenth century in Great Britain, gas lighting transformed the nature of business and access to knowledge. In the words of one gas-lighting historian, “It banished the darkness in many people’s homes—not only the darkness of the night, but the darkness of ignorance.”13 Businesses were able to increase productivity by operating longer, and people had more opportunity to read novels and newspapers and expand their intellectual horizons.

As noted, gas lighting was entrenched within society, and Edison was forced to confront New York’s political machinery when attempting to reach his goal of illuminating the offices of Wall Street. Modeling his electric distribution system after that of the gas industry, Edison needed permits from city authorities to bury his wires underground. In hopes to sway city leadership, Edison and his lawyers hosted a gathering at Menlo Park where those who were either apathetic or skeptical could witness Edison’s seemingly threatening innovation. Neither Edison nor the New York aldermen were ecstatic about the meeting prospects. Accounts of the meeting show that the officials proposed that Edison pay a $1,000 tax per mile of wire he buried underground within the city borders.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

During the 1950s SRI pioneered the first check-processing computers. Duvall arrived to work on an SRI contract to automate an English bank’s operations, but the bank had been merged into a larger bank, and the project was put on an indefinite hold. He used the time for his first European vacation and then headed back to Menlo Park to renew his romance with computing, joining the team of artificial intelligence researchers building Shakey. Like many hackers, Duvall was something of a loner. In high school, a decade before the movie Breaking Away, he joined a local cycling club and rode his bike in the hills behind Stanford.

In the space of less than a year he went from struggling to program the first useful robot to writing the software code for the two computers that first connected over a network to demonstrate what would evolve to become the Internet. Late in the evening on October 29, 1969, Duvall connected Engelbart’s NLS software in Menlo Park to a computer in Los Angeles controlled by another young hacker via a data line leased from the phone company. Bill Duvall would become the first to make the leap from research to replace humans with computers to using computing to augment the human intellect, and one of the first to stand on both sides of an invisible line that even today divides two rival, insular engineering communities.

That update made it possible to simply click on any function or command to view a related online manual. Having easy access to the software documentation made it simpler for developers to program the computers and reduce the number of bugs. At the time, however, he was unfamiliar with the history of Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center in Menlo Park during the 1960s and 1970s. He had moved to California to get a master’s degree in computer science, with a plan to move back to France after graduation. It had been a fun sojourn in California, but the French computer firm would pay for his schooling only if he returned to Europe. Not long before he was scheduled to return, however, he stumbled across a small blurb advertising a job in an artificial intelligence research laboratory at SRI.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Trained at the VA in San Francisco under the auspices of the navy and then recalled during the Korean War, Hollister decided that, if the United States was going to have so many wars, he’d be better off making a career in the VA than in private practice. He became an internist at the Menlo Park VA hospital and had a breakthrough in the early 1950s using a hypertension drug to treat schizophrenia. By 1959, when he attended a CIA-funded conference on LSD, Hollister was medical director at Menlo Park and a leader in psychopharmacology. When presenters suggested that LSD ingestion mimicked the schizophrenic state, Hollister was skeptical. The CIA was happy to pay him to check it out.42 That’s how Kesey ended up trying every drug in the government’s medicine cabinet, from LSD to psilocybin to mescaline to morning glory seeds.

The oNLine System (NLS) was a leap forward in computing technology, and if you watch a video of the charismatic Engelbart wielding it at the “Mother of All Demos,” you’ll see that it’s still a somewhat recognizable interface today.10 The mouse moved freely in two dimensions; there were windows and linked hypertext. Engelbart gave the demo on a keyboard-mouse-screen terminal in San Francisco, wirelessly connected to the computer itself at the ARC, in Menlo Park, via microwave transmission. He video-chatted live with the team at SRI, and the audience was riveted. The next step was to transform the performance into a prototype, but that wasn’t on the philosopher Engelbart’s agenda. Meanwhile, Bob Taylor left ARPA after funding cuts and a disillusioning trip to Vietnam to try to coordinate the war’s chaotic information streams.11 He went to the University of Utah in 1969, where his ARPA munificence funded one of the nation’s top computer science programs, but the next year, when corporate copy giant Xerox invited him to help build out the Computer Science Lab (CSL) at the company’s new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), he headed for the coast.

Program director Wallace Stegner thought the charismatic and rebellious Kesey a clown, but other faculty spied promise, including novelist Malcolm Cowley. When a friend told Kesey that the veterans’ hospital was paying local volunteers to take exciting new drugs, he signed up, had his mind blown, and got a job at the Menlo Park VA, where he had unfettered access to experimental narcotics. Kesey started bringing drugs home, where he gathered a scene about him.38 His 1962 debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was an instant hit, romanticizing the patients Kesey saw at work as exemplars of independent consciousness.


pages: 370 words: 129,096

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

While at Disneyland a few months earlier on a date with his wife, Eberhard had come up with the name Tesla Motors, both to pay homage to the inventor and electric motor pioneer Nikola Tesla and because it sounded cool. The cofounders rented an office that had three desks and two small rooms in a decrepit 1960s building located at 845 Oak Grove Avenue in Menlo Park. The third desk was occupied a few months later by Ian Wright, an engineer who grew up on a farm in New Zealand. He was a neighbor of the Tesla cofounders in Woodside, and had been working with them to hone his pitch for a networking startup. When the start-up failed to raise any money from venture capitalists, Wright joined Tesla.

“It was a mistake,” Eberhard said. “I wanted more investors. But, if I had to do it again, I would take his money. A bird in the hand, you know. We needed it.” Not long after this meeting took place, Musk called Straubel and urged him to meet with the Tesla team. Straubel heard that their offices in Menlo Park were about a half a mile from his house, and he was intrigued but very skeptical of their story. No one on the planet was more dialed into the electric vehicle scene than Straubel, and he found it hard to believe that a couple of guys had gotten this far along without word of their project reaching him.

The founders were impressed with his spirit and hired Berdichevsky after one meeting. This left Berdichevsky in the uncomfortable position of calling his Russian immigrant parents, a pair of nuclear submarine engineers, to tell them that he was giving up on Stanford to join an electric car start-up. As employee No. 7, he spent part of the workday in the Menlo Park office and the rest in Straubel’s living room designing three-dimensional models of the car’s powertrain on a computer and building battery pack prototypes in the garage. “Only now do I realize how insane it was,” Berdichevsky said. Tesla soon needed to expand to accommodate its budding engineer army and to create a workshop that would help bring the Roadster, as they were now calling the car, to life.


pages: 409 words: 129,423

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

This was not entirely arbitrary; the USGS already had an astrogeology branch, headquartered in Flagstaff, Arizona, that was deeply involved in the study of the moon and was helping to train the Apollo astronauts. The USGS gave primary responsibility for its study of Mars to a team of five geologists, three from Flagstaff, two from the survey’s California center in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco. The senior member of the USGS team was a man called Hal Masursky; in part because Murray was at the same time working on a mission to Venus and Mercury, Masursky became one of the television team’s two principal investigators (PI). The other PI was a young man called Brad Smith, a highly rated expert on Mars as observed through telescopes, who had yet to complete his doctorate.

It was the huge success of Shoemaker’s work on impacts, and in particular his demonstration, in Germany, that the presence of coesite could be used to show that much larger, more highly eroded features than Meteor Crater shared its extraterrestrial origin, that finally got NASA on board. By August 1960 Shoemaker and a handful of others made up a newly formed Astrogeology Study Group, half of them in Washington, D.C., and half in Menlo Park, California. When in 1961 President Kennedy committed America to reaching the moon within a decade, the astrogeologists were well positioned to be part of the adventure. Shoemaker did not need to wait for the first moon missions to study the processes that shaped it. Now that he understood the process of impact cratering in all its phenomenal violence, he was able to see how it accounted for much of the lunar surface.

In 1960, on a trip to JPL that was in part an exploration of employment opportunities, Shoemaker was astonished to see one of the earliest copies of the first moon map drawn by Pat Bridges: a map of Copernicus, one of the youngest and most striking of the moon’s craters, and one that he had been studying as he worked out his ideas about ejecta blankets and secondary craters. He got a copy and, as soon as he returned to Menlo Park, began to use it as the basis for his first lunar geological map. On Earth, geological mapping starts in the field. The geologist wanders the landscape from outcrop to outcrop, identifying the rock type in each one. He assigns the outcrops to various geological units—bodies of rock formed by a single process, or a set of related processes, in a discrete period of time.


pages: 520 words: 134,627

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

., part of a Napa Valley wine dynasty, who worked with Singer to present daughter Agustina as a phony water polo recruit Davina and Bruce Isackson, a Hillsborough, California, couple who used Singer’s illegal services for two daughters Michelle Janavs, a Newport Beach, California, mom and Hot Pockets heiress who engaged with Singer for two daughters, including to rig tests and pitch one as an athlete Elisabeth Kimmel, a San Diego media executive who hired Singer to work with her son Spencer Marjorie Klapper, a Menlo Park, California, jewelry designer who used Singer’s illicit help for her son Toby Macfarlane, a Del Mar, California, title insurance executive who used Singer to pass off two children as bogus athletic recruits Bill McGlashan, a San Francisco–area private equity investor who hired Singer for his son P. J. Sartorio, the Menlo Park, California, founder of a frozen Mexican food company who turned to Singer to rig a test for his daughter Stephen Semprevivo, a Los Angeles business executive who used Singer’s shady services to help place his son Adam at Georgetown David Sidoo, a Canadian businessman and former pro football player who paid to have Riddell take tests for two sons, Jake and Ethan Devin Sloane, a Bel Air water-sector entrepreneur who used Singer’s illicit operation for his son, Matteo, then a student at the Buckley School Morrie Tobin, a Los Angeles investor who didn’t know Singer but who bribed Yale women’s soccer coach Rudy Meredith to tag his daughter Sydney as a recruit John B.

He’d redo a parking job if even one tire was touching a white line, pulling back out and shifting over a few inches till it was perfect. Around fifty, with two kids and a wife, he lived about as far away from the edge as one could get. A player turned coach at the University of Kansas, Center spent two years in the 1990s as a stockbroker at Paine Webber in Menlo Park, California, before coming back to the courts as head coach at Texas Christian University in 1998. He moved to Austin in 2000. Intense, competitive, and emotional, he took losses hard. He held his athletes to a high standard, but also celebrated wins and earned their respect. Center ran a consistently good, if not outstanding, team.

A kind female FBI agent helped her figure out whom to text—she tried her divorce lawyer—and had Buckingham’s daughter get her mom an energy bar and her shoes. Huffman and Huneeus, the San Francisco vintner, described brash armed agents tramping through their homes and ordering the kids out of bed. In Menlo Park, Marjorie Klapper wore her pajamas when cuffed, before being allowed to change. At another home, a radiation oncologist and his wife were transported in separate cars to lockups. Michael Center, the head men’s tennis coach at the University of Texas, was carted off from his Austin home around 6:00 a.m. with a burnt orange T-shirt promoting a charity run by a longtime friend and Texas Longhorns sweatpants.


pages: 430 words: 135,418

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

Yoler was put on the board, as was a longtime friend and mentor of Eberhard’s, Bernie Tse. On the night their new chairman’s check was deposited, they all gathered, except for Musk, in a tiny Menlo Park office that Eberhard had rented. They passed around a bottle of champagne and toasted the start of their company. It was an auspicious beginning for a promising business, one that was truly their own. CHAPTER 3 PLAYING WITH FIRE Outside the three-bedroom home JB Straubel rented in Menlo Park sat a pile of used electric motors packed individually in large wooden crates—dozens of them, creating a stark contrast to the white fence and manicured lawn of the neighbor’s house across the street.

Eberhard and Wright had already gone to the UK to finalize their agreement with Lotus, and the carmaker shipped its first Elise to San Dimas. Straubel and the team at AC Propulsion dug in. They began by ripping out the gas engine to make room for an electric motor and batteries. Straubel quickly ran into one of Tesla’s first hurdles. While the EV1 motors stacked up back at Straubel’s home in Menlo Park illustrated the precision and uniformity that came from a big carmaker, AC Propulsion’s motors were something else. Each was a jewel, he thought. Beautifully crafted—and unique. That was a problem. Eberhard’s plan called for selling hundreds of Roadsters a year. Straubel couldn’t return to his team with jewels; he needed cogs for a machine.

With two young children, they eventually moved back to the States, and to Palo Alto, where he founded Panasonic’s Silicon Valley R&D lab. At Tesla, Kelty, then forty-one years old, would become Straubel’s guide to a new world. On paper, they were an odd couple: the worldly family man and the sheltered bachelor, whose yard in Menlo Park was still piled with EV1 motors. But the two connected over a curiosity for the world and a common interest in energy products. Together they made an appealing sales team: With his industry connections, Kelty could land meetings. He would open them by introducing himself and Straubel in Japanese, followed by Straubel’s presentation of Tesla’s technology, Kelty translating all the while.


pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN THE LAUNCH PAD Randall Stross is the author of several acclaimed books, including eBoys, Planet Google, and The Wizard of Menlo Park. He has a PhD in history from Stanford University. Visit randallstross.com THE LAUNCH PAD Inside Y Combinator RANDALL STROSS PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China penguin.com A Penguin Random House Company First published in the United States of America by Portfolio/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA), 2012 This paperback edition with a new epilogue published 2013 Copyright © Randall Stross, 2012, 2013 Penguin supports copyright.

The street happened to be named Pioneer Way and it was located in a light industrial area, a forlorn triangle bordered on two edges by highways. It was about a twenty-minute drive from where the posh offices of venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road were concentrated, near Stanford, on the leafy west side of Menlo Park. The neighborhood of Pioneer Way belonged to a separate galaxy. YC sat among small manufacturers, and auto repair and body shops. The architecture in the neighborhood was strictly no-frills utilitarian—a good setting for lean startups. YC was there every other winter until 2009, when Graham and Livingston decided to make the Valley their permanent home and run the program there for both the winter and summer batches.4 Two years after YC’s founding, a seed fund named TechStars sprang up in Boulder, Colorado.

Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot), 200 Lynch, Sean, 123, 187 Machinima, 144 Mackey, Kurt, 51, 168–70, 219, 223 Mah, Jessica, 52–54 Malcolm X, 197 Mamet, David, 101 Manhattan Project, 3 Mason, Andrew, 112 McCay, Jason, 29–32, 32–33, 51, 92–97, 202–3 McClure, Dave, 35, 87, 147 McKinsey & Company, 114 Menlo Park, CA, 41 Mercedes, 214 Merrill Lynch, 211 Meteor, 234 MetroLyrics, 126, 127 Miami, FL, 40, 237 MicroMint, 105 micropayments, 105, 107, 125 Microsoft, 16, 131, 238 BASIC, 11, 68 Codecademy, 216 cofounders, 161, 162 Graffiti Facebook app, 165 invisibility in early years, 159 Office, 36 original idea, 68–69 startups, threat to, 59 MileSense, 228 Millicent, 105 Milner, Yuri, 28, 47, 87, 88, 222 Minecraft, 165, 168 Mint, 10, 204 MIT, 98, 112 Collison, Patrick, 61, 64 Graham, Paul, 22, 162, 203 Morris, Robert, 27, 63 Vogt, Kyle, 142 Mixpanel, 131 MobileWorks, 89–90, 134–39, 194 Moghadam, Mahbod, 80–82, 84, 126, 196, 201 Mohamed, Shazad, 47 MongoDB, 30, 31, 92–93, 137 MongoHQ, 30–33, 51–52, 92–97, 102, 135, 136 finalist interview, 32–33 Heroku, 31, 32 Mackey, Kurt, 219 Skype, 223 venture capitalists, 202–3 MongoLab, 92 MongoMachine, 135 Moore, Demi, 206, 214 Morris, Robert academic training, 24–25 Artix, 29 father of, 253n7 interviewing finalists, 10 MIT, 27 privacy, 253n8 Prototype Day, 119 Viaweb, 24–26, 29, 42, 133 YC partner, 27, 57, 63 Morris worm, 24–25, 253n7–8 Moses, 197 Mountain View, CA, 2, 10, 17, 35, 51, 98–99 mSpot, 106–8 Musk, Elon, 66 MVP (minimum viable product), 77 MySpace, 201 MySQL, 137 Narula, Prayag, 89, 134–39 NASDAQ, 5 National Computer Security Center, 253n7 National Security Agency, 253n7 Nebraska, 39 New World Ventures, 263n14 New York City, 42, 80 GroupMe, 124 Rap Genius, 223 SeedStart, 42 startups’ interest in, 148 YC, 256–57n3 New York Times, 105, 209 New York University, 91, 112 New Zealand, 238 NFC, 66, 151–59 NFL, 167 Nike, 122 99dresses, 267–68n6 North Carolina, 209 Northeastern University, 112 Notifo, 219–20 NowSpots, 51, 168–70, 218–19, 223 Obvious Corporation, 58 oDesk, 172 O’Doherty, Patrick, 17–18 OMGPOP, 225–26 One Kings Lane, 54 Ooyala, 104 Open Systems, 46 OpenID, 156 Opez, 98–100, 218 Oracle, 60, 161, 238 Oxford University, 57, 62 Pang, Randy, 9, 68, 163–64 Panguluri, Srini, 60, 66, 151, 154, 155, 160 Paperlinks, 51, 103, 153 Paramount, 165 Parse, 122, 129, 228 capital raised, 212, 230, 233 Demo Day, 212 Rehearsal Day, 185–86 YC alumni, 160 Path, 265n1 PayPal, 58, 64, 66, 107–8, 140 Pay2See, 105 Pellow, Ben, 110–12, 134, 136, 138, 218 Persson, Markus, 168 Philippines, 238 PHP, 122 Picasa, 43 Picplum, 194, 219 Pictionary, 225 Pincus, Alison, 54 Pioneer Way, 40 Pittsburgh, PA, 41, 237 Play-Doh, 127 Polis, Jared, 41 Portland, OR, 223 Posterous, 63, 147 PostgreSQL, 137 PowerPoint, 36 Pristavec, Venetia, 104 Procter & Gamble, 208 Providence, RI, 42 Puff Daddy, 164 Python, 124 QR codes, 152–53, 156–58 QuickBooks, 53 Quicken, 53 Rackspace, 101, 131 Rails, 122 Ralston, Geoff, 151–58 Rap Genius Altman, Sam, 196–202 Demo Day, 216 expanding idea, 235–36 growth, 78–80 New York City, 223 Prototype Day, 126–27 Taggar, Harj, 80–85, 196 Ravikant, Naval, 58 Ravisankar, Vivek, 212–13 Ready-Campbell, Noah, 105–9 Red Bull, 130 Reddit, 59, 106, 166, 195 Redis, 137 Rejection Therapy, 121 Ren, JP, 43–44, 103, 130–33 Reno 911, 121 Ridejoy, 120–21, 163, 187–88, 192, 211.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

The walls are covered with huge murals of superheroes—Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman—frozen in action poses. My grandfather was the first venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. My dad moved here, joined him, and became one of the pioneers of the business. So I grew up here when El Camino was a dirt road. Downtown Menlo Park had about five stores total. I’ve watched this whole metropolis build around Silicon Valley, and tried to get to the heart of what makes this ecosystem work. I’ve been the Johnny Appleseed of venture capital—spreading the seeds of this valley everywhere I go. You need angel investors who work together to fund start-ups.

That’s why everyone is confounded: this isn’t happening within city jurisdictions anymore. Suddenly you realize it’s actually an indictment of municipal taxation. The whole idea of taxing a business located in your jurisdiction is to offset the impact of the workers on housing availability, transit, parks, other city services. Today, cities like Palo Alto and Menlo Park are collecting business taxes from tech companies headquartered there, but they aren’t dealing with the impacts of the workers on housing. The link is ironic: the money to offset the housing crisis just isn’t available. The old rules are meaningless against the new technology—it allows these companies to pretend they are ungovernable.

If you don’t want to go to school, go get a job digging a ditch—whatever you want to do. My husband never paid child support. To buy the home that I have now, I worked three jobs. There was times when I sewed my shoes up because I needed to buy things for them. Yes, darn right I was strict on them! You have to be. I’m glad my kids went to school out of the area. I sent my son to Menlo Park, there’s a religious school. It wasn’t easy with the little money I had to pay, but I sent him over there. I wanted him to meet and be around other kids. I always worried, if all you see is crime and you don’t get to see how other people live, what do you have to live for? “Just because you live here in East Palo Alto,” I used to tell him, “you don’t have to do what other people do.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Facebook had also bid for the London lab, offering each DeepMind founder twice as much money as they made from the sale to Google. PART TWO WHO OWNS INTELLIGENCE? 7 RIVALRY “HELLO, THIS IS MARK, FROM FACEBOOK.” In late November 2013, Clément Farabet was sitting on the couch in his one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, typing code into his laptop, when his iPhone rang. The screen read “Menlo Park, CA.” When he answered the call, a voice said: “Hello, this is Mark, from Facebook.” Farabet was a researcher in the deep learning lab at NYU. A few weeks earlier, he’d been contacted by another Facebook executive, out of the proverbial blue, but he still didn’t expect a call from Mark Zuckerberg.

What he didn’t say was that even humans couldn’t agree on what was and what was not hate speech. * * * — TWO years earlier, in the summer of 2016, after AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol and before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Zuckerberg sat down at a conference table inside Building 20, the new centerpiece of the company campus in Menlo Park. Designed by Frank Gehry, it was a long, flat building on steel stilts that spanned more than four hundred thirty thousand square feet, seven times the size of a football field. The roof was its own Central Park, nine acres of grass and trees and gravel walkways where Facebookers sat or strolled whenever they liked.

“In many cases,” Pomerleau said, “there is no right answer.” Initially, there was a flurry of activity in response to his challenge. Nothing came of it. A day after Pomerleau issued his challenge, as Facebook continued to deny there was a problem, the company held a press roundtable at its corporate headquarters in Menlo Park. Yann LeCun was there, and a reporter asked him if AI could detect fake news and other toxic content that spread so rapidly across the social network, including violence in live video. Two months earlier, a man in Bangkok had hung himself while broadcasting a live Facebook video. LeCun responded with an ethical conundrum.


pages: 524 words: 146,798

Anarchy State and Utopia by Robert Nozick

distributed generation, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, means of production, Menlo Park, moral hazard, night-watchman state, Norman Mailer, Pareto efficiency, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, rent control, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, school vouchers, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Yogi Berra

See also the more extended discussion of the private protection scheme in Francis Tandy, Voluntary Socialism (Denver: F. D. Tandy, 1896), pp. 62-78. A critical discussion of the scheme is presented in John Hospers, Libertarianism (Los Angeles: Nash, 1971), chap. II. A recent proponent is Murray N. Rothbard, who in Power and Market (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, Inc., 1970), pp. 1-7, 120-123, briefly describes how he believes the scheme might operate and attempts to meet some objections to it. The most detailed discussion I know is in Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (Lansing, Mich.. privately printed, 1970), especially pp. 65-115.

In itself this would be legitimate and not punishable as a crime, since no court or agency may have the right, in a free society, to use force for defense beyond the selfsame right of each individual. However, Smith would then have to face the consequence of a possible countersuit and trial by Jones, and he himself would have to face punishment as a criminal if Jones is found to be innocent.” Power and Market (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies Inc, 1970), p. 197, n. 3. 3 See also the symposium “Is Government Necessary?” The Personalist, Spring 1971. 4 Related issues that natural-rights theories must cope with are interestingly treated in Erving Goffman, Relations in Public (New York: Basic Books, 1971), chaps. 2, 4. 5 If Locke would allow special paternalistic restrictions, then perhaps a person legitimately could give another the permission and the right to do something he may not do to himself: for example, a person might permit a doctor to treat him according to the doctor’s best judgment, though lacking the right to treat himself. 6 These questions and our subsequent discussion are repeated (with stylistic improvements) from a February 1972 draft circulated under the title of Part I of this book.

If legitimacy were tied to desert and merit rather than to entitlement (which it isn’t), then a dominant protective agency might have it by meriting its dominant market position. 11 Statement I below expresses a’s being entitled to wield the power, whereas a’s being entitled to be the one that wields that power is expressed by statement 2 or 3.1. . a is the individual x such that x wields power P and x is entitled to wield P. and P is (almost) all the power there is. 2. a is entitled to be the individual x such that x wields power P and x is entitled to wield P, and P is (almost) all the power there is. 3. a is entitled to be the individual x such that x wields power P and x is entitled to wield P and x is entitled that P be (almost) all the power there is. 12 Rothbard imagines that somehow, in a free society, “the decision of any two courts will be considered binding, i.e., will be the point at which the court will be able to take action against the party adjudged guilty.” Power and Market (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), p. 5. Who will consider it binding? Is the person against whom the judgment goes morally bound to go along with it? (Even if he knows that it is unjust, or that it rests on a factual mistake?) Why is anyone who has not in advance agreed to such a two-court principle bound by it?


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Wall Street Meat by Andy Kessler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, automated trading system, banking crisis, Bob Noyce, George Gilder, index fund, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Pepto Bismol, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, undersea cable, Y2K

I suspect there was some standoffclause in their departure agreement with Morgan Stanley that said they couldn’t recruit anyone to work for them, but, as word spread, people found them and interviewed to be part of the Deutsche Morgan Grenfell Technology group. Notice that this was not the “Technology Banking group,” or “Technology Research group,” or “Technology Trading group.” Instead, the umbrella was held high over all of them. They hired more that 150 people within a week, to work in the old EF Hutton building in New York, or in Menlo Park, California, so as to be near venture capitalists who were directing the IPOs of their investments. Frankie had analysts, bankers and traders—everything that was needed to create that “boutique within a bulge bracket” firm. · · · While all this was going on in 1996, Fred Kittler, my old client from JP Morgan, and I started our very own firm, Velocity 170 Netscape IPO Capital Management.

If there was a deal to be done, they did it. They also had a fund on the side to invest in private deals. There was a digital camera operating system company we were looking at, and Frankie was going to throw some cash in the deal as well. He told Fred and me to come in and talk to him about it. Their offices on El Camino in Menlo Park were two minutes from my house. When you walked in, Frankie’s office was the first one by the door. He could see everyone who was coming and going. Frank’s clothing budget hadn’t kept up with his compensation. As we walked to a conference room, I noticed a big rip in the back of his pin-stripe suit pants, and his wallet falling out.

Not five years earlier, Morgan Stanley had four technology 187 Wall Street Meat analysts with Frank Quattrone and a small crew as technology investment bankers. Now they had over fifty analysts covering every technology industry segment, including “periph-reeals,” and over one hundred investment bankers in their Sand Hill Road office in Menlo Park, California, alone. I struggled with what made this whole system tick. I had friends who had growth funds with $10 billion, $20 billion, even $40 billion in assets. They did absolutely no fundamental research. No Hank Hermann-like Piranha tactics to figure out what analysts were saying and how the market would react to the next piece of news.


pages: 250 words: 73,574

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers by John MacCormick, Chris Bishop

Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fault tolerance, information retrieval, Menlo Park, PageRank, pattern recognition, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush

But perhaps even more remarkable than the HP and Apple success stories is the launch of a search engine called Google, which operated out of a garage in Menlo Park, California, when first incorporated as a company in September 1998. By that time, Google had in fact already been running its web search service for well over a year—initially from servers at Stanford University, where both of the cofounders were Ph.D. students. It wasn't until the bandwidth requirements of the increasingly popular service became too much for Stanford that the two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, moved the operation into the now-famous Menlo Park garage. They must have been doing something right, because only three months after its legal incorporation as a company, Google was named by PC Magazine as one of the top 100 websites for 1998.

See compression Lovelace, Ada Love's Labour's Lost low-density parity-check code Lycos LZ77 Machine Learning (book) machine learning. See pattern recognition MacKay, David Manasse, Mark master. See replica matching mathematician Mathematician's Apology, A mathematics; ancient problems in; beauty in; certainty in; history of; pretend McCorduck, Pamela MD5 medicine megapixel memex memory: computer; flash Menlo Park metaword; in HTML metaword trick; definition of. See also indexing Metzler, Donald Meyer, Carl D. Microsoft Microsoft Excel Microsoft Office Microsoft Research Microsoft Word mind MIT Mitchell, Tom MNIST mobile phone. See phone monitor MP3 MSN multiplicative padlock trick MySpace Najork, Marc NameSize.exe NEAR keyword in search query; for ranking nearest-neighbor classifier nearest-neighbor trick Netix network: computer; equipment; neural (see neural network); protocol; social (see social network) neural network; artificial; biological; convolutional; for sunglasses problem; for umbrella problem; training neuron neuroscience New York New York University nine algorithms Nobel Prize Norberg, Arthur Ntoulas, Alexandras number-mixing trick object recognition one-way action online banking.


pages: 1,136 words: 73,489

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

An OSS Project-by-Project Typology,” in Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories - MSR 2014, chair Premkumar Devanbu (Hyderabad, India: Association for Computing Machinery, May 2014): 344–47, https://doi.org/10.1145/2597073.2597116. 97 Nicole Carpenter, “The Gentle Side of Twitch,” Gizmodo, April 23, 2019, https://gizmodo.com/the-gentle-side-of-twitch-1834215442. 98 Ssh-chat Code, GitHub, accessed March 31, 2020, https://github.com/shazow/ssh-chat. 99 Spencer Heath MacCallum, The Art of Community (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), 5. 100 MacCallum, The Art of Community, 66. 101 T. L. Taylor, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 92–93. 102 MacCallum, The Art of Community, 67. 103 Nadia Eghbal, “Emerging Models for Open Source Contributions” (presentation, GitHub CodeConf, Los Angeles, June 29, 2016), https://www.slideshare.net/NadiaEghbal/emerging-models-for-open-source-contributions. 104 Mikeal Rogers, “Healthy Open Source,” Node.js Collection, Medium, February 22, 2016, https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/healthy-open-source-967fa8be7951. 105 Taylor Wofford, “Fuck You and Die: An Oral History of Something Awful,” Vice, April 5, 2017, https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-and-die-an-oral-history-of-something-awful. 106 Adam Rowe, “Why Paid Apps Could Be the Future of Online Communities,” Tech.co, November 1, 2019, https://tech.co/news/woolfer-paid-app-online-communities-2019-11. 107 Kevin Simler, “Border Stories,” Melting Asphalt, March 2, 2015, https://meltingasphalt.com/border-stories/. 03 108 Star Simpson (@starsandrobots), “Til recently you were online . . .,” Twitter, November 5, 2017, 6:54 p.m., https://twitter.com/starsandrobots/status/927323260244463616. 109 Ronald Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4, no. 16 (November 1937): 386–405, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511817410.009. 110 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Loc 2053. 111 Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, Or, Linux and ‘The Nature of the Firm,’” The Yale Law Journal 112, no. 3 (2002): 369–446, https://doi.org/10.2307/1562247. 112 Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin,” 381. 113 Guido van Rossum, “Foreword for ‘Programming Python’ (1st Ed.),” Python.org, May 1996, https://www.python.org/doc/essays/foreword/. 114 Linus Torvalds, “LINUX’s History,” Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, July 31, 1992, https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html. 115 Linus Torvalds, “Re: Kernel SCM Saga..,” Mailing List ARChive, April 7, 2005, https://marc.info/?

(Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 32. 141 “Teams,” Django Software Foundation, accessed March 31, 2020, https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/teams/. 142 Caddyserver / Caddy, GitHub, accessed March 31, 2020, https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy. 143 Spencer Heath MacCallum, The Art of Community (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), 63–67. 144 MacCallum, The Art of Community, 63. 145 “Meet the Team,” Babel, accessed March 31, 2020, https://babeljs.io/team. 146 Jacob Kaplan-Moss, “Retiring as BDFLs,” Jacob Kaplan-Moss (blog), January 13, 2014, https://jacobian.org/2014/jan/13/retiring-as-bdfls/. 147 Urllib3, GitHub, accessed March 13, 2020, https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/. 148 Andrey Petrov, “How to Hand over an Open Source Project to a New Maintainer,” Medium, February 9, 2018, https://medium.com/@shazow/how-to-hand-over-an-open-source-project-to-a-new-maintainer-db433aaf57e8. 149 Klint Finley, “Giving Open-Source Projects Life after a Developer’s Death,” Wired, November 6, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/giving-open-source-projects-life-after-a-developers-death/. 150 Alanna Irving, “Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/Year,” Open Collective, October 23, 2017, https://medium.com/open-collective/funding-open-source-how-webpack-reached-400k-year-dfb6d8384e19. 151 Christopher Hiller, Nadia Eghbal, and Mikeal Rogers, “Maintaining a Popular Project and Managing Burnout with Christopher Hiller,” Request for Commits, podcast audio, November 1, 2017, https://changelog.com/rfc/15. 152 Ayrton Sparling (FallingSnow), “I Dont Know What to Say,” Event-stream Issues, GitHub, November 20, 2018, https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116. 153 Dominic Tarr (dominictarr), “Statement on Event-Stream Compromise,” Dominictarr / Readme.md Code, GitHub, November 26, 2018, https://gist.github.com/dominictarr/9fd9c1024c94592bc7268d36b8d83b3a. 154 Felix Geisendörfer, “The Pull Request Hack,” Felix Geisendörfer (blog), March 11, 2013, https://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html. 155 Na Sun, Patrick Pei-Luen Rau, and Liang Ma, “Understanding Lurkers in Online Communities: A Literature Review,” Computers in Human Behavior, no. 38 (September 2014): 110–117, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214003008. 156 Kraut and Resnick, Building Successful Online Communities, 63. 157 Andrew J.

.,” Core-js Issues comment, GitHub, June 13, 2019, https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/571#issuecomment-501889710. 199 Denis Pushkarev (zloirock), “@revelt please, don’t say me what I should do . . .,” Core-js Issues comment, GitHub, June 14, 2019, https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/571#issuecomment-502040557. 200 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950), 129. 201 Spencer Heath MacCallum, The Art of Community (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), 48. 202 David Heinemeier Hansson, “Open Source beyond the Market,” Signal v. Noise, May 20, 2019, https://m.signalvnoise.com/open-source-beyond-the-market. 203 David Bollier, “The Growth of the Commons Paradigm,” in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, eds.


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The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

Its centrepiece building alone will hold 12,000 employees, with others working from satellites around it, and the campus features a 1,000-seat amphitheatre for the company’s iconic product launches. The campus is reported to have cost around $5 billion and took eight years to construct.2 In 2018, Facebook expanded its Menlo Park campus to include a new building with a 3.6-acre rooftop garden, hundreds of forty-foot-tall redwood trees, extensive pathways, a 2,000-person events space, five new restaurant options and more than a dozen new bespoke works of art.3 Google is currently building a 595,000-square-foot campus with world-renowned designer Thomas Heatherwick on the US West Coast,4 while simultaneously building a ‘landscraper’ – an office longer than the city’s tallest building – in London to serve as its UK headquarters.5 Big tech firms have tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, billions in revenues, even higher valuations, and the ultra-glitzy headquarters to show for it.

utm_term=.77032a06a277 26https://www.cnet.com/news/huawei-reportedly-sides-with-trump-on-5g-us-is-lagging-behind/ 8 THE RESISTANCE 1https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/us/letter-from-san-francisco-a-beautiful-promenade-turns-ugly-and-a-city-blushes.html 2There’s a lot to nerd out on about Apple’s campus, and if you’d like to do so, this Wired piece on it is excellent: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-campus/ 3https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebooks-menlo-park-campus-now-has-a-new-frank-gehry-designed-building/ 4https://www.fastcompany.com/3068889/googles-newly-approved-hq-are-the-perfect-metaphor-for-silicon-valley 5https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/01/google-submits-plans-million-sq-ft-london-hq-construction-kings-cross 6https://www.eff.org/about/staff 7$11 million in 2016–17, as its audited accounts show, but that has increased, as Cohn told me, and see https://www.eff.org/document/2016-2017-audited-financial-statement 8https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/john-perry-barlow-open-internet-champion-grateful-dead-lyricist-dies-n845781 9http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do 10https://www.eff.org/about/history 11Barlow’s full declaration can be read here (love it or loathe it, it’s certainly a fascinating document and an insight into a particular time and vision): https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence 12https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2017/index.html#FinancialsModal 13The Knight Foundation is a major US funder of journalism, technology and freedom-of-expression projects in the common interest. 14https://panopticlick.eff.org/results?

That digital divide will only widen. 7https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-free-basics-developing-markets Index Aadhaar, here Abramson, Jill, here Ackerman, Spencer, here Acquisti, Alessandro, here ad blockers, here, here advertising, online, here, here, here, here, here, here complexity of, here, here and consumer benefits, here CPM (cost per mille), here programmatic advertising, here, here, here see also surveillance airspace spectrum, here Al Shabab, here Alexander, General Keith, here, here, here Alibaba, here al-Qaeda, here Amazon, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and advertising, here and centralisation of power, here and regulation, here Andreessen, Marc, here, here Android, here, here angel investors, here, here, here, here, here antitrust laws, here AOL, here, here, here Apple, here, here, here, here, here, here AppNexus, here, here, here ARPANET, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here separation of military elements, here, here see also DARPA Ars Technica, here artificial intelligence (AI), here, here, here Associated Press, here AT&T, here, here, here, here Atlantic, here Baidu, here Barlow, John Perry, here, here, here batch processing, here Bell, Emily, here, here Berners-Lee, Tim, here, here, here betaworks, here, here Bezos, Jeff, here bit.ly, here Bitcoin, here, here, here blackholing, here blockchains, here Bomis, here book publishers, here Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), here Borthwick, John, here, here, here, here, here, here botnets, here Brandeis, Louis, here broadband customers, here, here BT, here, here BuzzFeed, here cable companies, here lobbying, here peering agreements, here profits, here, here reputation and trust, here tier one providers, here, here traffic blocking, here transit fees, here cable TV, here, here, here Cambridge Analytica, here Carnegie, Andrew, here celebrities, here Cerf, Vint, here, here, here, here Certbot, here Chicago School of Economics, here China, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Chrome, here CIA, here Cisco, here Clinton, Hillary, here ‘cloud, the’, here CNN, here Cohn, Cindy, here, here Cold War, here, here Comcast, here, here, here, here, here CompuServe, here computers, early, here content farms, here, here cookies, here, here, here, here, here Cox, Ben, here credit cards, here Crimea, here Crocker, Steve, here, here, here, here, here, here, here cryptocurrencies, here, here, here, here Daily Caller, here, here Daly, Tom, here, here, here DARPA, here, here, here, here, here data brokers, here, here, here Defense Communications Agency, here del.icio.us, here Deliveroo, here ‘digital colonialism’, here DirecTV, here distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, here, here, here Dolby, here Domain Name System (DNS), here, here, here, here, here, here Dots and Two Dots, here DoubleClick, here duolingo, here Duvall, Bill, here Dyn attack, here eBay, here, here Eisenstein, Elizabeth, here elections, interference in, here Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), here, here Eliason, Frank, here, here, here, here, here Encarta, here encryption, here, here Engelbart, Doug, here Etsy, here European Union (EU), here, here, here, here, here, here see also General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Facebook, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here acquisition of WhatsApp, here, here, here, here and advertising, here, here, here, here, here, here and centralisation of power, here and ‘digital colonialism’, here and government entities, here influence on elections, here Menlo Park campus, here privacy scandals, here and regulation, here, here, here, here Facetime, here facial recognition, here FakeMailGenerator, com, here Fastclick, here Fastly, here FBI, here, here Federal Communications Commission (FCC), here, here, here financial crash, here, here FireEye, here First World War, here, here Five Eyes, here, here, here Flickr, here Flint, Michigan, here Foreign Policy, here, here Fotolog, here, here, here Foursquare, here Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, here Free Basics, here free speech, here, here, here, here, here Freedom of Information Act, here GCHQ, here, here, here, here, here and encryption, here General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), here, here, here George V, King, here Ghonim, Wael, here Gibson, Janine, here, here, here Gilded Age, here, here, here Gilmore, John, here Gimlet media, here Giphy, here Gizmodo blog, here Gmail, here Goodwin, Sir Fred, here Google, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and advertising, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and centralisation of power, here London headquarters, here and regulation, here, here, here Grateful Dead, here Greene, Jeff, here, here, here Greenwald, Glenn, here Grindr, here Guardian, here, here, here, here and Snowden leaks, here, here Guo Ping, here Gutenberg press, here Heatherwick, Thomas, here Herzfeld, Charles, here Hoffman, Reid, here Hong Kong, here HOSTS.TXT, here Hotmail, here HTML, here HTTP, here, here HTTPS Everywhere, here Huawei, here, here Hutchins, Marcus, here IBM, here identity, here India, here, here Industrial Revolution, here Instagram, here intellectual property, here, here internet, origins of, here, here commercialisation and globalisation, here gradual expansion, here logging and security, here the name, here origins of networking, here separation of military elements, here, here see also ARPANET Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), here, here, here, here Internet Hall of Fame, here, here Internet of Things, here internet service providers (ISPs), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Pakistan/YouTube incident, here intranets, here IP (Internet Protocol), here IP addresses, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and blackholing attacks, here iPhones, here, here Iran, here, here, here, here Stuxnet worm attack, here, here ISIS, here Jackson, Steve, here Jarvis, Jeff, here journalism, here see also newspapers Kaspersky, here key cards, here Kickstarter, here, here, here Kidane v.


Robot Futures by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Burning Man, business logic, commoditize, computer vision, digital divide, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, phenotype, Skype, social intelligence, software as a service, stealth mode startup, strong AI, telepresence, telepresence robot, Therac-25, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Primer 3: Electronics Electronics trends in robotics have followed a circuitous path that only now has the sort of stable progress that illuminates the future. One of the first research robots was Shakey the Robot, built by the Artificial Intelligence Center of Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International) in Menlo Park, California (Wilber 1972; Nilsson 1984). By 1971, this robot was already far ahead of its time: it could navigate cubicles in a research lab, visually identify its position, and recognize obstacles. Imagine, this was visual navigation through the use of video cameras at a time when the computer interface was still a teletype machine, not a computer monitor with text!

v=YQIMGV5vtd4 (accessed January 31, 2012). Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Walker, Matt. 2009. “Ant Mega-Colony Takes over World.” BBC Earth News. July 1. Wilber, B. M. 1972. “A Shakey Primer.” Technical Report. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA. November. Index 3D Printing, 28, 30, 121 Abuse, 57–60, 117 Academia, 112, 113, 118, Accelerometers, xv, 36, 95, Accountability, 100–103, 107, 110, 117 Action, xvi, xviii, 60, 100, 103, 110, 111, 121 Adjustable autonomy, 45, 46, 77, 80, 102, 103, 121 Advertising, 4, 13, 14, Agency, 60, 61, 81, 121 Air quality, 74, 113–115 Analytics, 5–9, 12, 13, 121 Android, xiv, 29, 40, 55 Artificial Intelligence, xv, xxi, 79, 81, 98, 105, 118, 121 Attention dilution disorder, 65, 82 Batteries, 19, 28, 30, 33–35, 111 Big data, 6, 122 Blade Runner, 55, 56 Blue, xi, 10 Browser, 5, 7 BumBot, 24, 25, 110 Carnegie Mellon University, x, xviii, 113 Chips, 57, 58 Cognition, xvi, xvii, 11, 41, 122 Colonies, 40, 42, 97–99 Common ground, xix, 126 Community, 38–40, 43, 112–116 Computer vision, 11–14, 21, 23, 30, 39, 102, 103, 122 CREATE Lab, x, 113 Data mining, 6, 8–13, 16, 17, 81, 122 Dehumanization, 60, 63, 107 Dick, Philip K., 55 Digital walls, 14 Disempowerment, 110 Do-it-yourself (DIY), 25–27 Driverless vehicle, 49–51, 59, 60, Drone, 76, 102, 103 132 Electric motor.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

In his early days, working on telegraphic innovations in Boston, he was pretty much a one-man band. But his later success depended on producing one of the world's first and most famous industrial R&D labs. When he was born in 1847 it was still normal for thinkers and innovators to work alone; by the time he died in 1931 this new form dominated invention. In his Menlo Park lab, Edison worked closely with at first around fifteen others, and eventually up to two hundred, in what he called ‘the invention business’. These engineers or ‘muckers’ worked in a single large room strewn with the detritus of technological innovation. Hours were hard and long. The atmosphere was part lab, part machine shop, part frat house.

The muckers were instrumental: one, Charles Batchelor, was particularly important, a skilled draughtsman and mechanic whose hands-on approach complemented Edison's so much he was even awarded 50 per cent on their co-inventions. Work was divided between research for clients in fields like telegraphy, electricity or the railways, and proprietary R&D. But the lines were never clear. Edison liked to claim a freewheeling approach, but Menlo Park was meticulous and methodical. In finding the right plant material for the first carbon filaments, the team tried no fewer than 6000 types. When developing the nickel-iron battery, they performed 50,000 experiments. Between 1876 and 1881 alone, on a workbench that ran the length of the New Jersey lab, there came a series of astonishing inventions and innovations, from vacuum pumps to filaments and lightbulbs, generators, mimeographs, voltmeters, the phonograph, a whole array of improved telegraphs and telephones.

Over time an effective institutional and cultural matrix dedicated to discovery and creation evolved. By the twentieth century it was rare indeed for big ideas to come without any organisational context – even novelists and musicians have publishers, record labels, informal networks and structures of critical appraisal. At this point we reach Edison, Menlo Park and all the rest of it: ideas generated, as a rule, in and through institutional contexts. A society's ability to generate significant ideas hence rests on its institutional base; and as ideas require more people and resources, so they rest more heavily on that base. The context of scaling up gives reasons for optimism here.


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The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

Author’s interview with Alan Kay; Landau and Clegg, “Reflections by Fellow Pioneers,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis; Alan Kay talk, thirtieth-anniversary panel on the Mother of All Demos, Internet archive, https://archive.org/details/XD1902_1EngelbartsUnfinishedRev30AnnSes2. See also Paul Spinrad, “The Prophet of Menlo Park,” http://coe.berkeley.edu/news-center/publications/forefront/archive/copy_of_forefront-fall-2008/features/the-prophet-of-menlo-park-douglas-engelbart-carries-on-his-vision. After reading an early draft of this section, Kay clarified some of what he had said in earlier talks and interviews, and I modified a few of his quotes based on his suggestions. 46. Cathy Lazere, “Alan C.

“Hugh and I were both engineers and we didn’t pay attention to business issues at all,” conceded Pitts.16 Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire. Bushnell was able to produce his game, Computer Space, for only $1,000. It made its debut a few weeks after Galaxy Game at the Dutch Goose bar in Menlo Park near Palo Alto and went on to sell a respectable 1,500 units. Bushnell was the consummate entrepreneur: inventive, good at engineering, and savvy about business and consumer demand. He also was a great salesman. One reporter remembered running into him at a Chicago trade show: “Bushnell was about the most excited person I’ve ever seen over the age of six when it came to describing a new game.”17 Computer Space turned out to be less popular in beer halls than it was in student hangouts, so it was not as successful as most pinball games.

“A union of people here tonight is more important than letting a sum of money divide us,” he declared.78 Eventually he outlasted all but twenty or so diehards, and it was decided to give the money to him until a better idea came along.79 Since he didn’t have a bank account, Moore buried the $14,905 that was left of the $20,000 in his backyard. Eventually, after much drama and unwelcome visits from supplicants, he distributed it as loans or grants to a handful of related organizations involved in providing computer access and education in the area. The recipients were part of the techno-hippie ecosystem that emerged in Palo Alto and Menlo Park around Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog crowd. This included the catalogue’s publisher, the Portola Institute, an alternative nonprofit that promoted “computer education for all grade levels.” Its loose-knit learning program was run by Bob Albrecht, an engineer who had dropped out of corporate America to teach computer programming to kids and Greek folk dancing to Doug Engelbart and other adults.


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Slide:ology: the art and science of creating great presentations by Nancy Duarte

An Inconvenient Truth, fear of failure, Isaac Newton, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, telepresence, web application, work culture

Interacting with Slides 241 Case Study: John Ortberg Faith and Flip Charts After enduring hideous presentations all week at work, the last thing you want to see are bullet points at church. Reading content from bullets in business or educational settings is bad enough, but excerpting them from sacred texts? One example of brilliant use of visual aids doesn’t involve slides at all. John Ortberg, Pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, uses a flip chart. Yes, a flip chart! Even though the congregation has 4,500 members and his sermons are broadcast to two remote locations, the flip chart works! As he speaks, he’ll sketch words or images on the flip chart to create a powerful mnemonic that congregants remember throughout the week.

When the screens are not in use, beautiful images of nature or stained glass are projected so the congregation can focus on his message. Even though Ortberg could have used slides in this sermon, he used large signs on easels. He used varying type styles to make each one look like a different type of sign. John Ortberg Pastor, Menlo Park Presbyterian Church Small Device, Big Impact Some of the best presenters in the world speak at the TED conference each year. The fascinating thing about attending the conference is that the person sitting next to you sometimes has as great of a story to share as the presenters on the stage. At one session I sat next to Scott Harrison, founder of charity:water (www.charitywater.org).


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More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

EXHIBIT 6.1 Edges of the Problem Continuum Discrete Continuous Static Dynamic Sequential Simultaneous Mechanical Organic Separable Interactive Universal Conditional Homogenous Heterogeneous Regular Irregular Linear Nonlinear Superficial Deep Single Multiple Stationary Nonstationary Source: Paul J. Feltovich, Rand J. Spiro, and Richard L. Coulsen, “Issues of Expert Flexibility in Contexts Characterized by Complexity and Change,” in Expertise in Context: Human and Machine, ed. Paul J. Feltovich, Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert R. Hoffman (Menlo Park, Cal.: AAAI Press and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 128-9 and author. The second idea, reductive bias, says that we tend to treat non-linear, complex systems (the right-hand side of the continuum) as if they are linear, simple systems. A common resulting error is evaluating a system based on attributes versus considering the circumstances.

Scott Armstrong, “The Seer-Sucker Theory: The Value of Experts in Forecasting,” Technology Review 83 (June-July 1980): 16-24. 2 Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (New York: Picador, 2002), 35-37. 3 Paul J. Feltovich, Rand J. Spiro, and Richard L. Coulsen, “Issues of Expert Flexibility in Contexts Characterized by Complexity and Change,” in Expertise in Context: Human and Machine, ed. Paul J. Feltovich, Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert R. Hoffman (Menlo Park, Cal.: AAAI Press and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997): 125-146. 4 R.J. Spiro, W. Vispoel, J. Schmitz, A. Samarapungavan, and A. Boerger, “Knowledge Acquisition for Application: Cognitive Flexibility and Transfer in Complex Content Domains,” in Executive Control Processes, ed. B.C. Britton (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987), 177-99. 5 Robyn M.

Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Fehr, Ernst. “The Economics of Impatience.” Nature, January 17, 2002, 269-70. Feltovich, Paul J., Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert Hoffman, eds. Expertise in Context: Human and Machine. Menlo Park, Cal.: AAAI Press and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Fine, Charles H. Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1998. Fisher, Kenneth L., and Meir Statman. “Cognitive Biases in Market Forecasts.” Journal of Portfolio Management 27, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 72-81.


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Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The ARPAnet allowed academics to share resources and transfer files. In its early years, the ARPAnet (later renamed DARPAnet) existed unnoticed by the outside world, with only a few hundred participating computers, or “hosts.” All addressing for this network was maintained by a single machine located at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. By 1984 the network had grown larger. Paul Mockapetris invented a new addressing scheme, this one decentralized, called the Domain Name System (DNS). The computers had changed also. By the late 1970s and early 1980s personal computers were coming to market and appearing in homes and offices.

Prior to the introduction of DNS in 1984, a single computer, called a name server, held all the name-to-number conversions. They were contained in a single text file. There was one column for all the names and another for all the numbers—like a simple reference table. This document, called HOSTS.TXT, 23. Ted Byfield, “DNS: A Short History and a Short Future,” Nettime, October 13, 1998. Physical Media 47 lived in Menlo Park, California, at the Network Information Center of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI-NIC).24 Other computers on the Internet would consult this document periodically, downloading its information so that their local reference tables would carry the most up-to-date data. The entire system of naming referred to in this file was called the name space.

See Layer, link Linz, Austria, 214, 227 Ljubljana, 212 Lovelace, Ada, 185, 188–189 Lovink, Geert, 17–18, 175–176 Lyon, Matthew, 122 Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 21 Malraux, André, 113 Mann, Omri, 179 Manovich, Lev, 19, 40, 52n29, 73–74 Mandel, Ernst, 23–24 Marx, Karl, 4, 87–102, 110, 113, 160 and “species being,” 13 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 151, 169, 182 Masters of Deception (Slatalla and Quittner), 164 Mattelart, Armand, 241–242 Max Planck Institute, 112 McKinsey & Company, 159 McLuhan, Marshall, 10, 18, 106n84, 212 McNamara, Robert, 205n72 Media, dead, 68 Mediation, 68 Melissa (virus), 184, 187 Memex (Bush), 59 Menlo Park (California), 48 Mentor, The, 156, 213 LambdaMOO, 191 Language, 50, 75, 164, 165, 195. See also Code; Programming, language Layer, 39–41, 129–130 application, 40, 130 Internet, 41, 130 link, 41, 130 transport, 41, 130 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 61 Leopoldseder, Hannes, 88, 103 Lessig, Lawrence, 40, 120, 141 Lévy, Pierre, 60, 169 Levy, Steven, 151–153, 169–170 LeWitt, Sol, 164–165 Lialina, Olia, 219, 224–225 Licklider, J.


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The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

This is why the final, conclusive mobile phone will never be developed, nor the perfect television show whose appeal doesn’t fade, nor the perfect umbrella, bicycle or pair of shoes. And this is why generating lots of ideas has to be a goal. Thomas Edison set “idea quotas” for his employees at Menlo Park: they were challenged to come up with one small invention per week and a major breakthrough every six months. Similarly, Google has built idea-prospecting into its business model: its 70/20/10 rule mandates that 70 percent of resources go to the core business, 20 percent to emerging ideas and 10 percent to brand new moonshots.

Rosati, Sarah R. Heilbronner, and Nelly Mühlhoff. “Waiting for Grapes: Expectancy and Delayed Gratification in Bonobos.” International Journal of Comparative Psychology 24 (2011): 99–111. Strom, Stephanie. “TV Dinners in a Netflix World.” New York Times. November 5, 2015. Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007. “Study: A Rich Club in the Human Brain.” IU News Room. October 31, 2011. Accessed April 29, 2014. <http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news-archive/20145.html> Svoboda, Elizabeth. “Innovators Under 35: Michelle Khine, 32.”

Wheeler Elementary School (Burlington) ref1 Hobbes, Thomas ref1 Hockney, David ref1 Hokusai, Katsushika ref1 Holoroom ref1 Holz, Karl ref1 Honda ref1 honeybees ref1, ref2, ref3 Honeywell ref1 horses ref1 Hot Bertaa tea kettle ref1 How Buildings Learn (Brand) ref1 Hughes, Robert ref1 human form bending ref1, ref2, ref3 blending ref1, ref2 mythical creatures ref1 human genome project ref1 humor ref1 Iberian sculpture ref1 IBM ref1, ref2, ref3 Icebag (Oldenburg) ref1 idea flings ref1 idea quotas ref1 IDEO ref1, ref2 Idriss, Ali Mohamed Younes ref1 Ihering, Hermann von ref1 image recognition ref1 image-labeling ref1 imagination ref1, ref2, ref3 “Imagine Mars” project ref1 Indian dance ref1 indigenous art ref1 Industrial Revolution ref1, ref2, ref3 information economy ref1 instant replay ref1 insulin ref1 intravenous (iv) drips ref1 inventions see design iPad ref1 iPhone ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 iPod ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Isaiah (Michelangelo) ref1 iTunes ref1 Ive, Jonathan ref1, ref2, ref3 IXI music player ref1 Japanese Imperial court ref1 Japanese Noh drama ref1 The Japanese Footbridge (Monet) ref1 Jay Z. ref1 Jesus phone (iPhone) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 “Jewish science” ref1 jigsaw method ref1 Jobs, Steve ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Johns, Jasper ref1, ref2, ref3 Johnson, Ben ref1 Johnson, Lonni Sue ref1, ref2 Johnson, Steve ref1 JR (artist) ref1 The Judgment of Paris (Raimondi) ref1 K-12 campuses ref1 Kahlo, Frida ref1, ref2 Kandinsky, Wassily ref1, ref2 Kettering, Charles ref1, ref2 Keystone Cops ref1 Khine, Michelle ref1 Killian, Michael ref1 kin selection ref1 King Jr, Martin Luther ref1 King Lear (Shakespeare) ref1 King Tee ref1 kingfisher ref1 Kitty Hawk (airplane) ref1 knives ref1 Koestler, Arthur ref1 Kramer, Hilton ref1 Kramer, Kane ref1, ref2 Kranz, Gene ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Krzywy Domek (“Warped Building”) ref1 Ku Klux Klan ref1 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge) ref1 Kulich, Max ref1 Laarman, Joris ref1 The “Lady Blunt” Stradivarius ref1 Land, Edwin ref1, ref2 landscaping ref1 office ref1 Zen Gardens ref1 language bending ref1 blending ref1 cinema ref1 coding ref1 cultural conditioning ref1 Google Translate ref1 universal ref1, ref2 Large Hadron Collider ref1 Las Meninas (Velázquez) ref1 Picasso variations ref1 lasers ref1, ref2, ref3 The Last Judgment (Michelangelo) ref1 Lauter Piano Company ref1 LCD televisions ref1 Le Bordel d’Avignon (Picasso) ref1 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Manet) ref1, ref2, ref3 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Picasso) ref1 The LEGO Movie (2014) ref1 Leguia, Luis ref1 Leigh, Simone ref1 Lenard, Philipp ref1 Lennon, John ref1 Lenormand, Louis-Sébastien ref1 Les Demoiselles d’Alabama (Colescott) ref1 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 “Let Me Ride” (song) ref1 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (King) ref1 Levi ref1 Lewis, Randy ref1 Lichtenstein, Roy ref1, ref2 “Life is Art” festival ref1 Ligeti, Györgi ref1 light bulbs ref1 Light Warlpiri ref1 Lightning Sonata (Cicoria) ref1 lions ref1 lipids ref1 liquid crystal displays ref1 literature bending ref1, ref2 breaking ref1, ref2 education ref1, ref2 mining history ref1 proliferating options ref1 see also drama Loewy, Raymond ref1 Longitude prize ref1 Longwell, Charles ref1 Lost in Space (tv) ref1 Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health (Gehry building) ref1 Louis C.K. ref1 Louvre ref1 Lovelace, Ada ref1 Lowes, John Livingston ref1 Lowe’s (US retailer) ref1 McCarthy, John ref1 McCartney, Paul ref1 MacWorld ref1 Maeda, John ref1 Malevich, Kazimir ref1 mami wata (mermaid) ref1 The Man in the High Castle (Dick) ref1 Manet, Edouard ref1, ref2, ref3 Manley, Tim ref1 manufacturing economy ref1 Marclay, Christian ref1 Marlborough Gallery ref1 The Marriage of Figaro (Beaumarchais) ref1 Martin, George ref1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology ref1 Maternity (Brandt) ref1 mathematical techniques ref1 Maugham, W. Somerset ref1 Mead, Margaret ref1 meatpacking industry ref1 mediated behavior ref1 memory ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Menlo Park ref1 Mercedes-Benz ref1 metaphors ref1 Michelangelo ref1, ref2 micro-encapsulation ref1 microfluidics ref1 Microsoft ref1, ref2 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) ref1 Middleton, Kate ref1 Miluni, Vlado ref1 Minotaur ref1 Mission Control ref1, ref2 MIT ref1 Media Lab ref1 mobile phones ref1, ref2, ref3 systems, breaking ref1 mobility vehicles ref1 Model T ref1 Mojave Aerospace ref1 Monet, Claude ref1, ref2 Moniz, Ernest ref1 Mont Sainte-Victoire (Cézanne) ref1 Montaigne, Michel de ref1 Moore, Marianne ref1 motivation ref1 Motor Coach Number 2 ref1 Motorola ref1 Mount Fuji ref1 moving successfully further away from a source, principle of ref1 Mozart, Nannerl ref1 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 MP3 ref1, ref2 Müller–Lyer illusion ref1 Muniz, Vik ref1, ref2 Murphy, Robin ref1 Murray, Bill ref1 Museum of Modern Art (New York) ref1 music ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 breaking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 cognition ref1 education ref1, ref2 mining history ref1, ref2 public reception ref1, ref2 scouting, distances ref1 “My dreams, my works must wait till after hell” (Ganesh/Leigh) (video) ref1 mythical creatures ref1 The Myth of the Isolated Artist (Oates) ref1 Nachmanovitch, Stephen ref1 Nakatsu, Eiji ref1 Naples conservatories ref1 Napoleon Bonaparte ref1 Napoleon III, Emperor ref1 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 National Endowment for the Arts (US) ref1 Nave Nave Fenua (Gauguin) ref1 Neanderthals ref1 Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art ref1 NeoSensory Vest ref1 Nestlé ref1 Netflix ref1 Neutral Moresnet ref1 New York Times (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 New York World’s Fair (1964) ref1, ref2 New Yorker (magazine) ref1, ref2, ref3 Newman, Barnett ref1 Newton, Isaac ref1 Newton-John, Olivia ref1 Nicholas, Adrian ref1 Nintendo ref1 Nobel Prize ref1, ref2 Nokia ref1 Norwood, Kenneth ref1 Not a Box (Portis) ref1 0 Through 9 (Johns) ref1 novelty ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 cultivating creativity ref1, ref2 with parameters ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Novich, Scott ref1 NPR (National Public Radio) ref1 Nubrella ref1 Oates, Joyce Carol ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Odyssey of the Mind ref1 Oh Sheet!


pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Even Thomas Edison, the most famous lone inventor, owed his success to his being a great collaborator, a skill he picked up as an itinerant telegraph operator, rarely staying in one place, constantly mixing and mingling with different people. Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, which opened in 1876 to be a ‘factory for invention’, produced the phonograph and the light bulb. The mythology surrounding the Menlo Park lab enshrined the idea that innovation came from specially talented people working in special conditions, cut off from the rest of the world. Yet Edison acknowledged that without his team of unsung engineers – Charles Batchelor, James Adam, John Kuresi, Charles Wurth – he would never have come up with many of the inventions that made him famous.

WikiHistory counter.li.org/ english.ohmynews.com/ www.fark.com www.ige.com www.plastic.com portal.eatonweb.com www.slashdot.org www.technorati.com/about www.worldofwarcraft.com INDEX 42 Entertainment 10, 11 A ABC 173 academia, academics 6, 27, 48, 59 Acquisti, Alessandro 210 Adam, James 95 adaptation 109, 110, 121 advertising 104, 105, 129, 173, 180, 219 Aegwynn US Alliance server 99 Afghanistan 237 Africa broadband connections 189 mobile phones 185, 207 science 196 use of Wikipedia 18 Aids 193, 206, 237 al-Qaeda 237 Alka-Seltzer 105 Allen, Paul 46 Altair BASIC 46 Amadeu, Sérgio 202 amateurism 105 Amazon 86 America Speaks 184 American Chemical Society 159 anarchy cultural 5 Wikipedia 16 Anderson, Chris: The Long Tail 216 Apache program 68 Apple 42, 103, 104, 135, 182 iPhone 134 iPods 46 Arendt, Hannah 174, 176 Argentina 203 Arrayo, Gloria 186 Arseblog 29, 30 Arsenal Football Club 29, 30 Arsenal.com 29 arXiv 160 Asia access to the web 5, 190 attitude to open-source 203 and democracy 189 mobile phones 166, 185 and open-source design communities 166–7 Ask a Ninja 57, 219 assembly line 93, 130 assets 224 astronomy 155, 162–3 authority 110, 115, 233 authorship and folk culture 57, 58 and mapping of the human genome 62 Azerbaijan 190 B bacteria, custom-made 164 Baker, Steve 148 Banco do Brazil 201 Bangladesh 205–6 banking 115, 205–6 Barber, Benjamin: Strong Democracy 174 Barbie, Klaus 17 Barbie dolls 17 Barefoot College 205 barefoot thinking 205–6 Barthes, Roland 45 Batchelor, Charles 95 Bath University 137 BBC 4, 17, 127, 142 news website 15 beach, public 49, 50, 51 Beach, The (think-tank) xi Bebo 34, 85, 86 Bedell, Geraldine x, xii–xiii Beekeepers 11, 15 Benkler, Yochai 174 The Wealth of Networks 194 Berger, Jorn 33 Bermuda principles 160 Billimoria, Jeroo 206 BioBrick Foundation 164 biology 163 open-source 165 synthetic 164–5 BioMedCentral 159 biotechnology 154, 163–4, 196–7, 199 black fever (visceral leishmaniasis) 200 Blackburn Rovers Football Club 29 Blades, Joan 188 Blizzard Entertainment 100 Bloc 8406 191 Blogger.com 33 blogs, blogging 1, 3, 20, 29–35, 57, 59, 74, 75, 78, 86, 115, 159, 170, 171, 176, 179, 181–2, 183, 191, 192, 214, 219, 229 BMW 140 Bohr, Neils 93 bookshops 2 Boulton, Matthew 54–5 Bowyer, Adrian 139, 140, 232 Boyd, Danah 213, 214 Bradley, Bill 180 Brand, Stewart 39–40, 43, 63 brands 104, 109 Brazil 201–2 Brenner, Sydney 62–5, 70, 77, 118, 231 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking) 163 Brindley, Lynne 141, 142, 144–5 British Library, London 141, 142, 144, 145 British Medical Journal 159 British National Party 169 Brooks, Fred 77–8 Brooks Hall, San Francisco 38 BT 112 bugs, software 70, 72, 165 bulletin boards 34, 40, 68, 77 Burma 190, 191 Bush, President George W. 18, 33–4, 180, 183 business services 130, 132, 166 C C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans) 62–5 Cambia 197 Cambridge University Press 159 camcorders 11 Campbell, Anne 176 Cancer Genome Atlas 160 capital 224 capitalism 224 commune 121, 125 managerial 24 modern 91, 121 social dimension of 90 Carlson, Rob 164 Carnegie Mellon University 210 cars manufacture 135–6 sharing 153 CBS 173 Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT 139 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) 30–31, 159 Chan, Timothy 106, 107 chat rooms 165 Chavez, President Hugo 203 Cheney, Dick 180 Chevrolet 105 Chicago: Full Circle council project 184 China based on privileged access to information 236 creative and cultural sectors 129–30 hackers 234 Internet connection 190, 204 makes available genetic data 199 motor-cycle production 136–7 online games market 106 open-access scientific data 159–60 open-source designs 141 politics 171, 192 power struggle in 235 spending on R & D 96, 159 web censorship 190–91 Chinese Communist Party 171, 235 Chongquing, China 136 Cisco 190 Citibank 207 Citizendium 14 climate change 170, 239 Clinton, Bill 174, 188 Clinton, Senator Hillary 181, 182, 183 CNN 15 co-operatives 121, 122, 123, 188 co-ordination 109, 110–11 coffee houses, London 95 Coke 109–10, 239 Cold War 169, 235 Coles, Polly xiii collaboration 9, 22, 31, 32, 36, 67, 79–80, 81, 82 collaborative innovation 65, 70, 75 and commerce 227 computer game 99, 100 Cornish tin-mining 55 and healthcare 150 and the library of the future 145 new technologies for 227–8 open 126, 128 peer 239 public services 145, 146, 152, 153 scientific 154, 155–6 We-Think 21, 23, 24, 146 Collis, Charles 134 Columbia University 212 commerce 25, 38, 48, 52, 57, 98, 227 commons 49, 50, 51–3, 79, 80, 124, 191, 226 communes 39–40, 46, 90, 121, 122, 128 communication(s) 130, 168, 174, 206, 239 mobile 186 Communism, collapse of 6 communities collaborative 117 and commerce 48 and commons 52 conversational 63 Cornish tin-mining 55 creative 70, 95 diverse 79–80 egalitarian 27, 48, 59, 63, 64 hacker 232 healthcare 151, 152 independence of 23 of innovation 54 libertarian, voluntaristic 45 Linux 65, 227 and loss of market for local newspapers 3 meritocratic 63 open-source 45, 68, 75, 80, 83, 95–6, 102, 109, 110, 111 open-source design 166–7 of scientists 53, 228 self-governing 59, 79, 80, 97, 104, 232 sharing and developing ideas 25 web 21, 23 worm-genome researchers 62–5 community councils 77, 80, 82 Community Memory project 42–3 companies computer-games 128 employee-owned 121, 122 shareholder-owned 122, 123, 125 see also corporations; organisations computer games 60, 127, 218 children and 147 created by groups on the web 7, 23, 87 modularity 78 multi-player 7, 204 success of World of Warcraft 98–9 tools for creating content 74 and We-Think 23 computer-aided design 134 computers democratising how information is accessed 139 distrust of 39 Goa School Computers Project 200–201 laptop 5, 36, 82, 155 mini- 135 personal 39, 46, 203 punch-cards 38 and science 154, 155 viruses 3, 4 connect 67, 75–9 Connectiva 201 consumer spending 131 consumers 98–108 consumer innovators 101–3 consumption constraints 25–6 engaging 89 fans 103–4 freedom 218 and innovation risk 100–101 participant 98–108 urban 124 contribute 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74–5 conversation 53, 54, 63, 69, 77, 93, 95, 113, 118, 174 Copernicus, Nicolaus 162 copyright 124, 157, 196 core 66, 67, 68–9, 70 Cornell University 233 ‘Cornish’ engines 55–6, 136, 229 Cornish tin-mining industry 54–6, 63, 125, 136 corporations centralisation of power 110 closed 128 and collaborative approaches to work 109 the cost of corporate efficiency 89–90 difficulty in making money from the web 7 hierarchies 88, 110 industrial-era 88 leadership 115, 117–19 loss of stability 122 restructuring and downsizing 88–9 see also companies; organisations counter-culture (1960s) 6, 27, 39, 45, 46, 59 Counts, David 183 Craigslist 3, 40, 118, 128, 218 Creative Commons 124 creative sector 129–30 creativity 1–2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 67, 82–3 collaborative 7, 20, 58, 86, 154 collective 39, 57–8 consumers 89 corporate 91–2 emergence of 93, 96 enabled by the web 1–2, 3, 5, 19, 26, 218–21, 222, 227 freedom to create 218–21 and interaction 119 and open innovation 93 origin of 112–13 social 5, 7, 58, 59, 82, 83, 86 tools for 218, 219 Crick, Francis 52, 62, 76 crime 153, 169, 183 criminality 1, 3 crowds 23, 61, 70, 72, 77 Crowdspirit 134 cultural élite 2 cultural sector 129–30 culture academic 38 anti-industrial 27, 28 basis of 4 collaborative 135 consumerist 172 corrosion of 4 cultural anarchy 5 folk 6, 27, 56–9, 220, 226 hippie 38 individual participation 6 political 171 popular 102 post-industrial 27, 28 pre-industrial 27, 28 We-Think 28, 59, 62, 169, 194, 230, 232–3, 238 Web 2.0 45 web-inflected 27 Western 239 wiki 14 work 114 YouTube cultural revolution 3 Cunningham, Ward 35–6 cyber cafés 107, 190, 192, 201, 204 Cyworld 34, 85, 86 D Dali, Salvador 105 Darby, Newman 102 Darpa 164 David, Paul 53 de Soto, Hernando 224–5 The Mystery of Capital 224 de Vellis, Phil 182 Dean, Howard 176–7, 178, 180, 185 Dean Corps 177 Debian 66 Debord, Guy 45, 46 decentralisation 7, 13, 39, 46, 59, 78, 226, 232 decision-making 78, 82, 84, 115, 173, 174 del.i.cious 86 democracy 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 16, 24, 170–74, 175, 176–92 basis of 174 conversational democracy at a national level 184 ‘craftsmen of democracy’ 174 Dean campaign 178 democratic advances 184 depends on public sovereignty 172 formal 195 geek 65 Homebrew 176 public debate 170, 171 and We-Think 170, 221, 239 Department for International Development (DFID) 207 Descartes, René 19–20 design 166 modular 136–7 open-source 133–5, 140, 141, 162–3, 166–7 developing world Fab Labs in 166 government attitudes to the Internet 190 impact of the web on 166 mobile phones 185–6 and open-access publishing 166 and open-source design communities 166–7 and open-source software 200–203 research and development 196 and We-Think’s style of organisation 204 diabetes 150 Digg 33 discussion forums 77 diversity 9, 23, 72, 76, 77, 79–80, 112, 121 division of labour 111 DNA description of the double helix (Watson and Crick) 52, 62, 76 DNA-sequencing 164–5 Dobson, John 102, 162–3 Doritos 105 dot.com boom 106 Dupral 68 Dyson (household-goods company) 134 Dyson, Freeman 163, 164 E E-Lagda.com 186 Eaton, Brigitte 33 Eatonweb 33 eBay 40, 44, 102, 128, 152, 165, 216–18, 221, 229, 235 Ebola virus 165 Eccles, Nigel xi economies of scale 137 economy digital 124, 131, 216 gift 91, 226 global 192 global knowledge 239 of ideas 6 individual participation 6 industrial 122 market 91, 221 a mass innovation economy 7 networked 227 of things 6 UK 129, 130 and We-Think 129 Edison, Thomas 72, 93, 95 EditMe 36 education 130, 146–50, 167, 183, 194, 239 among the poorest people in the world 2, 193 civic 174 a more convivial system 44 Edwards, John 181 efficiency 109, 110 Einstein, Albert: theory of relativity 52 elderly, care of 170 Electronic Arts 105, 106, 128, 177 Electronic Frontier Foundation 40 electronics 93, 135 Eli Lilly (drugs company) 77 Ellis, Mark: The Coffee House: a social history 95 enclosures 124 Encyclopaedia Britannica, The 15–18, 126 encyclopaedias 1, 4, 7, 12–19, 21, 23, 36, 53, 60, 61, 79, 161, 231 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) 161, 226 Endy, Drew 164, 165 energy 166, 232, 238 Engelbart, Doug 38–9, 59 engineering 133, 166 Environmental Protection Agency 152 epic poems 58, 60 equality 2, 24, 192–7, 198, 199–208 eScholarship repository, University of California 160 Estonia 184, 234 Estrada, President Joseph 186 ETA (Basque terrorist group) 187 European Union (EU) 130 Evans, Lilly x Evolt 68, 108 F Fab Labs 139, 166, 232 fabricators 139 Facebook 2, 34–5, 53, 142, 152, 191, 193, 210 factories 7, 8, 24 families, and education 147 Fanton, Jonathan 161 Fark 33 Feinstein, Diane 176 Felsenstein, Lee 42, 43, 44 fertilisers 123 Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University 161 file-sharing 51, 58, 135, 144, 233 film 2, 3, 4, 47, 86, 129, 216, 218, 220–21 film industry 56 filters, collaborative 36, 86 financial services 130, 132 Financial Times 118 First International Computer (FIC), Inc. 136, 141 flash mobbing 10, 11 Flickr 34, 85, 86, 210, 218–19 Food and Drug Administration (US) 92 Ford, Henry 24, 93, 96 Fortune 500 company list 122 Frank, Ze (Hosea Jan Frank) 57, 219 freedom 1, 2, 6, 24, 208, 209, 210–21, 226 French, Gordon 41, 42 friendly societies 188 Friends Reunited 34 friendship 5, 233 combinatorial 95 Friendster 34, 35 fundamentalists 232 G Gaia Online 35 Galileo Galilei 154 gambling 169 GarageBand software 57, 135, 148 Gates, Bill 46, 47, 51, 227 Gates Foundation 160 geeks 27, 29–36, 37, 38, 48, 59, 65, 179 gene-sequencing machines, automated 64 genetic engineering 164, 196–7, 235 Georgia: ’colour revolution’ 187 Gershenfeld, Neil 139–40, 166, 232 GetFrank 108 Ghana, Fab Lab in 139 Gil, Gilberto 202 Gjertsen, Lasse 56, 218 Gland Pharma 200 global warming 238 globalisation 202, 228, 239 Gloriad 155 GM 135 Goa School Computers Project 200–201 Goffman, Erving 103–4 Goldcorp Inc. 132–3, 153 Golden Toad 40 GoLoco scheme 153 Google x, 1, 29, 32, 33, 47, 66, 97, 104, 113–14, 128, 141, 142, 144, 212 Google Earth 161 Gore, Al 64 governments in developing countries 190 difficulty in controlling the web 7 GPS systems 11 Grameen Bank 205–6, 208 ‘grey’ sciences 163 grid computing 155 Gross, Ralph 210 group-think 23, 210–11 groups 230–31 of clever people with the same outlook and skills 72 decision-making 78 diverse 72, 80, 231 and tools 76–7 Guthrie, Woody 58 H Habermas, Jurgen 174 hackers 48, 74, 104, 140, 232, 234 Hale, Victoria 199 Halo 2 science fiction computer game 8 Hamilton, Alexander 17–18 Hampton, Keith 183–4 Hanson, Matt xi health 130, 132, 146, 150–52, 167, 183, 239 Heisenberg, Werner 93 Henry, Thierry 29 Hewlett Packard 47 hierarchies 88, 110, 115 hippies 27, 48, 59, 61 HIV 193 Homebrew Computer Club 42, 46–7, 51, 227 Homebrew Mobile Phone Club 136 Homer Iliad 58 Odyssey 58 Homer-Dixon, Thomas: The Upside of Down 238–9 Hubble, Edwin 162 Human Genome Project 62, 64, 78, 155, 160, 161, 226 human rights 206 Hurricane Katrina 184 Hyde, Lewis: The Gift 226 hypertext 35, 39 I I Love Bees game 8, 10–12, 15–16, 19, 20, 69, 231 IBM 47, 66, 97 System/360 computer 77 idea-sharing 37, 94, 237, 239 as the biggest change the web will bring about 6 with colleagues 27 and consumer innovators 103 dual character of 226 gamers 106 Laboratory of Molecular Biology 63 through websites and bulletin boards 68 tools 222 We-Think-style approach to 97 and the web’s underlying culture 7 ideas combining 77 and creative thinking 87 from creative conversations 93, 95 gifts of 226 growth of 222, 239 and the new breed of leaders 117–18 ratifying 84 separating good from bad 84, 86 testing 74 the web’s growing domination 1 identity sense of 229 thieves 213–14 Illich, Ivan 43–5, 48 Deschooling Society 43, 44, 150 Disabling Professions 43 The Limits to Medicine 43, 152 Tools for Conviviality 44 independence 9, 72, 231 India Barefoot College 205 creative and cultural sectors 129–30 Fab Lab in 139 Internet connection 190, 204 mobile phones 207 and One World Health 200 spending on R & D 96 telephone service for street children 206 individuality 210, 211, 215, 216, 233 industrialisation 48, 150, 188 information barriers falling fast 2 computers democratise how it is accessed 139 effect of We-Think 129 large quantities on the web 31–2 libraries 141, 142, 143, 145 looking for 8 privileged access to 236 sharing 94, 136 the web’s growing domination 1 Wikipedia 19 Innocentive 77 innovation 5, 6, 91–3, 94, 95–8, 109 among the poorest people in the world 2 biological 194 collaborative 65, 70, 75, 90, 119, 146, 195 collective 170, 238 and competition/co-operation mix 137 Cornish mine engines 54–6 corporate 89, 109, 110 and creative conversations 93, 95 creative interaction with customers 113 cumulative 125, 238 decentralised 78 and distributed testing 74 and diverse thinking 79 and education 147 independent but interconnected 78 and interaction 119 and Linux 66 local 139 a mass innovation economy 7 medical 194 open 93, 96–7, 125, 195 in open-source communities 95–6 and patents 124 pipeline model 92, 93, 97 R & D 92, 96 risks of 100–101 social 170, 238 successful 69 user-driven 101 and We-Think 89, 93, 95, 125, 126 the web 2, 5, 7, 225 Institute for One World Health 199–200 Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI) 179 Institute of Fiscal Studies 131 institutions convivial 44 industrial-era 234 and knowledge 103 and professionals 3, 5 public 142, 145 Instructables site 134 Intel 97 intellectual property 75, 122, 124, 125, 234 law 124–5 intelligence, collective bloggers 33 getting the mix right 23 Google’s search system 32 I Love Bees and Wikipedia examples 8, 10–19 milked by Google 47 the need to collaborate 32 self-organisation of 8 and social-networking sites 35 the web’s potential 3, 5 International Polar Year (IPY) 156, 226 Internet broadband connection 178, 189, 192 combined with personal computers (mid-1990s) 39 cyber cafés 107, 190, 192, 201, 204 Dean campaign 177 in developing countries 190 draws young people into politics 179, 180 an early demonstration (1968) 38 and Linux 66 news source 178–9 open-source software 68 openness 233 and political funding 180 pro-am astronomers 163 used by groups with a grievance 168 in Vietnam 189–90, 191 investment 119, 121, 133, 135 Iran 190, 191 Iraq war 18, 134, 191 Israel 18 Ito, Joi 99 J Japan politics 171 technology 171 JBoss 68 Jefferson, Richard 197, 199 Jodrell Bank Observatory, Macclesfield, Cheshire 162 JotSpot 36 journalism 3, 74, 115, 170–71 Junker, Margrethe 206 K Kampala, Uganda 206 Kazaa music file-sharing system 144 Keen, Andrew 208 The Cult of the Amateur 208 Kelly, Kevin 211 Kennedy, John F. 176 Kenya 207 Kepler, Johannes 162 Kerry, John 180 Khun, Thomas 69 knowledge access to 194, 196 agricultural 194 barriers falling fast 2 collaborative approach to 14, 69 encyclopaedia 79 expanding 94 gifts of 226 individual donation of 25 and institutions 103 and networking 193 and pro-ams 103 professional, authoritative sources of 222 sharing 27, 44, 63, 70, 199 spread by the web 2, 3 Wikipedia 16, 18, 19, 195 Korean War 203 Kotecki, James (’EmergencyCheese’) 182 Kraus, Joe 36 Kravitz, Ben 13 Kuresi, John 95 Kyrgyzstan: ’colour revolution’ 187 L Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge 62–3, 77 labour movement 188 language 52–3 Lanier, Jaron 16, 210–11, 213 laptop computers 5, 36, 82, 155 lateral thinking 113 leadership 89, 115, 116, 117–19 Lean, Joel 55 Lean’s Engine Reporter 55, 63, 77 Lee, Tim Berners 30–31 Lego: Mindstorms products 97, 104, 140 Lewandowska, Marysia 220, 221 libraries 2, 141–2, 143, 144–5, 227 life-insurance industry (US) 123 limited liability 121 Linked.In 35 Linux 65–6, 68, 70, 74, 80, 85, 86, 97, 98, 126, 127, 128, 136, 201, 203, 227 Lipson Community College, Plymouth 148 literacy 194 media 236 Lloyd, Edward 95 SMS messaging (texting)"/>London coffee houses 95 terrorist bombings (July 2005) 17 Lott, Trent 181–2 Lula da Silva, President Luiz Inacio 201 M M-PESA 207, 208 MacArthur Foundation 161 McCain, John 180 MacDonald’s 239 McGonigal, Jane 11, 69 McHenry, Robert 17 McKewan, Rob 132–3, 153 McLuhan, Marshall: Understanding the Media 45 Madrid bombings (March 2004) 186–7 Make magazine 165 management authoritative style of 117 and creative conversation 118 hierarchies 110 manufacturing 130, 132, 133–7, 138, 139–41, 166, 232 niche 139 Marcuse, Herbert 43 Marin 101 Mark, Paul xi market research 101 market(s) 77, 90, 93, 102, 123, 216, 226–7 Marsburg virus 165 Marx, Karl 224 mass production 7, 8, 24, 56, 96, 227, 232, 238 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 139, 164, 233 Matsushita 135 media 129, 130, 156, 172, 173, 182, 211 literacy 236 Meetup 179, 185 Menlo Park laboratory, New Jersey 95 Merholz, Peter 33 meritocracy 16, 63 Microsoft 46, 47, 51, 56, 75, 109–10, 126, 127, 144, 202, 203, 204, 239 Office 201 Windows 200 Windows XP 66 Middle East 170, 189, 190, 192 Milovich, Dimitry 102 ‘minihompy’ (mini homepage) 204 Minnesota Mining and Materials 121 mobile phones 5 in Africa 185, 207 in Asia 166, 185 camera phones 74, 115, 210 children and 147 in developing-world markets 207–8 with digital cameras 36 flash mobs 10 I Love Bees 11 in India 207 open-source 136, 203 politics 185–9 SMS messaging (texting) 101–2, 185, 187, 214, 215 mobs 23, 61 flash 10, 11 modularity 77, 84 Moore, Fred 41–2, 43, 46, 47, 59, 227 More, Thomas: Utopia 208 Morris, Dick 174 Morris, Robert Tappan 233 Mosaic 33 motivation 109–12, 148 Mount Wilson Observatory, California 162 mountain bikes 101 MoveOn 188–9 Mowbray, Miranda xi music 1, 3, 4, 47, 51, 52, 57, 102, 135, 144, 218, 219, 221 publishing 130 social networking test 212–13 mutual societies 90, 121 MySpace 34, 44, 57, 85, 86, 152, 187, 193, 214, 219 MySQL 68 N National Football League (US) 105 National Health Service (NHS) 150, 151 National Public Radio (NPR) 188 Natural History Museum, London 161 Nature magazine 17 NBC 173 neo-Nazis 168 Netflix 216, 218 Netherlands 238 networking by geeks 27 post-industrial networks 27 social 2–7, 20, 23, 34–5, 36, 53, 57, 86, 95, 147, 149, 153, 159, 171, 183–4, 187, 193, 208, 210, 212, 213–15, 230, 233 New Economy 40 New Orleans 184 New York Magazine 214 New York Review of Books 164 New York Stock Exchange 95 New York Times 15, 182, 191 New Yorker magazine 149 Newmark, Craig 118 news services 60, 61, 171, 173, 178–9 newspapers 2, 3, 30, 32, 34, 171, 172, 173 Newton, Sir Isaac 25, 154 niche markets 216 Nixon, Richard 176 NLS (Online System) 39 Nokia 97, 104, 119, 140 non-profits 123 Nooteboom, Bart 74 Noronha, Alwyn 200–201 Norris, Pippa 189 North Africa, and democracy 189 Nosamo 35, 186 Noyes, Dorothy 58 Nupedia 13, 14 Nussbaum, Emily 214–15 O Obama, Barack 181, 191 Ofcom (Office of Communications) 31 OhmyNews 34, 87, 204, 231 oil companies 115 Oldenburg, Henry 25, 53–4, 156 Ollila, Jorma 119 Online System (NLS) 39 Open Architecture Network (OAN) 133–4 Open Net Initiative 190 Open Office programme 201 Open Prosthetics 134 Open Source Foundation 97 OpenMoko project 136 OpenWiki 36 O’Reilly, Tim 31 organisation commons as a system of organisation 51 pre-industrial ideas of 27, 48 social 20, 64, 165 We-Think’s organisational recipe 21 collaboration 21, 23 participation 21, 23 recognition 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 196 organisations civic 189 open/collaborative vs. closed/hierarchical models 89, 126, 127, 128 public 152 successful 228 see also companies; corporations Orwell, George: 1984 182 Ostrom, Elinor 51–2, 80 ownership 6, 119, 120, 121–6, 127, 128, 225 Oxford University 234 P paedophiles 3, 168, 213–14 Page, Scott xi, 72 Pakistan 237 Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco 40 parallel universes 7 participation 23, 216, 223, 230, 232 consumers 98, 100 public services 145, 146, 150, 152, 153 a We-Think ingredient 21, 24 Partido Populaire (PP) (Spain) 187 patents 55, 56, 92, 97, 102, 124, 154, 196, 197, 199 Paul, Ron 185 Pawson, Dave x–xi Pax, Salam 57 peasants 27, 48, 59 peer recognition 54, 106, 111, 156, 228–9 peer review 53, 54, 156, 165, 236 peer-to-peer activity 53–4, 135, 148, 151 People’s Computer Company 41 People’s Democratic Party (Vietnam) 191 performance art/artists 2, 10 performance management 110 Perl 68 Peruvian Congress 202 Pew Internet & American Life 31, 179 pharmaceutical industry 92–3, 195–6, 197, 199, 200 Phelps, Edmund 114–15, 220 Philippines: mobile phones 185–6 Philips, Weston 105 photographs, sharing of 34, 75, 86, 218–19 Pitas.com 33 Plastic 33 Playahead 35 podcasts 142 Poland 220–21 polar research 156 politics bloggers able to act as public watchdog 181–2, 183 decline in political engagement 171–2 democratic 173 donations 179 funding 180–81 and journalism 170–71 and mobile phones 185–9 online 183 the online political class 179 and online social networks 35, 86 political advocates of the web 173–4 racist groups on the web 169 and television 173, 183 ultra-local 183, 184 US presidential elections 173, 179 videos 182 the web enters mainstream politics 176 young people drawn into politics by the Internet 179 Popper, Karl 155 Popular Science magazine 102 pornography 169, 214 Post-it notes 121 Potter, Seb 108–9 Powell, Debbie ix power and networking 193 technological 236 of the We-Think culture 230 of the web 24–5, 185, 233 PowerPoint presentations 140, 142, 219 privacy 210, 211 private property 224, 225 Procter and Gamble (P & G) 96–7, 98 productivity 112, 119, 121, 151, 227, 232 agricultural 124 professionals, and institutions 3, 5 property rights 224 public administration 130 Public Broadcasting Service 188 Public Intellectual Property Research for Agriculture initiative 199 Public Library of Science 159 public services 132, 141–2, 143, 144–53, 183 public spending 146 publishing 130, 166 science 156–7, 159–60 Putnam, Robert 173, 184 Python 68 Q quantum mechanics 93 ‘quick-web’ 35 R racism 169, 181–2 radio 173, 176 RapRep (Rapid Replicator) machines 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 232 Rawls, John: A Theory of Justice 194 Raymond, Eric 64 recognition 21, 223 peer 54, 106, 111, 156 record industry 56, 102 recycling 111 Red Hat 66, 227 Red Lake, Ontario 132, 133 research 166 market 101 pharmaceutical 195–6 research and development (R & D) 92, 96, 119, 196 scientific 154–7, 159–65 retailing 130, 132 Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil 201 Roh Moo-hyun, President of South Korea 35, 186 Roosevelt, Franklin 176 Roy, Bunker 205 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey 161 Royal Society 54 Philosophical Transactions 25, 156 Ryze.com 34 S Sacca, Chris 113, 114 Safaricom 207 St Louis world fair (1904) 75–6 Samsung xi, 203 Sanger, Larry 13, 14, 16 Sanger Centre, Cambridge 155 Sao Paolo, Brazil 201 SARS virus 165 Sass, Larry 139 satellite phones 11 Saudi Arabia 190 scanners 11 Schumacher, E.


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The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

“But you have to actually go down and see the Room demo they have in Irvine.” “Can they come up here and do a demo?” Zuckerberg asked. “Yeah. But it’ll be comparatively shitty. I mean, it’ll probably still blow you away, but it’s just not as good as the Room.” Zuckerberg was intrigued . . . but still not enough to rearrange his schedule. “I’M GONNA FLY UP TO MENLO PARK AND GIVE A DEMO TO MARK ZUCKERBERG,” Iribe said. “Nice!” Luckey replied. “Any particular objective in mind? Or just because, you know, it’s Mark Zuckerberg? It was mostly because it was Mark Zuckerberg, but Iribe and Malamed had also started throwing around a crazy idea: What if a company like Facebook led our Series C?

Zuckerberg agreed it was important that he make time to visit soon. Maybe the following week? And with tentative plans on the horizon, the Facebook guys spoke with Iribe about his vision for Oculus, the critical role that all four of them believed that virtual social spaces would play. LEAVING MENLO PARK, IRIBE FELT GREAT ABOUT HOW THINGS HAD GONE AT Facebook. He didn’t like getting ahead of himself, but there was a sense that this could be the beginning of a big, down-the-road collaboration. And that feeling grew even stronger the following day when Iribe received a promising follow-up email from Zuckerberg.

“Yes, it concerns me too,” Zuckerberg replied. As did the fact that he found Carmack to be “socially awkward in person” (and Kang to be “crazy”). Nevertheless, Facebook agreed to include the indemnity provision that Kang wanted for Carmack. Not only that, but—over a weekend of negotiating at Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park—Iribe was also able to obtain a similar indemnity provision for himself as well. As for the additional upfront compensation, Iribe asked Luckey if he would be willing to reallocate some of his signing day money to Carmack. “Essentially,” Iribe explained, “you’d just be moving money from one bucket to another; so the money you’d get today, you’d now just get a few years later—at the end of the vesting period.”


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The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

In The New Geography of Jobs, the economist Enrico Moretti tells an intriguing story of two places in California: Menlo Park and Visalia. The story begins in 1969, with a young engineer turning down a job offer at Hewlett-Packard in Menlo Park (in the heart of Silicon Valley) to move to the midsize town of Visalia, three hours’ drive away. At the time, many professionals were leaving cities for smaller communities, which were considered better places for family life. At the time, both places in California had prospering middle classes, similar rates of crime, and comparable quality of schools. And while incomes in Menlo Park were higher on average, America was on an equalizing path.

By 1927, electricity had a monopoly on illumination in New York City, and the last two gas lamplighters left their craft, ending the story of their profession and that of the Lamplighters Union.3 Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb surely made the world better and brighter. In his laboratory in Menlo Park, oil lamps and candles still polluted the air on the day of his breakthrough. As William Nordhaus, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018, has shown, the price of light fell dramatically thereafter, as electricity spread to Chicago’s Academy of Music, London’s House of Commons, Milan’s La Scala, and the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.4 For the purpose of streetlighting, even the New York lamplighters, some of whom were forced into early retirement, willingly admitted that the new system was more expeditious.

And while incomes in Menlo Park were higher on average, America was on an equalizing path. Yet today, Menlo Park and Visalia are in different universes. As Silicon Valley has grown to become the world’s hub for innovation, Visalia has become a backwater. It has the second lowest share of college-educated workers in America, and its crime rates are high and trending upward while its relative earnings are in decline.30 And these are not isolated examples: [They reflect] a broader national trend. America’s new economic map shows growing differences, not just between people but between communities. A handful of cities with the “right” industries and a solid base of human capital keep attracting good employers and offering high wages, while those at the other extreme, cities with the “wrong” industries and a limited human capital base, are stuck with dead-end jobs and low average wages.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Rather than fight Swan, Edison established a joint venture with him to manufacture lightbulbs in Britain. To create an entire system required considerable funding. Although not called such at the time, one of the other inventions that could be credited to Edison and his investors was venture capital. For what he developed in Menlo Park, New Jersey, was a forerunner of the venture capital industry that would grow, coincidentally, around another Menlo Park—this one in Silicon Valley in California. As an Edison biographer has observed, it was his melding of the “laboratory and business enterprise that enabled him to succeed.”6 Costs were a constant problem, and as they increased, so did the pressures.

When people think about power, it’s usually only when the monthly bill arrives or on those infrequent times when the lights are suddenly extinguished either by a storm or some breakdown in the delivery system. All this electrification did indeed begin with a flip of a switch. THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK On the afternoon of September 4, 1882, the polymathic inventor Thomas Edison was in the Wall Street offices of the nation’s most powerful banker, J. P. Morgan. At 3:00 p.m., Edison threw the switch. “They’re on!” a Morgan director exclaimed, as a hundred lightbulbs lit up, filling the room with their light.2 Nearby, at the same moment, 52 bulbs went on in the offices of the New York Times, which proclaimed the new electric light “soft,” and “graceful to the eye . . . without a particle of flicker to make the head ache.”

His partial deafness made him somewhat isolated and self-centered, but also gave him an unusual capacity for concentration and creativity. He proceeded by experiment, reasoning, and sheer determination, and, as he once said, “by methods which I could not explain.” He had set up a research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, with the ambitious aim, as he put it, of making an invention factory that would deliver “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.”4 “THE SUBDIVISION OF LIGHT” That was not so easy, as he found when he homed in on electricity. He wanted to replace the then-prevalent gas-fired lamp.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

This perspective was warmly received in Silicon Valley, which Brand thought was why the microcomputer revolution happened at that specific time and place: “The stuff came out of the Stanford area, I think, because it took a Buckminster Fuller access-to-tools angle on things.” For a community that was still defining itself, Fuller was an inexhaustible source of metaphors and images, which spread through existing networks into every corner of the culture. The Whole Earth Catalog, for example, was born at the Portola Institute, an educational nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, that eventually included a commercial arm for books on computing. At the suggestion of Marc LeBrun—a coding prodigy who would later be one of the first four members of the Apple Macintosh team—the subsidiary was called Dymax, an homage to Dymaxion, the personal brand that Fuller used for his designs.

Listening carefully to Brand’s description of the fair, Fuller advised him to clarify its intentions, and he expressed concerns that it would become overly political. When Brand asked if a photo of the whole earth might change the world’s perspective, Fuller said, “You’re right. I’ll take back what I said in my letter.” On January 3, 1968, Brand wrote to Fuller about research being conducted in Menlo Park by an engineer named Douglas Engelbart. “The program is operational now using constant on-line intense interaction with computer-driven cathode ray tube displays of text, graphs, and link-node arrays,” Brand explained. “A number of persons at remote consoles can work in interactive concert on a mutually generated display, with mutual access to the computer memory.”

He told Fuller that he hoped to sell the Dymaxion Map and plans for domes, with the ultimate goal of connecting readers “with manufacturers, suppliers, authors, inventors.” In October 1968 Brand launched the catalog as a start-up in a garage at the Ortega Park Teachers Laboratory, which was housed in the former Rancho Diablo near Menlo Park. He based its layout on Steve Baer’s Dome Cookbook, and he often reviewed books without reading them—he could generally gather from the illustrations and index whether or not they were worth recommending. The first printing had an initial run of a thousand copies, and although he started with just fifty subscribers, he sold tens of thousands by the end of the following year.


The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

In Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, 1219–1226. Stock, J., and Trebbi, F. (2003). Who invented instrumental variable regression? Journal of Economic Perspectives 17: 177–194. Textor, J., Hardt, J., and Knüppel, S. (2011). DAGitty: A graphical tool for analyzing causal diagrams. Epidemiology 22: 745. Tian, J., and Pearl, J. (2002). A general identification condition for causal effects. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press/MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA, 567–573. Wermuth, N., and Cox, D. (2008). Distortion of effects caused by indirect confounding.

In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence 10 (R. L. de Mantaras and D. Poole, eds.). Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 46–54. Balke, A., and Pearl, J. (1994b). Probabilistic evaluation of counterfactual queries. In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1. MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA, 230–237. Cartwright, N. (1983). How the Laws of Physics Lie. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK. Haavelmo, T. (1943). The statistical implications of a system of simultaneous equations. Econometrica 11: 1–12. Reprinted in D. F. Hendry and M. S. Morgan (Eds.), The Foundations of Econometric Analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 477–490, 1995.

In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence 10 (R. L. de Mantaras and D. Poole, eds.). Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 46–54. Balke, A., and Pearl, J. (1994b). Probabilistic evaluation of counterfactual queries. In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1. MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA, 230–237. Cowles, M. (2016). Statistics in Psychology: An Historical Perspective. 2nd ed. Routledge, New York, NY. Duncan, O. (1975). Introduction to Structural Equation Models. Academic Press, New York, NY. Freedman, D. (1987). As others see us: A case study in path analysis (with discussion).


pages: 323 words: 92,135

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

Doug led a group of researchers at the Stanford Research Institute and had been working since 1962 on a topic they called “Augmented Human Intellect.” Doug got a slot at the AFIPS conference to present his group’s findings. Ho hum, a real snoozer, right? But his team had put together a huge surprise. They had microwave links on the roof and phone lines hooked up to connect the Convention Center to their labs in Menlo Park. What Doug showed off was a system called NLS or oN Line System. On a computer screen with both graphics and text were multiple windows, a text editor with cut and paste, and an outline processor. A wooden-looking mouse controlled an on-screen pointer as a cursor. Multiple users could connect remotely.

The second one was installed at the Stanford Research Institute.” “Doug Engelbart’s group?” “That’s it. Did I tell you this story already?” “Nope. Go on.” “With two, you can tango. These two machines talked via NCP, Network Control Protocol. We get AT&T to provide a 50 186 Running Money kilobit per second private line between LA and Menlo Park up north.” “Yeah.” “So we hook up the two IMPs, and ARPANET was born.” “But what was the first packet?” I asked. “Oh, yeah. I called them up on a regular phone line and said, ‘OK, we are about to send an L, let me know when you see it.’ “They told me, ‘There it is, we got an L,’ and I heard a lot of applause in the background.

“The tour starts at three, so we’d better figure out which door, quick,” I pleaded. Phil opened one of the doors in front of us and almost got trampled as a mass of people flowed out. We tried another door and were ushered into a lobby and told to step aside, a shift change was taking place. “You guys with the school?” some guy in a rent-a-cop uniform asked. “Yes, Menlo Park.” “OK, the tour has started, but you haven’t missed the tram. Walk this way.” I knew what was coming. I looked at Phil, who said, “If I could walk that way . . .” Nyuk-nyuk. Maybe this won’t be such a bad afternoon after all. It was the middle of the summer, and there were a few too Sweating at the NUMMI 241 many kids hanging around our house, so my wife had insisted I take our two older boys on the tour of NUMMI.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

But maybe I can help you think about your journey in a new way. To better help you think about what a Startup Hero does and the impact he or she creates, whether in a success or a failure. I provide you here with a story. The Tesla Story Ian Wright came to pitch his new business, Wright Motors. We met at DFJ’s offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. He brought with him an invention that was strung together with tires, PVC pipes, some fabric, and magic Lithium Ion batteries. It was a new kind of electric car. He asked me to sit in the machine and get strapped in with a five-point harness. I asked why I needed to be strapped in since the only electric cars I had seen were golf carts and the original Chevy Volt that George Schultz drove, and none of them had much in the way of scary pickup.

Tom initially went around recruiting venture capitalists to move into his space. At first, people balked since the buildings were out on a hill in the middle of nowhere. Most people, my father included, wanted to stay in Palo Alto, where they would have more of a “status” address. No one had heard of Menlo Park, but Palo Alto was considered one of the big cities of the peninsula. But Tom kept at it and finally recruited some top venture capitalists to come work at the Sand Hill Road location. It became known as the place for venture capitalists. The press wrote it up regularly as the venture capitalist’s equivalent of Wall Street.

Mark 16:15 As apostles and prophets, we are concerned not only for our children and grandchildren but for yours as well - and for each of God's children. Russell M. Nelson The Draper University Story I always wanted to start a school. I had a top-flight education. The places I studied at were exceptional. Hillview Elementary School in Menlo Park, California, was one of the top public schools in the state at that time. Phillips Academy prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, continues to be the top prep school in the country. Stanford University, where I studied electrical engineering, was the top electrical engineering school, and arguably the best college in the country.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

It was, as Scientific American concluded, “The Great Electric Car Quandary.” Of course, skeptics said the same thing about Thomas Edison’s electric light bulbs. Critics assumed that the market would continue to favor gas lamps, which were supported by a well-established infrastructure. Soon after Edison demonstrated his bulbs in a grand display at his Menlo Park lab in January 1880, a letter writer to The New York Times, who identified himself as F. G. Fairfield, PhD, of the New York College of Veterinary Surgeons, surmised “on practical and economical as well as on scientific and optical grounds, that the Edison system in its present state could not successfully compete with gas.”

It had taken the company just three months to go from the first schematics to a functional car. The result was a bare-bones vehicle with no body panels, a new battery pack, and the insides of a prototypical Tesla stuck on the chassis of a Lotus Elise. Straubel tore off down the road outside Tesla’s new office in San Carlos, six miles from Menlo Park, as his coworkers stood around in awe of their creation. Drew Baglino, an early engineer at the company, also took a spin. At the 2016 shareholders’ meeting, he recalled what it was like. “It was my first four-second zero-to-sixty experience, and I had never experienced anything like that,” he said onstage after being invited up by Musk.

The engineers didn’t realize until it was too late. Now he is pissed. Musk: “I want names named. If someone’s always on the hot seat and is always the root cause for problems, they will not be part of this organization long term.” Scene II: Not long after the meeting, Musk visits a Tesla vehicle delivery center in Menlo Park. Awaiting him is a workshop full of defective Roadsters. Musk: “Holy mackerel!” His hands go to his head. “Jesus! We have, like, an army of cars here. Like, Jeeeeesus!” Musk tells the team to overhire to fix the problem. “I’m available twenty-four/seven to help solve issues. Call me three A.M. on a Sunday morning, I don’t care.”


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

The story originates from a passage in a biography of Newton, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, written by one of his contemporaries, William Stukeley, and published more than two decades after Newton’s death. The relevant passages from the book are available online at The Royal Society, “Newton’s Apple,” http://royalsociety.org/library/moments/newton-apple/. 10. Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, “Young Edison,” http://www.menloparkmuseum.org/thomas-edison-and-menlo-park (excerpted from Westfield Architects and Preservation Consultants, Preservation Master Plan, Edison Memorial Tower, Museum, and Site (2007). 11. “Answers for Young People,” http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html; Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (HarperOne, 1999). 12.

Fry was fascinated, but he didn’t think those applications made sense, and at that moment he couldn’t come up with any others.8 We like eureka stories. Popular lore is filled with this kind of thing. One warm evening, Isaac Newton is sitting under an apple tree in his garden when an apple falls and bonks him on the head; he instantly discovers gravity.9 Thomas Edison is staying up all night at Menlo Park, frantically experimenting, when suddenly he creates a new lightbulb that glows continuously for thirteen-and-a-half hours.10 Tim Berners-Lee is helping some scientists share data when out of the blue an idea hits him and he invents the World Wide Web.11 But these stories are rarely accurate. Newton had been working on the problem of gravity for years, and neither he nor his biographer said an apple hit him on the head.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

“free is not a business model”: “Ebay Lectures Taobao That Free Is Not a Business Model,” South China Morning Post, October 21, 2005, http://www.scmp.com/node/521384. his autobiography, Disruptor: 周鸿祎, “颠覆者” (北京: 北京联合出版公司, 2017). Sinovation event in Menlo Park: Dr. Andrew Ng, Dr. Sebastian Thrun, and Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, “The Future of AI,” moderated by John Markoff, Sinovation Ventures, Menlo Park, CA, June 10, 2017, http://us.sinovationventures.com/blog/the-future-of-ai. book The Lean Startup: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (New York: Crown Business, 2011). 3.

Silicon Valley prides itself on long work hours, an arrangement made more tolerable by free meals, on-site gyms, and beer on tap. But compared with China’s startup scene, the valley’s companies look lethargic and its engineers lazy. Andrew Ng, the deep-learning pioneer who founded the Google Brain project and led AI efforts at Baidu, compared the two environments during a Sinovation event in Menlo Park: The pace is incredible in China. While I was leading teams in China, I’d just call a meeting on a Saturday or Sunday, or whenever I felt like it, and everyone showed up and there’d be no complaining. If I sent a text message at 7:00 PM over dinner and they haven’t responded by 8:00 PM, I would wonder what’s going on.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Bezos joined Bechtolsheim, Cheriton, and Shriram as investors, making for a total of a million dollars of angel money. On September 4, 1998, Page and Brin filed for incorporation and finally moved off campus. Sergey’s girlfriend at the time was friendly with a manager at Intel named Susan Wojcicki, who had just purchased a house on Santa Margarita Street in Menlo Park with her husband for $615,000. To help meet the mortgage, the couple charged Google $1,700 a month to rent the garage and several rooms in the house. At that point they’d taken on their first employee, fellow Stanford student Craig Silverstein. He’d originally connected with them by offering to show them a way to compress all the crawled links so they could be stored in memory and run faster.

Hölzle, still wary, accepted the offer but kept his position at UCSB by taking a yearlong leave. He would never return. In April he arrived at Google with Yoshka, a big floppy Leonberger dog, in tow, and dived right in to help shore up Google’s overwhelmed infrastructure. (By then Google had moved from Wojcicki’s Menlo Park house to a second-floor office over a bicycle shop in downtown Palo Alto.) Though Google had a hundred computers at that point—it was buying them as quickly as it could—it could not handle the load of queries. Hundreds of thousands of queries a day were coming in. The average search at that time, Hölzle recalls, took three and a half seconds.

Instead, you’d have results that suggested a fine-dining experience at Windows on the World, on the 107th floor of the now-nonexistent North Tower. A half-dozen engineers moved their computers into a conference room. Thus Google created its first war room. (By then—less than a year after moving from the house in Menlo Park to the downtown Palo Alto office—Google had moved once again, to a roomier office-park facility on Bayshore Road in nearby Mountain View. Employees dubbed it the Googleplex, a pun on the mathematical term googolplex, meaning an unthinkably large number.) When people came to work, they’d go to the war room instead of the office.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

But, at the time, Doug was a voice crying into the wilderness. Bob Taylor: Doug and I talked about doing this demo in early ’68, and I was strongly encouraging Doug to do it. He said, “It’s going to cost a fortune. We’re going to bring in this huge display, we’re going to have online support between San Francisco and Menlo Park, and it’s just going to cost a ton of money.” Alan Kay: And basically, when they approached Taylor about doing this, Taylor said, “Look, spend what you need, but don’t do it small—and be redundant enough so the thing really works.” Bob Taylor: I said, “Don’t worry about it. ARPA will pay for it.”

Stewart Brand: When I went into Engelbart’s lab for the first time, there was a big poster of Janis Joplin, which is kind of an indication that they were feeling like part of the counterculture. Alan Kay: In that whole area—University Avenue in Palo Alto and then El Camino going all the way into Menlo Park—the counterculture was going on. The NLS debuted at the national computer conference at Brooks Hall in San Francisco’s Civic Center in December 1968. When the lights came up, Engelbart sat onstage with a giant video screen projected behind him, and a mouse at his fingertips. Then, in what has become known as “the Mother of All Demos,” Engelbart showed off what his computer could do.

He founded Netscape in 1994 and in just over a year the company laid the foundation for virtually every technology that defines today’s online experience. Alan Kay: A lot of people think the internet appeared in the nineties. It started in 1969. John Markoff: Today’s internet started with the ARPANET, and the ARPANET started with two nodes, and one of them was in Southern California and the other one was at Menlo Park in Doug Engelbart’s Augment project. Doug Engelbart: Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, the two guys running that office, told us all that they were going to go ahead and put together this network, and I volunteered to start a Network Information Center and that’s sort of why they put me on early. John Markoff: The NLS system was supposed to be the first killer app for ARPANET, which became the internet.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Mostly under 40, they want to live in nearby bustling San Francisco, since Silicon Valley can resemble The Stepford Wives. Each morning, thousands of tech workers hop on private, Wi-Fi-enabled coaches from one of the dozens of pick-up points in San Fran’s increasingly gentrified streets, and head down Highway 101 into Menlo Park (for Facebook), Sunnyvale (for Yahoo) or Mountain View (for Google). It’s impossible to ignore the buzz, the thrill, and the enterprise of the place. Alongside it, though, is another world, inhabited by the people who are left behind in the mad rush towards progress: the ignored women in tech start-ups who complain about misogyny, the Uber drivers who can only afford to live 70 miles away and have to work on zero-hour contracts, the long-time residents who are turfed out so their landlords can rent out their homes on Airbnb.

I recently visited GCHQ as part of an outreach effort held by the intelligence agency, who are worried about losing their best computer programmers to the tech firms, who can outbid even them (imagine how much worse it must be for local councils). GCHQ has a security-cleared Costa Coffee in their building with notoriously long queues and average drinks. Facebook’s Menlo Park has excellent coffee. The biggest tech firms are motoring ahead. They spend more on research than businesses in other industries: the top companies in the US that spend the most on research and development are ‘the big five’: Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s holding company), Intel, Microsoft and Apple.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

This is our dilemma: Old, network-blinded leaders (and the young people who think like them) pull us from Washington and other capitals and traditional power centers into a world in which their ideas and policies constantly fail. We trust them less and less as a result. At the same time, a rising generation lashes us into amazing meshes. We welcome this connection. Centered in places such as Menlo Park or Seattle or Zhongguancun or Tel Aviv, these figures understand networks perfectly, but—so far—not yet much else. Old and new, each group works anyhow on our freedom. We are pulled dangerously between these forces. Problems seem to get worse. What we need to find is a way out of this trap. A fusion.

We are children of the Enlightenment, after all, so we want to know what goes on inside the machines. We want them, at least, to be accountable to us. This tension is one reason why places such as Silicon Valley often leave a visitor with an uneasy feeling. Go drive along the anodyne strip of asphalt that runs in front of Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, home of the greatest venture capital funds of our age. Inside those offices, revolutions are dreamed up, debated, and funded. You might expect to see, as a result, something as magnificent as the Vatican for these high priests of technology. But what you pass in that two-mile strip resembles nothing so much as a row of mildly prosperous dental practices.

Dense and self-learning fusions of mind and data such as TensorFlow and other soon-to-be-arriving AI systems are all gated universes. 5. The topological charm of these explosively growing clusters was first teased apart by the electrical engineer Bob Metcalfe in the 1970s. Metcalfe was hunting for a better way to send data—say, grocery lists to his wife—through Menlo Park, and he perfected a connection protocol called Ethernet, which soon became a standard for linking machines. What Metcalfe noticed as more and more users piled into the gateland of Stanford’s Ethernet-connected machines was that the reach of the system was growing exponentially. A system with one phone, for example, is really not very useful.


pages: 223 words: 52,808

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

All of this was happening at that time: Seymour Papert with his Logo programming language and Turtle graphics; Simula; and some of our own stuff as well, such as the Arpanet, the Flex Machine and its first object-oriented operating system, the idea of Dynabook, and much, much more. It was an exciting time. The Whole Earth Catalog and its folks were nearby in Menlo Park thinking big thoughts about universal access to tools. Not just physical, but especially mental. This was the first book in the PARC library, and it had a big influence on how we thought things should be. We loved the idea of lots of different tools being available with explanations and comments, and we could see that it would be just wonderful if such media could be brought to life as one found and made it.

There are still bad websites and bad software, some of it spectacularly bad, but the example of the good ones will drive out the bad ones. 8.3 Interactivity David Albrecht of People’s Computer Company (PCC: what a radical name!) discovered and promoted Computer Lib. People’s Computer Company operated a timesharing BASIC computer lab in Menlo Park, and published a newsletter on interactive computing. The newsletter told me how to get the book. PCC also published a big book of computer games in BASIC, called What to Do After You Hit Return. One guessing game was called “Hunt the Wumpus.” It was lucky for Ted that Bob Albrecht knew about Computer Lib, because Hugo’s Book Service had few contacts among computer enthusiasts.


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

THE DRIVE SOUTH to Palo Alto is a trip through the history of Silicon Valley. From Route 92 in San Mateo over to Interstate 280, a “bucolic” eight-laner skirting San Andreas Lake and Crystal Springs Reservoir, which store drinking water for San Francisco piped in from the Sierras; past the blandly ostentatious venture-capitalist habitat along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park and traversing the oblique, mile-long Stanford Linear Accelerator, which slashes like a hairline fracture through the landscape and beneath the freeway; past the “Stanford Dish” radio telescope, and the white-faced Herefords and ornate oak trees dotting the expansive greenbelt behind the university campus.

He even resisted when a court-ordered paternity test established the likelihood that he was the father at 94.4 percent; it was as if the mere fact of his denial would negate the proof. When he finally starting paying child support of $385 a month, he continued to protest that he might well not be Lisa’s father. He saw her rarely, letting Chrisann raise Lisa on her own in a small house in Menlo Park. It would take years for Steve to bring Lisa into his life in any significant way, and later he would repeatedly express deep regret over his behavior. He knew he had made a terrible mistake. The event obviously crossed the line of what anyone would consider acceptable behavior. Lisa has spoken about the distance she felt from her father, and the confusion and instability she felt as a child.

This potentially noble sentiment became a half-baked and confused endeavor, and yet another distraction. Sometimes Steve’s good intentions could lead to a deep intellectual self-deception, in which trivial issues loomed larger than life and fundamental realities were swept under the rug. He did try to be a good boss. For example, Steve hosted annual “family picnics” for his employees in Menlo Park. They were kid-oriented Saturday affairs, featuring clowns, volleyball, burgers and hot dogs, and even hokey events like sack races. At his invitation, I attended one in 1989 with my daughter, Greta, who was five years old at the time. Steve, who was barefoot, sat with me on a hay bale and chatted for an hour or so while Greta wandered off to watch the Pickle Family Circus, a Bay Area comedic troupe of acrobats and jugglers that Steve had hired.


pages: 744 words: 142,748

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley

air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, card file, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dumpster diving, Garrett Hardin, Hush-A-Phone, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Markoff, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, The Home Computer Revolution, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Sheridan even offered to demonstrate the techniques described in the document for the FBI and AT&T if they wanted. Sheridan also told the FBI that Draper had a small assembly line going for red boxes that were to be sold in the near future. He was actively using a blue box from the house across the street from People’s Computer Company, or PCC, a small nonprofit in Menlo Park dedicated to teaching people about computers. And Draper was also red boxing from a pay phone just down the street from PCC, Sheridan reported. The AUTOVON document caused quite a stir. It described, in detail, how to use a blue box to access the military’s phone system from the civilian telephone network via a phreaking technique called guard banding.

Despite Sheridan’s failure to hack into AUTOVON earlier in the day, Perrin had developed a certain confidence in Sheridan’s claims ever since getting the White House on the phone. “What the hell are you calling me about? I already knew that,” Perrin recalls telling them. He hung up and went back to sleep. Just two miles from Stanford University, the 1900 block of Menalto Avenue in Menlo Park was a collection of small storefronts on a tree-lined street in a mostly residential neighborhood. You wouldn’t have thought so from a casual glance but it was a nexus of nerdly activity. A fixture on the block was the electric vehicle pioneer Roy Kaylor. Kaylor was an inveterate tinkerer, a Stanford electrical engineer, an odd blend of hippie and West Point graduate.

The Pacific Telephone people said they would need to talk to their attorneys to figure out how they could help. For its part, the FBI started spot surveillances on Draper’s known haunts to get a handle on his activities. Agents were assigned to check two locations on a random basis. The first was Draper’s apartment in Mountain View. The second was the People’s Computer Company in Menlo Park. Draperism. That was John Draper’s term for what he viewed as the persistent bad luck that seemed to follow him around like a rain cloud. Draperism was never his fault, never the result of anything he had done. Like the weather, it was a purely external phenomenon, something that just happened.


pages: 559 words: 157,112

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, L Peter Deutsch, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, oil shock, popular electronics, reality distortion field, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

The first was a raid on the only laboratory on the West Coast—possibly the country—whose work on interactive computing met his stern standards. The lab belonged to the legendary engineer Douglas C. bart, an adamantine visionary who held court out of a small think tank called SRI, or the Stanford Research Institute, a couple of miles north of Palo Alto in the community of Menlo Park. There Engelbart had established his “Augmentation Research Center.” The name derived from his conviction that the computer was not only capable of assisting the human thought process, but reinventing it on a higher plane. The “augmentation of human intellect,” as he defined it, meant that the computer’s ability to store, classify, and retrieve information would someday alter the very way people thought, wrote, and figured.

At NASA in 1963 Taylor had saved Engelbart’s lab by scrounging enough money to overcome a budget crisis. After moving on to ARPA he turned the trickle of funding into a flood. By the end of the decade the Augmentation Research Center, fueled by ARPA’s half-million-dollar annual grant and occupying one entire wing of SRI’s Menlo Park headquarters, reigned as the think tank’s dominant research program. What it produced was nothing short of astonishing. Obsessed with developing new ways for man and computer to interact, Engelbart linked video terminals to mainframes by cable and communicated with the machines via televised images.

The audience was riveted, as Engelbart in his subdued drone described and demonstrated a fully operational system of interactive video conferencing, multimedia displays, and split-screen technology. At one point half of a twenty-foot-tall projection screen was occupied by a live video image of Engelbart on stage, the other half by text transmitted live from Menlo Park (it was a shopping list including apples, oranges, bean soup, and French bread). Minutes later the screen carried a live video image of a hand rolling the unusual “mouse” around a desktop while a superimposed computer display showed how the cursor simultaneously and obediently followed its path.


pages: 51 words: 8,543

Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec, Maria Popova

lifelogging, Menlo Park

www.giorgialupi.com STEFANIE POSAVEC is a data designer whose work focuses on non-traditional representations of data derived from language, literature or scientific topics. Often using a hand-crafted approach, her work has been exhibited at, among others, MoMA in New York, CCB in Rio de Janeiro, the Science Gallery in Dublin and the V&A in London. In 2013 she was Facebook’s first data-artist-in-residence at their Menlo Park campus. www.stefanieposavec.co.uk


The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, obamacare, Parler "social media", Skype, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

Though we remained in touch throughout the school year, we would each pursue other love interests, much to his dismay. By the time summer rolled around, I decided not to go home to Los Angeles. I had an apartment and freedom, so why would I? I took a temporary volunteer gig in Menlo Park as an after-school workshop instructor in the arts for kids aged twelve to seventeen. The only thing I remember about those kids was that not one of them knew who Michael Jackson was, which made me wonder what kind of sad kids Menlo Park was raising. I met Oladife at the grocery store during the summer where my best girlfriends, Megan and Akilah, and I took a vow to be open-minded to everything that came our way.


pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

He worries about unintended consequences and loss of privacy as well as lesser matters such as the paucity of apps. Immediate Want Israel got to see Glass firsthand for the first time in May 2013. He was scheduled to spend the day with Scoble, at SRI International, the venerable and prolific independent research and development facility in Menlo Park, to interview researchers for this book. Early in the day, he tried on Scoble’s device for about 60 seconds. His concerns evaporated. He immediately wanted one. He might not vow to wear it every day, but knew he wanted one and would find many uses for it. It took only that single minute for him to understand how such a device would improve his productivity, give him access to information and enable new forms of communication.

Later she uses the same app to summon it back. As she waits, she watches the car approach on her app. The car knows where its owner is via a location sensor in the phone. Annie Lien, is an independent automated driving consultant who was formerly program manager at Volkswagen Group Electronics Research Lab in Menlo Park, California, where she was in charge of product and marketing for conceptual cars under the Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche and Volkswagen brands. She played a key role in the development of experimental cars such as the driverless Audi in the video. Lien prefers to call them automatic or auto-piloted rather than self-driving, because “it will be a very long time before cars operate without a driver who can take over the controls, except for limited, low-speed activities such as self-parking,” she says.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

Coke is not alone in assuming that the sky’s the limit when it comes to choice. There’s an upscale grocery store in Menlo Park, California, that offers 75 types of olive oil, 250 varieties of mustard, and 300 types of jams. But are more choices always better than fewer? You would be hard-pressed to find an economist who would tell you that fewer choices are better. But it’s becoming clear that more choices are not always desirable—either for the purveyor of goods or for the consumer. The social psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a booth at that Menlo Park grocery store where they displayed a variety of jams.13 Half the time during the day there were six jams on the table and half the time there were twenty-four jams.

Man Who statistics Martin, Steve Marx, Karl Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Masserman, Jules Masuda, Takahiko mathematics; correlation of test scores in; in Eastern versus Western cultures; economics and; in statistics; unconscious mental processes in Mayo Clinic Mazda McKinsey & Company McPhee, John mean; distribution around; regression to; standard deviation from, see standard deviation mechanics, Newtonian median Menlo Park (California) mental illness mental modules mere familiarity effect metaphysics methodologies; difficulties of, in measuring human variables Michigan, University of; department of psychology microeconomics Microsoft Middle Ages Midwestern Prevention Project Milkman, Katherine Mill, John Stuart Missionaries and Cannibals problem modesty bias modus ponens molecular biology Molière Morgan, James Mo-tzu Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mullainathan, Sendhil multiple regression analysis (MRA); in medicine; in psychology Na, Jinkyung Nagashima, Nobuhiro National Football League (NFL) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) National Institutes of Health natural experiments negative correlation negative externalities neuroscience Newell, Allen New Hampshire New Jersey Newton, Isaac New York City, September 11 (9/11) terrorist attack on New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York University nihilism Nobel Prize Norenzayan, Ara normative prescription North Carolina Obama, Barack obligation schemas observations; correlation of; as natural experiments; standard deviation of; weaknesses of conclusions based on Occam’s razor Oedipus complex Ohio State University opportunity costs opt-in versus opt-out policies organizational psychology Orwell, George Oswald, Lee Harvey Ottoman Empire outcomes; of choices; costs and benefits of; educational; of family conflicts; tracking outcome variables; see also dependent variables overgeneralization Oxford University paradigm shifts Park, Denise Parmenides parsimony, principle of particle physics Pascal, Blaise Pavlov, Ivan payoff matrix Peace Corps Pearson, Karl Pearson product moment correlation peer pressure Peng, Kaiping Pennebaker, James percentage estimates perceptions; extrasensory; subliminal; unconscious permission schema Perry, Rick Perry Preschool Program persuasion phenomena; influence of context in; simplest hypothesis possible for philosophy; see also names of individual philosophers physics Piaget, Jean Picasso, Pablo Pietromonaco, Paula Plato platykurtic curve plausibility; of causal links; of conclusions; of correlations; of hypotheses; of unconscious processes Poincaré, Henri Polanyi, Michael Popper, Karl postformalism post hoc ergo propter hoc heuristic post hoc explanations postmodernism preferences prescriptive microeconomics price heuristic prime numbers Princeton University probability; in cost-benefit analysis; decision theory and; schemas for problem solving; decision theory for; formal logic for; unconscious mind’s capacity for psychoanalytic theory psychology; clinical; cognitive, see cognitive psychology; developmental; organizational; postformalist; reinforcement theory; social, see social psychology Ptolemy, Claudius public policy quantum theory Rahway State Prison (New Jersey) randomized studies; design of; multiple regression analysis versus range, definition of Rasmussen polling firm Reagan, Ronald reality reasoning; categorical; causal; circular; conditional; cultural differences in; deductive; deontic; dialectical, see dialectical reasoning; inductive; pragmatic schemas; syllogistic, see syllogisms; teachability of; see also logic Reckman, Richard reductionism Reeves, Keanu reference group effect regression; to the mean; see also multiple regression analysis reinforcement learning theory relationships, principle of; see also correlation relativity theory reliability Renaissance representativeness heuristic Republican Party revealed preferences revolutions, scientific Riegel, Klaus Rogers, Todd Rohn, Jim Romans, ancient Romney, Mitt Roosevelt, Franklin Rorschach inkblot test Ross, Lee Russell, Bertrand Russia Russian language Saab Sachs, Jeffrey samples; biased Santorum, Rick satisficing Saudi Arabia Save More Tomorrow plan scarcity heuristic Scared Straight program scatterplots schemas; pragmatic reasoning Schmidt, Eric Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) Science magazine scientific revolutions Sears Secrets of Adulthood (Chast) self-enhancement bias self-esteem self-selection Seligman, Martin September 11 (9/11) terrorist attacks Shafir, Eldar Shepard, Roger significance; causal Simon, Herbert Siroker, Dan Skinner, B.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

All of these offhand answers—and the myths and half-truths they contain—need to be taken apart and closely examined, not just because technology is a critical slice of our modern economy, but also because of the preeminent role the Valley plays in shaping the future of humanity. “When you write a line of code, you can affect a lot of people,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, told me as we sat in her so-called Only Good News conference room at the social network’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. “It matters that there aren’t enough women in computer science. It matters that there aren’t enough women in engineering. It matters that there aren’t enough women CEOs. It matters that there aren’t enough women VCs. It matters that there isn’t enough of a track record of entrepreneurs to fund,” she told me.

Now the contrarian “misfit,” who once called the value of diversity a myth, was whispering into the ear of the man holding the most powerful office in the world. 3 GOOGLE: WHEN GOOD INTENTIONS AREN’T ENOUGH IN 1998, WHEN TWO quirky and very academic Stanford students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to start a search engine business, they needed an office. Like many great tech entrepreneurs before them, they looked around for an underutilized Silicon Valley garage. Through mutual friends, they found a landlord in Susan Wojcicki, who wasn’t just any Menlo Park homeowner. An up-and-coming businesswoman, Wojcicki, then thirty years old, had worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company and then in marketing at Intel. She had also recently finished her MBA at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, and she displayed her business acumen in the rent she charged for the garage: $1,700 a month, which was above the going rate.

In 2014, a journalist got wind of a secret all-male club of venture capitalists called VC 21, consisting of male partners from a variety of firms, including Kleiner, Accel, and Greylock. Once club members realized the press was on the scent, they invited a few female investors to join, and the bad PR was averted. VC 21 was later rebranded as the Venture Social Club. An email to club members in March 2017 touted an all-expenses-paid stay at the Rosewood hotel in Menlo Park and an “over the top” long weekend at the Montage on Maui, “complete with sunset cruises, ocean fun and private dinner experiences.” Members have also told me of similar trips, involving stays at spectacular mansions, sporting events such as heli-skiing, ridiculous amounts of drinking, and elaborate dinners accompanied by $200 bottles of wine.


From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture by Theodore Roszak

Buckminster Fuller, germ theory of disease, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, Murray Bookchin, Norbert Wiener, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

The history of the period is mainly a collection of such emblems and symbols, evocative but ephemeral. There were those, however, more ing of the wild asparagus who took the stalk- seriously and put a deal of inventive thought and practical energy into the skills of postindustrial survival. There was, for example, the Portola Institute in Menlo Park, which From dates from 1966. it, along a number of routes, one can trace the origins of several ingenious projects in the Bay Area whose aim was to scale- down, democratize, and humanize our hypertrophic technological society. These included the Briarpatch Network, the Farallones Institute, Urban House, the Simple Living tional scene, the most the Project.


pages: 39 words: 4,665

Data Source Handbook by Pete Warden

en.wikipedia.org, machine readable, Menlo Park, openstreetmap, phenotype, social graph

There’s some unusual data available, including weather, ocean names, and elevation: curl "http://ws.geonames.org/findNearestAddressJSON?lat=37.451&lng=-122.18" {"address":{"postalcode":"94025","adminCode2":"081","adminCode1":"CA", "street":"Roble Ave","countryCode":"US","lng":"-122.18032", "placename":"Menlo Park","adminName2":"San Mateo", "distance":"0.04","streetNumber":"671", "mtfcc":"S1400","lat":"37.45127","adminName1":"California"}} US Census If you’re interested in American locations, the Census site is a mother lode of freely downloadable information. The only problem is that it can be very hard to find what you’re looking for on the site.


pages: 223 words: 60,909

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.” 50 Zuckerberg famously calls this approach “the Hacker Way”: build something quickly, release it to the world, see what happens, and then make adjustments. The idea is so ingrained in Facebook’s culture—so core to the way it sees the world—that One Hacker Way is even the official address of the company’s fancy Menlo Park headquarters. That’s why it was so easy for fake news to take hold on Facebook: combine the deeply held conviction that you can engineer your way out of anything with a culture focused on moving fast without worrying about the implications, and you don’t just break things. You break public access to information.

About a mile southwest, at Uber’s headquarters, another scandal is brewing: a tool called “Greyball,” used to systematically mislead authorities in markets where the service was banned or under investigation, has just been reported in the New York Times.4 Across the street, at Twitter, stock prices fell more than 10 percent in a single month, and the company is scrambling.5 And thirty miles south, in Menlo Park, Facebook has just started rolling out its solution to fake news: stories shared on Facebook that have been debunked by third-party, nonpartisan fact-checking organizations have begun being marked with a red caution icon and the word “Disputed”—a label that’s already being disputed itself, with some calling it censorship and others calling it too milquetoast for news that’s demonstrably false.6 Unrest is brewing at the big tech companies.


pages: 207 words: 63,071

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

All this amounted to a professional relationship similar to the one I had with Dad. One day my olfactory senses yanked me into the kitchen as fresh chocolate chip cookies were warming in the oven. As she baked, Mom whistled along with the classical music on the radio. I told her, casually, that the City of Menlo Park had just agreed to be a beta tester of our product. A wide smile erupted on her face. She wiped her hand off and extended it out for a firm, enthusiastic shake. Our kind of embrace. 16 MY START-UP LIFE Brainstorm: All the Fuss About “Passion”— and How to Tap into Yours “Find your passion and follow it,” countless advice books instruct.

President,” but who cares about that?) CHAPTER 5.0 First Meeting with a VC (It’s All About the Network) My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can. RALPH WALDO EMERSON For entrepreneurs, getting a meeting with a venture capitalist on the fabled Sand Hill Road, which runs through Menlo Park, and along the northern edge of the Stanford University campus, is a worthy accomplishment. If you don’t know a VC personally, it can take dozens of calls and emails to secure a meeting with someone who could fund your start-up. And dozens of calls and emails are no guarantee of an audience. For me, as lady luck would have it, I met with a venture capitalist early on: my very first meeting with an adult businessperson. >> The value of obtaining advice from experienced people in the field is one I cherished from the start and continue to hold as essential to successful entrepreneurship.


pages: 256 words: 60,620

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

Karl Duncker, “On Problem Solving,” Psychological Monographs 58, no. 270 (1945); Paul J. Feltovich, Rand J. Spiro, and Richard L. Coulsen, “Issues of Expert Flexibility in Contexts Characterized by Complexity and Change,” in Expertise in Context: Human and Machine, ed. Paul J. Feltovich, Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert R. Hoffman (Menlo Park, CA, and Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press and MIT Press, 1997), 125–146. Taleb, The Black Swan, discusses a similar concept he calls the “ludic fallacy.” 15. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). 16. Benoit Mandelbrot, “The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices,” in The Random Character of Stock Market Prices, ed.

The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Feltovich, Paul J., Rand J. Spiro, and Richard L. Coulsen. “Issues of Expert Flexibility in Contexts Characterized by Complexity and Change.” In Expertise in Context: Human and Machine, edited by Paul J. Feltovich, Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert R. Hoffman, Menlo Park, CA, and Cambridge: AAAI Press and MIT Press, 1997. Festinger, Leon, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956. Forrester, Jay W.


pages: 196 words: 61,981

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

For all the attention the Chinese Great Firewall receives in blocking Twitter and YouTube, Alibaba’s Aliyun offers a way to bypass the Great Firewall, for a fee. Other well-known surveillance companies such as Hikvision and SenseTime have a slew of foreign investment. SenseTime’s investors include Qualcomm, Fidelity International, Silver Lake Partners (based in Menlo Park, California), and Japan’s SoftBank Vision Fund. SoftBank’s Vision Fund has ties to Saudi wealth, and spans the globe in its international influence—investing in companies from Alibaba to WeWork and Slack. In one corner of the Megvii showroom is a display about Meitu, the beauty and cosmetics app with which you can quickly edit your selfies.

Curated Instagram campaigns, featuring prominent influencers, are launched by a vast landscape of small, new “lifestyle brands”—companies based outside China that source directly from AliExpress. Manufacturers on AliExpress also move with lightning speed in customizing designs. Many crowdfunded products made on Kickstarter are produced by these small manufacturers as well. Wish.com, with headquarters based in Menlo Park, is a peculiar version of Amazon with half a billion users. It is a drop-shipper, sourcing from AliExpress, but its customer base is in the Midwest, Texas, and Florida. Its diverse users range from those who frequent flea markets and swap meets to racists who post on 4chan about the “cheap chink gear” available.


pages: 282 words: 63,385

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance by Matthew Brennan

Airbnb, AltaVista, augmented reality, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, ImageNet competition, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, paypal mafia, Pearl River Delta, pre–internet, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork, Y Combinator

Pulling out of talks with Musical.ly and having missed the opportunity to acquire WhatsApp in 2014, Tencent instead opted to gain a foothold in Western social networking via a $2 billion stake in Snapchat. Kevin Systrom, the then CEO of Instagram, had met in person with Musical.ly’s founders in Shanghai and later persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to consider a deal. Serious yet inconclusive talks were held at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. Several senior Facebook executives opened Musical.ly accounts and tested the platform, including Zuckerberg, who often interacted with the company’s founders through the platform. 251 Media later reported that Facebook had “ultimately walked away out of concern about the app’s young user base and Chinese ownership, according to a person familiar with the matter.” 252 Both were risks that Facebook would already have been well aware of before going into the talks.

Smartphones and memes were helping to form a new category of “user-generated music videos.” Some artists even began to write lyrics to new songs with short video-friendly hand gestures in mind. Struggling competitors In the summer of 2019, Mark Zuckerberg stood at the front of the auditorium at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, facing an assembled group of company staff. He was midway through fielding questions as part of an employee open Q&A session, a company tradition that allowed for a direct communication line between front line staff and the CEO. An engineer in the audience raised his hand. “Are we concerned about TikTok’s growing cultural clout among teens and Gen Z, and what is our plan of attack?”


pages: 524 words: 120,182

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

“The [IAS] School of Mathematics”: Quoted in Macrae, N., John von Neumann. New York: Pantheon, 1992, p. 324. “to have no experimental science”: Quoted in Regis, E., Who Got Einstein’s Office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1987, p. 114. “The snobs took revenge”: Regis, E., Who Got Einstein’s Office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1987, p. 114. Chapter 9 “ evolutionary computation”: For a history of early work on evolutionary computation, see Fogel, D. B., Evolutionary Computation: The Fossil Record. New York: Wiley-IEEE Press, 1998.

General System Theory: Essential Concepts and Applications, Cambridge, MA: Abacus Press, 1986. Redner, S. How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution. European Physical Journal B, 4(2), 1998, pp. 131–134. Regis, E. Who Got Einstein’s Office? Eccentricity and genius at the Institute for Advanced Study. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1987. Rendell, P. Turing universality of the game of Life. In A. Adamatzky (editor), Collision-Based Computing. London: Springer-Verlag, 2001, pp. 513–539. Robbins, K. E., Lemey, P., Pybus, O. G., Jaffe, H. W., Youngpairoj, A. S., Brown, T. M., Salemi, M., Vandamme, A.


A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

ARPA had funded the Cambridge, Mas­ sa­chu­setts–­based com­pany of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) to build the ARPANET, that is, to network dif­fer­ent computers at dif­ fer­ent locations with each other. The first ARPANET transmission, in October 1969, traveled from the University of California at Los Angeles through BBN’s purpose-­built interface computers in Cambridge to the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California.36 By 1972, ARPANET had grown to thirty-­seven nodes. However, as one historian of the Internet has argued, the early ARPANET was not a particularly hospitable—or useful—­place for the p ­ eople who accessed it.37 During its first few years, ARPANET users experienced unreliable connections.

Levy employs the language of evangelization in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, such as Albrecht “spreading the gospel of the Hacker Ethic” (166), Albrecht as a “prophet of BASIC” (167), and “the mission of spreading computing to the ­people” (170). 103. Bob Albrecht, My Computer Likes Me When I Speak in BASIC (Menlo Park, CA: Dymax, 1972). 104. Ibid., 1. 105. Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our ­Gamble over Earth’s ­Future (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 106. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Proj­ect on the Predicament of Mankind, electronic ed.

“Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration: The IBM User Group, Share.” Technology and Culture 42, no. 4 (October 1, 2001): 710–736. Alberts, Gerard, and Ruth Oldenziel, eds. Hacking Eu­rope: From Computer Culture to Demoscenes. London: Springer-­Verlag, 2014. Albrecht, Bob. My Computer Likes Me When I Speak in BASIC. Menlo Park, CA: Dymax, 1972. Allen, Danielle, and Jennifer S. Light, eds. From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Alper, Meryl. “ ‘Can Our Kids Hack It with Computers?’ Constructing Youth Hackers in ­Family Computing Magazines (1983–1987).”


pages: 253 words: 65,834

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

VCs don’t typically show as much interest in services, either health care or financial, or consumer products and services. While there is always an exception, it tends to be harder to scale these businesses fast enough to drive the kinds of returns that VCs like to see. David Hornik David Hornik, forty-one, is a general partner at August Capital, based in Menlo Park, California, where he focuses on information technology companies. One of August Capital’s claims to fame is that its founder, David Marquardt, was the first and only institutional investor in Microsoft and still sits on its board of directors. When he launched www.ventureblog.com in 2004, David Hornik was the first venture capitalist to become a blogger (and inspired many others to blog, myself included).

His father, Bill Draper, is one of Silicon Valley’s legendary venture capitalists and still invests out of his own firm. Tim has created a legacy of his own by investing in early-stage companies, including Skype, Hotmail, and Baidu, the Chinese-based search company that is profiled later in Chapter 7. DFJ is based in Menlo Park, California, but starting in 2005 began to aggressively expand outside of the United States, with affiliated funds in Israel, Europe, India, China, Vietnam, and others. The model DFJ has taken is analogous to the McDonald’s franchise model. Find a local management team, provide them with a brand and back-office support (accounting, fund management, and the like), and create a global network of venture capitalists that are tied together by economic and social bonds, share deals and analysis, yet make investment decisions and control the bulk of their own economics locally.


pages: 262 words: 65,959

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, cognitive dissonance, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Wolfskehl Prize, women in the workforce

This would allow them once again to corner the market in back problems and happily promote their own bogus treatments. Homer’s inventing exploits reach a peak in “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace” (1998). The title is a play on the Wizard of Menlo Park, the nickname given to Thomas Edison by a newspaper reporter after he established his main laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. By the time he died in 1931, Edison had 1,093 U.S. patents in his name and had become an inventing legend. The episode focuses on Homer’s determination to follow in Edison’s footsteps. He constructs various gadgets, ranging from an alarm that beeps every three seconds just to let you know that everything is all right to a shotgun that applies makeup by shooting it directly onto the face.


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

So he put the filament inside a glass tube and created a vacuum, basically by sucking the air out of the tube. Now when he hooked it up to a battery the filament would glow and not burn out. Swan didn’t consider it much of an invention and never patented the idea. In October of 1879, Charles Batchelor, who was one of Thomas Alva Edison’s assistants, demonstrated the same principle at his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Once again, we had almost simultaneous inventions. Turns out that in 1876, Edison had bought out a patent by a Canadian named Woodward, but no matter, he had his light bulb and took out a his own patent. John Pierpont Morgan and the Vanderbilts put up $300,000 in exchange for patent rights and capitalized the Edison Electric Light Company.

Engelbart got up and demonstrated a few things his team was playing with, built onto something called NLS or oN Line System. On a computer screen with both graphics and text were multiple windows, a text editor with cut and paste, and an outline processor. A “mouse” 134 HOW WE GOT HERE controlled an on screen pointer as a cursor. Multiple users could connect remotely – in fact the demo was connected live to Menlo Park, 45 miles to the south. There was hypertext to be able to “link” to information anywhere on the computer or network. If you were stuck, a help system would provide assistance based on the context of what you were looking for. The 1,000-plus attendees were stunned. This was 1968, with hippies roaming aimlessly through San Francisco.


pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

., & McDonald, D. W. (2008). Wikipedian self-governance in action: Motivating the policy lens. In E. Adar, M. Hurst, T. Finin, N. S. Glance, R e f e r e n c e s    2 4 1 N. Nicolov, & B. L. Tseng (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (pp. 27–35). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Bianchi, A. J., Kang, S. M., & Stewart, D. (2010). The organizational selection of status characteristics: Status evaluations in an open source community. Organization Science. doi:10.1287/orsc.1100.0580 Billings, M., & Watts, L. A. (2010). Understanding dispute resolution online: Using text to reflect personal and substantive issues in conflict.

In HT ’11: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (pp. 201–210). New York: ACM. Laniado, D., Tasso, R., Volkovich, Y., & Kaltenbrunner, A. (2011). When the Wikipedians talk: Network and tree structure of Wikipedia discussion pages. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (pp. 177–184). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ ICWSM11/paper/viewFile/2764/3301 Lanier, J. (2006, May 29). Digital Maoism: The hazards of the new online collectivism. The Edge. Retrieved from http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06 _index.html Latour, B. (1986).

Some simple economics of open source. The Journal of Industrial Economics, 50(2), 197–234. Leskovec, J., Huttenlocher, D., & Kleinberg, J. (2010). Governance in social media: A case study of the Wikipedia promotion process. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (pp. 98–105). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM10/paper/view File/1485/1841 Lesser, E., Fontaine, M., & Slusher, J. (Eds.). (2012). Knowledge and communities. London: Routledge. Lessig, L. (1999). Code: And other laws of cyberspace. New York: Perseus. Lessig, L. (2001).


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Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

They had bills to pay, but in the dispersed city, it was not as though they could just work around the corner. Kim got a job as an administrative assistant at the Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, fifty miles west. That’s how she found herself crawling out of bed at five each morning, dropping her toddler, Justin, at day care, then hitting the highway for two hours, up over the Diablo Range, down through the Castro Valley, across the shallow south end of San Francisco Bay, up to the 280, through the hills above Redwood City, and down into Menlo Park. When she could, she’d catch a ride with her grandmother, Nancy, who also worked for the foundation. Otherwise, she’d go solo in her Chevy Malibu.

Then it was back home for a shower and bed. For now, we will forget Randy’s road-induced back pain. We will put aside his irritation with other drivers and his general bitterness at having to spend so much time on the highway. (After all, not everyone minds a long commute. Randy’s mother, Nancy, told me she enjoyed the two-hour drive to Menlo Park, near Palo Alto, in her gold Lexus.) It was Randy’s relationships with the people around him that were hurt most by his long-distance life. Randy disliked his neighborhood intensely. He couldn’t wait to get out of Mountain House. The problem had nothing to do with the aesthetics of the place. It was still as pristine and manicured as the day he and his wife moved in.


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The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution by Marc Weingarten

1960s counterculture, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Donner party, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Haight Ashbury, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, post-work, pre–internet, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, working poor, yellow journalism

In 1959 he received a creative writing fellowship from Stanford to study with Wallace Stegner. Kesey wrote during the day and worked the night shift at a psychiatric hospital in nearby Menlo Park. He lived on Perry Lane, a small Palo Alto bohemian enclave adjacent to the Stanford golf course, where he discussed literature and politics with the group of artists and writers that had settled into the placid rhythms of the place. His first exposure to hallucinogens occurred at the Menlo Park hospital when he volunteered to take part in experiments with LSD for scientific research. Kesey’s initiations into the world of psychoactive drugs and mental illness provided the raw material for Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey wrote sections of Cuckoo’s Nest while on peyote and LSD).

Inside Kesey’s vast log cabin, tape recorders and 8 mm cameras and projectors were strewn about. These were the documentary tools for the Pranksters’ experiments in all-in-one consciousness, the Acid Tests. A few Pranksters made some halfhearted attempts to rattle Wolfe. One afternoon George Walker took the writer for a spin in his Lotus, taking the curves around Menlo Park at ninety miles per hour. By the joy ride’s end, Wolfe was ashen and visibly shaken; Walker was amused but admired Wolfe’s stoic professionalism. When Kesey moved the Pranksters’ operations to La Honda from Harriet Street, Wolfe tagged along with Ed McClanahan in his sports car. As McClanahan negotiated mountain roads “that were as crooked as a goat’s hind leg,” Wolfe interviewed him, scribbling shorthand on a legal pad situated between them.


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The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Huebner and A. N. Meltzoff, “Intervention to Change Parent–Child Reading Style: A Comparison of Instructional Methods,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 26, no. 3 (2005). 4. V. J. Rideout, Ulla G. Foehr, and Donald F. Roberts, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds, (Menlo Park, Calif.: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010); Matt Richtel, “Wasting Time Is the New Divide in the Digital Era,” New York Times, May 29, 2012. 5. These children lived in a downtrodden part of Chicago where only 16 percent of the elementary school population had met the local low-ball No Child Left Behind standards.

., “Influencing Factors of Screen Time in Preschool Children: An Exploration of Parents’ Perceptions Through Focus Groups in Six European Countries,” Obesity Reviews 13, no. 1 (2012); Aric Sigman, “Time for a View on Screen Time,” Archives of Disease in Childhood 97, no. 11 (2012). 13. V. J. Rideout, Donald F. Roberts, and Ulla G. Foehr, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds (Menlo Park, Calif.: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005). 14. Suzy Tomopoulous et al., “Infant Media Exposure and Toddler Development,” Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine 164, no. 12 (2010); Alan Mendelsohn et al., “Infant Television and Video Exposure Associated with Limited Parent–Child Verbal Interactions in Low Socioeconomic Status Households,” Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine 162, no. 5 (2008). 15.

Christakis, “The Effects of Infant Media Usage: What Do We Know and What Should We Learn?” Acta Paediatrica 98 (2009); Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff, “Television and DVD/Video Viewing”; V. J. Rideout and E. Hamel, The Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Their Parents (Menlo Park, Calif.: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2006); Pooja S. Tandon et al., “Preschoolers’ Total Daily Screen Time at Home and by Type of Child Care,” Pediatrics 124, no. 6 (2009); Susan Lamontagne, Rakesh Singh, and Craig Palosky, “Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically from Five Years Ago,” Henry J.


The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams

Alfred Russel Wallace, behavioural economics, centre right, conceptual framework, intentional community, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Menlo Park, out of africa, Plato's cave, social intelligence, theory of mind

Art as information: explaining Upper Palaeolithic art in western Europe. World Archaeology 26, 185–207. Bataille, G. 1955. Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art. London: Macmillan. Bates, C. D. 1992. Sierra Miwok shamans, 1900–1990. In Bean, L. J. (ed.) California Indian shamanism, pp. 97–115. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press. Bean, L. J. (ed.) 1992. California Indian Shamanism. Menlo Park: Ballena Press. Bégouën, H. & Breuil, H. 1958. Les Cavernes du Volp: Trois Frères – Tuc D’Audoubert. Paris: Flammarion. (Republished by American Rock Art Research Association, Occasional Paper 4, 1999.) Bégouën, R. & Clottes, J. 1981. Apports mobiliers dans les cavernes du Volp (Enlène, Les Trois-Frères, Le Tuc d’Audoubert).

E. 1982. Phosphenes in the context of Native American rock art. In Bock, F. (ed.) American Indian Rock Art,Vols 7–8, pp. 1–10. El Toro (CA): American Rock Art Research Association. Hedges, K. E. 1992. Shamanistic aspects of California art. In Bean, L. J. (ed.) California Indian Shamanism, pp. 67–88. Menlo Park (CA): Ballena Press. Hedges, K. E. 1994. Pipette dreams and the primordial snake-canoe: analysis of a hallucinatory form constant. In Turpin, S. (ed.) Shamanism and Rock Art in North America, pp. 103–24. San Antonio: Rock Art Foundation. Heizer, R. F. & Baumhof, M. 1959. Great Basin petroglyphs and game trails.


The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

A test equipment company was born in Palo Alto, a printed circuit firm in Menlo Park. A new Palo Alto-based technical services operation designed and fabbed prototype components, while a crystal-growing facility in Mountain View (founded by another refugee from Shockley) specialized in the manufacture of pure silicon ingots. The number of tenants in the Stanford Industrial Park increased sixfold in five years.62 The concentration of firms benefited Fairchild Semiconductor, which could use the mass spectrometer at Lockheed and ask the Bay Area Pollution Control Lab to perform a series of important experiments on silicon oxide. Fairchild could have a Menlo Park firm deliver de-mineralized water, purified to the precise standards the lab required for washing components and mixing chemicals.

Gordon Moore has jokingly called the desire not to move “the entrepreneurial spirit that drove the formation of Fairchild Semiconductor.” Gordon Moore interview by Alan Chen. 92. Not going to give away the store: Fairchild Founder A, interview by Christophe Lécuyer. 93. Chickening out: Gordon Moore, interview by Alan Chen, IA. Noyce’s concerns: John W. Wilson, The New Venturers: Inside the High-Stakes World of Venture Capital, (Menlo Park, Calif.: Addison-Wesley, 1985): 32. 94. Two primary reasons: Betty and Bob Noyce to Family, 11 July 1957. 95. Nice to have you here: Julius Blank, interview by author. 96. Some kind of leader: Arthur Rock, interview by author. Big talker: Fairchild Founder A, interview by author. 97. Dollar bill ceremony: Fairchild Founder A, interview by author.

IBM Building 25: Alan Hess, “A 45-Year-Old Building Worth Saving,” San Jose Mercury News, 16 Nov. 2003. 62. Electronics sales surpassed $500 million, nearly two-thirds: Western Electronics Manufacturers Association 1961 report, reprinted in Leadwire, Oct. 1961. New startups: “Printed Circuits Firm Formed in Menlo Park,” Electronic News, Oct. 1960; “Diotran Pacific Formed by Four In Palo Alto, Cal,” Electronic News, 6 March 1961; “Firm Established in Palo Alto to Service Producers,” 18 Sept. 1961. Stanford Industrial Park tenants: Findlay, Magic Lands, 140. 330 Notes to Pages 119–123 63. Resources available to Fairchild Semiconductor: “Progress Report, Chemistry Section, 1 Feb. 1960,” Box 5, File 1, Fairchild R&D Reports, M1055, SSC; “Progress Report, Micrologic Section, 1 July 1960,” Box 5, File 2, ibid.; Box 6, File 1, ibid. 64.


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Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

The for-profit company was funded by Albrecht’s substantial stock holdings (he had been lucky enough to get into DEC’s first stock offering), and soon the company had a contract to write a series of instructional books on BASIC. Albrecht and the Dymax crowd got hold of a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. To house this marvelous machine, they moved the company to new headquarters in Menlo Park. According to his deal with DEC, Bob would get a computer and a couple of terminals in exchange for writing a book for DEC called My Computer Likes Me, shrewdly keeping the copyright (it would sell over a quarter of a million copies). The equipment was packed into a VW bus, and Bob revived the medicine show days, taking his PDP-8 road show to schools.

or some other digital black magic box? Or are you buying time on a time-sharing service? If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with likeminded interests. Exchange information, swap ideas, help work on a project, whatever . . . The meeting was called for March 5, 1975, at Gordon’s Menlo Park address. Fred Moore and Gordon French had just set the stage for the latest flowering of the hacker dream. Chapter 10. The Homebrew Computer Club The fifth of March was a rainy night in Silicon Valley. All thirty-two participants in the first meeting of the yet unnamed group could hear the rain while sitting on the hard cement floor of Gordon French’s two-car garage.

In true hacker spirit the club had no membership requirement, asked no minimum dues (though French’s suggestion that anyone who wanted to should give a dollar to cover meeting notice and newsletter expenses had netted $52.63 by the third meeting), and had no elections of officers. By the fourth meeting, it was clear that the Homebrew Computer Club was going to be a hacker haven. Well over a hundred people received the mailing, which announced the meeting would be held that week at the Peninsula School, an isolated private school nestled in a wooded area of Menlo Park. Steve Dompier had built his Altair by then: he had received the final shipment of parts at 10 one morning, and spent the next thirty hours putting it together, only to find that the 256-byte memory wasn’t working. Six hours later he figured out the bug was caused by a scratch on a printed circuit.


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Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

That year, two students at Stanford – one the child of an AI researcher, the other of a mathematician – came up with a clever way to build a smart web catalogue by ranking pages based on the number of incoming links. In 1997, 24-year-old Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned their nifty algorithm into a company, launched from a garage in Menlo Park. To make it the ‘Worldwide Headquarters’ they thought it should be, they kitted it out with a few tables, three chairs, a turquoise shag rug, a folding ping-pong table and a few other items. The garage door had to be left open for ventilation. It must have seemed innocuous at the time, but over the next two decades, Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s company would make some of the biggest advances in AI history.

Forget Electricity, Here’s Cognicity Right now we are in the ‘early adopter’ stages of what will, its boosters claim, be as big a shift as the arrival of electricity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In 1879, the American inventor Thomas Edison was able to produce a reliable, long-lasting electric light bulb in his laboratory in Menlo Park, California. By the 1930s, this technology was available to 90 per cent of people living in US cities, and a growing number of rural areas. At the flick of a switch, electricity gave people control over the light in their homes and workplaces, independent of time of day. It interrupted the regular biological rhythms of life and endowed people with a sovereignty over daylight that allowed them to create their own schedules for both work and play.


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The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

And he formed companies as needed to push his inventions to market and to make the market for them, one for research and development, others to make components, and still another to operate the system. Edison also gave us a new system for organizing research and invention and applying it directly to the development of new commercial products. He opened the doors to his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory in 1876, dubbing it his “invention factory.” His goal was to create a system that could regularly churn out “useful things every man, woman, and child in the world wants…at a price they could afford to pay.”9 Within a decade he had turned it into a mammoth invention factory sprawling over two city blocks, stocked with technical staff, library resources, machine tools, scientific instruments, and electrical equipment.

Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 9. Mathew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1992), 314, retrieved from www.nps.gove/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/25edison/25edison.htm/ 10. Paul Israel, “Inventing Industrial Research: Thomas Edison and the Menlo Park Laboratory,” Endeavor 26, no. 2 (June 1, 2002), retrieved from www.sciencedirect.com. 11. Mokyr, “The Second Industrial Revolution.” 12. The quote is from Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review 20 (1887), p. 349, as cited in Hughes, Networks of Power, 105. 13. A terrific study of this process is Naomi R.


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Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

There might be some irony, granted, in Silicon Valley boosting a solution to a problem it believes that it is creating—in disrupting the labor underpinnings of the whole economy, and then promoting a disruptive welfare solution. Those job-smothering, life-awesoming technologies come in no small part from garages in Menlo Park and venture-capital offices overlooking the Golden Gate and group houses in Oakland. “Here in Silicon Valley, it feels like we can see the future,” Misha Chellam, the founder of the start-up training school Tradecraft and a UBI advocate, told me. But it can feel disillusioning when that omniscience yields uncomfortable truths, he said.

tripled in the past fifteen years: “The MetLife Study of Caregiving Costs to Working Caregivers: Double Jeopardy for Baby Boomers Caring for Their Parents” (Westport, CT: MetLife Mature Market Institute, National Alliance for Caregiving, and Center for Long Term Care Research and Policy, June 2011). “The need is growing exponentially”: Ai-jen Poo, telephone interview by author, Mar. 2, 2015. tasks as a “joint responsibility”: Usha Ranji and Alina Salganicoff, “Balancing on Shaky Ground: Women, Work and Family Health” (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, Oct. 20, 2014). World Economic Forum report: “The Global Gender Gap Report 2016” (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016). “It is simply valuable work”: Emily Peck, “Women Work More Hours Than Men, Get Paid Less,” HuffPost, Oct. 27, 2016. the only advanced economy: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Social Policy Division, Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, Family Database, “PF2.5.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

Nowhere is this more obvious than in San Francisco, where some of the hottest tech start-ups are forgoing Silicon Valley for the city itself. Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, Pinterest, and Yelp are among those that have opted to build new headquarters in San Franciscos proper instead of the stretch of suburbs that make up the Bay Area peninsula. Several venture capital firms, too, longtime fixtures of Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, have recently announced plans to either relocate or open satellite offices in San Francisco. In the mornings, the traffic on the 101, the main commuting freeway out of San Francisco toward the Valley, is now heavier heading out of the city than the reverse. One of the more interesting company relocations these days is happening in Las Vegas, where Zappos, the online shoe giant, is getting ready to move from a cookie-cutter suburban office park off a highway interchange in Henderson, Nevada, to a brand-new headquarters in Las Vegas’s old city hall.

But when Apple-owned Pixar moved to a new headquarters in Emeryville, California, Jobs pushed the designers to emphasize central locations where employees could mingle with one another with the hope of fostering creativity. Another exception is Mark Zuckerberg, who has built Facebook’s headquarters into a massive campus in Menlo Park, but one that attempts to approximate urbanism, with a walkable commercial strip that includes a dry cleaner, gym, doctor’s office, and various eateries. Zappos, the online shoe giant: Leigh Gallagher, “Tony Hsieh’s New $350 Million Startup,” Fortune.com, January 23, 2012. In keeping with the findings of: Glaeser found that, for example, that innovation happens faster in cities because proximity to others breeds creativity.


Genentech The Beginnings of Biotech (Synthesis) -University Of Chicago Press (2011) by Sally Smith Hughes

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, barriers to entry, creative destruction, full employment, industrial research laboratory, invention of the wheel, Joseph Schumpeter, mass immigration, Menlo Park, power law, prudent man rule, Recombinant DNA, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley

Serving on the board of the failing company, he met Eugene Kleiner, who with Thomas Perkins in 1972 had founded Kleiner & Perkins, a venture capital partnership with offices in San Francisco.8 Taking a measure of Swanson, Kleiner was impressed, according to Perkins, with the young man’s ability “to think straight and get things done.” 9 When Swanson decided to leave Citibank and seek a new position, Kleiner recommended him to Perkins to fi ll a vacancy at the partnership. Perkins, a former Hewlett-Packard engineer with a Harvard MBA, respected Kleiner’s ability to assess individual character and motivation. Late in 1974 Swanson joined Kleiner & Perkins as a junior partner in its Menlo Park office on Sand Hill Road. He was twenty-six. One of Swanson’s assignments was to monitor the partnership’s substantial investment in Cetus Corporation, the company about to acquire Stan Cohen as scientific adviser.10 Kleiner and Perkins worried that Cetus was not focused on product development and feared their equity stake was turning sour.

By the mid-1970s, however, Lilly was seeking alternatives to extracting insulin from animal pancreases, a source not expected to keep up with the predicted expansion of the diabetic population. For Swanson meanwhile was pressed to find a facility for Genentech. The firm’s operation from the Kleiner & Perkins suite in Menlo Park and then from an office in San Francisco’s financial district had sufficed while the company was essentially Swanson, a part-time secretary, and a telephone. With Genentech’s technology proven and the insulin project pending, it was high time to acquire lab space and hire scientists. In March 1978 Swanson completed a third round of private financing, providing $950,000 at $8 per share.8 Genentech now had the means to move on to the next stage of corporate development.


pages: 485 words: 143,790

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway by Doug Most

Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, independent contractor, Menlo Park, place-making, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, safety bicycle, streetcar suburb, transcontinental railway

“I received your favor of the 11th this morning and at once called you ‘Send Sprague.’” Johnson, it turned out, was not the only one nudging Edison. Electrical World, a publication that closely monitored the progress in electricity, made a boast in 1883 that seemed like a pointed attack on the wizard from Menlo Park. Electrical World said that while Edison’s incandescent light was impressive, it was time to move on and discover other ways the power of electricity could be applied. “The electric light has long ceased to be a curiosity or even a novelty,” the publication proclaimed. “It has become a common, every-day affair.

But as Sprague, now a twenty-six-year-old former U.S. Navy ensign, stepped off his steamship in New York’s harbor after journeying across from England, he paid little attention to the crowd of excited people making their way east through the city’s streets. He was thinking only about the job that was waiting for him across the Hudson River in Menlo Park, New Jersey, with Thomas Edison. There was a marching band and police escorts on horses, followed by twenty-five carriages, all moving down Fifth Avenue to Fourteenth Street, where they turned east and made their way down to City Hall. The festivities were all part of a celebration New Yorkers had been anticipating for more than a decade, much as they’d been waiting for a subway.

The next year only reinforced in Sprague’s mind how badly he wanted to be a pioneer in designing the perfect electric motor. In April 1884, when Edison finally asked Sprague to step away from lighting and turn his attention to using electricity to create power, it was too late. Sprague had decided he no longer wanted to report to Edison or have to rely on Menlo Park’s resources. He told Edison he had made such progress on his own that he wanted to be recognized for what he achieved independently, and not as an Edison apprentice. “You will surely understand me when I say that I desire to identify myself with the successful solution to this problem,” Sprague wrote to Edison on April 24, 1884.


pages: 303 words: 67,891

Advances in Artificial General Intelligence: Concepts, Architectures and Algorithms: Proceedings of the Agi Workshop 2006 by Ben Goertzel, Pei Wang

AI winter, artificial general intelligence, backpropagation, bioinformatics, brain emulation, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, epigenetics, friendly AI, functional programming, G4S, higher-order functions, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, John Conway, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Occam's razor, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, semantic web, statistical model, strong AI, theory of mind, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Y2K

AAAI-05 Workshop on Modular Construction of Human-Like Intelligence, Pittsburg, PA, July 10. AAAI Technical Report, vol. WS-05-08, pp. 71- 78. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. [3] Samsonovich, A. V., Ascoli, G. A., De Jong, K. A., & Coletti, M. A. (2006). Integrated hybrid cognitive architecture for a virtual roboscout. In Beetz, M., Rajan, K, Thielscher, M., & Rusu, R.B. (Eds.). Cognitive Robotics: Papers from the AAAI Workshop. AAAI Technical Report, vol. WS-06-03, pp. 129-134. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. [4] Samsonovich, A. V. (2006). Biologically inspired cognitive architecture for socially competent agents. In Upal, M.

In Upal, M. A., & Sun, R. (Eds.). Cognitive Modeling and Agent-Based Social Simulation: Papers from the AAAI Workshop. AAAI Technical Report, vol. WS-06-02, pp. 36-48. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. [5] Tolman, E. C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and man. Psychological Review 55 (4): 189-208. [6] Downs, R. M., & Stea, D. (1973). Cognitive maps and spatial behavior: Process and products. In Downs, R. M., & Stea, D. (Eds.). Image and Environments, pp. 8-26. Chicago: Aldine. [7] OKeefe, J., & Nadel, L. (1978). The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. New York, NY: Clarendon. [8] O'Keefe, J., & Dostrovsky, J. (1971).


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Earthquakes are a bay area special interest, but BBSs devoted to 26-04-2012 21:44 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 34 de 35 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/4.html disaster preparedness are nationwide. In the bay area, there is the Public Seismic Network, a four-node BBS network spread between Menlo Park, San Jose, Pasadena, and Memphis, Tennessee; U.S. Geological Survey volunteers staff the Menlo Park node. Rising Storm BBS is oriented toward general emergency preparation and survival, including message areas in self-sufficiency, self-defense, law and order, firearms, and civil liberties. Rising Storm is the California node of Survnet, a small survivalist network that includes information and discussion about survival politics as well as survival techniques.

From ARPANET to NREN: The Toolbuilders' Quest Douglas Engelbart might have remained a voice in the wilderness, one of the myriad inventors with world-changing devices, or at least the plans for them, gathering dust in their garages. And you might still be required to wear a lab coat and speak FORTRAN in order to gain access to a computer. But Engelbart got a job in the early 1960s doing some respectably orthodox computer research at a new think tank in Menlo Park, California, the Stanford Research Institute. And a few years later, the paper he wrote, "The Augmentation of Human Intellect," fell into the hands of J. C. R. Licklider, another man with foresight who was in a historically fortunate position to do something about their shared vision of the future.


Stacy Mitchell by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers, the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

accelerated depreciation, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, drop ship, European colonialism, Haight Ashbury, income inequality, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, new economy, New Urbanism, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, RFID, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the long tail, union organizing, urban planning, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

HF5468.M58 2006 381.120973—dc22 2006013818 For Jacob CONTENTS PART ONE PART TWO INTRODUCTION ix ONE CHAIN STORE WORLD 3 TWO FADING PROSPERITY 33 THREE COMMUNITY LIFE 73 FOUR BLIGHTED LANDSCAPE 101 FIVE SOMETIMES LOW PRICES 127 SIX MONOPOLIZED CONSUMERS 138 SEVEN UNCLE SAM’S INVISIBLE HAND 163 EIGHT COMMUNITIES UNCHAINED 192 NINE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENTS 223 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 259 NOTES 260 INDEX 299 INTRODUCTION Kepler’s, a fifty-year-old independent bookstore in Menlo Park, California, abruptly shut down. Owner Clark Kepler explained that bookstore chains and Amazon.com had displaced so much of the store’s sales that he could no longer pay the bills. But before Kepler could file for bankruptcy, the business was swept up in an outpouring of community grief. Hundreds of local residents rallied outside the shuttered store, which was soon covered in forlorn love letters from customers describing how the bookstore had been the center of community life and what a loss it was. “Can’t the store be saved? You’re one of the main reasons I’m in Menlo Park,” read one.

See hardware retailing; Home Depot; Lowe’s Burden, Dan, 97 Burton, Betsy, 141, 257 Business Alliance for Local Living Economics (BALLE), 255–58 Business Visitation Program, 228 Buxman, Paul, 47–49 buy-local initiatives. See shop-local initiatives buyer power, 183–90 Cabela’s, 165 California: Arcata, 215–16; Arvin, 73–74; Berkeley, 230; Coronado, 216; Dinuba, 73–74; El Cerrito, 113; family farming, 48–49, 73–74; Inglewood, 194; Lafayette, 112–13; Lancaster, 71; Menlo Park, ix; Mt. Shasta, 214; restrictions on chain retail, 171, 194, 215–17; Rockridge, 112–13; San Francisco, 216–17; Santa Cruz, 82–85, 235; Santa Fe, 254; tax revenues from chain retail, 65–66; union losses in grocery retail, 61; Ventura, 169; Watsonville, 232–33 Callahan, Bill, 86 campaigns, grassroots: to block big-box development, 192–200; buy-local initiatives, 250–57; and economic impact of chains, 43–44; elements of successful, 199–200; to eliminate subsidies, 164, 171, 221; to 301 enact impact analysis requirements, 214–15; and environmental preservation, 108, 111; historical, 4, 205–10; landmark preservation, 89; location restrictions for chain retail, 213–14; in Mexico, 17; regional-level planning, 218–21; to restrict formula businesses, 215–18; to restrict the size of stores, x, 192–98, 210–13; to save local stores ix, 43–44, 82–85; tactics employed by mega-retailers against, 108, 200–205 Canada, 16 Cape Cod Commission, 218–20 capital: for local business start-ups, 225, 226; local losses to megaretailers, xii–xiii, 34, 39–45; local ownership and community, 41– 42; social, 70, 77, 78–81, 82–85, 87 capitalism, shifting attitudes in American, xviii, 26–32, 60–61 Cargill, 46–47 cargo volume increases, 115–16 Carmichael, Nancy, 228 carpet stores, 247–48 Carrefour, 19, 20 cars.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Zuckerberg was hosting one of his now famous Q&A Town Halls at Facebook headquarters. These Town Halls are public opportunities for Facebook users worldwide to write in and pose questions about Facebook and its governance directly to Mark himself. On this particular day, the Q&A took place in a moderately sized room at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Users had come, some from around the world, to ask questions directly to the CEO of the world’s largest social network. After a few opening pleasantries, the audience sang a muffled “Happy Birthday” to Zuckerberg, and the questioning began. The moderator, a Facebook employee named Charles, read the first question aloud: “Mark, this question comes from Israel, but is about Ukraine….It’s from Gregory, and he says, ‘Mark, recently I see many reports of unfair Facebook account blocking, probably as a result of massive fake abuse reports.

Sean Parker encouraged him to take company stock as payment instead; when Facebook went public in 2012, Choe’s shares were worth $200 million. Today they are worth $500 million. Facebook takes the relationship between art and innovation seriously. It’s even got an artist-in-residence program that brings in its artists to cover the walls and hallways of its Menlo Park campus with creative and meaningful murals. The art, in some sense, reflects Facebook’s culture, for better or worse. There’s a famous stencil poster that reads “Move Fast and Break Things.” When Mark Zuckerberg first coined the phrase, it was heralded as the creative mentality driving Facebook’s innovation.

Over the years, as I researched the Hype Machine and tried to understand its inner workings, I returned to this image over and over again in my mind. It was a green, blue, and white stencil that simply read: “The Social Network Is the Computer” (Figure 3.1). Figure 3.1 Photograph taken by the author at Facebook headquarters, Menlo Park, California. The Social Network Is the Computer One could interpret this mural in many ways. In one sense, the social network was the product Facebook was selling. While Apple sold computers, Facebook sold the network (or advertising on it). But for me the mural had a deeper meaning.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

There were Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. Democrats held forty-six of fifty-three congressional seats. Again, in California a historical model is at work of the wealthy medieval keep, primarily among the coastal elite in such iconic enclaves as La Jolla, Malibu, Montecito, Carmel, Pebble Beach, Menlo Park, Atherton, Pacific Heights, Sausalito, and Napa. Great fortunes and privilege surround global cultural and commercial brand names such as Apple, Caltech, eBay, Facebook, Gap, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Hollywood, Intel, Netflix, Oracle, Stanford, Walt Disney, Wells Fargo, and hundreds more that anchor a five-hundred-mile-long affluent California coastal belt.

The wisdom of the elite managerial class is far superior to the common sense of the public. Those whose jobs are outsourced and shipped abroad are themselves mostly deemed wanting, given their naïveté in assuming that building a television set in Dayton or farming one hundred acres in Tulare is as valuable as designing an app in Menlo Park or managing a hedge fund in Manhattan. To paraphrase again the earlier referenced quote of former treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers, if the new meritocracy fueled inequality, this was because people were being treated as they deserved. Predictable consequences followed from the gospel of Americanized globalism.

Yet the film industry did not disclose that its own producers and directors had previously curtailed the presence of dark-skinned actors to ensure greater profitability by accommodating the on-screen aesthetic preferences of Chinese moviegoers.44 If we wonder why the United States by 2017 found itself a deer-in-the-headlights victim of long-standing Chinese patent and copyright infringements, technological appropriation, dumping, currency manipulation, and huge surpluses—topped off by systematic Chinese deceit in spreading the coronavirus—it may have been because so many celebrities, academics, and corporate interests were not just heavily invested in Chinese profiteering but quite willing to abide by Beijing’s own requirements of censorship and obeisance. A certain arrogant fallacy exists among the American creators of globalization that they are naturally admired and envied—and thus their emulators would logically never seek to harm the font of their own commercial profiteering and psychological well-being. The tech masters of the universe in Menlo Park and Sunnyvale are the kindred souls of their business counterparts in Shanghai, Seoul, and Tokyo, but not so much of the poor and lower middle classes of Bakersfield and Fresno a mere 150 miles away. The symbiosis between America’s disparate regions is critical to the health of the country, especially in the sense of the duty to make sure not just that Silicon Valley’s products enrich fellow Americans but also that foreign governments do not use them to harm the freedoms of US citizens—or indeed, in a military context, to threaten their very security.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

Then, with Ph.D. in hand-along with half a dozen patents on the plasma devices-he went out looking for a more congenial atmo- sphere in private industry. In October 1957 he accepted an offer from a think tank known as SRI, the Stanford Research Institute, a university spin-off located just north of Palo Alto, in Menlo Park, California. He very quickly learned to keep a low profile even there. ("Don't tell anybody else," urged one colleague when he heard about Engelbart's ambitions. "It will prejudice people against yoU.")8 Engelbart continued to do conventional work at SRI for another year and a half, in the process earning a dozen more patents.

But it was worth a try: Engelbart had a formal proposal and a copy of his manifesto waiting on Lick's desk the day he arrived at the Pentagon. After all, he later wrote, "there the unlucky fellow was, having advertised that 'man-computer symbiosis,' computer time-sharing, and man-computer inter- faces were the new directions. How could he in reasonable consistency turn this down, even if it was way out there in Menlo Park?"!! He couldn't. Although Lick never publicly described his first response to "Framework," it must have included a strong component of deja VUe Here was the entire idea of human-computer symbiosis, re-created by a complete un- known out in the middle of nowhere. Lick had to admire that-even though En- gelbart had been quite right in anticipating some skepticism on his part ("Later," says Engelbart, "a couple of his friends told me that his reaction was, 'Well, he's way out there'-meaning far from MIT-'in Palo Alto, so we probably can't ex- pect much.

Looming over Engelbart's right shoulder, dominating the stage, was a twenty-two-by-eighteen-foot display screen that magnified his every expression to the proportions of the Jolly Green Giant. And behind that, invisible to the au- dience but very much a part of the show, was a jury-rigged chain of cameras and video links and telephone lines stretching thirty miles down the peninsula to Menlo Park. With a setup like this, no one knew quite what to expect. But Engelbart defi- nitely had their attention. "The research program that I'm going to describe to you," he began in that soft, strangely compelling baritone, "is quickly character- izable by saying, '1£ in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and that was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?'


pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

Palo Alto, which hosts the prestigious Stanford University, is home to the founding fathers of today’s new media and modern communication technologies. The former house of Apple founder Steve Jobs is situated a few hundred metres from the homes of Google co-founder Larry Page and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Menlo Park, Facebook’s international headquarters, is just a five-minute drive away. I enter the closed-off campus, immediately paralysed by the sensory overload. Are you hungry? Choose between authentic Thai curries, American burgers and exotic ice creams. Bored? Drop by at the computer game arcade to play Crash Bandicoot.

., Daniel here Habeck, Robert here HackerOne here hackers and hacking here ‘capture the flag’ operations here, here denial of service operations here ethical hacking here memory-corruption operations here political hacking here ‘qwning’ here SQL injections here techniques here Halle shooting here Hamas here, here Hanks, Tom here Happn here Harris, DeAndre here ‘hashtag stuffing’ here Hate Library here HateAid here, here Hatreon here, here, here Heidegger, Martin here Heise, Thorsten here, here Hensel, Gerald here, here Herzliya International Institute for Counter-Terrorism here Heyer, Heather here, here, here Himmler, Heinrich here Hintsteiner, Edwin here Histiaeus here Hitler, Adolf here, here, here, here, here Mein Kampf here, here Hitler salutes here, here, here, here Hitler Youth here HIV here Hizb ut-Tahrir here, here, here Höcker, Karl-Friedrich here Hofstadter, Richard here Hollywood here Holocaust here Holocaust denial here, here, here, here, here Holy War Hackers Team here Home Office here homophobia here, here, here Hooton Plan here Hoover Dam here Hope Not Hate here, here, here Horgan, John here Horowitz Foundation here Hot or Not here House of Saud here Huda, Noor here human trafficking here, here Hussein, Saddam here, here Hutchins, Marcus here Hyppönen, Mikko here Identity Evropa here, here iFrames here Illuminati here Incels (Involuntary Celibacy) here, here Independent here Inkster, Nigel here Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Intelius here International Business Times here International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) here International Federation of Journalists here International Holocaust Memorial Day here International Institute for Strategic Studies here Internet Research Agency (IRA) here iPads here iPhones here iProphet here Iranian revolution here Isabella I, Queen of Castile here ISIS here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here hackers and here, here, here, here, here Islamophobia here, here, here, here, here, here, here Tommy Robinson and here, here see also Finsbury Mosque attack Israel here, here, here, here, here Israel Defense Forces here, here Jackson, Michael here jahiliyya here Jakarta attacks here Jamaah Ansharud Daulah (JAD) here Japanese anime here Jemaah Islamiyah here Jesus Christ here Jewish numerology here Jews here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also anti-Semitism; ZOG JFG World here jihadi brides here, here JihadWatch here Jobs, Steve here Johnson, Boris here Jones, Alex here Jones, Ron here Junge Freiheit here Jurgenson, Nathan here JustPasteIt here Kafka, Franz here Kampf der Niebelungen here, here Kapustin, Denis ‘Nikitin’ here Kassam, Raheem here Kellogg’s here Kennedy, John F. here, here Kennedy family here Kessler, Jason here, here Khomeini, Ayataollah here Kim Jong-un here Kohl, Helmut here Köhler, Daniel here Kronen Zeitung here Kronos banking Trojan here Ku Klux Klan here, here Küssel, Gottfried here Lane, David here Le Loop here Le Pen, Marine here LeBretton, Matthew here Lebron, Michael here Lee, Robert E. here Li, Sean here Li family here Libyan Fighting Group here LifeOfWat here Lifton, Robert here Littman, Gisele here live action role play (LARP) here, here, here, here, here, here lobbying here Lokteff, Lana here loneliness here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lorraine, DeAnna here Lügenpresse here McDonald’s here McInnes, Gavin here McMahon, Ed here Macron, Emmanuel here, here, here, here MAGA (Make America Great Again) here ‘mainstream media’ here, here, here ‘Millennium Dawn’ here Manosphere here, here, here March for Life here Maria Theresa statue here, here Marighella, Carlos here Marina Bay Sands Hotel (Singapore) here Marx, Karl here Das Kapital here Masculine Development here Mason, James here MAtR (Men Among the Ruins) here, here Matrix, The here, here, here, here May, Theresa here, here, here Meechan, Mark here Meme Warfare here memes here, here, here, here and terrorist attacks here Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) here Menlo Park here Mercer Family Foundation here Merkel, Angela here, here, here, here MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) here, here, here MI6, 158, 164 migration here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also refugees millenarianism here Millennial Woes here millennials here Minassian, Alek here Mindanao here Minds here, here misogyny here, here, here, here, here see also Incels mixed martial arts (MMA) here, here, here, here Morgan, Nicky here Mounk, Yascha here Movement, The here Mueller, Robert here, here Muhammad, Prophet here, here, here mujahidat here Mulhall, Joe here MuslimCrypt here MuslimTec here, here Mussolini, Benito here Naim, Bahrun here, here Nance, Malcolm here Nasher App here National Action here National Bolshevism here National Democratic Party (NPD) here, here, here, here National Health Service (NHS) here National Policy Institute here, here National Socialism group here National Socialist Movement here National Socialist Underground here NATO DFR Lab here Naturalnews here Nawaz, Maajid here Nazi symbols here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Hitler salutes; swastikas Nazi women here N-count here Neiwert, David here Nero, Emperor here Netflix here Network Contagion Research Institute here NetzDG legislation here, here Neumann, Peter here New Balance shoes here New York Times here News Corp here Newsnight here Nietzsche, Friedrich here, here Nikolai Alexander, Supreme Commander here, here, here, here, here, here 9/11 attacks here, here ‘nipsters’ here, here No Agenda here Northwest Front (NWF) here, here Nouvelle Droite here, here NPC meme here NSDAP here, here, here Obama, Barack and Michelle here, here, here, here, here Omas gegen Rechts here online harassment, gender and here OpenAI here open-source intelligence (OSINT) here, here Operation Name and Shame here Orbán, Viktor here, here organised crime here Orwell, George here, here Osborne, Darren here, here Oxford Internet Institute here Page, Larry here Panofsky, Aaron here Panorama here Parkland high-school shooting here Patreon here, here, here, here Patriot Peer here, here PayPal here PeopleLookup here Periscope here Peterson, Jordan here Pettibone, Brittany here, here, here Pew Research Center here, here PewDiePie here PewTube here Phillips, Whitney here Photofeeler here Phrack High Council here Pink Floyd here Pipl here Pittsburgh synagogue shooting here Pizzagate here Podesta, John here, here political propaganda here Popper, Karl here populist politicians here pornography here, here Poway synagogue shooting here, here Pozner, Lenny here Presley, Elvis here Prideaux, Sue here Prince Albert Police here Pro Chemnitz here ‘pseudo-conservatives’ here Putin, Vladimir here Q Britannia here QAnon here, here, here, here Quebec mosque shooting here Quilliam Foundation here, here, here Quinn, Zoë here Quran here racist slurs (n-word) here Radio 3Fourteen here Radix Journal here Rafiq, Haras here Ramakrishna, Kumar here RAND Corporation here Rasmussen, Tore here, here, here, here Raymond, Jolynn here Rebel Media here, here, here Reconquista Germanica here, here, here, here, here, here, here Reconquista Internet here Red Pill Women here, here, here, here, here Reddit here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here redpilling here, here, here, here refugees here, here, here, here, here Relotius, Claas here ‘Remove Kebab’ here Renault here Revolution Chemnitz here Rigby, Lee here Right Wing Terror Center here Right Wing United (RWU) here RMV (Relationship Market Value) here Robertson, Caolan here Robinson, Tommy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Rockefeller family here Rodger, Elliot here Roof, Dylann here, here Rosenberg, Alfred here Rothschilds here, here Rowley, Mark here Roy, Donald F. here Royal Family here Russia Today here, here S., Johannes here St Kilda Beach meeting here Salafi Media here Saltman, Erin here Salvini, Matteo here Sampson, Chris here, here Sandy Hook school shooting here Sargon of Akkad, see Benjamin, Carl Schild & Schwert rock festival (Ostritz) here, here, here Schilling, Curt here Schlessinger, Laura C. here Scholz & Friends here SchoolDesk here Schröder, Patrick here Sellner, Martin here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Serrano, Francisco here ‘sexual economics’ here SGT Report here Shodan here, here Siege-posting here Sleeping Giants here SMV (Sexual Market Value) here, here, here Social Justice Warriors (SJW) here, here Solahütte here Soros, George here, here Sotloff, Steven here Southern, Lauren here Southfront here Spencer, Richard here, here, here, here, here, here Spiegel TV here spoofing technology here Sputnik here, here SS here, here Stadtwerke Borken here Star Wars here Steinmeier, Frank-Walter here Stewart, Ayla here STFU (Shut the Fuck Up) here Stormfront here, here, here Strache, H.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

Over time, Anon’s power diffused into endless splinter sects (“Operation Monsanto,” “Operation Killing Bay,” “Operation DarkNet”). The election of Donald Trump, and his fomenting of online hate groups—many active on 4chan—tarnished Anon’s Robin Hood reputation by proximity. The troll behemoth 4chan is amorphous; it is no institution. It has nothing like Facebook’s money or massive Menlo Park campus, but to borrow a line from Videodrome, the anonymous image board “has a philosophy and that is what makes it dangerous.” In its early years, the website footers linked to a manifesto by a user known only as “Shii,” who created an earlier anonymous board, which 4chan was based on. “Anonymity counters vanity,” Shii wrote in the text.

Regardless of who flagged the account, the hoops he had to jump through with the service were institutionally racist. Online harassment had, up until this point, been primarily discussed as a user-to-user conflict; but Facebook stoked its own problems—with its real names policy, the platform harassed its own users. Facebook eventually offered an apology to the drag queen users who had protested outside its Menlo Park headquarters and received media attention. Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, wrote a post defending the policy while extending an olive branch to those it alienated: “The spirit of our policy is that everyone on Facebook uses the authentic name they use in real life. For Sister Roma, that’s Sister Roma.


pages: 506 words: 152,049

The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Menlo Park, Necker cube, p-value, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, stem cell, Tragedy of the Commons

Toad tadpoles associate preferentially with siblings. Nature 282, 611–613. Wallace, A. R. (1866). Letter to Charles Darwin dated 2 July. In J. Marchant (1916) Alfred Russel Wallace Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1, pp. 170–174. London: Cassell. Watson, J. D. (1976). Molecular Biology of the Gene. Menlo Park: Benjamin. Weinrich, J. D. (1976). Human reproductive strategy: the importance of income unpredictability, and the evolution of non-reproduction. PhD dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Wenner, A.

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B 205, 567–580. Williams, G. C. (1980). Kin selection and the paradox of sexuality. In Sociobiology: Beyond Nature/Nurture? (eds G. W. Barlow & J. Silverberg), pp. 371–384. Boulder: Westview Press. Wilson, D. S. (1980). The Natural Selection of Populations and Communities. Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings. Wilson, E. O. (1971). The Insect Societies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: the New Synthesis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wilson, E. O. (1978). On Human Nature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Winograd, T. (1972).

. & Dickison, M. (1996). The extended replicator. Biology and Philosophy 11, 377–403. Stone, G. N. & Cook, J. M. (1998). The structure of cynipid oak galls: patterns in the evolution of an extended phenotype. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 265, 979–988. Trivers, R. L. (1985). Social Evolution. Menlo Park, N.J.: Benjamin/Cummings. Vermeij, G. J. (1987). Evolution and Escalation: An Ecological History of Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Vollrath, F. (1988). Untangling the spider’s web. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 3, 331–335. Weiner, J. (1994). The Beak of the Finch. London: Cape.


pages: 371 words: 36,271

Libertarian Idea by Jan Narveson

centre right, invisible hand, means of production, Menlo Park, night-watchman state, Pareto efficiency, Peter Singer: altruism, prisoner's dilemma, psychological pricing, rent-seeking, zero-sum game

Honorssee, for example, “Property, Title, and Redistribution” from Equality and Freedom: Past, Present and Future, ed. by Carl Wellman, ARSP Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy: Beiheft Neue Folge nr. 10 (Wiesbaden: Steiner-Verlag, 1977), pp. 107-115. 7. Murray Rothbard, Power and Market (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), p. 76. 8. In connection with freedom of speech, see Narveson, “Rights and Utilitarianism,” in W. E. Cooper, K. Nielsen, and S. C. Patten, eds.. New Essays on John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism, Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Vol. 5 (1979): 148; for the general thesis, see “Human Rights: Which, If Any, Are There?”

See esp. p. 174, where he argues that persons having extraordinary wealth are “in a position to restrict other people‟s freedom and exercise power over them, in any of a number of ways, from hiring henchmen to beat them up to influencing politicians to disregard their claims.” 3. Murray Rothbard, Power & Market (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), p. 99. 4. Kai Nielsen, Equality and Liberty (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allenheld, 1983), discusses this idea at some length, giving no apparent credit to its utter disconnection from the libertarian theory even though he takes it to be the archetypal defense of property. 1. 103 PART TWO: Foundations: Is Libertarianism Rational?

“Foundationalism in Political Theory.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 115-137. Rosenberg, Alexander. “Prospects for the Elimination of Tastes from Economics and Ethics.” In J. Paul, F. Miller, and E. F. Paul, eds., Ethics and Economics. London. Blackwell, 1985. Pp. 48-68. Rothbard, Murray. Power & Market. Menlo Park, Calif: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970. Scanlon, Thomas. “Utiliarianism and Contractualism.” In A. Sen and B. Williams, eds.. Utilitarianism and Beyotui. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Scruton, Roger. The Meaning of Conservatism. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1977. Sen, Amartya.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

He realized that America needed more than just folksy tinkerers with bright ideas. It needed professional innovators: people who could produce brilliant ideas on a regular basis, just as factories were producing products, and who could fit those innovations into a broader system of supply and demand. To that end he created America’s first industrial laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876 and staffed it with German PhDs, skilled craftsmen, and “absolutely insane men.” He wanted to produce “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so,” and he wanted his laboratory’s products to have commercial value. “We can’t be like the old German professor who as long as he can get his black bread and beer is content to spend his whole life studying the fuzz on a bee!”

He invented an efficient lightbulb that could be manufactured in bulk. He established electric-generating stations that could provide power for those lights. His first great breakthrough took place on October 22, 1879, when he applied electricity to a cotton-thread filament suspended in a vacuum glass bulb. Thousands of people traveled to Menlo Park to see his “light of the future” that could light the world without a flame and be turned on and off with the flick of a switch. In 1882, standing in the office of his banker, J. P. Morgan, he flicked a switch and lit up Lower Manhattan with power generated from his electric power station in Pearl Street.

Lockwood, the head of AT&T’s patent department, explained, “I am fully convinced that it has never, is not now, and never will pay commercially, to keep an establishment of professional inventors or of men whose chief business it is to invent.”25 Lockwood was the owl of Minerva: as the century turned, invention was in fact becoming a corporate function, like accounting or advertising, and inventors were becoming company men (see chart below). Thomas Edison was the harbinger of a new age with his “invention factory” in Menlo Park and a plan to produce a big invention every six months. By the turn of the century, everyone was trying to follow in his footsteps. The proportion of patents granted to individuals rather than to firms fell, from 95 percent in 1880 to 73 percent in 1920 to 42 percent in 1940.26 In 1900, General Electric, desperate to develop a new incandescent lightbulb as its patent on the old lightbulb ran out, created an R&D lab under the control of Willis Whitney.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Aside from its stunning scenery, the Valley does not advertise its riches. With the country’s top venture-capital firms and its thriving high-tech companies, Sand Hill Road, the Valley’s main strip, is a sort of New Economy version of Wall Street. The four-lane highway runs through a hilly landscape from the town of Menlo Park past the mission-style buildings of Stanford University’s campus to the edge of Palo Alto. There are no iconic financial towers dominating the surrounding landscape; nor are there legions of briefcase-toting workers rushing by. Instead, there are views of the mountains and the Horse Park at Woodside, an enormous facility devoted to a variety of equestrian events.

Khosla’s portfolio of twenty-four clean tech start-ups also includes companies experimenting with fuel from waste cellulose and electricity from solar thermal sources: For example, Range Fuels of Colorado, which he founded, plans to turn wood chips, agricultural waste, municipal sewage, and pig manure into ethanol. “I’m going after green and ‘cheaper than fossil’ technologies,” Khosla argues from his Menlo Park, California, office, “because it’s the only way to solve the scale problem and to attract the hundreds of billions—or even trillions—of dollars necessary to make a difference in global warming.” Biofuels could be a $50 billion market by 2015 and could retool Detroit, some predict. In 2006 VCs poured $727 million57 into thirty-nine alternative energy start-ups, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

Coffee, professor of law, Columbia University Law School; Steven Drobny, author, Inside the House of Money (2006), and cofounder and partner of Drobny Global Advisors, an international macro research firm; Ted Forstmann (Forbes 400); Charles Geisst, professor of finance, School of Business, Manhattan College, New York, and author, Wall Street: A History (1997); Vinod Khosla (Forbes 400); Jerome Kohlberg (Forbes 400); Bruce Kovner (Forbes 400); Dick Kramlich, cofounder and general partner of New Enterprise Associates, Menlo Park, Calif., and former chairman and president of the National Venture Capital Association; Steven Pearlstein, business columnist, Washington Post; Michael Peltz, executive editor, Institutional Investor and Alpha; Julian Robertson (Forbes 400); Arthur Rock (Forbes 400); David Skeel, professor of corporate law, University of Pennsylvania Law School, and author, Icarus in the Boardroom (2005); Roy Smith, professor of entrepreneurship and finance, New York University, and author, The Wealth Creators (2001); Charles Taylor, National Venture Capital Association; David B.


pages: 313 words: 94,490

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, Barry Marshall: ulcers, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, desegregation, Helicobacter pylori, Jeff Hawkins, low cost airline, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pepto Bismol, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer

What skills will our employees need to successfully please customers, and how will we get better at serving our customers over time? An example of strategic language that speaks to internal capabilities comes from Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the phonograph and the lightbulb. Edison was not a lone inventor; he created the first industrial R&D lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The researchers in his labs were called “muckers.” The term comes from two slang phrases of the time—“to muck in” was to work together as mates, and “to muck around” was to fool around. Why was this a good way for Edison’s researchers to talk strategy? In any entrepreneurial organization, there’s a natural tension between efficiency and experimentation.

The term “muckers” is a strategy statement masquerading as a nickname. It makes it clear that, given the tough choice between efficiency and experimentation, you choose experimentation. Why? Because you’re a mucker. Muckers don’t obsess over Gantt charts. Muckers muck. And muckers muck because that is precisely the organizational capability that will make Menlo Park successful. Talking strategy in a thoughtful way can relieve the burden of decision paralysis. Barrier 3: Lack of a common language In the classic 1950s models of communication, a “sender” communicates with a “receiver.” The metaphor suggests that the message passed is a kind of package—wrapped up on one side and unwrapped on the other.


pages: 407 words: 90,238

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

It’s for this reason that, when the global consultancy McKinsey did a ten-year global study of companies, they found that top executives—meaning those most called upon to solve strategically significant “wicked problems”—reported being up to 500 percent more productive in flow. Similar results have also been showing up in psychedelic research. Several decades ago, James Fadiman,44 a researcher at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, in Menlo Park, California, helped bring together twenty-seven test subjects—mainly engineers, architects, and mathematicians drawn from places like Stanford and Hewlett-Packard—for one specific reason: for months prior, each of them had been struggling (and failing) to solve a highly technical problem. Test subjects were divided into groups of four, with each group receiving two treatment sessions.

When we came back out [of the sessions], they took one look at us and said, ‘Whatever they do, don’t let them go back in that room!’” Over on Perry Lane, the bohemian cottage enclave where he lived, Kesey and his growing band of pranksters took things out of the lab and into the field. “Volunteer Kesey gave himself over to science21 at the Menlo Park vets hospital,” Tom Wolfe recounts in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “and somehow drugs were getting up and walking out of there and over to Perry Lane.” “Half the time,” Wolfe continues, “Perry Lane would be like some kind of college fraternity row22 with everybody out on a nice autumn Saturday afternoon on the grass . . . playing touch football . . . an hour later Kesey and his circle would be hooking down something that in the entire world only they and a few other avant-garde neuropharmacological researchers even knew about.”


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

He even discovered the original Falconbridge iron ore body in Canada, though he failed to bring it into successful commercial production, and abandoned his claim. This setback was remedied by others at a later date. Part of the key to his success was that he was one of the first to see the potential for applying mass production techniques and teamwork to the process of invention. His laboratory at Menlo Park in New Jersey is generally reckoned to have been the first industrial research laboratory. Others made a substantial contribution to his innovations, which he acknowledged, saying, ‘I am quite correctly described as more of a sponge than an inventor.’ This probably overstates the case, but it contains a large grain of truth.

Thompson) 1 Manchester 1 Manchester School 1 Mandeville, Bernard 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Manuel I, King of Portugal 1 manufacturing 1 market makers 1 Marriage of Figaro (Mozart) 1 Marsh, Peter 1 Marshall Plan 1 Marx, Karl 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 involvement in speculation 1 mathematical models 1 Mayfair economy 1 Meade, James 1 Medici family 1, 2 Meiji restoration 1, 2 Mellon, Andrew 1, 2, 3, 4 Melville, Herman 1 Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions 1 Memoirs of Herbert Hoover 1 Mencken, H. L. 1, 2 Menlo Park 1 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 1, 2, 3 Meriwether, John 1 Merton, Robert 1 Michelangelo 1, 2 Micklethwait, John 1 Midas myth 1, 2, 3 Milton, John 1 Minsky, Hyman 1, 2 Miró, Joan 1 Mississippi Bubble 1, 2 Misunderstanding Financial Crises (Gary B. Gorton) 1 Moby-Dick (Herman Melville) 1 Molière 1, 2 Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe) 1 Mond, Alfred 1, 2 money motive 1 Moneychangers, The (Upton Sinclair) 1 Montesquieu 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Moore, G.


pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

In the popular media, Edison fashioned for himself an image as the humble tinkerer, the hard worker whose gift of genius did not crush his folksy ways. He spoke plainly, not burdened by an oversized ego or entranced by arcane scientific mumbo-jumbo. Far from the otherworldly absentminded professor, he carried with him all the plainspoken credibility of the common man. The Wizard of Menlo Park would leave the obscure glories of science, theories, and publication in scholarly journals to the scientists. He was a simple man, simply making products ordinary people could use and enjoy. What most of the public didn’t see was his unrelenting drive and business savvy. Edison had come of age in the nascent corporate worlds of the telegraph and the railroad.

Not about to let those years of research go to waste, Edison set about finding new uses for his alkaline battery, designing a wide array of devices it could power, from railroad signals and switches to ship lighting and miner’s lights. Eventually, it became one of the most profitable divisions of Edison’s empire. However, the long years spent in battery development may have also distracted the Wizard of Menlo Park from other inventions coming on line at the time. He rejected radio, calling it a “craze” and took special pains to explain that “…there are several laws of nature which cannot be overcome when attempts are made to make the radio a musical instrument.” For years he resisted building a phonograph with a radio integrated into the unit, seeing the two technologies in competition for consumers’ attention, even as his distributors and customers demanded just such a product. 10 Victorian Age of Discovery “To the electron—may it never be of any use to anybody!”


pages: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

: The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, Riverside Editions, 1956. Donaldson, Margaret. Children’s Minds. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Dyson, George B. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. New York and Menlo Park, Calif.: Addison Wesley, 1997. Edelman, Gerald M. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1992. ———. “Building a Picture of the Brain.” Daedalus 127 (Spring 1998): 37–69. ———. Topobiology: An Introduction to Molecular Embryology. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

New York: Touchstone, 1993. ———. Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Langton, Christopher, et al., eds. Artificial Life II. Redwood City and Menlo Park, Calif.: Addison Wesley, 1990. Leonard, Andrew. Bots: The Origin of New Species. San Francisco: Hardwired Books, 1997. Lessig, Lawrence. Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Levy, Steven. Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology. New York: Vintage, 1992.


pages: 350 words: 96,803

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

See Brown (1991), pp. 10–11. 23 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, chapter 3, section 7 (Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 30. 24 Ibid., Book I, chapter 3, section 9, pp. 30–31. 25 Robert Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35–56; see also Trivers, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin /Cummings, 1985). 26 Sarah B. Hrdy and Glenn Hausfater, Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives (New York: Aldine Publishing, 1984); R. Muthulakshmi, Female Infanticide: Its Causes and Solutions (New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House, 1997); Lalita Panigrahi, British Social Policy and Female Infanticide in India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1972); and Maria W.

Journal of the American Dietetic Association 100, no. 10 (2000): 3. Tribe, Laurence H. “Second Thoughts on Cloning.” The New York Times, December 5, 1997. Trivers, Robert. “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35–56. ———. Social Evolution. Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin/Cummings, 1985. Uchtmann, Donald L., and Gerald C. Nelson. “US Regulatory Oversight of Agricultural and Food-Related Biotechnology.” American Behavioral Scientist 44 (2000): 350–377. Varma, Jay K. “Eugenics and Immigration Restriction: Lessons for Tomorrow.” Journal of the American Medical Association 275 (1996): 734.


pages: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Indeed he is said to have captured the dying Edison’s last breath in a glass vessel which can be inspected to this day in the Henry Ford Museum. It is certainly true that he transported the whole of Menlo Park, Edison’s factory/research facility, all the way from New Jersey to Greenfield, Dearborn. For Greenfield Village is Ford’s mixture of a Disneyland re-creation of a folksy middle-American small town and a ‘living’ museum of American achievement. It contains not just Menlo Park, but also the North Carolina bicycle shop where Orville and Wilbur Wright first built a powered heavier than air flying machine. Not a replica of the bicycle shop, the actual bicycle shop itself, transported brick by brick, pane by pane.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

Soon come the scandals and lawsuits and criminal cases, with tales of sleazy founders sexually harassing female employees or, in one extreme case, allegedly beating up a girlfriend. These are the people who now run tech companies, who have been entrusted with huge sums of other people’s money. It would be nice to think that when everything falls apart, the only ones who get hurt will be venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. But a lot of the money being thrown at these kids originally came from pension funds. The pain, when it comes, will not be confined to Sand Hill Road. Walking around San Francisco, it strikes me that this cannot end well, that the combination of magical thinking, easy money, greedy investors, and amoral founders represents a recipe for disaster.

In the end Doerr got nothing out of Google Glass except some publicity, but maybe that was the point all along. In the old days, Silicon Valley venture capitalists embraced a California version of clubby East Coast white-shoe culture. All of the top VC firms literally sit beside one another on the same street, a big boulevard called Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. For decades these firms resembled snooty private gentlemen’s clubs—in the British upper class sense of the word. They were almost exclusively male and were run by former engineers who shunned publicity and quietly voted Republican. Today generating hype has become a central part of the venture capital business.


pages: 299 words: 92,782

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, and Robert R. Hoffman, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Paul J. Feltovich, Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert Hoffman, eds., Expertise in Context: Human and Machine (Menlo Park, CA, and Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press and The MIT Press, 1997). 11. This discussion relies on Colvin, Talent Is Overrated, 65–72. 12. K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (July 1993): 363–406. 13.

“Forecasting Profitability and Earnings.” Journal of Business 73, no. 2 (April 2000): 161–175. Feller, William. An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Application. Vol. 1. 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1968. Feltovich, Paul J., Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert Hoffman, eds. Expertise in Context: Human and Machine. Menlo Park, CA, and Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press and The MIT Press, 1997. Finucane, Melissa L., and Christina M. Gullion. “Developing a Tool for Measuring the Decision-Making Competence of Older Adults.” Psychology and Aging 25, no. 2 (June 2010): 271–288. Fischhoff, Baruch. “Hindsight ≠ Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty.”


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

Stewart, “A Mandate for State Action,” presented at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers, Washington. D.C.. December 4, 1967. 10 J. Lederberg et al., Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States (Washington. D.C.: National Academy Press, 1992). 11 Further information can be found in: J. D. Watson et al., Molecular Biology of the Gene (4th ed.; Menlo Park. CA: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, 1987); P. Berg and M. Singer, Dealing with Genes: The Language of Heredity (Mill Valley, CA: University Science Books, 1992); and J. D. Watson, The Double Helix (New York: New American Library, 1969). 12 F. J. Fenner et al., The Biology of Animal Viruses (New York: Academic Press, 1968). 13 For excellent renditions of the history of antibiotics and controversies concerning the rise of bacterial resistance to the chemicals, the reader is referred to two highly readable books: M.

Berg and M. Singer, Dealing with Genes: The Language of Heredity (Mill Valley, CA: University Science Books, 1992); M. Singer and P. Berg, Genes to Genomes (Mill Valley, CA: University Science Books, 1991); and J. D. Watson, N. H. Hopkins, J. W. Roberts, et al., Molecular Biology of the Gene (4th ed.; Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Co., 1987). 3 For an excellent review of McClintock’s work and its subsequent impact on molecular biology, see N. V. Federoff, “Maize Transposable Elements.” Chapter 14 in D. E. Berg and M. M. Howe, eds., Mobile DNA (Washington, D.C.: American Society for Microbiology, 1989).

Weber, “AIDS and the ‘Guilty’ Virus,” New Scientist, May 5, 1988: 32–33; and A. G. Fettner, “Dealing with Duesberg,” Village Voice, February 2, 1988: 25–29. 210 See S. B. Thomas and S. C. Quinn, “Understanding the Attitude of Black Americans,” in J. Stryker and M. D. Smith, eds., Dimensions of HIV Prevention: Needle Exchange (Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 1993), 99–128. 211 Estes (1991), op. cit., 489–558. 212 A. J. Pinching, “AIDS and Africa: Lessons for Us All,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 79 (1986): 501–3. 213 Karpas (1990), op. cit. 214 B. Evatt, D. P. Francis, and M. F. McLane, “Antibodies to Human T Cell Leukemia Virus-Associated Membrane Antigens in Haemophiliacs: Evidence for Infection Before 1980,” Lancet II (1983): 698–700. 215 Centers for Disease Control, “Recommendations for Counseling Persons Infected with Human T-Lymphotropic Virus, Types I and II,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 42 (1993): 1–7. 216 C.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Subsequent chapters trace the improvements that are omitted from GDP across the many dimensions of the home and its equipment, public and personal transformation, information, communication, entertainment, and public health and medicine and, in the most novel part of the book, treat in detail of improvements in working conditions for adult males on the job, adult women in the home, and youth during the gradual transition from child labor to schooling. Inventions and Inventors. The major inventions of the late nineteenth century were the creations of individual inventors rather than large corporations. We go behind the scenes to Thomas Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where on the epochal night of October 10, 1879, a particular variety of cotton filament finally made possible an electric light bulb that would last not just for an hour but for days and weeks. We also visit Karl Benz’s lab, where, just ten weeks after Edison’s discovery, he took the last step in developing a reliable internal combustion engine.

Thomas Edison did not invent the electric light, but he was responsible for making it commercially viable in the United States, partly because he combined a practical electric lamp with the development of electric power generation, starting with the Pearl Street station in New York City in 1882.81 Edison’s unique contribution was his solution of the double problem of inventing an efficient light bulb that could be manufactured in bulk while also establishing electric generating stations to bring power into the individual home. Compared with the international celebration of the golden spike in 1869 (see chapter 2), the moment when electric light became commercially viable was a much quieter affair. Throughout 1879, Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, had been focused on the search for the best material for the filament in the electric light bulb. Finally, it all came together, on the night of October 22, 1879: At 1:30 in the morning, Batchelor and Jehl, watched by Edison, began on the ninth fiber, a plain carbonized cotton-thread filament … set up in a vacuum glass bulb.

Lunchtime passed and the carbonized cotton fiber still glowed. At 4:00 pm the glass bulb cracked and the light went out. Fourteen and a half hours!82 Few, if any inventions, have been more enthusiastically welcomed than electric light. Throughout the winter of 1879–1880, thousands traveled to Menlo Park to see the “light of the future,” including farmers whose houses would never be electrified in their lifetimes. Travelers on the nearby Pennsylvania Railroad could see the brilliant lights glowing in the Edison offices. The news was announced to the world on December 21, 1879, with a full-page story in the New York Herald, opened by this dramatic and long-winded headline: EDISON’S LIGHT—THE GREAT INVENTOR’S TRIUMPH IN ELECTRIC ILLUMINATION—A SCRAP OF PAPER—IT MAKES A LIGHT, WITHOUT GAS OR FLAME, CHEAPER THAN OIL—SUCCESS IN A COTTON THREAD.83 On New Year’s Eve of 1879, 3,000 people converged by train, carriage, and farm wagon on the Edison laboratory to witness the brilliant display, a planned laboratory open house of dazzling modernity to launch the new decade.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

The Homebrew Computer Club The group became known as the Homebrew Computer Club, and it encapsulated the Whole Earth fusion between the counterculture and technology. It would become to the personal computer era something akin to what the Turk’s Head coffeehouse was to the age of Dr. Johnson, a place where ideas were exchanged and disseminated. Moore wrote the flyer for the first meeting, held on March 5, 1975, in French’s Menlo Park garage: “Are you building your own computer? Terminal, TV, typewriter?” it asked. “If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with like-minded interests.” Allen Baum spotted the flyer on the HP bulletin board and called Wozniak, who agreed to go with him. “That night turned out to be one of the most important nights of my life,” Wozniak recalled.

It was a rhetorical flourish he would use at product presentations over the ensuing decades. The audience was not very impressed. The Apple had a cut-rate microprocessor, not the Intel 8080. But one important person stayed behind to hear more. His name was Paul Terrell, and in 1975 he had opened a computer store, which he dubbed the Byte Shop, on Camino Real in Menlo Park. Now, a year later, he had three stores and visions of building a national chain. Jobs was thrilled to give him a private demo. “Take a look at this,” he said. “You’re going to like what you see.” Terrell was impressed enough to hand Jobs and Woz his card. “Keep in touch,” he said. “I’m keeping in touch,” Jobs announced the next day when he walked barefoot into the Byte Shop.

The practice on the commune was to give children Eastern spiritual names, but Jobs insisted that she had been born in America and ought to have a name that fit. Brennan agreed. They named her Lisa Nicole Brennan, not giving her the last name Jobs. And then he left to go back to work at Apple. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with her or with me,” said Brennan. She and Lisa moved to a tiny, dilapidated house in back of a home in Menlo Park. They lived on welfare because Brennan did not feel up to suing for child support. Finally, the County of San Mateo sued Jobs to try to prove paternity and get him to take financial responsibility. At first Jobs was determined to fight the case. His lawyers wanted Kottke to testify that he had never seen them in bed together, and they tried to line up evidence that Brennan had been sleeping with other men.


pages: 125 words: 28,222

Growth Hacking Techniques, Disruptive Technology - How 40 Companies Made It BIG – Online Growth Hacker Marketing Strategy by Robert Peters

Airbnb, bounce rate, business climate, citizen journalism, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital map, fake it until you make it, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, pull request, revision control, ride hailing / ride sharing, search engine result page, sharing economy, Skype, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, turn-by-turn navigation, Twitter Arab Spring, ubercab

At the same time, channels can be used as an advertising platform or for the pure delivery of content. A YouTube channel is an “everyman’s” venue to publishing video content that, if it goes viral, can be a ticket to a music career, acting roles, or television or movie contracts. For some, YouTube has literally been a place where dreams come true. It began, however, in a garage in Menlo Park, California. Three former PayPal employees wanted to share some video of a party the night before. They weren’t sure how to do it, so they started brainstorming, bought a domain name, spent some months developing the site, and released a public beta in May 2005 populated with videos of PJ, a cat that belonged to one of the founders.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

While it may be tempting to ask how there can be clues to something that hasn’t even happened yet, recall that every future is founded upon the past and present, and that these are laden with signals and indicators of what’s to come. So read on and learn about this future age of artificial emotional intelligence, because all too soon, it will be part of our present as well. PART ONE THE ROAD TO AFFECTIVE COMPUTING 1 THE DAWN OF EMOTIONAL MACHINES Menlo Park, California—March 3, 2032 7:06 am It’s a damp spring morning as Abigail is gently roused from slumber by Mandy, her personal digital assistant. Sensors in the bed inform Mandy exactly where Abigail is in her sleep cycle, allowing it to coordinate with her work schedule and wake her at the optimum time.

Of course, the elderly and the very young will hardly be the only beneficiaries of emotionally aware devices. As these systems continue to develop and begin interacting in combination with other emerging technologies, they will bring many unforeseen opportunities and challenges, as we’ll explore in the next chapter. 12 MIXING IT UP Menlo Park, California—November 12, 2033 “Hey! What did I tell you about running through the house?” Abigail calls out after the two young boys who just tore through her home office. At seven and nine years old, Dale and Jerry are her only nephews and today they are really taxing her patience. Abigail had no idea how demanding it would be when she agreed to take care of them while her sister and brother-in-law took a week’s vacation in Maui.


pages: 146 words: 43,446

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Benchmark Capital, business climate, classic study, creative destruction, data acquisition, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, high net worth, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tech worker, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, wealth creators, Y2K

He'd quit, or threatened to, several times over the past two and a half years. He kept saying that he knew how software should be written because he knew how Microsoft wrote software. Microsoft deployed thousands of programmers in human waves whenever it sought to create something new. Jim Clark had deployed three young men on top of a Jenny Craig weight loss center in Menlo Park, California. But Jan Bocksum was given no choice. By edict from Wolter Huisman, he and four or five other stout and sturdy Dutch workers had acquired a working knowledge of Clark's new computer system. None of them actually knew how to program the boat, but all of them knew how to use the computer.

Finally, at four o' clock one morning in January 1999, or three months after Healtheon canceled its IPO, we boarded Clark's plane in Palm Beach, Florida, and flew to the Canary Islands: I, Clark, and Hyperion's chef, Tina Braddock, whom Clark had decided to take with him wherever he went. The rest of its crew and the software engineer Steve Hague were already on board. (Lance and Tim had been sent back to the room on top of the Jenny Craig weight loss center in Menlo Park, California.) Hyperion had just passed Spain on its way to a dock in Grand Canary, where it planned to collect us the next day. Clark's jet was fired up and ready to go. His luggage compartment was crammed with food and wine for the crossing. After seven years of writing software that could sail a boat, Clark, at last, had the chance to watch his program guide his boat across an ocean.


pages: 309 words: 101,190

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward

Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, computer age, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, industrial robot, invention of radio, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, phenotype, Robert X Cringely, stem cell, the long tail, trade route

., and Grzeszczuk, R. (1995) ‘Artificial fishes: autonomous locomotion, perception, behavior, and learning in a simulated physical world’. Artificial Life, 1, 327–51. Thomas, K. (1983) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Thompson, D’A. (1942) On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trivers, R. L. (1985) Social Evolution. Menlo Park: Benjamin/ Cummings. Vermeij, G. J. (1993) A Natural History of Shells. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vollrath, F. (1988) ‘Untangling the spider’s web’. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 3, 331–5. Vollrath, F. (1992) ‘Analysis and interpretation of orb spider exploration and web-building behavior’.

Vollrath, F. (1992) ‘Analysis and interpretation of orb spider exploration and web-building behavior’. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 21, 147–99. Vollrath, F. (1992) ‘Spider webs and silks’. Scientific American, 266, 70–76. Watson, J. D., Hopkins, N. H., Roberts, J. W., Steitz, J. A., and Weiner, A. M. (1987) Molecular Biology of the Gene (4th edn). Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings. Weiner, J. (1994) The Beak of the Finch. London: Jonathan Cape. Williams, G. C. (1992) Natural Selection: Domains, Levels and Challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, E. O. (1971) The Insect Societies. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.


pages: 319 words: 100,984

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

It was, I realised later, a wonderfully apt place from which to see it. The train taking me from San Francisco airport to Mountain View was passing Menlo Park, where in the 1960s making maps of the Moon had been a rite of passage for the newly minted “astrogeologists” of the US Geological Survey. On Mount Hamilton, in the hills over which it was rising, is the Lick Observatory, where a pioneering photographic survey of the Moon was undertaken more than a century ago, and where those Menlo Park geologists would be sent, some eager and some unwilling, to inspect the object of their study. Up ahead of me was NASA’s Ames Research Center, the reason for my trip to Mountain View, home to the wind tunnels used to define the blunt re-entry-ready shape of the Apollo command modules, and home for a while to some of the rocks those modules brought back.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

Stewart Brand (of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Whole Earth Catalog fame) manned a video camera trained on Engelbart’s on-stage keyboard, while Engelbart proceeded to show a working prototype of a fully functional hypertext system, including a word processor, video and graphics displays, and the ability to link one document to another, all connected to another computer in Menlo Park by a 1,200-baud modem. The system also 258 T he I ntergalactic N etwor k featured a never-before-seen device for pointing at objects on the screen: a small wooden box with wheels attached to the bottom that Engelbart eventually dubbed the “mouse.” Engelbart had encountered Bush’s essay while stationed in the Philippines after World War II.

Also in attendance were a few key members of the original NLS team, who migrated over to Xerox’s PARC research division under the direction of Alan Kay, with whom they began developing the first true personal computer, the Alto. Stewart Brand, who was of course there, later brought the novelist and ur–Merry Prankster Ken Kesey over to look at the system; Kesey promptly dubbed it “the next thing after acid.”16 By the early 1970s, a “People’s Computer Center” had appeared in Menlo Park, providing access to rudimentary computer tools that would allow customers to play games or learn to program. In the mid-1970s a young Steve Jobs (another LSD experimenter) first caught a glimpse of the graphical user interface (GUI) at Xerox PARC, soon licensing the software that would shape the subsequent trajectory of the Macintosh operating system and influence the design of the personal computer operating systems that most of us still use. 260 T he I ntergalactic N etwor k The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s would play a formative role in shaping the personal computer revolution that followed.


pages: 325 words: 97,162

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin Sharma

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, dematerialisation, epigenetics, fake news, Grace Hopper, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Rosa Parks, telemarketer, white picket fence

“And I’m realizing that even one interruption when I’m thinking about a hot new product or my next blue ocean venture could cost me many millions of dollars—or more,” said the entrepreneur excitedly. “What you two just said is massively important if you are serious about leveraging your talents and expressing the fullness of your inherent greatness,” the billionaire affirmed as he beamed cheerfully. “Edison would climb up the hill to his Menlo Park laboratory and work for hours and hours, and sometimes days upon days, with his team on the one invention that was the center of their inspiration. That groovy cat was a pretty gnarly dude.” The billionaire then pointed to the chart on the back of the painting. “I know you both need to get going, so you can get ready for the ceremony.

Each morning, you enter this invisible bubble of your own making that is completely empty of other people’s superficial messages, spam, fake news, advertisements, silly videos, irrelevant chatting and other forms of cyber-hooking that will destroy your life of monumental potential. Part of this philosophical construct is your Personal Menlo Park, the place where—like Thomas Edison—you get lost from the world and go to generate the masterworks that will raise you to industry dominance and global eminence. The real key here is solitude for a scheduled period each day, in a positive environment that floods you with creativity, energy, happiness and the feeling the work you’re doing is for the upliftment of humanity.


Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design by Giles Colborne

call centre, Firefox, Ford Model T, HyperCard, Menlo Park, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, sunk-cost fallacy

It’s the details that make all the difference. emove Download from WoweBook.com Before After Download from WoweBook.com Decisions We often focus on giving users as many choices as possible. But choice can easily overwhelm users. In 2000, Dr. Sheena S. Iyengar and Dr. Mark R. Lepper set up a tasting booth at Draeger’s Market in Menlo Park, California. Hundreds of people walked past the booth each day. One weekend, they put out a selection of twenty-four varieties of jams; on another they set out six. The wider selection performed badly. Only 2 percent of passersby bought the jam. When there were fewer options, 12 percent of passersby purchased the jam.


pages: 398 words: 108,889

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

If “world domination” was to be the eventual outcome, Peter realized camaraderie and teamwork were necessary ingredients. He scheduled an afternoon for the company’s holiday offsite party so employees could relax and bond away from the office before making a final pre-holiday push. Employees caravanned over from the office to the party, held at a meeting facility on Sand Hill Road in adjacent Menlo Park. For anyone not familiar with the reference, Sand Hill is to venture capital what Wall Street is to the stock market. A broad, ambling road in the undeveloped foothills behind Stanford University, Sand Hill houses many of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms and provided four-fifths of the funds that poured into California startups during the late 1990s.

See also legal actions against PayPal regulatory risks with PayPal, 121 less than banks with gaming, 214 need for clarification, 168 robot bidder, 55–60 Rockower, JoAnne background, 135 discovery about Billpoint listings, 206 life after PayPal, 312 role at eBay Live, 271 transfer to marketing, 234 “turn off Checkout” tool, 232 Rowe, Amy, 119, 124, 155 Ruckstuhl, Ann, 209 Sacks, David attempt to retain Paul Martin, 266 attitude towards competition, 56–57 cashflow crisis approach, 136–137 collaboration with Elon Musk, 110–111 continuation at PayPal under eBay, 295–296 debate over fee transactions, 149–150 deferral to Elton Musk production halt, 154 departure from PayPal, 303 The Diversity Myth, 7 eBay Live plan, 269–270 employee relations, 23 Eric’s concern about reporting to, 114 fight to keep PayPal name, 155 handwriting on wall, 301–302 hiring by Confinity, 15 life after PayPal, 312 management strength, 311 management style, 126, 184, 269 meeting with employees about eBay buyout, 287–288 Meg Whitman’s thanks to, 285 message board proposal, 100–101, 107 move to oust Elon Musk, 157–159 nickname, 32 PayPal banner ads innovation, 46–48 PayPal expenses reduction effort, 170 position at X.com (PayPal), 75 product team meeting at P/X, 117–119 reaction to Eric’s first day, 18 refusal to stop brands survey, 156 response to Eric’s call to break Billpoint, 261–262 “Scotty” promotion suggestion, 30 signoff on Palm application termination, 146 temperament, 46, 184 transaction guarantee rollout, 137–138 “turn off Checkout” tool order, 232 sales. See promotions; upselling Salomon Smith Barney, 236, 239, 244 Sand Hill Road (Menlo Park), 31 scalability problems. See customer service at X.com (PayPal); Oracle/Windows schism at X.com (PayPal) Schumpeter, Joseph, 2, 3 . See also “creative destruction” “Scotty” (James Doohan), 30, 33–34 reason promotion failed, 52 secret weapon. See charity robot SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) accusation of PayPal violation, 242–243, 251 delay of PayPal IPO, 240, 241 .


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 203–231. 37. Kristie Mackrasis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 23, 133, 139, esp. 112–140. 38. Judy O’Neill, “Interview with Paul Baran,” Charles Babbage Institute, OH 182, March 5, 1990, Menlo Park, CA, accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.gtnoise.net/classes/cs7001/fall_2008/readings/baran-int.pdf. 39. Ibid.; see also Stewart Brand, “Founding Father,” Wired 9 (3) (1991), accessed April 15, 2015, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran_pr.html. 40. Brand, “Founding Father.” 41.

New York: Penguin Group, 1992. Odom, William E. The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. O’Hearn, Dennis. “The Consumer Second Economy: Size and Effects.” Soviet Studies 32 (2) (April 1980): 218–234. O’Neill, Judy. “Interview with Paul Baran.” Charles Babbage Institute, OH 182, Menlo Park, CA, March 5, 1990. Accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.gtnoise.net/classes/cs7001/fall_2008/readings/baran-int.pdf. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 1972. O’Shea, Michael. The Brain: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Osokina, Elena. Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941.


Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, bitcoin, Burning Man, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, index card, jimmy wales, junk bonds, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, nuclear paranoia, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, young professional

I think for most people, Silicon Valley is largely a state of mind more than it is a real place—a strip-malled Klondike of billionaires with proprioception issues, clad in khakis in groups of three, awkwardly lumbering across a six-lane traffic artery with a grass median, all to get in on the two-for-one burrito special at Chili’s before the promotion ends next Tuesday. I’ve many happy memories of the Valley. One afternoon, in a long-ago world called Before 9/11, I’d park my car just inside Menlo Park, the Valley’s venture-capital capital, on the other side of Interstate 280, just west of the Sand Hill Road exit. Walking through what seemed to be a Christmas-tree farm, I’d arrive at a chain-link fence with a Department of Energy warning sign, duck through one of its many breaches and sit beside the Stanford Linear Accelerator,* two miles long and operational until 1966.

The mall’s escalator had been removed and dumped onto the parking lot. A guy in a crane was picking it up in his machine’s teeth and flinging it around like it was a pearl necklace—a moment of pure joy, and in a poetic way, a metaphor for up and down class mobility in San Jose, Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Menlo Park. It’s the money that makes the Valley sexy, because there’s otherwise not very much that’s sexy about what goes on there. Tech is tech; cables and routers are cables and routers. But wait. Tesla is sexy. Xapo is kind of sexy. And Houzz is fun. But having said all this, my Bay Area friend Liz continues to write a novel titled Founderfucker, which is about the mothers and daughters of patrician East Coast families going through elaborate rituals to snag socially clueless Valley tech workers with vast amounts of stock—preferably company founders.


Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

Maybe this is what the world would be like in the future—people across nations and cultures all talking about the same fun thing at the same time, with Facebook and BuzzFeed uniting them. Jonah learned that he’d misunderstood Facebook’s point of view when Chris Cox introduced him to Adam Mosseri at a party on the sprawling roof garden of the building Frank Gehry had designed for Facebook in Menlo Park. Mosseri, a tall and unusually open Facebook executive, was in charge of News Feed. His decisions could make or break publishers. “How often do you think things should go viral like the Dress?” Mosseri asked. Jonah was surprised by the question—and by the idea that the frequency of things going viral was up to Mosseri’s team.

The conversation made clear to Jonah that Facebook was worried about something new: losing control. To them, the Dress hadn’t been a goofy triumph: it had been a kind of a bug, something that scared them. The Dress itself was harmless, but the next meme to colonize the entire platform within minutes might not be, and this one had moved too fast for the team in Menlo Park to control. Many of Facebook’s critics were glad to see the platform make this realization: it marked the beginning of a decade in which Facebook would start to realize its own power and try to control it, even if the company’s efforts always seemed to be too little, too late. Jonah saw it differently.


The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

They are making too much money to blow a good thing. The Martini Man adds that this will be the last conversation; the semiconductor company has hired him back at a sizable increase in salary, and he is being transferred within the week to San Diego… Four men in business suits sit around an upstairs table in a Menlo Park restaurant. The mood is one of careful secrecy and almost breathtaking exhilaration. The meeting has been convened to plot the creation of a new company. Among the four of them, there are two master’s degrees in business, a doctorate in computer sciences, and a decade of experience as a corporate treasurer.

The wire is endless, so unless you enjoy heights and perpetually being a breath away from corporate death, you’d best not venture out in the first place. The image of the loner appears throughout most of the research on entrepreneurs. Robert Lorenzini, founder of a silicon refinery, Siltec Corp. of Menlo Park, California, described a successful entrepreneur as “a pragmatic dreamer, a loner, a person willing to take full responsibility for his or her actions.” But one shouldn’t get the impression that entrepreneurs are some kind of devil-may-care business barnstormers. On the contrary, the man or woman out on that wire is purposeful, sure of what he or she is doing.

The members of the venture industry, on the other hand, need one another. Few can (or would) put up all the venture money or have all the technical expertise needed for a new startup. So they create consortiums among themselves swapping information at the monthly WAVC meetings or in the Sun Deck cafeteria at 3000 Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, the home of more than a dozen venture capital firms and the center of the business on the West Coast. Nevertheless, “you can’t really call us a cabal because sometimes we work together and sometimes we compete,” says Thomas Perkins, Kleiner Perkins’s general partner. In the eighties, the venture capital industry has changed, a victim of its own success.


Polaroids From the Dead by Douglas Coupland

dematerialisation, edge city, guns versus butter model, index card, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Because of the rain and his wet shoes, Ben can now de-sock with the rest of the Deadheads without feeling guilty—guilty that his wealth precludes his continued membership in the sixties culture of his youth, an era he now views through an AT&T commercial soft-focus lens: a mutt puppy chewing Crazy Susan’s shawl outside the Avalon Ballroom; sunsets over Daly City viewed from San Bruno, with microdot-freak chatter inside the bus sounding like Charlie Brown’s teachers; nibbling daisy petals in mellow Leandra’s polished redwood Edwardian Kleenex box of a house in Menlo Park; getting naked on Muir Beach. Dead concerts. Without them, the sixties would be extinct. Ben has used his money to follow the Dead around the world over the past years: Cairo, Dijon, Lille, Boulder, Rotterdam…pursuing that era, refusing it permission to die. Ben remembers an old science-fiction movie he once saw, Silent Running, in which Earth had been been nuked and a spaceship—an ark—loaded with seeds and trees, traveled the universe in search of a new planet to call home.


The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gentrification, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, It's morning again in America, jitney, junk bonds, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Skinner box, Southern State Parkway, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Henry I made a kind of fetish of collecting historical buildings­ especially the boyhood homes and workshops of his fellow genius­ inventor-entrepreneur-industrialists. Beginning in the 1920s, he 1 9 8 ... T H R E E C I T I E S acquired the Wright Brothers' boyhood home and the old bike shop in Dayton, Ohio, where they first tinkered with gliders; Thomas Edison's Menlo Park, New Jersey, research lab; the Ohio birthplace of pickle king H.J. Heinz; the Michigan boyhood farmstead of tire mogul Harvey Firestone; and much more, including Ford's own modest birthplace. All were moved to the Dearborn site-along with other miscellaneous pe­ riod buildings : a gristmill, a covered bridge, a stagecoach inn, a one­ room schoolhouse, barns-and reassembled into a sort of village.

. , 258-59 Massachusetts, 21-22, 23, 263-64 Massachusetts, University of, library at, 266-67 Massachusetts Bay Company, 19, 22 Massachusetts State House, 154 mass merchandising, 166-68 mass production, 151-52, 163-66 mass transportation, 86-92 automobiles and, 90-92 decline of, 90-92 Robert Moses and, 99, 100 see also light rail Mayflower, 18-19 Mead, William Rutherford, 63, 64 megalopolis, 15 Mencken, H. L., 207, 210 Menlo Park, N.J. , 199 Mennonites, 23-24 Metesky, George, 12, 13 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y. ), 13 Metropolitan Service District (Portland, Oreg. ), 204-5 Mettowee River Valley, Vt. , 271-72 Mettowee Valley Project, 272 Mexico, 214 Miami, Fla., 126-27, 254 Miami Beach, Fla. , 229 Michigan, 161-62 Midwest, 29, 180 national grid and, 30 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 73 Mills, Robert, 154 Minuit, Peter, 22 Modernism, 57, 59-84, 121, 239, 245 Bauhaus and, 70-71, 76-77 Beaux Arts style and, 62-67 discontinuity and, 250 factory architecture and, 67-69 industrialism and, 60-61 International Style and, 73-81 Postmodernism and, 81-84 Purism and, 72-73 Radiant City concept and, 78-80 and refugees from Nazis, 76-77 relationships and, 250 skyscrapers and, 75 Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo, 77 Moline, Ill., 114 monoculture, 94 "Monopoly" (game), 231 Montesquieu, 152 Monticello ( Virginia), 151, 154 Montreal, Canada, 134, 180, 181, 187 I N D E X Moore Farm ( Vermont), 272 Morgan, J.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

He had tried and failed with Taxi Magic and Cabulous, two investments in rival companies that would have precluded his backing Uber. Now he recognized that Uber, free from the regulation and price controls that governed the operation of yellow cabs, was the larger prize. Benchmark almost scuttled the deal with a practical joke. Kalanick was on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to visit rival Sequoia Capital before a scheduled meeting with Benchmark’s partnership. As they waited for Kalanick to arrive, Gurley and his partner Matt Cohler looked at the Uber app and saw a single Uber car in front of Sequoia’s office a mile away. Because Uber did not yet operate down in Silicon Valley, they guessed this oddly idle car was Kalanick’s ride.

He had met Kalanick in the Market Street office and later persuaded his company to pitch in five million dollars, the initial bond in what would become a close relationship between the investment bank and the startup. Not everyone devoured the pitch. Venture capital firms like Yuri Milner’s DST took a look but passed, reasoning that Kalanick was nothing like the introverted CEOs of Facebook and Google. A few other firms expressed interest, but Kalanick’s clear favorite was the newest sugar daddy on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road: Andreessen Horowitz, the two-year-old firm that a few months before had led the Series B round in Airbnb, making the home-sharing startup a unicorn. The attraction for Kalanick was the same as it had been for Brian Chesky. The firm was led by entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and known for offering favorable terms at muscular valuations.


pages: 336 words: 113,519

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, complexity theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, endowment effect, feminist movement, framing effect, hindsight bias, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, the new new thing, Thomas Bayes, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

For instance, any person’s assessment of probabilities of a killer storm making landfall in 1973 was bound to be warped by the ease with which they recalled the fresh experience of Hurricane Camille. But how, exactly, was that judgment warped? “We thought decision analysis would conquer the world and we would help,” said Danny. The leading decision analysts were clustered around Ron Howard in Menlo Park, California, at a place called the Stanford Research Institute. In the fall of 1973 Danny and Amos flew to meet with them. But before they could figure out exactly how they were going to bring their ideas about uncertainty into the real world, uncertainty intervened. On October 6, the armies of Egypt and Syria—with troops and planes and money from as many as nine other Arab countries—launched an attack on Israel.

On the Golan Heights, a hundred or so Israeli tanks faced fourteen hundred Syrian tanks. Along the Suez Canal, a garrison of five hundred Israeli troops and three tanks were quickly overrun by two thousand Egyptian tanks and one hundred thousand Egyptian soldiers. On a cool, cloudless, perfect morning in Menlo Park, Amos and Danny heard the news of the shocking Israeli losses. They raced to the airport for the first flight back home, so that they might fight in yet another war. * * * * By the time they were finished with the project, they had dreamed up an array of hysterically bland characters for people to evaluate and judge to be more likely lawyers or engineers.


pages: 377 words: 115,122

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

Just as Tony Robbins’s aggressive upselling is OK with his fans because spreading helpful ideas is part of being a good person, and just as HBS expects its students to be talkers because this is seen as a prerequisite of leadership, so have many evangelicals come to associate godliness with sociability. 3 WHEN COLLABORATION KILLS CREATIVITY The Rise of the New Groupthink and the Power of Working Alone I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork … for well I know that in order to attain any definite goal, it is imperative that one person do the thinking and the commanding. —ALBERT EINSTEIN March 5, 1975. A cold and drizzly evening in Menlo Park, California. Thirty unprepossessing-looking engineers gather in the garage of an unemployed colleague named Gordon French. They call themselves the Homebrew Computer Club, and this is their first meeting. Their mission: to make computers accessible to regular people—no small task at a time when most computers are temperamental SUV-sized machines that only universities and corporations can afford.

So if you wanted to replicate the conditions that made Woz so productive, you might point to Homebrew, with its collection of like-minded souls. You might decide that Wozniak’s achievement was a shining example of the collaborative approach to creativity. You might conclude that people who hope to be innovative should work in highly social workplaces. And you might be wrong. Consider what Wozniak did right after the meeting in Menlo Park. Did he huddle with fellow club members to work on computer design? No. (Although he did keep attending the meetings, every other Wednesday.) Did he seek out a big, open office space full of cheerful pandemonium in which ideas would cross-pollinate? No. When you read his account of his work process on that first PC, the most striking thing is that he was always by himself.


The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, centre right, computer age, disinformation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, power law, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, telemarketer

"Have you ever wondered why they can't figure out a way to take people with your talents and supervise you and have you fix things?" "I dunno," Mitnick mumbles, dubious of the idea. "I think they tried that with Poulsen, didn't they?" "Almost but not quite." "I thought he was damn lucky to get a job with SRI [SRI International, a think tank and defense contractor in Menlo Park, California]. If I got a job at that bank [Security Pacific], I wouldn't be here now. I'd probably be rich. I'd probably be driving my Mercedes on the 405 [freeway]." Mitnick starts to say good night. "I just wanted to let you know about that U.S. News & World Report." "This week's edition?" "Yep.

Mitnick seems to have a secret communication channel with Jon Liftman, a journalist Markoff happens to know. "We all thought it was interesting," says Chen. "It was out of the ordinary. We all said, however, that we shouldn't look at it." ■ ■ ■ Markoff calls Robert Berger, chief technology officer of Internex Securities, a tiny Menlo Park, California, Internet provider, and tells him he has a security problem. Markoff explains that Mitnick has broken into his Internex e-mail account, and that "Tsutomu" is working "on tracking it down." Markoff would later say that Shimomura phoned Berger first, and that Markoff phoned as a reporter, and out of concern for his own e-mail.


pages: 440 words: 117,978

Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll

affirmative action, call centre, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, information security, John Markoff, Menlo Park, old-boy network, Paul Graham, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable

Together, the Arpanet, Milnet, and a hundred other networks make up the Internet. There are thousands of university, commercial, and military computers connected through the Internet. Like buildings in a city, each has a unique address; most of these addresses are registered at the Network Information Center (NIC) in Menlo Park, California. Any one computer may have dozens or hundreds of people using it, so individuals as well as computers are registered in the NIC. The NIC’s computers provide a directory: just connect to the NIC and ask for someone, and it’ll tell you where they’re located. They don’t have much luck keeping their database up to date (computer people change jobs often), but the NIC still serves as a good phone directory of computer people.

It took only one phone call to find out that the FBI wasn’t policing the Internet. “Look, kid, did you lose more than a half million dollars?” “Uh, no.” “Any classified information?” “Uh, no.” “Then go away, kid.” Another attempt at rousing the feds had failed. Maybe the Network Information Center would know who policed their net. I called Menlo Park and eventually found Nancy Fischer. To her, the Internet wasn’t just a collection of cables and software. It was a living creature, a brain with neurons extending around the world, into which ten thousand computer users breathed life every hour. Nancy was fatalistic: “It’s a miniature of the society around us.


pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Google In 1998, around the time Cringely and Gates were meeting, things were happening in Silicon Valley – the 1,500 square miles stretching south-east of San Francisco bay, from Palo Alto at its northerly point down to Santa Clara. It was the dot-com boom, and two people who had recently decided to give up their postgraduate studies were running their company from a garage in Menlo Park. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both 25 (both were born in 1973, 18 years after both Gates and Jobs), had become friends at Stanford University while doing their doctorates. They fitted Gladwell’s template perfectly: brilliant thinkers who had honed their computing skills through endless hours of study.

(The PageRank patent is owned by Stanford University, where it was developed; Google is the exclusive licensee.) They became a classic Silicon Valley start-up in summer 1998, maxing out their credit cards to buy equipment, spending almost nothing on office furniture (the tables in their first offices at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue, Menlo Park were doors balanced on carpenters’ timber-sawing stands), and operating in what is commonly known as ‘stealth mode’. Renamed from ‘BackRub’, and almost named ‘The Whatbox’ (they decided it sounded a bit too much like ‘wetbox’, which sounded vaguely porn related), the Google web page first went live in August 1997.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Feeling that his rudimentary knowledge of electricity was holding him back, in 1891 he decided to move to Detroit to take a job as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company. The Edison Illuminating Company was the brainchild of Thomas Edison, America’s most famous inventor. Edison was as close to a celebrity as America had at the time. The Wizard of Menlo Park had invented a dizzying array of world-altering technologies, from the automatic telegraph to the phonograph to the world’s first commercially usable light bulb. Newspapers avidly reported on his every venture. Ford was naturally starstruck. To Ford, Edison’s greatest accomplishment was showing how corporations and business could be a force for good in society.

The only leisure activity that outranks Facebook scrolling is watching television (the average American spends two hours and forty-nine minutes a day in front of the tube).1 For a corporation that represents the culmination of hundreds of years of creative destruction, Facebook has a surprisingly friendly face. For many of its employees, the day begins with a free pickup by one of the company’s luxury vans that shuttle back and forth between San Francisco and Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters or perhaps with a trip on one of the company’s ferries sailing across San Francisco Bay. When employees arrive at Facebook’s offices, they enter a realm that can only be described as a Disneyland for adults—which is no coincidence, given that the company brought in Disney consultants to help design the area.


Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

And he could not have achieved so much without generous financing by some of the era’s richest businessmen—but he made good use of this investment as his Menlo Park laboratory explored many new concept and options, deserving to be seen as a precursor of the corporate R&D institutions whose innovations have done much to create the twentieth century. Edison’s filament of a carbonized cotton sewing thread in a high vacuum gave off steady light in Edison’s first durable light bulb on October 21, 1879, and he demonstrated 100 of his new light bulbs in Menlo Park, New Jersey, on December 31, 1879, by illuminating his laboratory, nearby streets, and the railway station.

GTM Research, June. http://www.greentechmedia.com/research/report/global-pv-demand-outlook-2015-2020. Janick, J. 2002. Ancient Egyptian agriculture and the origins of horticulture. Acta Horticulturae 582:23–39. Jansen, M. B. 2000. The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jehl, F. 1937. Menlo Park Reminiscences. Dearborn, MI: Edison Institute. Jenkins, B. 1993. Properties of Biomass, Appendix to Biomass Energy Fundamentals. Palo Alto, CA: EPRI. Jenkins, R. 1936. Links in the History of Engineering and Technology from Tudor Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jensen, H. 1969.


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The United States successfully detonated its first hydrogen bomb on the Pacific atoll of Bikini in 1952; the Soviets followed suit in Siberia nine months later. 204. Halberstam, D., The Fifties. New York: Villard Books, 1993. 205. The best source of information regarding Chargoff’s numbers, DNA, and the basis of modern biology is Watson, J. D., Hopkins, N. H., Roberts, J. W., et al., Molecular Biology of the Gene. Fourth edition. Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings, 1987. 206. Upton, A. C., “Radiation Carcinogenesis.” In Holland, J. F. and Frei, E., Cancer Medicine. Second edition. Philadelphia: Lea and Freberger, 1982. 207. The author interviewed Linus and Ava Helen Pauling on three occasions during the late 1970s and 1980s and attended several speeches he gave three decades after these events, reflecting on the nuclear fallout struggle.

Morbidity and Mor tality Weekly Report 39 (1990): 529–538; U.S. General Accounting Office, Needle Exchange Programs: Research Suggests Promise as an AIDS Prevention Strategy. GAO/HRD-93–60. Washington, D.C.: House of Representatives, 1993; Kaiser Family Foundation, Needle and Syringe Availability and Exchange for HIV Prevention. Menlo Park: Kaiser Family Foundation, 1992; Vlahov, D., Munoz, A., Anthony, J. C., et al., “Association of drug injection patterns with antibody to Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 among intravenous drug users in Baltimore, Maryland.” American Journal of Epidemiology 132 (1990): 847–856; and Wilson, B.

Evans, R. G. and Stoddart, G. L., “Producing health, consuming health care.” In Evans, R. G., et al., 1994, op. cit. 566. Further, the burden of the uninsured was not spread evenly across the society. See Kaiser Commission on the Future of Medicaid. Health Needs and Medicaid Financing: State Facts. Menlo Park: Kaiser Foundation, 1993; and Erdman, K. and Wolfe, S. M., Poor Health Care for Poor Americans: A Ranking of State Medicaid Programs. Washington, D.C.: Public Health Research Group, 1988. 567. Hay, J. W., Osmond, D. H., and Jacobson, M. A., “Projecting the medical costs of AIDS and ARC in the United States.”


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

We were still profoundly strange. The Valley already had elite pockets, but it was mostly not so rich, and much of it was raunchy and depressing. All of America, including the Valley, retained a slimy coating from the 1970s. Rusty signs with missing blinking lights offered live sex shows just north of Menlo Park, and beleaguered streetwalkers crowded the corners. And yet this was our gathering place. We needed to stay close together, as there was not yet an Internet, but we needed network effects. I remember playing pool at a rough dive bar on El Camino Real, the main drag, and thinking that a hacker in Palo Alto was like a cue ball that spins in a fixed spot after knocking another ball into faraway action.

Joy, Bill juggling Kalman filter Kapor, Mitch karate Kay, Alan Kelly, Kevin Kemp, Jack Khan, Ali Akbar Kickstarter Kim, David Kim, Scott Kinect Kinect Hacks King, Stephen kitchen design Klein Bottle Knitting Factory Knuth, Don Kollin, Joel Kotik, Gordy Krueger, Myron Kuiper Belt Kurzweil, Ray Kyoto Prize LaBerge, Stephen Langer, Susanne language translation Lanier, Ellery (father) death of death of Lilly and dome and mysticism and PhD studies and science writing and teaching career and Lanier, first wife divorce from Lanier, Lena Lanier, Lilibell (daughter,) Lanier, Lilly (mother) death of laser procedure on retina lasers Lasko, Ann latency Lawnmower Man, The (film) Learning Company Leary, Timothy Lectiones Mathematicae LEEP Lennon, John Lennon, Sean Leonard, Brett Levitt, David Levy, Steven libertarians licensing light pen lightweight optics limerence links, one- vs. two-way Linn, Roger LISP Lissajous patterns “Little Albert” experiment lobster avatar Los Alamos Los Angeles LSD Lucas, George lucid dreaming Lumière brothers Macedonians machine learning “Machine Stops, The” (Forster) machine vision Macintosh computers operating system MacIntyre, Blair Macromedia Macromind magazine stands magic magical thinking magicians magic window magnetic fields malware Manchurian Candidate, The (film) Mandala mapping marijuana markets Mars Marxism mass media Mateevitsi, Victor mathematics video games and Mathews, Max Matrix films Matsushita Mattel MAX design tool MAX visual programming tool McDowall, Ian McFerrin, Bobby McGreevy, Mike McGrew, Dale McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan ramp McMillen, Keith MDMA (Ecstasy) measurement medicine. See also surgical simulation mega-octopus Mekas brothers memory memory palaces Menke, Joseph Menlo Park Metropolis magazine Mexican-Americans Mexico Michael (gorilla) MicroCosm project micro- or nanopayments Microsoft Microsoft Research Faculty Summit Midas, King military contracts mind control Minecraft Minority Report (film) Minsky, Margaret Minsky, Marvin MIT Media Lab Mitchelson, Marvin mixed reality term coined mobile phones, cheap Möbius-Orwellian tech talk modeless computation modes molecules Molici, Dave Mondo 2000 magazine monitors Monk, Thelonius Montessori school Monty Python Moog, Bob Moog synthesizer Moondust (computer game) Moore’s Law Moravec, Hans Morley, Ruth Morrow, Charlie Mortgage-backed securities motion capture suits motion parallax motion sensing motor cortex mouse, computer MSNBC Mu, Queen multiperson experiences multiperson organizationas multitouch designs multiview display Muppets music royalties and musical instruments musicians music technology music videos Musk, Elon mystery mysticism MythBusters Mythical Man-Month, The (Brooks) Naimark, Michael Naked Lunch (Burroughs?)


pages: 502 words: 124,794

Nexus by Ramez Naam

artificial general intelligence, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, crowdsourcing, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Ken Thompson, low earth orbit, mandatory minimum, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, the scientific method, upwardly mobile, VTOL

Wats breathed a sigh of relief and tossed the tester into the garbage. Someday he'd pay for his crimes. But not today. Saturday 2040.02.18 : 2108 hours Kade picked Sam up just past nine in a Siemens autocab. The little plastic and carbon fiber car drove them south and east along the 101, past SFO, past San Mateo, past Menlo Park and Palo Alto and Stanford, and the venture capital hub of the world. She kept Kade engaged in conversation. She asked about his work, his friends, the party, the music he listened to, when he'd first tried Nexus. He answered everything except the questions on Nexus, and asked his own about her, her life, New York, her work in data archeology.

Sam spun to present a clear shot on the woman to the shooters, heard the thwap of a silenced tranq dart, and a moment later felt the grasp around her neck loosen and Ilya's limp body crumple to the ground. Watson Cole came up for air under the Dumbarton Bridge. He slid his body slowly into the shallows where it came to ground in Menlo Park, gradually letting just his face rise above the level of the water. With luck, the bridge would shield him from any cameras, IR or visual, searching for him from above. He'd swum more than six miles underwater, an exhausting feat in the best of times. He needed time to let his blood hyperoxygenate again.


pages: 410 words: 120,234

Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings by Earl Swift

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, COVID-19, data acquisition, Internet Archive, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, zero-sum game

His bosses were cool to the idea, so Shoemaker pursued the study himself, before and after the agency abandoned its uranium project and transferred him to its offices in Menlo Park, California. Soon he invented a term for what he was doing—astrogeology—and, although he got a lot of teasing from his colleagues, came up with the first procedures for mapping the moon’s mineral makeup. In 1960, when, as his colleague Don Wilhelm put it, the Survey “had too little money and too many geologists, whereas the reverse seemed to be true at NASA,” the space agency underwrote the creation of an Astrogeologic Studies Unit at Menlo Park, with Shoemaker its head. Two years later, in the wake of JFK’s challenge to the nation, his tiny squad expanded into a full-fledged branch of the Survey.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

But it was Brush who would be forgotten. • • • RECORDED HISTORY WOULD be kinder, perhaps too kind, to an equally youthful inventor thirty or so miles removed from the bustling thoroughfares of New York City. In the New Jersey township of Raritan, Thomas Alva Edison had set up a laboratory in the Menlo Park section of town. At the peak of Brush’s acclaim, Edison was working on experiments in incandescent lighting, the lightbulb. An arc lighting system, while extremely bright, required daily maintenance and replacement of the carbon rods—it was also unstable at times, throwing off sparks from its high-voltage wires.

In addition, unlike the arc light system, where every light on a wire needed to be powered on at the same time, Edison’s system planned for switches, which would allow an individual lightbulb to be turned on or off, on demand. Edison imagined a power grid with centralized power generation and metered use. To top it off, Edison went with the costly option of underground wires. By the end of 1881, the Edison lighting system existed in prototype form at Menlo Park as his company was hard at work digging underground around the nexus of American finance: Wall Street. Edison then purchased a building on Pearl Street to serve as the site for a central power station for the grid. Dismayed residents soon complained about the endless drilling, especially for such a speculative purpose.

Chapter 15: Light inventor named Charles Brush: “Charles Francis Brush,” Harper’s Weekly, July 26, 1890. known as arc lighting: “The Brush Electric Lighting,” Scientific American 44, no. 274 (April 2, 1881). “within a two-mile radius”: Ibid. six thousand individual lights: Ibid. “monopolized the field”: Ibid. Menlo Park section: Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2004), 52. “unstable at times”: “The Risks of Electric Lighting,” New York Times, March 26, 1882; Jonnes, Empires of Light, 142–43. monthly $75 paycheck: Robert E.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

The machine was a primitive object, but it was built as a small-scale computer around a microprocessor. It was the basis for the design of Apple I, then of Apple II, the first commercially successful micro-computer, realized in the garage of their parents’ home by two young school drop-outs, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, in a truly extraordinary saga that has by now become the founding legend of the Information Age. Launched in 1976, with three partners and $91,000 capital, Apple Computers had by 1982 reached $583 million in sales, ushering in the age of diffusion of computer power. IBM reacted quickly: in 1981 it introduced its own version of the microcomputer, with a brilliant name: the Personal Computer (PC), which became in fact the generic name for microcomputers.

One such gathering was the Home Brew Computer Club, whose young visionaries (including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak) would go on to create in the following years up to 22 companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Comenco, and North Star. It was the club’s reading, in Popular Electronics, of an article reporting Ed Roberts’s Altair machine which inspired Wozniak to design a microcomputer, Apple I, in his Menlo Park garage in the summer of 1976. Steve Jobs saw the potential, and together they founded Apple, with a $91,000 loan from an Intel executive, Mike Markkula, who came in as a partner. At about the same time Bill Gates founded Microsoft to provide the operating system for microcomputers, although he located his company in 1978 in Seattle to take advantage of the social contacts of his family.

Kelley, Maryellen (1986) “Programmable automation and the skill question: a re-interpretation of the cross-national evidence”, Human Systems Management, 6. —— (1990) “New process technology, job design and work organization: a contingency model”, American Sociological Review, 55 (April): 191–208. Kelly, Kevin (1995) Out of Control: the Rise of Neo-biological Civilization, Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley. Kendrick, John W. (1961) Productivity Trends in the United States, National Bureau of Economic Research, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —— (1973) Postwar Productivity Trends in the United States, 1948–69, National Bureau of Economic Research New York: Columbia University Press. —— (1984) International Comparisons of Productivity and Causes of the Slowdown, Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. —— and Grossman, E. (1980) Productivity in the United States: Trends and Cycles, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

But it was Brush who would be forgotten. • • • RECORDED HISTORY WOULD be kinder, perhaps too kind, to an equally youthful inventor thirty or so miles removed from the bustling thoroughfares of New York City. In the New Jersey township of Raritan, Thomas Alva Edison had set up a laboratory in the Menlo Park section of town. At the peak of Brush’s acclaim, Edison was working on experiments in incandescent lighting, the lightbulb. An arc lighting system, while extremely bright, required daily maintenance and replacement of the carbon rods—it was also unstable at times, throwing off sparks from its high-voltage wires.

In addition, unlike the arc light system, where every light on a wire needed to be powered on at the same time, Edison’s system planned for switches, which would allow an individual lightbulb to be turned on or off, on demand. Edison imagined a power grid with centralized power generation and metered use. To top it off, Edison went with the costly option of underground wires. By the end of 1881, the Edison lighting system existed in prototype form at Menlo Park as his company was hard at work digging underground around the nexus of American finance: Wall Street. Edison then purchased a building on Pearl Street to serve as the site for a central power station for the grid. Dismayed residents soon complained about the endless drilling, especially for such a speculative purpose.

Chapter 15: Light inventor named Charles Brush: “Charles Francis Brush,” Harper’s Weekly, July 26, 1890. known as arc lighting: “The Brush Electric Lighting,” Scientific American 44, no. 274 (April 2, 1881). “within a two-mile radius”: Ibid. six thousand individual lights: Ibid. “monopolized the field”: Ibid. Menlo Park section: Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2004), 52. “unstable at times”: “The Risks of Electric Lighting,” New York Times, March 26, 1882; Jonnes, Empires of Light, 142–43. monthly $75 paycheck: Robert E.


pages: 141 words: 46,879

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

Boeing 747, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, job satisfaction, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, out of africa, phenotype

Ridley, Matt, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Macmillan, 1994). Sagan, Carl, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980). and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (New York: Random House, 1992). Tinbergen, Nike, The Herring Gull's World (New York: Harper & Row, 1960). , Curious Naturalists (London: Penguin, 1974). Trivers, Robert, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, Calif.: BenjaminCummings, 1985). Watson, James D., The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York: Athenewn, 1968). Weiner, Jonathan, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (New York: Knopf, 1994). Wickler. Wolfgang, Mimicry in Plants and Animals, R.


pages: 190 words: 46,977

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding

Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine

Like Elon, the two men had just made millions by starting their own company, NuvoMedia—which produced one of the world’s first handheld e-readers in 1998. They sold their start-up two years later for $187 million. ROAD TRIP ALERT! At this point, Tesla Motors was located in a run-down 1960s office building, occupying an office just big enough for a couple of desks. You can drive past Tesla’s humble beginnings at 845 Oak Grove Avenue, Menlo Park, California. And just like Elon, instead of running off to buy an island, Marc and Martin went in search of a problem to solve. It didn’t take long to settle on oil. Marc had seen firsthand oil’s influence on politics in the Middle East. And in the United States, what was the main use for oil?


pages: 420 words: 143,881

The Blind Watchmaker; Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins

Boeing 747, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, phenotype, random walk, silicon-based life, Steven Pinker, the long tail

Thompson, S. P. (1910) Calculus Made Easy. London: Macmillan. Trivers, R. L. (1985) Social Evolution. Menlo Park: Benjamin-Cummings. Turner, J. R. G. (1983) ‘The hypothesis that explains mimetic resemblance explains evolution’: the gradualist-saltationist schism. In M. Grene (ed.) Dimensions of Darwinism, pp. 129–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Valen, L. (1973) A new evolutionary law. Evolutionary Theory, 1: 1–30. Watson, J. D. (1976) Molecular Biology of the Gene. Menlo Park: Benjamin-Cummings. Williams, G. C. (1966) Adaptation and Natural Selection. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.


pages: 675 words: 141,667

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

Lukasik, “Why the Arpanet Was Built,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33 (2011): 4–21. 16 Paul Baran, electrical engineer, oral history interview by David Hochfelder, 1999, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. See also Paul Baran, oral history interview by Judy O’Neill, March 5, 1990, Menlo Park, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 17 Baran interview, IEEE History Center, 1999. 18 In this era, a “small” computer was about the size of a refrigerator. 19 Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 59–69. 20 See Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010); Thomas Haigh, “Software in the 1960s as Concept, Service, and Product,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 24 (2002): 5–13; Martin Campbell-Kelly, “The History of the History of Software,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29 (2007): 40–51. 21 Stephen D.

Russell, April 9, 2011, IEEE Computer Society History Committee, available from http://www.computer.org/comphistory/pubs/2012–03-russell.pdf. Baran, Paul. Oral history interview by David Hochfelder, October 24, 1999, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Baran, Paul. Oral history interview by Judy E. O’Neill, March 5, 1990, Menlo Park, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Cerf, Vinton. Oral history interview by Judy E. O’Neill, April 24, 1990, Reston, Virginia. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Crocker, Steve. Oral history interview by Judy E. O’Neill, October 24, 1991, Glenwood, Maryland.


Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

C. 196 I. "Special Considerations of the Individual as a User, Genera- tor, and Retriever of Information." AmerIcan Documentation I 2, no. 2: I2I- 2 5. . 1962. "AugmentIng Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework." Report to the Director of Information SCIences, Air Force Office of ScientIfic Re- search. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, October. . I963. "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect." In V,stas in Information Handling, edited by P. W. Howerton and D. C. Weeks, I: 1-29. Washington, D.C.: Spartan. . 1973. "Design Considerations for Knowledge Workshop Terminals."

Proceedings of the AFIPS Office Automation Conference. San Fran- cisco, April 5 -7: 279-90. . I988. "The Augmented Knowledge Workshop." In A HIstory of Personal Workstations, edited by A. Goldberg, pp. 187-232. New York: ACM Press. , et al. 1970. Advanced Intel/ect-Augmentation TechnIques. Final report to NASA (Contract NASI-7897). Menlo Park, Calif.: SRI. Works C,ted 267 , and W. K. English. 1968. "A Research Center for Augmenting Human In- tellect." In Proceedings of the AFIPS I968 Fal/ Joint Computer Conference 33, pp. 395-4 10 . Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books. , R. W. Watson, and J. C. Norton. 1973. "The Augmented Knowledge Work- shop."


From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

It is the difference between consumer goods and capital goods. Oracle (founded in Belmont, California, in 1977) was the most successful of three relational database firms that emerged around that time in Northern California. The other two were Relational Technology Inc., in Alameda, and Relational Database Systems, in Menlo Park. All three were near IBM’s San Jose Research Laboratory, where the pioneering research on relational databases had been done in the early 1970s. The technology had diffused from IBM through the University of California at Berkeley to the new firms. As time went on, Northern California fostered other producers of relational database software (including Sybase, Illustra, and Unify) and makers of complementary products (e.g., Gupta Technologies).

Cook’s undergraduate education was in economics and mathematics. After receiving an MBA degree from Harvard in 1976, Cook got his formative professional experience at Procter & Gamble, where he spent 4 years as a marketer for Crisco cooking fat—an experience to which he later attributed his strong customer focus.39 After a 3-year spell in the Menlo Park office of the management consultancy Bain and Company, he resigned to form a software company. Cook credits his decision to go into personal finance software to the experience of seeing his wife struggle to pay household bills. In 1983, home accounting software was already a well-established software category with dozens of packages on the market, including the market leader, Continental Software’s Home Accountant.


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The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

other paths remain open: As resistance in a parallel circuit system increases—when, for example, you plug five power strips, each containing five power cords, into one power strip and plug that into a single wall outlet—current actually increases. This can lead to unexpected conflagrations! This is why, when you were eight and attending mandatory fire safety classes, they urged you not to plug too much stuff into a single outlet. flickered to light in 1882: Technically, his first actual grid was the one he built to light his Menlo Park laboratory, but Pearl Street was the first public installation. contemporary 15-watt bulb: If you have seen a vintage “Edison” incandescent in a store or hanging in your favorite bar, you know the relative brightness of these bulbs fairly well. They were dim enough that building codes demanding lightwells were not changed until well into the 1940s, when fluorescent bulbs became more readily available.

competing streetcar lines: According to Munson (2005, p. 32), in 1887 Edison had sold 121 DC central stations, and George Westinghouse, in his first year of business and Edison’s main competitor, was working on 68. A year later, in 1888, Edison had installed a total of 44,000 new bulbs, while Westinghouse had installed more than that number (48,000) in October 1888 alone. By 1889, a mere decade after Edison’s first viewing of electric bulbs strung in parallel at Menlo Park, Westinghouse had generators running more than 350,000 AC-powered bulbs. 125 cycles per second: Hughes (1983), 128. machines that used it: Munson (2005), 43, and Schroeder (1986), 530–31. “polyphase and then the reverse”: Hughes (1983), 122. One remarkable thing about Hughes’s account of the early processes of electrification is his care in showing the effects that things, rather than people, have on systems design and infrastructural trajectories, including things like business structures, previous investments, little machines, and materials.


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Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

On top of all that, Brand’s first version of the cult catalog included Brautigan’s famous poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” next to a picture of a nude couple with libertarian amounts of pubic hair on display. The concept worked, and the Whole Earth Catalog became a runaway success. Brand and his wife, Lois, had started off selling a print run of a thousand copies out of their Menlo Park home. Version one retailed for $5. They hired staff as their readership, and the subscriptions to the catalog and its supplements, grew exponentially. Brand produced six different editions of the catalog, published every half year, and nine quarterly supplements in total that were much shorter.

story=31, cached on May 30, 2008. 32.Quoted in Katherine Fulton, “How Stewart Brand Learns,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, November 30, 1994, 40. 33.Quoted in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 79. 34.Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 34. 35.Ibid., 35. 36.The Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1971), 316. 37.See the preface of every Whole Earth publication, all catalogs and supplements. 38.Michael Rossman, On Learning and Social Change (New York: Random House, 1972), 109. 39.Ibid., 203. 40.Ibid., 113. 41.Ibid., 260–61. 42.Ibid., 262. 43.Stewart Brand, “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox,” Harper’s 247, no. 1482 (November 1973): 20. 44.For more details, see Bateson’s short biography in Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (New York: Dutton, 1978), xiii. 45.Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1972), xi. 46.Ibid., 481.


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The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, feminist movement, Gregor Mendel, invention of agriculture, language acquisition, Menlo Park, phenotype, rent control, the long tail, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, University of East Anglia, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

, Human Reproductive Behavior, ed. L. Betzig, M. Borgehoff Mulder and P. Turke, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 153–60 Budiansky, S., 1992, The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, William Morrow, New York Bull, J. J., 1983, The Evolution of Sex-determining Mechanisms, Benjamin-Cummings, Menlo Park, California —1987, ‘Sex-determining mechanisms: an Evolutionary Perspective’, The Evolution of Sex and its Consequences, ed. S. C. Stearns, Birkhauser, Basel, pp. 93–115 Bull, J. J., and Bulmer, M. G., 1981, ‘The Evolution of XY Females in Mammals’, Heredity, 47:347–65 —and Charnov, E. L., 1985, ‘On Irreversible Evolution’, Evolution, 39:1149–55 Burley, N., 1981, ‘Sex Ratio Manipulation and Selection for Attractiveness’, Science, 211:721:–2 Burt, A. and Bell, G., 1987, ‘Mammalian Chiasma Frequencies as a Test of Two Theories of Recombination’, Nature, 326:803–5 Buss, D., 1989, ‘Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12:1–49 —1992, ‘Mate Preference Mechanisms: Consequences for Partner Choice and Intrasexual Competition’, The Adapted Mind, ed.

., 1975, The Homosexual Matrix, Signet, New York Trivers, R. L., 1971, ‘The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism’, Quarterly Review of Biology, 46:35–57 —1972, ‘Parental Investment and Sexual Selection’, Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, ed. B. Campbell, Aldine-Atherton, Chicago, pp. 136–79 —1985, Social Evolution, Benjamin-Cummings, Menlo Park, California —1991, ‘Deceit and Self-deception: The Relationship between Communication and Consciousness’, Man and Beast Revisited, ed. M. H. Robinson and L. Tiger, Smithsonian, Washington, DC, pp. 175–91 —and Willard, D., 1973, ‘Natural Selection of Parental Ability to Vary the Sex-ratio of Offspring’, Science, 179:90–91 Troy, S. and Elgar, M.


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The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Sequoia, for its part, was so eager to get close to them that partner Roelof Botha willingly accepted the idea. The boys hatched a plan. On the appointed day, they overslept. They were supposed to meet at 8 A.M. Botha called at 8:05—“Where are you guys?” Zuckerberg and Andrew McCollum, his Wirehog partner, rushed over to Sequoia’s swanky offices on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road in pajama bottoms and T-shirts. Though they said they’d overslept, it was deliberate. “It was actually supposed to be worse,” says Zuckerberg. “We won’t even go there.” Then, as the stiff but attentive partners of Sequoia looked on, Zuckerberg made his presentation. He showed ten slides.

One of Chris Hughes’s friends at Harvard’s Kirkland House was Olivia Ma, whose father, Chris, was a senior manager for acquisitions and investments at the Washington Post Company. Ma’s daughter urged him to take a look at Thefacebook, and between Christmas and New Year’s of 2004 he took Zuckerberg to a Sunday lunch in Menlo Park, near Facebook’s offices in Palo Alto. The Post was already an investor in Tribe.net, and Ma found Thefacebook enticing because of its focus on a promising demographic—college students. He also immediately found himself impressed with Zuckerberg. “I concluded in that first lunch that the key to Mark is that he is a psychologist,” says Ma.


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Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In 1882, Edison’s state-of-the-art machinery converted less than 2.5 percent of the heat energy in the coal into electricity.5 For comparison, some modern coal-fired power plants, using “ultra-supercritical” technology, can convert nearly half of the coal’s heat energy into electric power.6 As for its size, the Pearl Street plant was a midget by modern standards. Edison’s first power plant produced 600,000 watts, or the equivalent of about 804 horsepower.7 That’s only a bit more output than a 2009 Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, which comes screaming out of the factory with a 620-horsepower engine.8 PHOTO 4 The Wizard of Menlo Park next to his original dynamo at Orange, New Jersey, 1906 Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-93698. Though the scale of what happened at 255–257 Pearl Street may seem downright puny, the conveniences and necessities of the modern world—lights, air conditioning, television, heart monitors, cell phones, iPods, and a panoply of other gizmos—were all made possible by the work that Edison pioneered at those two long-gone buildings near the southern tip of Manhattan.

His total cost for that power capacity (in late 2009, the Briggs and Stratton units cost $1,999.99 each) would be about $120,000.55 That works out to about $0.20 per watt. The result: a 105-fold improvement over the costs Edison faced when he built the Pearl Street station. Indeed, if the Wizard of Menlo Park were still around, he could buy all the cheap generating capacity he wanted. And with an Internet connection and a credit card, he could even get free shipping. CHAPTER 6 If Oil Didn’t Exist, We’d Have to Invent It AMIDST ALL THE RHETORIC about the evils of oil, the evils of OPEC, the claims that we are “addicted” to oil, that oil fosters terrorism, that we can “win the oil endgame,” or that oil is killing the planet, the simple, unavoidable truth is that using oil makes us rich.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

the headline screamed. facebook under fire was the Fox News chyron. Facebook denied the allegations, but Zuckerberg sensed that this was a crisis to be managed, and he turned to Thiel to help him. On Wednesday, May 18, a group of sixteen prominent right-wing media personalities were summoned to Menlo Park for a meeting. They included talk show hosts Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and Dana Perino; the presidents of the Tea Party Patriots, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation; and a handful of others. Officially, they were there to see Zuckerberg and Sandberg, but Thiel was the reason many of them had made the trip.

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake,” he’d later tell Congress when called to answer questions about the ways that Facebook had been used to manipulate the election campaign. But in the moment, the company denied that it was helping to spread misinformation, while downplaying the extent of the Russian government’s involvement. Two months after the meeting in Menlo Park, Thiel formally endorsed Trump, becoming the star of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Then, in mid-October, just days after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexual assault, Thiel donated $1 million to Trump’s campaign. The move helped turn a tide of negative press and added to the coffers of a campaign that would buy a barrage of targeted Facebook advertisements as part of a voter suppression strategy designed to discourage potential Clinton supporters.


pages: 1,758 words: 342,766

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices) by Steve McConnell

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, continuous integration, data acquisition, database schema, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, General Magic , global macro, Grace Hopper, haute cuisine, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Menlo Park, no silver bullet, off-by-one error, Perl 6, place-making, premature optimization, revision control, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, slashdot, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, statistical model, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, web application

A Discipline for Software Engineering. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Chapter 5 of this book describes Humphrey's Probe method, which is a technique for estimating work at the individual developer level. Conte, S. D., H. E. Dunsmore, and V. Y. Shen. Software Engineering Metrics and Models. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1986. Chapter 6 contains a good survey of estimation techniques, including a history of estimation, statistical models, theoretically based models, and composite models. The book also demonstrates the use of each estimation technique on a database of projects and compares the estimates to the projects' actual lengths.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, 1992. Grady describes lessons learned from establishing a software-measurement program at Hewlett-Packard and tells you how to establish a software-measurement program in your organization. Conte, S. D., H. E. Dunsmore, and V. Y. Shen. Software Engineering Metrics and Models. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1986. This book catalogs current knowledge of software measurement circa 1986, including commonly used measurements, experimental techniques, and criteria for evaluating experimental results. Basili, Victor R., et al. 2002. "Lessons learned from 25 years of process improvement: The Rise and Fall of the NASA Software Engineering Laboratory," Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering.

International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 27, no. 4: 337–47. [bib36entry71] Böhm, C., and G.Jacopini. 1966. “"Flow Diagrams, Turing Machines and Languages with Only Two Formation Rules."” Communications of the ACM 9, no. 5 (5): 366–71. [bib36entry72] Booch,Grady. 1987. Software Engineering with Ada, 2d ed. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings. [bib36entry73] Booch,Grady. 1994. Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications, 2d ed. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley. [bib36entry74] Booth,Rick. 1997. Inner Loops : A Sourcebook for Fast 32-bit Software Development. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley. [bib36entry75] Boundy,David. 1991.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Main Street: The symbol of the real economy of workers paid hourly or monthly and sealed off from the circular loops of WALL STREET moneymaking. Perhaps the street where you live, Main Street is the site of local businesses and jobs. Silicon Valley: A symbol of the high-tech entrepreneurial economy, centered in Santa Clara County, California, and largely funded by venture capital from SAND HILL ROAD in Palo Alto and Menlo Park. The high-tech economy is increasingly based on INFORMATION THEORY, which governs its infrastructure of communications and computing, particularly software. Silicon Valley sustains both MAIN STREET and WALL STREET by supplying them with new technology. Through Wall Street, Silicon Valley provides Main Street with opportunities for sharing in the equity of the ascendant sectors of the world economy.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

The noted science-fiction writer William Gibson, a favorite of hackers and techies, said in a 1999 radio interview (though apparently not for the first time): “The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.”1 Nearly two decades later—though the potential now exists for most of us, including the very poor, to participate in informed decision making as to its distribution and even as to bans on use of certain technologies—Gibson’s observation remains valid. I make my living thinking about the future and discussing it with others, and am privileged to live in what to most is the future. I drive an amazing Tesla Model S electric vehicle. My house, in Menlo Park, close to Stanford University, is a Passive House, extracting virtually no electricity from the grid and expending minimal energy on heating or cooling. My iPhone is cradled with electronic sensors that I can place against my chest to generate a detailed electrocardiogram to send to my doctors, from anywhere on Earth.* Many of the entrepreneurs and researchers I talk with about breakthrough technologies, such as artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, are building a better future at a breakneck pace.


pages: 220

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, credit crunch, David Heinemeier Hansson, Elon Musk, fail fast, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, web application

I had read the over-the-top stories on the blogs—how this was the event where deals were made, where companies were founded, invested in, and acquired. I’d also read about how people passed out and how the police were called. It sounded like fun. The party had grown so big that it was now held on VC firm August Capital’s giant outdoor deck on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. I had never been to Sand Hill Road. I knew it was 69 Page 69 Svane c04.tex V3 - 10/28/2014 7:36 P.M. S TA R TU P L A N D renowned, but didn’t know what to expect. By this point I did know that I didn’t know anything about how the Valley worked. I had been in the city a few days for meetings and drove down to Sand Hill Road.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

During the next two years, literally hundreds of small firms entered the microcomputer software business, and Microsoft was by no means the most prominent. The Altair 8800, and the add-on boards and software that were soon available for it, transformed hobby electronics in a way not seen since the heyday of radio. In the spring of 1975, for example, the “Homebrew Computer Club” was established in Menlo Park, on the edge of Silicon Valley. Besides acting as a swap shop for computer components and programming tips, it provided a forum for the computer-hobbyist and computer-liberation cultures to meld. During the first quarter of 1975, MITS received over $1 million in orders for the Altair 8800 and launched its first “worldwide” conference.

While just a silly made-up word to most users, the original term was indicative of the complex math behind Page and Brin’s creation, as well as of the large numbers (in terms of web indexing and searches) that their search tool would later attain. In 1998 Page and Brin launched Google Inc. in a friend’s Menlo Park garage. Early the following year, they moved the small company to offices in Palo Alto. By the early 2000s Google had gained a loyal following, and thereafter it rapidly rose to become the leading web search service. Taking $25 million in loans from leading Silicon Valley venture-capital firms to refine the technology, hire more staff, and greatly extend the infrastructure (the ever-expanding number of servers), the two founders were forced to hire a professional CEO, Eric Schmidt, early in 2001.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Hamming, R. W Introduction to Applied Numerical Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Hankins, Thomas L. Science and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Harel, David. Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1987. Harman, Willis. Global Mind Change: The New Age Revolution in the Way We Think. New York: Warner Books, 1988. Harmon, Paul and David King. Expert Systems: Artificial Intelligence in Business. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1985. Harre, Rom, ed. American Behaviorial Scientist: Computation and the Mind.

The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1944. Schön, Donald A. Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987. Schorr, Herbert and Alain Rappaport, eds. Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 1989. Schrödinger, Erwin. What Is Life? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Schull, Jonathan. “Are Species Intelligent?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13:1 (1990). Schulmeyer, G. Gordon. Zero Defect Software. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. Schwartz, Lillian E The Computer Artist’s Handbook: Concepts, Techniques, and Applications.


pages: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

An introduction to ROC analysis. Pattern Recognition Letters, 27(8), 861–874. Fawcett, T., & Provost, F. (1996). Combining data mining and machine learning for effective user profiling. In Simoudis, Han, & Fayyad (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 8–13. Menlo Park, CA. AAAI Press. Fawcett, T., & Provost, F. (1997). Adaptive fraud detection. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 1 (3), 291–316. Fayyad, U., Piatetsky-shapiro, G., & Smyth, P. (1996). From data mining to knowledge discovery in databases. AI Magazine, 17, 37–54. Frank, A., & Asuncion, A. (2010).

: Trick Questions, Zen-like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You Need to Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy. Little, Brown and Company. Provost, F., & Fawcett, T. (1997). Analysis and visualization of classifier performance: Comparison under imprecise class and cost distributions. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-97), pp. 43–48 Menlo Park, CA. AAAI Press. Provost, F., & Fawcett, T. (2001). Robust classification for imprecise environments. Machine learning, 42(3), 203–231. Provost, F., Fawcett, T., & Kohavi, R. (1998). The case against accuracy estimation for comparing induction algorithms. In Shavlik, J. (Ed.), Proceedings of ICML-98, pp. 445–453 San Francisco, CA.


pages: 495 words: 144,101

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, bank run, barriers to entry, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, creative destruction, desegregation, feminist movement, financial independence, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing, urban renewal, We are as Gods, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Whether this set of ideas transcends or represents yet another iteration of what Donald Worster called the dialectic of “arcadian” and “imperialist” ecology is an important question to explore. Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977/1994). 47. Stewart Brand, diary entries dated July 9, 1968 and August 16, 1968, Stewart Brand Papers, Stanford University Special Collections. 48. The Last Whole Earth Catalog (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1971), 185. The catalogue included only books deemed either “useful as a tool” or “relevant to independent education,” making mention tantamount to endorsement. It also recommended the A Is A Directory and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (344). The Atlas Shrugged excerpt was from a speech by Rand villain Floyd Ferris, in which he tells Hank Rearden, “One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Kyle, Richard. The New Age Movement in American Culture. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995. Lassiter, Matthew. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1971. Lerner, Abba P. “Capitalism and Freedom.” American Economic Review 53, no. 3 (1963): 458–60. Lichtenstein, Nelson, ed. American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Loomis, Mildred J.


pages: 678 words: 148,827

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, classic study, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, impulse control, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, overview effect, Paradox of Choice, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

Quotes aside, considering the strides we are making toward equality in this generation, I take responsibility for using more inclusive language whenever I can, and I hope this book reflects that intention. In essence, I hope everyone reading this book feels a sense of belonging, unconditional positive regard, and a sense of common humanity. Preface On June 8, 1970, a warm summer day in Menlo Park, California, Abraham Maslow was furiously writing in his notebook. His mind was full of so many theories and ideas about the higher reaches of human nature, including a theory he had been developing for the past few years: Theory Z. His wife, Bertha, lounged a few steps away by the pool at their home.

The way I feel now, I just don’t feel up to writing all the things I feel I ought to, the world needs, my duties. Wouldn’t mind dying as a result, but I just don’t have the stamina to do them. So the thought is save it all in little memos in these journals & the right person to come will know what I mean & why it must be done.10 On that warm, sunny day in Menlo Park, on June 8, 1970, Maslow put down his notepad, and with great frustration, he got up to do his daily exercise. He did not want to leave his work, even for a second. As he slowly started to jog, his wife, Bertha, wondered why he seemed to be moving in such an odd way.11 Just as she was about to ask whether he was all right, Maslow collapsed.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

I am not aware of much sober scholarship on this particular transition from East Coast government to Silicon Valley private business, although much of the dated rhetoric that pits state against corporations can be found in popular accounts, such as Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: Harper Business, 1999), and L. Gordon Crovitz, “Who Really Invented the Internet?” Wall Street Journal (July 22, 2012), https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444464304577539063008406518. 28. Judy O’Neill, “Interview with Paul Baran,” Charles Babbage Institute, OH 182 (February 5, 1999), Menlo Park, CA, accessed September 15, 2017, http://www.gtnoise.net/classes/cs7001/fall_2008/readings/baran-int.pdf. 29. Tara Abraham, Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 30. Stewart Brand, “Founding Father,” Wired 9, no. 3 (1991), http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran_pr.html. 31.

The work of child pornography detection relies on the discursive and bodily collaboration between human and machine, as “elite content reviewers”18 make specific decisions to escalate cases toward arrest. This form of content review extends policing into extrajudicial realms. Content reviewers, at a certain scale, view photographs as empirical data to generate evidence in reporting cases to law enforcement. For example, in one visit to Facebook’s main campus in Menlo Park, California, in the spring of 2014, I shadowed some of the staff on the Community Operations team. Community Operations is one of several entities at Facebook that deal with child exploitation issues, alongside Trust and Safety and Marketing managers. I sat at a long conference table in a sunny boardroom with Joan and Rhea, and a third manager, Mona, videoconferencing in from Dublin.


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

In the fall of 1969, while college campuses thundered with the sound of protests, ARPANET went live for the first time, establishing a connection between computers at Stanford and UCLA.75 “What hath God wrought?” Samuel Morse had tapped out in the first message sent by telegraph in 1844. At ten-thirty p.m. on October 29, 1969, a single message traveled from Los Angeles to Menlo Park, California: “LO,” the first two letters of the word “LOGIN,” before the system crashed. What would become the Internet had dawned, with very little sense of it having been wrought by God. This demonstration didn’t attract attention, except in technical circles. But MIT was a technical circle.

“If man is to continue as a successful pattern-complex function in universal evolution,” Fuller wrote in 1960, “it will be because the next decades will have witnessed the artist-scientist’s spontaneous seizure of the prime design responsibility and his successful conversion of the total capability of tool-augmented man from killingry to advanced livingry.” For Stewart Brand, an LSD advocate and one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the commune answered the atomization of Cold War America. But communal living required tools, a taking back of the machine. In 1968, from his base in Menlo Park, California, Brand launched the Whole Earth Catalog, with the motto “access to tools.” (“The insights of Buckminster Fuller are what initiated this catalog,” Brand wrote in its inaugural issue.)40 In 1972, when ARPANET made its debut, Brand celebrated the liberation of the computer from big business.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Five years later, the School held its first annual HBS Business Plan contest for students, and a year after that, Stevenson and his colleagues finally got their due: Entrepreneurial Management was officially added as a faculty unit. In 1997, the School belatedly opened an outpost in Silicon Valley—the “California Research Center” on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road. In 2000, a new course, The Entrepreneurial Manager, was added to the required first-year curriculum in place of a curricular mainstay, General Management. Ten years before, the class had included cases on Bank One, General Electric, and Nokia. In 2000? Charles Schwab, Intuit, and Chemdex.com.

Thus began what is undoubtedly the most important overhaul of its curriculum in the last half century, away from the needs of big business and toward the needs of a student body that increasingly had eyes on being their own boss, as entrepreneurs. In 1997, HBS opened a Research Center on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, and promptly began organizing job-hunting trips for MBAs to the West Coast. Just as it had argued almost a century before that going to HBS provided more experience than actual experience, the School began crafting an argument that going to HBS provided more entrepreneurial juice than working at an actual startup.

., 14 HBS Club of New York, 288–89 HBS Clubs, 287 HBS Environmental Club, 560 HBS Fund, 287, 495 HBS network, 3, 6, 9, 156, 179, 231, 318, 503; big-company CEOs and, 534–37; Bower and, 201–2; Bush 43rd and, 503; DLJ and, 468; Doriot and, 126; Lynton and, 534–37; Paulson and, 477; start-up capital and, 330, 477, 494; Stemberg founding of Staples and, 332–33 HBS Research Center, Menlo Park, 328, 494 HBS Section X, 570 HBS Student Association Faculty Award, 557 Healy, Paul, 521 Heard, Francha Eaton, 237 Heaton, Herbert, 21 hedge funds, 466, 479, 531, 534, 540–41. See also Ackman, William A. “Bill” Heinz, John and Teresa, 560 Henderson, Bruce, 207, 417 Henderson, Ernie, 179 Henderson, James, 128 Henderson, Lawrence J., 81–82, 84, 111, 355 Henderson, Rebecca, 238 Henry, James, 406–7 Hersum, Anita, 279 Hertz, John D., 123 Herzlinger, Regina, 238, 573 Hewlett-Packard, 241, 321, 322, 460, 531, 563 Higdon, Hal, 512 Higgins, Bob, 332 Higher Learning in America, The (Veblen), 95 Hill, Linda, 238, 314, 557–58 Hitch, Charles, 272 Hoagland, Ralph, 128 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 25 Homans, George, 308 Hoopes, James, 14, 31, 3, 882, 114, 315, 317, 523 Hoover, Herbert, 101 Hosmer, Windsor, 326 Hostetter, Amos, Jr., 323 Hotta, Shozo, 205–6 “How Business Schools Lost Their Way” (Bennis and O’Toole), 224 “How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy” (Porter), 414 How Harvard Rules (Trumpbour), 432 Hubbard, Glenn, 405 Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, The (Mayo), 88, 90 human relations movement, 37, 81–90, 93, 118, 286, 355 human resources movement, 61, 197–98 Huston, Darren, 531 IBM, 142, 209, 289, 301, 347; HBS grads hired by, 460; HBS partnership with, 154–55; HBS’s Executive Education and, 151; HBS’s MBAs required to buy computers and, 155; Kanter and, 404; layoffs at, 404, 492–93 Icahn, Carl, 367, 480, 481 Ignatius, Adi, 306 Iksil, Bruno (London Whale), 472, 548 Immelt, Jeffrey, 305, 531 “Impact Investing: Trading Up, Not Trading Off” (Bales), 7 INCADIS (Individual Case Discussion Simulator), 287 income inequality, 5, 10, 23, 56, 390, 426, 510, 539, 540–41; CEO compensation and, 165–66, 539, 544; concentration of wealth, 539; stock market and, 491; submerged state and, 542; wage stagnation and, 165, 426, 491 “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998” (Saez), 540 India: business education in, 231, 233; Satyam Computer Services fraud, 408–9, 521 Indian Institute of Management–Ahmedabad, 230, 231, 236, 564–65 India Research Center, 234, 545 Individualized Corporation, The (Ghosal and Bartlett), 491 Industrial Bank of Japan, 153–54; endowment of HBS professorship, 153, 402 industrial organization (IO), 412–13 industrial psychology, 84–86 innovation, 557–58; disruptive, 303, 409, 422, 424, 572, 573; Doriot and wartime, 124; founder-inventors and, 60; MBAs and, 120–21; MBAs in Silicon Valley and, 10.


Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

An alternative, albeit much slower, route south from San Francisco is to take Hwy-35, which winds its way majestically along the ridges that divide the Bay from the Ocean. At certain spots, you are rewarded by simultaneous views across both bodies of water. Palo Alto and Stanford University Just south of the exclusive communities of Woodside and Menlo Park, leafy PALO ALTO nestles between I-280 and US-101. Despite its proximity to Stanford University, it has little of the college-town vigor of its northern rival, UC Berkeley. Indeed, Palo Alto has become somewhat of a social center for Silicon Valley’s nouveau riche, as evidenced by the trendy cafés and chic new restaurants that cluster along its main drag, University Avenue.

Just around the corner from lively California Ave, this friendly motel has the best prices for en-suite rooms. Very clean and there’s a pool. $90 Cowper Inn 705 Cowper St, Palo Alto t650/327-4475, wwww.cowperinn.com. Restored Victorian house with attractive rooms close to University Ave. The cheaper rooms have shared bathrooms. $105. Stanford Park Hotel 100 El Camino Real, Menlo Park t 650/322-1234 or 1-800/3682468, w www.stanfordparkhotel.com. Very pleasant, luxurious first-class hotel in extensive grounds near Stanford University. Offers good packages and online rates. $160. Stanford University Across the CalTrain tracks from town and spreading out from the west end of University Avenue, STANFORD UNIVERSITY is by contrast one of the tamest places you could hope for.

Cheaper alternatives tend to cluster around El Camino Real. Bistro Elan 448 S California Ave, Palo Alto t 650/327-0284. Spiffy Cal cuisine such as duck confit and pan-seared Maine scallops served to the cyber elite. Dinner prices are rather steep at around $20 per entree, so consider a lunchtime visit. Bistro Vida 641 Santa Cruz Ave, Menlo Park t 650/462-1686. Giving Silicon Valley a much-needed style infusion by serving delicious Left Bank Parisian bistro fare, but at rather inflated prices. Evvia 420 Emerson St, Palo Alto t650/3260983. California/Greek lamb and fish dishes with names like païdakia arnisia and arni kapama, as well as baked fish and other Hellenic faves, served in a cozy yet elegant dining room.


pages: 176 words: 55,819

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

At the same time, Hale introduced Catherine to friend and venture capitalist Tim Draper with the hope that Tim could identify local not-for-profit opportunities. Turned out Tim did indeed know of a good opportunity—his own organization. A couple years earlier, Tim had set up a small foundation called BizWorld in the bottom floor of his venture capital firm in Menlo Park. BizWorld aimed to spread the passion for entrepreneurship curriculum to elementary school students around the world. It was a powerful vision, but Tim didn’t have time to run it. He wanted Catherine to become the foundation’s chief executive officer. Catherine loved the concept—business, personal finance, and entrepreneurship were all topics she was passionate about.


pages: 199 words: 56,243

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

It is the late 2000s, and you have just completed a long day at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, reviewing financial information and getting an advance look at the latest in a string of dazzling new products. You are tired but excited; remember, about a decade ago this company was almost bankrupt! You, your fellow board members, and a handful of Apple execs travel to a sushi restaurant called Mitsunobu in nearby Menlo Park to relax and have some fun after a busy day. It’s a big enough group that you have to split up into a couple of tables in a private dining room. You have a glass of wine and are enjoying some tasty salmon sashimi while you discuss serious things with the distinguished people at your table. Suddenly, a burst of laughter from the other table interrupts the placid atmosphere, followed by a shout, then another outburst.


pages: 212 words: 64,724

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle

fear of failure, lateral thinking, Menlo Park

I extend my gratitude to Corea Ladner and those wonderful people who have contributed to this book by giving me space, that most precious of gifts — space to write and space to be. Thank you to Adrienne Bradley in Vancouver, to Margaret Miller in London and Angie Francesco in Glastonbury, England, Richard in Menlo Park and Rennie Frumkin in Sausalito, California. I am also thankful to Shirley Spaxman and Howard Kellough for their early review of the manuscript and helpful feedback, as well as to those individuals who were kind enough to review the manuscript at a later stage and provide additional input. Thank you to Rose Dendewich for word-processing the manuscript in her unique cheerful and professional manner.


pages: 243 words: 61,237

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

The academic literature on framing is vast and sometimes conflicting.12 But the following five frames can be useful in providing clarity to those you hope to move. The less frame Everybody loves choices. Yet ample research has shown that too much of a good thing can mutate into a bad thing. In one well-known study, Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark Lepper of Stanford set up booths at an upscale grocery store in Menlo Park, California, and offered shoppers the chance to taste and subsequently purchase different flavors of jam. The first booth offered twenty-four varieties. A week later, Iyengar and Lepper set up another booth with only six varieties. Not surprisingly, more customers stopped at the booth with the vast selection than at the one with fewer choices.


pages: 216 words: 61,061

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

A quality Internet connection is a public utility that should be accessible to all people, regardless of how much money they have and where they live. If we believe every American has a right to electricity, why would we withhold humanity’s greatest omnidirectional flow of information? The Internet (called ARPANET back in its infancy) was born in America with a connection between two computers, one at UCLA and the other in Menlo Park, California. Yet today, “nineteen million Americans, many in rural areas… can’t get access to a high-speed connection at any price, it’s just not there. And for a third of all Americans… it’s just too expensive.”3 That’s research from Susan Crawford, law professor and technology expert, who has done tremendous work bringing this reality to light and letting us know that we should all take action to give Americans the access they deserve.


pages: 256 words: 58,652

The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 by Jordan Mechner

game design, Menlo Park, place-making, restrictive zoning, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs

Only there was this strange dark cloud on the horizon over Oakland. I went upstairs and checked the damage. The phone and power were still out. I rejoined the people outside. Bob (the manager) and Larry (the owner) were making a quick inspection of the building. I wondered where Tomi was. She’d been supposed to meet Rob Finkelstein in Menlo Park to watch the game on TV. I looked around and there she was, coming down the sidewalk. I’d never been so happy to see someone. We sat in her car and listened to the radio. When we heard that some buildings had fallen down south of Market, and a 50-foot section of the Bay Bridge had collapsed, it finally started to sink in that we were in the middle of a major event.


pages: 192 words: 63,813

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

The speed with which computers can pro­cess information gives them a huge advantage—­almost beyond thought of a competition—in many situations involving vast amounts of data, such as controlling electrical grid networks or traffic flow. AI can analyze more images in an hour than a ­human expert could in a lifetime. Perhaps its most evident benefits have appeared in the medical world, especially in radiography and diag- The Moon · 63 nosis. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, based in Menlo Park, California, has established the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity.11 Regina Barzilay, the first winner of this million-­dollar prize, created an algorithm to analyze mammograms in order to predict ­whether a patient is likely to develop breast cancer in the ­future.


pages: 554 words: 167,247

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, asset light, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, business process, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, crony capitalism, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, obamacare, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, the payments system, young professional

However, although the more complicated and arguably less important (though politically easier to market) MLR rules that Stephanie Cutter blogged about had been completed, these hospital billing regulations still had not been written when Steven D. fell ill, nearly ten months after the East Room signing ceremony. A PAKISTANI RUG MARKET Four months into her husband’s illness, Alice by chance got the name of Patricia Stone of Menlo Park, California. Stone was one of fifty to a hundred “medical billing advocates” who by 2011 had made a cottage industry out of helping people deal with one of the abiding ironies of America’s largest consumer product: completely inscrutable healthcare bills and equally opaque insurance company Explanations of Benefits.

CALLING SILICON VALLEY At the White House, the decision had still not been made whether to save or scrap HealthCare.gov. Jeffrey Zients wanted still more eyes from Silicon Valley on the problem. At about six in the morning on Saturday, October 19, 2013, he emailed John Doerr, a senior partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, the Menlo Park–based venture capital powerhouse whose investments include Amazon, Google, Sun, Intuit, and Twitter. Could Doerr call him when he awoke to talk about the healthcare website? Zients asked. When Doerr quickly called back, Zients said, “We’re pulling together this surge of people to do this assessment to see if the site’s fixable or not.


pages: 574 words: 164,509

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Jeff Kaufman’s Blog (blog), November 2. Keim, G. A., Shazeer, N. M., Littman, M. L., Agarwal, S., Cheves, C. M., Fitzgerald, J., Grosland, J., Jiang, F., Pollard, S., and Weinmeister, K. 1999. “Proverb: The Probabilistic Cruciverbalist.” In Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 710–17. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Kell, Harrison J., Lubinski, David, and Benbow, Camilla P. 2013. “Who Rises to the Top? Early Indicators.” Psychological Science 24 (5): 648–59. Keller, Wolfgang. 2004. “International Technology Diffusion.” Journal of Economic Literature 42 (3): 752–82. KGS Go Server. 2012. “KGS Game Archives: Games of KGS player zen19.”

In Information Processing, 256–64. Paris: UNESCO. Nicolelis, Miguel A. L., and Lebedev, Mikhail A. 2009. “Principles of Neural Ensemble Physiology Underlying the Operation of Brain–Machine Interfaces.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 (7): 530–40. Nilsson, Nils J. 1984. Shakey the Robot, Technical Note 323. Menlo Park, CA: AI Center, SRI International, April. Nilsson, Nils J. 2009. The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., and Turkheimer, E. 2012. “Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments.”


pages: 575 words: 171,599

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, delayed gratification, estate planning, Etonian, glass ceiling, high net worth, junk bonds, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, McMansion, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, technology bubble, too big to fail

She was highly educated—after Kent State, she got a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University and an MBA from Berkeley—and, more important, she’d worked at a number of companies in the tech space, including the biggest player, Intel. Later in the year, Rajaratnam met her in Menlo Park and, just as he had promised, he offered her a job. The only condition was that she would have to move to New York to train. Khan was torn. She wanted to break into Wall Street, but she knew if she accepted the offer it would probably mean the end of her marriage. Her husband, Sakhawat, was a traditional Asian Muslim man who liked to have his wife by his side, not burnishing her career three thousand miles away.

By 2009, Galleon Group, the hedge fund company he had built from scratch, managed about $6 billion in assets and employed nearly 130 investment professionals—among them analysts and portfolio managers. Rajaratnam had every reason to feel pleased; his sprawling investment empire now stretched from Menlo Park to Mumbai and he was pouring money into markets as far afield as Sri Lanka. He had only to look outside his office to feel satisfied. There sat rows and rows of traders and analysts, all jockeying to make money for him and, along the way, themselves. Whenever he had a hot tip, all he had to do was slide one of the glass panels and shout to the traders on the desk.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

Internet firms started listing themselves alongside legacy American companies on stock exchanges, and billions of dollars came pouring westward. While Thiel had found some success as a global macro investor, he saw in the craze for all things internet a lucrative opportunity to invest in promising technology start-ups. If Thiel were to flourish in this arena, he believed his firm needed the right address, namely on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, the home of Silicon Valley’s preeminent venture capital firms. Thiel put Ken Howery on the hunt for office space—Howery’s first Thiel Capital assignment. It wasn’t an easy one. With the internet land grab underway, Sand Hill Road’s low-slung buildings had waiting lists and leased for sums higher than Manhattan offices with sweeping views of Central Park.

What followed taught them all valuable lessons about mergers—what makes them work and what makes them fail. “A merger isn’t two companies joining together,” Luke Nosek remarked. “It’s actually closer to hiring fifty people, sight unseen.” 10 CRASH In early 2000, Thiel and Musk were set to meet with Mike Moritz at Sequoia’s office at 2800 Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to discuss the merger. Musk offered Thiel a lift from Palo Alto. The year before, Musk had purchased a Magnesium Silver McLaren F1, Chassis #067, from Gerd Petrik, a German pharmaceutical executive. A $1 million sports car complete with gull-wing doors and an engine bay encased in gold foil, Musk dubbed the automobile a “work of art” and “a really beautiful piece of engineering.”


Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost

Colossal Cave Adventure, Fairchild Semiconductor, functional programming, game design, Google Earth, higher-order functions, Ian Bogost, Ivan Sutherland, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software studies, Steve Wozniak

Robinett was the first Atari employee who had a degree in computer science, which may have had something to do with his visiting the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and encountering another kind of maze there—one that would inspire the cartridge he created. The game he devised was not at all obvious at the time, but it would manage to establish the basic conventions of the graphical adventure. Text Adventure into Action Adventure A few years before Robinett rode his bike between Sunnyvale and Menlo Park, Don Woods added on to Will Crowther’s code to complete the canonical version of the PDP-10 program Adventure. This Adventure, which made its appearance in 1976, was the first example of the form that would be called the “text adventure” and that later still would be called “interactive fiction.” Crowther and Woods’s original specimen combined some elements from the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons with aspects of the experience of caving, one of Crowther’s hobbies.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

The decisions that have left our most innovative regions gasping for more housing were similarly made in extremely obscure, low-participation venues. For instance, while the impacts of development restrictions in Silicon Valley are region-wide, the institutions that make them include small-town councils in Menlo Park and Los Altos, both of which have very low rates of political participation. Even in large cities, development decisions are disproportionately influenced by historic preservation commissions with strong biases against new housing. As Edward Glaeser has shown, 16 percent of the buildable land in New York City is in historic districts.


pages: 229 words: 67,869

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

But Phineas Upham had been cleared of all charges. Surely he had a right to be forgotten? Didn’t he? I emailed Bryce Tom. ‘Is Metal Rabbit Media still operational?’ He emailed back. ‘What can I help you with?’ I emailed him back. ‘I’m a journalist …’ I never heard from him again. * The Village Pub in Woodside, near Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, looks like no big deal from the outside, but when you get inside you realize it’s massively upmarket and filled with tech billionaires - the restaurant version of the nonthreatening clothes the tech billionaires were wearing. I told my dining companion, Michael Fertik, that he was the only person from the mysterious reputation-management world who had returned my email.


pages: 257 words: 68,143

Waiting for Superman: How We Can Save America's Failing Public Schools by Participant Media, Karl Weber

An Inconvenient Truth, antiwork, collective bargaining, feminist movement, hiring and firing, index card, knowledge economy, Menlo Park, Robert Gordon, school choice, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

Note: Graduation rates are for first-time, full-time students graduating in 150 percent normal time. 10 Becky Smerdon, Barbara Means, et al., Evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s High School Grants Initiative: 2001-2005 Final Report (Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research; Menlo Park, CA: SRI International, 2006). 11 Steven G. Rivkin, Eric A. Hanushek, and John F. Kain, “Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement,” Econometrica 73, no. 2 (March 2005): 417-458. 12 Robert Gordon, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger, Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job (Washington, DC: Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution, 2006). 13 Stephen Newton, “Stull Evaluations and Student Performance,” Los Angeles Unified School District, http://notebook.lausd.net/pls/ptl/docs/PAGE/CA_LAUSD/FLDR_ORGANIZATIONS/FLDR_PLCY_RES_DEV/PAR_DIVISION_MAIN/RESEARCH_UNIT/PUBLICATIONS/POLICY_REPORTS/IMPACT_STULL_186.PDF. 14 Kim Marshall, “It’s Time to Rethink Teacher Supervision and Evaluation,” Phi Delta Kappan, June 2005. 15 Scholastic and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools (New York: Scholastic Inc., 2010). 16 Marguerite Roza, Frozen Assets: Rethinking Teacher Contracts Could Free Billions for School Reform (Washington, DC: Education Sector, 2007). 17 Valerie Russ, “Teachers, School District Approve Contract,” Philadelphia Daily News, January 23, 2010. 18 Scholastic and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Primary Sources. 19 “Rocketship Education 2009 Academic Results Highest Performing in San Jose and Santa Clara County, Tops Palo Alto Unified,” www.rsed.org/news/RSED%2009%20Results%20Release%209.16%20FINAL.doc. 20 Mike Feinberg, personal communications, 2010.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

It was raining like hell outside, and Doug Engelbart was pacing nervously on the stage. A tall, fit forty-three-year-old wearing a crisp white shirt and blue tie, with streaks of gray showing in his neatly parted hair, he looked like he could work for NASA or the Defense Department. And he did, in the sense that for the past several years the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), in Menlo Park, California, had funded his quixotic quest to invent the future. In three hours the auditorium would be filled with the best computer scientists in the world, all gathered for the annual conference of the 1968 Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE).


pages: 257 words: 64,285

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Upstart firms like short-lived Leap, Chariot, and Bridj, have started to employ smart technology to take advantage of the flexibility of the bus to serve specific passengers rather than general markets. 244 245 Employer-based Transport. Companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook operate buses for their employees who wish to live in the City of San Francisco but work in 30-50 miles to the south in Mountain View, Cupertino, and Menlo Park. They differ from traditional macro-transit in that the routes are far more dynamic and personalized for the actual riders, rather than for random, prospective riders. In other words, these are far more demand driven, and despite the size of the vehicle, the networks are typically much smaller (though in the future they may grow).


pages: 259 words: 67,456

The Mythical Man-Month by Brooks, Jr. Frederick P.

Boeing 747, Conway's law, finite state, HyperCard, Ken Thompson, machine readable, Menlo Park, Multics, no silver bullet, seminal paper, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Turing machine, work culture

Reprinted with the kind permission of IFIP and Elsevier Science B. V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Parnas, D. L., "Designing software for ease of extension and contraction," IEEE Trans, on SE, 5,2 (March, 1979), pp. 128-138. Booch, G., "Object-oriented design," in Software Engineering with Ada. Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin/Cummings, 1983. Mostow, J., ed., Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering, /£££ Trans, on SE, 11, 11 (Nov., 1985). Parnas, D. L., "Software aspects of strategic defense systems," Communications of the ACM, 28, 12 (Dec., 1985), pp. 1326-1335. Also in American Scientist, 73, 5 (Sept.


pages: 246 words: 70,404

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

Very calmly I say to the TA, ‘You know, I was in the library and I was looking at the history of rapes by fraternity members on campus. And strangely enough, there weren’t any. So . . . I’m all for this direct action, but if we really mean to confront the perpetrators and hold some people to account, I’ve made a list of blocks in East Palo Alto and Menlo Park where rape and violent crime are out of control. Why don’t we go tape off one of those blocks?’ “So, this is East Palo Alto, man. Overwhelmingly Latino and there’s poor black neighborhoods, and of course you can guess her reaction. So, her mouth is just wrung into this grimace and she’s turning purple.


Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland

gentrification, invisible hand, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, microapartment, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

The store name on their bags? so much stuff: so little time(r). >Within minutes of being in The Land of Software I'm swooning with boredom while the geeks are swarming like bees around the latest gizmo from the futuretowns of the Silicon Valley in California--Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Walnut Creek, Menlo Park. . . . "Ty! Checketh out hither hardware," shouts Harmony. "It's virtual'" I am by now completely convinced that my downfall in life is going to be my inability to achieve computer nirvana like a true hacker or hackette. I think this lacking is the most unmodern facet of my personality--the career equivalent of having six fingers, or a vestigial tail.


pages: 224 words: 71,060

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream by Yuval Levin

affirmative action, Airbnb, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, conceptual framework, David Brooks, demand response, Donald Trump, fake news, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, WeWork

In a brilliant 2015 paper entitled Two Pathways for Congressional Reform, political scientist Daniel Stid lays out these two paths, which he dubs Wilsonian and Madisonian reform—the former pushing in the direction of parliamentary government and a presidential model of governance and the latter pointing toward the separation of powers with Congress in the driver’s seat. The Madisonian approach strikes me as by far the better suited to the challenges we face now, but it is almost absent from the discussion of congressional reform in both political science and political journalism. Daniel Stid, Two Pathways for Congressional Reform (Menlo Park, CA: William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2015), https://hewlett.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Two-Pathways-for-Congressional-Reform_March-2015.pdf. 8. On this subject, the work of the great American historian Douglass Adair, particularly the essays gathered in his 1971 collection Fame and the Founding Fathers (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998), remains second to none. 9.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

For the VCs, bets on crypto were a hedge of sorts. If Balaji was right, the forthcoming token economy was poised to upend the Valley’s longtime role as kingmaker of the startup scene. Better then to try and get an inside track on the emerging industry that could make Sand Hill Road—the famous strip of Palo Alto and Menlo Park that houses the most prestigious venture capital offices—irrelevant. Americans were glomming onto the growing crypto mania but it was nothing compared to what was happening across the Pacific. In South Korea, investing in crypto became as common as buying mutual funds, and by late 2017, one-third of the country’s workers owned some sort of digital currency.


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

But doing better—figuring out how to invent the lightbulb as we know it—would be expensive. Those stories of Edison spending years doing thousands of experiments to get the bulb right aren’t entirely accurate in one important way—it wasn’t just Edison alone in a room. By this time, he had a whole invention factory next to his house in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he paid scribes and mechanics and machinists and blacksmiths to help him invent stuff. Edison was rich and famous—he’d already invented the record player!—but even so, he knew he couldn’t afford to invent the lightbulb on his own. He wrote to his lawyer, “All I want at present is to be provided with funds to push the light rapidly.”


Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Extinction Rebellion, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, p-value, profit maximization, rent-seeking, rewilding, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks

Gadagkar, “Can Animals Be Spiteful?” Also see Jensen, “Punishment and Spite, the Dark Side of Cooperation.” 16. A. R. Brereton, “Return-Benefit Spite Hypothesis: An Explanation for Sexual Interference in Stumptail Macaques (Macaca arctoides),” Primates 35, no. 2 (1994): 123–136; R. Trivers, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin-Cummings, 1985); Jensen, “Punishment and Spite, the Dark Side of Cooperation.” 17. Brereton, “Return-Benefit Spite Hypothesis.” 18. Hauser, McAuliffe, and Blake, “Evolving the Ingredients for Reciprocity and Spite.” 19. R. A. Johnstone and R. Bshary, “Evolution of Spite Through Indirect Reciprocity,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 271, no. 1551 (2004): 1917–1922. 20.


pages: 206 words: 68,757

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

In other words, and in common with far more aspects of reality than we’re comfortable acknowledging, reading something properly just takes the time it takes. Must Stop, Can’t Stop In the late 1990s, a psychotherapist in California named Stephanie Brown began to notice certain striking new patterns among the clients who came to seek her help. Brown’s consulting rooms are in Menlo Park, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and as the first dot-com boom gathered steam, she found herself meeting its early casualties: well-paid, highstatus overachievers who were so accustomed to a life of constant motion and stimulation that remaining seated for a fifty-minute therapy session seemed to cause them almost physical pain.


pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

‘Letter to Vannevar Bush and Program on Human Effectiveness’. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine, edited by James Nyce and Paul Kahn, 235–44. London: Academic Press. . 1962b. ‘Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework’. Report to the Director of Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Menlo Park, CA, Stanford Research Institute. Online: http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/ engelbart/full_62_paper_augm_hum_int.html (accessed April 2013). . 1963. ‘A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect’. In Vistas in Information Handling, Volume 1: The Augmentation of Man’s Intellect By Machine, edited by Paul W.


Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, contact tracing, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, flex fuel, global pandemic, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John von Neumann, low interest rates, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norbert Wiener, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Yom Kippur War

Kash, “Innovation Policy for Complex Technologies,” Issues in Science and Technology (Fall 1999) (www.issues.org/16.1/rycroft.htm) (innovation requires “collaborative networks”). 3. These and the following details are from the biography of Loomis by Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). 4. The norms of the Rad Lab’s “great groups” are common to other innovations— both before and after—including the lightbulb at Edison’s Menlo Park “Invention Factory,” the transistor at Bell Labs, the integrated circuit and microchip efforts at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, the personal computer at Xerox PARC and Apple, and biotech advances at Genentech and Craig Venter’s genomics projects. Venture capitalists typically try to find groups with similar characteristics.


pages: 291 words: 77,596

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

airport security, Albert Einstein, book scanning, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, information retrieval, invention of writing, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, language acquisition, lifelogging, Menlo Park, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, RFID, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Ted Nelson, telepresence, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application

His lab developed a hypermedia groupware system called Augment (originally called NLS). Augment supported bookmarks, hyperlinks, recording of e-mail, a journal, and more. Engelbart, Douglas C. “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report AFOSR-3223 Under Contract AF 49(638)- 1024,” SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, October 1962. ———. “Authorship Provisions in AUGMENT.” COMPCON ’84 Digest: Proceedings of the COMPCON Conference, San Francisco, California, February 27-March 1, 1984, 465-72. Many others besides us have noted the inadequacy of conventional computer file systems.


Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

The Procrustean Marxism and Subjective Rigor wife drinks the barrel in an unknown number of days, “w,” so she drinks 1/w in one day. Therefore 1/14 + 1/w = 1/10; solve for w, which turns out to be 35 days. 10. L. Carey Bolster et al., Invitation to Mathematics (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1987), 82–83. 11. Randall I. Charles et al., Scott Foresman-AddisonWesley Math (Menlo Park, CA: Scott ForesmanAddison Wesley, 1998), 186–187. 12. Timothy J. Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 143–144. Reiss quotes terminology from Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

It is also the opportunity for smaller, nimbler companies that have emerged from the very markets they serve, enabled by the new tools of democratized manufacturing to route around the old retail and production barriers. Even better, some of those companies that start with niche markets may graduate to huge ones. The ultimate combination of atoms and bits In early 2009, if you had visited the TechShop makerspace in Menlo Park, California, south of San Francisco, you would have seen a tall, somewhat gangly guy named Jim McKelvey at a bench, fiddling with a little block of plastic. For all anyone could tell, he was just another guy trying to learn how to use a CNC machine, albeit with a particularly unimpressive little project.


pages: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

Their 1973 correspondence, discovered by investigative reporter Yasha Levine in the Hayek archive at Stanford University in California, captures the two men calmly considering the merits of the U.S. Social Security system, America’s largest social program, which they both fought long and hard to dismantle.19 The exchange springs from Koch’s attempt to entice Hayek to accept a special teaching post at Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian think tank in Menlo Park, California. Hayek, by then in his early seventies, responded that, having undergone gall bladder surgery earlier that year, he feared “the problems (and costs) of falling ill away from home.” He wouldn’t have to worry about such things in Austria, where there were strong public health care and social insurance systems.


The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

Despite their similar characteristics as children, their lives took very different trajectories. As an adult, Al became famous. He was Thomas Alva Edison, became a celebrated scientist and inventor with 1,093 US patents, and invented remarkable, transformative technologies, such as the lightbulb. He was affectionately nicknamed “the Wizard of Menlo Park” by those who respected his different way of thinking.9 In contrast, Jonah today is a young man who still seeks patterns in the world around him. He didn’t become a world-famous inventor, but in his own quiet way, he shows the same drive to understand, experiment, and invent. For example, as an adult, he is fascinated by patterns on the surface of the ocean.


pages: 257 words: 75,685

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich

bread and circuses, effective altruism, end world poverty, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jim Simons, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nick Bostrom, Pareto efficiency, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, supervolcano, time value of money, William MacAskill

Foundation Net assets ($) Net assets per pupil ($) Woodside School Foundation Cupertino Educational Endowment Foundation San Francisco Education Fund Hillsborough Schools Foundation Portola Valley Schools Foundation Every Child Can Learn Foundation KIDDO!—Mill Valley Schools Community Foundation Petaluma Educational Foundation Marcus A. Foster Educational Institute Ross School Foundation Piedmont Educational Foundation Menlo Park-Atherton Education Foundation Los Altos Educational Foundation Educational Foundation of Orinda 11,308,243 8,822,870 24,690 563 8,207,907 137 3,517,164 2,510 2,688,720 3,847 2,409,876 40 2,360,500 1,019 1,729,572 221 1,641,393 30 1,454,616 1,115,254 3,637 417 1,069,295 546 932,538 237 836,517 343 Source: Author’s dataset.


pages: 232 words: 72,483

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

Before he met with Doerr, Maris thought it might make sense to create a deck that outlined the heart of his Big Idea. He wanted to shape something powerful, not goofy. And if it was goofy, he figured Doerr would be the man to tell him so straight out. Maris met with Doerr at Kleiner Perkins’s offices in Menlo Park and put the idea to him this way: John, imagine you’re walking along a beach and you find a lamp, and in this lamp you also find a genie. Naturally, it has three wishes. So what do you wish for first? What is the one thing none of us can control? Time, right? At your age, if all goes well, maybe you’ll live another 30 years?


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

Some commentators have drawn apt comparisons between the 2020s and the Gilded Age of the 1920s, for such are the contrasts. San Francisco symbolises the chasm between rich and poor: a large homeless population in desperate state down the road from millionaires and billionaires, who watch the destitute and addicted through the windows of their Uber or the executive shuttle to Menlo Park or Mountain View (Chan 2017; Solnit 2014). There is now an active policy debate about tackling tech wealth and power, much of it focused on the dominance of digital markets by a small number of giant companies. The biggest—Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft—became even more successful as the pandemic moved so much more activity online.


pages: 589 words: 197,971

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Schriever impressed Kenney, who noted on his efficiency report a year later in July 1941 that he was graduating from the Engineering School with an academic rating of “Superior.” He had done so well, in fact, that he was one of those selected to go on to Stanford University in September 1941 for a master’s degree in more advanced aeronautical engineering studies. Bennie moved his young family out to Menlo Park, California, right near the university. That June, Dora had given birth to their second child, a daughter, Dodie (after the nickname of Dora’s maternal grandmother) Elizabeth (for Bennie’s mother). When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December, he assumed he would receive immediate orders to drop his courses and go.

“LET’S DIVE-BOMB THE BASTARDS” He left for Australia from Hamilton Field in the predawn of June 20, 1942, flying west in the diminishing darkness out over the Golden Gate Bridge bound for the first stop in Hawaii. He had not been able to tell Dora, who was staying behind with the two children in the rented house at Menlo Park, when he would return because he had no way of knowing. Bennie did not bid farewell to the great span across the entrance to San Francisco Bay. He was wrapped in a sleeping bag in the back of one of the new B-24 Liberators, the second of the strategic bombers that was entering the inventory of the U.S.


pages: 654 words: 204,260

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

One of their first tasks, Doss told me, was to draw up an “earthquake and volcano hazards plan”—a plan of action in the event of a crisis. “There isn't one already?” I said. “No. Afraid not. But there will be soon.” “Isn't that just a little tardy?” He smiled. “Well, let's just say that it's not any too soon.” Once it is in place, the idea is that three people—Christiansen in Menlo Park, California, Professor Robert B. Smith at the University of Utah, and Doss in the park—would assess the degree of danger of any potential cataclysm and advise the park superintendent. The superintendent would take the decision whether to evacuate the park. As for surrounding areas, there are no plans.

Thompson, Dick. Volcano Cowboys: The Rocky Evolution of a Dangerous Science. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Thorne, Kip S. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. Tortora, Gerard J., and Sandra Reynolds Grabowski. Principles of Anatomy and Physiology. Menlo Park, California: Addison-Wesley, 1996. Trepil, James. The Unexpected Vista: A Physicist's View of Nature. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1983. ———. Meditations at Sunset: A Scientist Looks at the Sky. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1987. ———. Meditations at 10,000 Feet: A Scientist in the Mountains.


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

Anybody with an idea, a laptop, and an Internet connection can give it a go, and many do, leading to an abundance of entrants, many of them still living in college dorm rooms. Although these founders do eventually need to raise money to fuel growth, they have many more sources of funding beyond the big firms with posh offices along Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road. Some need expert guidance and trusted connections as much as they need capital. VC firms have always provided a combination of all these services, but these services are increasingly becoming unbundled: as the competition among investors to back the next Facebook or Dropbox has intensified, the most promising entrepreneurs can pick and choose what they most want in an investor.


pages: 283 words: 82,161

Momma and the Meaning of Life by Irvin D. Yalom

Internet Archive, Menlo Park, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley

Ah had help—from the pastor, the church, lots of good folk." Ignoring Magnolia's disclaimer, Rosa addressed me. "I met Magnolia when we were both in the hospital about a year ago and once, after we were discharged, I picked her up in my car and we rode around all afternoon—through Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, up into the hills. Magnolia gave me a tour. She pointed out everything to me, not just the important stuff now, but also the way this whole county used to be, and all the things that happened thirty or forty years ago on some special spot. That was the best ride I ever had." "How do you feel about what Rosa said, Magnolia?"


pages: 283 words: 81,163

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Rothbard also explains in great detail why government intervention is the enemy of liberty and economic progress. ———. Man, Economy, and State. Mission, KS: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1962. A treatise on economic theory by one of the twentieth century’s preeminent Austrian School, free-market economists. ———. 1977. Power and Market: Government and the Economy. Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies. An excellent and comprehensive exposition of the economics of government interventionism. ———. What Has Government Done to Our Money? Santa Ana, CA: Rampart College, 1974. An explanation of why the gold standard is consistent with free-market capitalism but fractional reserve banking is not.


pages: 362 words: 86,195

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet by Joseph Menn

Brian Krebs, dumpster diving, fault tolerance, Firefox, John Markoff, Menlo Park, offshore financial centre, pirate software, plutocrats, popular electronics, profit motive, RFID, Silicon Valley, zero day

They settled in the Bay Area town of Pacifica, picking a condo with a view of the best surf break within half an hour of San Francisco. Barrett’s departure could not have come at a worse time for Prolexic. The company was about to take on its most unusual client, an anti-spam firm based in Haifa, Israel, and in Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park, where venture capital firms had invested $4 million in it. Blue Security Inc. had a radical idea for stopping spam. Over the course of a year, it compiled a list of 450,000 email addresses of people who wanted to be protected. Blue Security then contacted major spammers, telling them to purge Blue Security’s clients from their target lists.


Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design by Richard Bird

bioinformatics, data science, functional programming, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, sorting algorithm

Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Bird, R. S. (1989). Algebraic identities for program calculation. Computer Journal 32 (2), 122–6. Gries, D. (1990). The maximum segment sum problem. In Formal Development of Programs and Proofs, ed. E. W. Dijkstra et al. University of Texas at Austin Year of Programming Series. Menlo Park. Addison-Wesley, pp. 43–5. Mu, S.-C. (2008). The maximum segment sum is back. Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM ’08), pp. 31–9. 12 Ranking suffixes Introduction The idea of ranking the elements of a list crops up frequently. An element x is assigned rank r if there are exactly r elements of the list less than x .


pages: 291 words: 87,296

Lethal Passage by Erik Larson

independent contractor, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, pez dispenser, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, The Great Moderation

It shifted emphasis from promoting the shooting sports to battling firearm regulations, a shift made official in 1977 when the association amended its New York State charter to include the goal of promoting “the right of the individual of good repute to keep and bear arms as a common law and constitutional right both of the individual citizen and of the collective militia.” A study conducted a few years earlier by the Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, California, for Remington Arms Company, warned that the NRA’s “right-wingers are becoming increasingly isolated from the society of today.” The report continued: “Dismissing unpleasant information about guns in society and denying integrity to those who are concerned about guns, they manage to survive in a bunker decorated with white hats and black hats, in a make-believe world of American ‘sacred rights,’ ancient skills, and coonskins.”


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

On October 29, 2009, the millionth ride was taken.9 The city can now add two thousand more bikes over one hundred stations, a year earlier than was expected. No universal magic formula can determine the right point of critical mass for different types of Collaborative Consumption. It varies depending on the context, the needs being met, and user expectations. TechShop in Menlo Park, California, founded in the summer of 2006 by Jim Newton, sells itself as a fifteen-thousand-square-foot “world-class workshop” where inventors, hobbyists, artists, automotive fanatics, mechanical engineers, and model makers can access equipment, supplies, and expert support to work on projects.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

As a favor of sorts, I sent Kyle an email letting him know that even though he had apparently blown off his Friday afternoon commitments, I would still be open to the possibility of an investment from Greylock. Funny enough, he never wrote back. Perhaps I would have better luck establishing relationships with monied techies in a more intimate, well-lubricated, convivial setting? Acting on a tip, I ventured out to Sand Hill Road for what was described to me as the hottest night out in Menlo Park: Cougar Night. This, I learned, was a tradition at the Stanford University–owned Rosewood Hotel, dating to 2009, with several interruptions related to public accusations of prostitution. The men who showed up were too old to be classified as cougar bait, but I can confirm that the debauchery of Cougar Night lived up to the legend, with all the fervid groping of last call at a British nightclub combined with the hyperpreppy attire of a velvet-rope club in New York’s Meatpacking District and the tangible awkwardness of any Silicon Valley social event.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Life As A Passenger How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan Preface In the Fall of 2015 while on a business trip to California, I persuaded my colleagues to take a slight detour with me to Mountain View. We were returning south to Menlo Park after meetings in San Francisco and continuing past our exit on Highway 101 didn’t immediately make any sense to them. “Just drive around”, I said; “I want to try to see something very important that you can only see in Mountain View”, knowing I probably sounded a little crazy. Mountain View is a small town of about 75,000 thousand people that is home to many of Silicon Valley’s most famous companies, but I was there to see its most famous non-human inhabitants.


pages: 314 words: 86,795

The Comedy Film Nerds Guide to Movies by Graham Elwood, Chris Mancini

blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Dr. Strangelove, financial engineering, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nuclear winter, Wall-E

Both were highly personal projects for someone though I do not want to meet the person who made the second one. I know for a fact that Edison only invented the movie camera because of what he wanted to see. I have heard it directly from a friend whose uncle was a young chemist when he met Mr. Edison at Menlo Park. There, an elderly Edison took him aside and regaled him with stories, including one that the invention of the movie camera was for the expressed purpose of seeing “French postcards” move! So it has been porn that has driven the technology of the film industry, but it is the needs of drama that has driven the artistic achievements.


pages: 271 words: 82,159

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, mass incarceration, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, RAND corporation, school choice, Silicon Valley

But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Valuing the priceless Whether open to the public or locked away in corporate vaults, data’s value is hard to measure. Consider the events of Friday, May 18, 2012. On that day, Facebook’s 28-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg symbolically rang NASDAQ’s opening bell from the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The world’s biggest social network—which boasted around one out of every ten people on the planet as a member—began its new life as a public company. The stock immediately jumped 11 percent, as many new technology stocks do on their first day of trading. However, then something odd happened.


pages: 249 words: 81,217

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age by Claudia Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Anton Chekhov, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, iterative process, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, overview effect, Stephen Hawking, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen

Sounds lovely. Though, in fact, the walk was just outside the grounds of Stanford University. Now I’ve been there and it is a particularly lush, green campus, but the route of the walk went past towns such as Palo Alto (of Facebook fame) and Mountain View (of Google fame), and the rather less lovely Menlo Park. So there were plenty of reminders of the urban world. It’s not quite what I could call a countryside walk. But still, it’s quite nice. Likewise, the urban walk was the most urban the team could find in the vicinity, but we’re not talking downtown San Francisco with its panhandlers and other reminders of inner-city deprivation.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Although it can be a rather dry, even arcane subject for nonlawyers, its importance for underwriting both innovation and fairness in our networked future can’t be overstated. Yes, as John Borthwick reminded me in our conversation at Betaworks, antitrust matters. Before I left for my trip to Brussels, I visited the Menlo Park law offices of Gary Reback, located in the very heart of Silicon Valley, just a few exits north on Route 101 from Google’s Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View. Reback is about the closest thing America has to its own Margrethe Vestager. “If there’s one person who’s going to help define antitrust law for the twenty-first century, it’s Gary Reback,” explained Wired magazine about Reback’s outspoken support for a law that maintains the competitiveness of an open marketplace.


pages: 627 words: 89,295

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M. Gehl, Michael E. Porter

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disintermediation, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, future of work, guest worker program, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, new economy, obamacare, pension reform, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, zero-sum game

He wrote: “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory.”1 Through individual states, America can experiment with new rules and processes to see what works best, particularly toward our first priority: electoral innovation. In the early twentieth century, the inventiveness of Thomas Edison’s fabled Menlo Park was rivaled by the Progressive Era’s “laboratories of democracy,” which patented a line of political innovations that included secret ballots, direct democracy, regulations on campaign donations, and many more. Today, from coast to coast, the states are reinvigorated yet again, churning out twenty-first-century innovations that address the problematic structures of the politics industry—plurality voting and the partisan primaries—that are stifling our democracy, our economy, and our quality of life.


pages: 287 words: 85,518

Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel by Josh Riedel

Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, invisible hand, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Menlo Park, messenger bag, off-the-grid, Port of Oakland, pre–internet, risk/return, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, tech bro, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Amber Coffman was unfazed; she kept us on track, singing over me with the correct verse, and I joined her, mouthing the words as the shuttle cruised down the 101 south into Silicon Valley. * * * An hour later, the shuttle pulled in to campus, a cluster of sixteen buildings near the salt flats in Menlo Park. I exited at Building 2, as my orientation materials instructed. A series of landscape paintings hung on the lobby wall behind the receptionist’s desk, painted with the paint engineered by that woman I’d met at Yarbo, the kind that shifts in response to your mood. The paintings transitioned out of landscape mode into psychedelic swirls.


pages: 781 words: 226,928

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

“Some of the people who were ex-People’s Computer Company guys collaborated with Commodore on the original manual because we wanted something really friendly,” says Finkel. “That was an interesting experience because those guys go way back.” Tomczyk sent the rough translation of the Japanese user manual to the writers in Menlo Park. They already owned several PET computers which helped then write the BASIC sections of their book, but Commodore also gave them an early VIC-20 computer. The PCC founders began the process of making computers easy for ordinary people. A month later, Tomczyk reviewed the early manuscript and was not happy with the results.

Soon, Harris and Finkel got their first look at the new VIC-20 computer. “They were always in my possession in the early days,” says Robert Russell. “When there got to be a few more we gave some to Tomczyk and Andy [Finkel] and guys like that.” The team continued working with Bob Albrecht and the ex-PCC writers at Menlo Park. “The manuscripts travelled back and forth with several iterations and phone calls discussing various changes and various arguments about what should go where,” recalls Finkel. “It was fun trying to get a manual that was consumer oriented rather than technical oriented at that time.” Early parts of the book dealt with setting up the computer, but much of the material was programming instruction.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

” * * * James Fadiman James Fadiman, PhD (psychedelicsresearch@gmail.com, jamesfadiman.com), has been involved with psychedelic research since the 1960s. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard and his graduate work at Stanford, where he collaborated with the Harvard Group, the West Coast Research Group in Menlo Park, and Ken Kesey. He is the author of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and is often referred to as America’s wisest and most respected authority on psychedelics and their use. Preface Some of my loved ones would insist that the most important work I’ve done in the last 4 years has involved studying and judiciously using psychedelics.

Dubner) Amoruso, Sophia: The Richest Man in Babylon (George Samuel Clason), No Man’s Land: Where Growing Companies Fail (Doug Tatum), Venture Deals (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson), Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties (Rainer Maria Rilke) Andreessen, Marc: High Output Management; Only the Paranoid Survive (Andrew S. Grove), Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (Peter Thiel with Blake Masters), Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Neal Gabler), Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (David Michaelis), The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (Randall E. Stross), Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (Steve Martin), The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) Arnold, Patrick: Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero (Chris Matthews), From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs (Andrew Weil), Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond) Attia, Peter: Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson), Surely You’re Joking, Mr.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Europeans hadn’t been aware of the useful properties of latex gums until two French naturalists noticed that indigenous Amazonians were using latex to make boots, hoods, tents, containers, and much more. However, unlike the Amazonians, when Europeans bumbled across latex’s properties, factories immediately sprang up in Britain, France, and the United States to make erasers, rubber boots, and raincoats.15 Incandescent light bulb (1879): Thomas Edison and his Menlo Park team “invented” the incandescent light bulb by improving on a line of nearly two dozen bulbs patented between 1841 and 1878 by inventors from Scotland, Belgium, France, and Russia. In Britain, Joseph Swan received a patent for a similar bulb in the same year as Edison. This cumulative process can be traced to Ben Franklin, who, while visiting his native Boston in 1743, saw a Scot named Archibald Spencer demonstrate the effect of static electricity in a public lecture.

Ian holistic thinking; analytic thinking and; cousin marriage and; Middle East and holistic visual processing Holland Holy Land Holy Roman Empire Homo economicus Hong Kong hourly pay Howes, Anton Huguenots hui laojia Hui merchants human nature human psychology; efforts to explain; innate; war and human rights Hume, David Hundred Years’ War hunter-gatherers; farming and; gods of; Hadza; impersonal prosociality and; interconnectedness among; kin-based institutions and; meat-sharing norms and; mobile; norms of; norm-violators in ibn Ahmad, Said Ibn Khaldûn Ibn al-Shatir Ilahita Imitation of Christ, The (Kempis) immigration; children and; first-generation; second-generation; to WEIRD societies impersonal exchange Impersonal Honesty Game impersonal markets; evolution of; individualism and; interpersonal relationships and; rise of impersonal prosociality; analytic thinking and; greater; hunter-gatherers and; impartial rule-following and; increasing; interpersonal prosociality and; market integration and; motivations for; psychology favorable to impersonal trust; GTQ and; intergroup competition and; levels of; trust without improving mentality incest; Anglo-Saxon kings and; circle of; cultural evolution and; Ju/'hoansi taboos against; marriage and; prohibitions; Protestantism and; Western Church and independence; psychological shifts in; Western Church and India; Hindu Marriage Act of 1955; psychological variation and Indian Ocean individualism; analytic thinking and; complex; corruption and; elements of; global map of; guilt and; impersonal markets and; innovation and; KII and; kin-based institutions and; Latin America and; Matsigenka and; measures of; MFP and; motivations for; omnibus measure of; Protestantism and; psychological; psychological shifts in; psychological variation in; psychology of; religion and; self-obsession and; social world of; understanding; walking speed and; WEIRD psychology and; Western Church and individual ownership industrialization Industrial Revolution; cause of; economic development and; economic growth and; eruption of; Germany and; innovation and; origins of; products of; Protestantism and; psychological variation and; run-up to; second; self-regulation and; southern Italy and informational networks in-group favoritism in-group loyalty inheritance initiation rites initiation rituals innovation; crucial; economic growth and; engines of; individualism and; Industrial Revolution and; knowledge societies and; preindustrial; rates of; social safety nets and; WEIRD psychology and instincts institutional-psychological mismatches instrumental variable regression integrative higher-level institutions intensive kinship; analytic thinking and; China and; conformity and; constraints imposed by; cousin marriage and; dissolution of; distrust of strangers and; economic prosperity and; emotional control in societies lacking; evolution of; historical; individuals with less; measure of; MFP and; norms rooted in; patience and; punishment and; rice cultivation and; self-control and; social networks and; social norms and; universal morality and; urbanization and; variation in; Western Church and; see also kin-based institutions intentions interdependence psychology intergroup competition; chiefdoms and; clans and; cultural evolution and; elevated levels of; forms of; France and; gods and; hell and; impersonal trust and; intensity of; kin-based institutions and; lasting psychological effects of; measures of; in Middle Ages; polygynous marriage and; pressure of; processes of; religious beliefs and; religious groups and; rituals and; societal complexity and; waning; WEIRD populations and internalized standards of guilt interpersonal exchange interpersonal interconnections interpersonal networks interpersonal prosociality interpersonal relationships introversion Inuit-Inupiaq language invention Ireland Islam; clock time and; inheritance customs of; martyrs and; Muslim call to prayer; Muslims; pastoral societies and; Spain and; trade and; urbanization and Italy; cousin marriage and; northern; self-government and; southern Jankowiak, William Japan Jesus Jews Johnson, Allen John VII (Pope) Ju/'hoansi; taboos against incest; trance dance of Justinian Code Kabyle peoples Kempis, Thomas à Kenya Kepler, Johannes Khan, Wali KII, see Kinship Intensity Index Kim, Emily kin altruism kin-based institutions; bilateral; conformity and; consensus building and; cultural evolution and; democratic institutions and; destruction of; diffuse; domination of; Europe and; experience in; extensive; extrication from; features of; functions of; global differences in; Hawaii and; historical intensity of; hunter-gatherers and; individualism and; influence of; in-group loyalty and; instincts and; intensive; intensive, breakdown of; intensive, lacking; intergroup competition and; levels of; marriage and; nature of; pair-bonding instincts and; premodern state formations and; psychology and; re-creation of; in regulated-relational societies; Roman Empire and; securities of; shared; social ties reinforced by; stronger; structure of; suppressed; traditional intensity of; weaker; Western Church and kin-based organizations Kinnersley, Ebenezer kin networks Kinship Intensity Index (KII); countries high on; countries with higher values of; cousin marriage and; of ethnolinguistic groups; guilt and; higher amounts of; importance of intentions and; individualism and; PGG and; shame and; tightness of societies and; Triad Task and; variation in; voluntary blood donations and kinship norms kinship practices kinship terminologies kinship traits knowledge sharing knowledge societies; growth of; innovation and; meetings of Korea Kuwait landowners Late Antiquity Late Middle Ages; Europe and; mechanical clocks and latex Latin America Latin Christendom Laurence, Steve Law and Revolution (Berman) law codes Lawspeaker left-handedness Letterbox Levine, Robert levirate marriage lex mercatoria Liberia life-cycle servants life expectancy linguistic systems literacy; analytic thinking and; early spread of; high levels of; impact of; political representation and; promotion of; Protestantism and; Prussia and; rates; societies; spread of; Western (Roman Catholic) Church and; women and Local Coreligionist Game Local God Locke, John London long-distance trading Los Angeles Lothringia low-status unmarried men loyalty Lübeck Lukaszewski, Aaron Luther, Martin Lutheranism Maasai Machiavelli, Niccolò madrassas Mafia Magdeburg Law Magellan, Ferdinand male-male competition Malthusian Trap manual labor Mapuche market grants market-integrated communities market integration; fairness and; impersonal prosociality and; patience and; in rural regions market norms; dissemination of; fostering; internalized; Middle Ages and market-thinking marriage; age of; arranged; clans and; to close relatives; communal ceremonies and; crime and; cultural evolution and; European Marriage Pattern; to forbidden relatives; groups; incest and; institutions; as keystone institution; kin-based institutions and; late; levirate; lifelong; MFP and; monogamous; norms; polyandrous; polygamous; premarital labor period; prohibitions; punishment and; remarriage; residence after; social norms and; sororate; taboos and; tribal boundaries and; venerable customs; Western (Roman Catholic) Church and; women and; see also cousin marriage; polygynous marriage Marriage and Family Program (MFP); Carolingian Empire and; changes wrought by; Christianity and; cities most influenced by; consolidation of; creation of; dosage of; Eastern Orthodox Church and; Europe, still in; European tribes and; exposure to; full force of; impact on Europe; implementation of; individualism and; intensive kinship and; milestones in; norms of; psychological effects of; social structure reorganized by; sway of; taboos and Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China Marshall, Lorna Martin of Tours Marx, Karl maternal-child bonds mating psychology Matsigenka; guilt and; hamlets; individualism and; psychology of; shame and; UG and maximal lineage Maya meat-sharing norms mechanical clocks; Late Middle Ages and; monasteries and Mediterranean Meiji Restoration memory Menlo Park menopause mentalizing abilities Merovingian Dynasty Mesopotamia Mesopotamian gods Mexico MFP, see Marriage and Family Program MFQ, see Moral Foundations Questionnaire Middle Ages; agriculture and; banking in; Cistercian Order and; cousin marriage and; cultural evolution during; intergroup competition in; market norms and; MFP exposure during; self-regulation and; universities and; urban centers and; Western Christian Church and; Yiddish and; see also Early Middle Ages; High Middle Ages; Late Middle Ages Middle East Middle English Migliano, Andrea Miguel, Ted military conquest military organizations militias mimicry mind hacks Ming Dynasty mirror images missionaries; from Nestorian and Oriental Churches; non-European countries and; relentless nature of; Twelve Apostles (New Spain) Mithraism model-based cues modern European languages modern societies monasteries; Cistercian Order; High Middle Ages and; mechanical clocks and; spread of Mongolia monitoring-and-punishing indices monogamy; marriage and; norms; suppressive effects of Montesquieu Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) moral judgments moral motivations moral realism moral relativism moral universalism Mormon community Motolinía, Toribio de Benavente Muqaddimah, The (Ibn Khaldûn) murder; criminal liability for; planned homicide; rates Murphy, Robert F.


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

The ARPANET’s earliest users were its builders: mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers at places like Bolt, Beranek and Newman, where Pat Crowther printed her cave maps and Will Crowther wrote router code; MIT; Carnegie Mellon; UCLA; and, up in Northern California, Berkeley, Stanford, and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. These people all contributed to designing the early Internet, suggesting new protocols, fixing bugs, and adding features as they went. Because the military and the highest echelons of academic computer science were so male dominated, it stands to reason that all these people, the first users of the Internet, were college-educated men.


pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

“The first person who told me about them pitched the business badly,” he says, adding that that person was “a little bit of a doofus when it came to these businesses.” But Jeremy Stoppelman, the cofounder of Yelp and an early Airbnb angel investor, told Hoffman it was an exciting idea and said he really needed to meet with its founders. Ten days later, the Airbnb founders drove down to the Greylock offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park—the mecca for venture capital—to meet with Hoffman. Within a few minutes, Hoffman says, it became clear to him that the concept was not Couchsurfing at all; it was eBay for space, which he saw as an infinitely bigger and far more original idea. He stopped them midway and told them there was no need to keep pitching.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Despite its increasing affluence, the city remains home to eight of the ten neighborhoods with the highest service-class concentrations in the Bay Area, most of them located in and around downtown. There are also large service-class zones at the far peripheries north of Marin and east of Oakland in a long band running from Oakland to Fremont, in Menlo Park, and in East Palo Alto in the heart of Silicon Valley. Virtually no plurality working-class districts remain in the region. Figure 7.6: San Francisco Source: Map by Martin Prosperity Institute, based on data from the US Census. Boston’s creative class is similarly tightly clustered in and around its downtown core, from the Financial District and Faneuil Hall to upscale Beacon Hill and Back Bay; the South End, the heart of the city’s gay community; and the Fenway-Kenmore area (see Figure 7.7).


pages: 310 words: 89,838

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

Across the Atlantic, there was no let-up in building more powerful accelerators. As CERN was finding its feet, the first multimillion-dollar laboratories, with accelerators measured in miles and kilometers rather than feet and meters, went into operation. The 3-kilometer-long Stanford Linear Accelerator was built at Menlo Park; another major facility, the National Accelerator Laboratory, went into construction on 6,800 acres of prairie land about 40 miles west of Chicago. At Brookhaven National Laboratory, engineers built the huge Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, for a time the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, with beams running at an energy of 33 GeV.


pages: 292 words: 94,324

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, fear of failure, framing effect, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, iterative process, lateral thinking, machine translation, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, placebo effect, seminal paper, stem cell, theory of mind

Other useful sources include E. J. Emanuel and L. L. Emanuel, "Four models of the physician-patient relationship," JAMA 267 (1992), pp. 2221–2226; G. L. Engel, "How much longer must medicine's science be bound by a seventeenth-century world view?," in The Task of Medicine: Dialogue at Wickenburg. Menlo Park, California, ed. K. White Donald (Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, 1988). Redelmeier has also examined the importance of clinical dialogue. See "Problems for clinical judgment: Eliciting an insightful history of present illness," Canadian Medical Association Journal 164 (2001), pp. 647–651; "Problems for clinical judgment: Obtaining a reliable past medical history," Canadian Medical Association Journal 164 (2001), pp. 809–813.


pages: 264 words: 90,379

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, fake news, haute couture, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, young professional

I think we get in trouble when this process of editing is disrupted—when we can’t edit, or we don’t know what to edit, or our environment doesn’t let us edit. Remember Sheena Iyengar, who did the research on speed-dating? She once conducted another experiment in which she set up a tasting booth with a variety of exotic gourmet jams at the upscale grocery store Draeger’s in Menlo Park, California. Sometimes the booth had six different jams, and sometimes Iyengar had twenty-four different jams on display. She wanted to see whether the number of jam choices made any difference in the number of jams sold. Conventional economic wisdom, of course, says that the more choices consumers have, the more likely they are to buy, because it is easier for consumers to find the jam that perfectly fits their needs.


pages: 509 words: 92,141

The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt, Dave Thomas

A Pattern Language, Broken windows theory, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, continuous integration, database schema, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, Grace Hopper, higher-order functions, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Menlo Park, MVC pattern, off-by-one error, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, revision control, Schrödinger's Cat, slashdot, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, systems thinking, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, traveling salesman, urban decay, Y2K

" • Jared Richardson, Senior Software Developer, iRenaissance, Inc. "I would like to see this issued to every new employee at my company. . . ." • Chris Cleeland, Senior Software Engineer, Object Computing, Inc. The Pragmatic Programmer From Journeyman to Master Andrew Hunt David Thomas Reading, Massachusetts Harlow, England Menlo Park, California Berkeley, California Don Mills, Ontario Sydney Bonn Amsterdam Tokyo Mexico City Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and Addison-Wesley was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters or in all capitals.


pages: 290 words: 94,968

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage

An Inconvenient Truth, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Evgeny Morozov, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, New Journalism, packet switching, place-making, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, social intelligence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, yellow journalism

Several people sitting at separate terminals could use this giant computer at the same time, and Kline could be found writing code on it at all hours of the day and night. That evening Leonard Kleinrock, the professor in charge of the computer lab, asked Kline to help him test a new device that would link the Sigma 7 to another computer at the Stanford Research Institute, four hundred miles away in Menlo Park, California. The project to link computers in this way had begun when Bob Taylor, an official at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, became frustrated by the proliferation of computer terminals in his office. ARPA was funding computer projects at the University of California, Berkeley; at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); and at the System Development Corporation, a pioneering software company based in Santa Monica.


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

Few involved in the early days of the internet could ever have imagined how central to billions of people’s lives it was to become, but some of them dreamed of it. A year before the ARPANET came online, on 9 December 1968, Doug Engelbart, the ultimate unsung conceptual, philosophical and practical pioneer of modern computing, addressed a crowd of 1,000 programmers at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. It was an event that was to become known as the Mother of All Demos, and during it Engelbart displayed publicly, in one gargantuan techno-splurge, many of the concepts of computing that are so ubiquitous today: the mouse (‘I don’t know why we call it a mouse. It started that way and we never changed it,’ Engelbart said that day), video conferencing, hypertext, teleconferencing, word processing and collaborative real-time editing.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

We were ushered into a large space on the MIT campus, in the middle of which there was a “cold room” raised off the floor and enclosed in glass, in which technicians wearing white lab coats, scarves, and gloves were busy collating punch cards coming through an enormous machine. When I approached, the steam from my breath fogged up the window into the cold room. Wiping it off, I saw “the” computer. I fell in love. Later, in the fall of 1967, I went to Menlo Park to spend time with Stewart Brand, whom I had met in New York in 1965 when he was a satellite member of the USCO group of artists. Now, with his wife, Lois, a mathematician, he was preparing the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog for publication. While Lois and the team did the heavy lifting on the final mechanicals for WEC, Stewart and I sat together in a corner for two days, reading, underlining, and annotating the same paperback copy of Cybernetics that Cage had handed to me the year before, and debating Wiener’s ideas.


pages: 347 words: 91,318

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

The six months of having virtually no competition while Blockbuster settled its debt problems left Hastings with the pleasant task of telling the market that his company would deliver better than expected revenue and subscriber growth in 2006. He told investors in April that as many as 20 percent of DVD householders in markets such as Boston and Menlo Park, California, were now Netflix subscribers, and the market showed no sign of saturation. Netflix’s stock price had bounced back to thirty dollars, while Blockbuster’s was marooned at around four dollars. Yet Blockbuster Online remained a threat, despite its flatlining subscriber growth during the last quarter of 2005 and the first quarter of 2006, and Netflix did not want it resuscitated now that its parent’s debt problem was under control.


Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology by Adrienne Mayor

AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, deep learning, driverless car, Elon Musk, industrial robot, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, life extension, Menlo Park, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, popular electronics, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing test

In Close Engagements with Artificial Companions, ed. Yorick Wilks, 63–74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bryson, Joanna, and Philip Kime. 2011. “Just an Artifact: Why Machines Are Perceived as Moral Agents.” In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 2, ed. T. Walsh, 1641–46. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. Buxton, Richard. 2013. Myths and Tragedies in Their Ancient Greek Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carafa, Giovanni, duca di Noja. 1778. Alcuni Monumenti del Museo Carrafa in Napoli. Naples. Digitized by Getty Research Institute in 2016: https://archive.org/details/alcunimonumentid00cara.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Cisco networking guru Dave Cheriton had all blessed the Google project with substantial investments. Stanford itself earned 1.8 million shares in exchange for Google’s access to Page’s patents held by the university. (Stanford had cashed in those shares for $336 million by 2005). Google moved out of Stanford in 1999 into the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, an Intel manager soon to be CEO of YouTube and a sister of Anne, the founder of the genomic startup 23andMe. Brin’s marriage to Anne in 2007 symbolized the procreative embrace of Silicon Valley, Sand Hill Road, and Palo Alto. (They divorced in 2015.) By 2017, Google’s own computer scientists had authored more of the world’s most-cited papers in the subject than had Stanford’s own faculty.1 Google’s founders always conceived of their projects in prophetic terms.


Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen Laberge PHD

Abraham Maslow, active measures, Albert Einstein, classic study, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, Menlo Park, tacit knowledge, the map is not the territory

Pendlebury, The Walled Garden of Truth (New York: Dutton, 1976), 11. G. Larsen, Beyond the Far Side (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel & Parker, 1983). I. Shah, Caravan of Dreams (London: Octagon, 1968), 132. I. Shah, The Way of the Sufi (New York: Dutton, 1968), 104. Tholey, op. cit. Shah, op. cit., 110. Tholey, op. cit. E. Langer, Mindfulness (Menlo Park, Calif.: Addison-Wesley, 1989). E. Langer, ““Rethinking the Role of Thought in Social Interaction,” in New Directions in Attribution Research, eds. H. Harvey, W. Ickes, and R. F. Kidd (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1978), 50. Langer, op. cit. I. Shah, Learning How to Learn (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 50.


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Chapter 19 Men in Tights They say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. A young social media marketer may have proved that once and for all on January 29, 2021, when he hired an airplane to fly over San Francisco trailing a banner that read suck my nuts robinhood. Kaspar Povilanskas gave the pilot a bit extra to have him circle the broker’s Menlo Park headquarters just south of the city a few times.[1] Meanwhile, about one hundred thousand users egged on by social media outrage went onto the Google Play store to give the Robinhood Android app one-star reviews, tanking its overall rating. A screenshot of one of many subsequently deleted by Google read: Literally engaging in illegal market manipulation by blocking purchases on stocks they don’t want you to purchase.


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

In some ways, that made sense; it was a sprawling, global startup that grew as it adapted. But that meant that the group that, say, showcased short films of Rappler for Internet.org and Free Basics9 was different from this team in Singapore, which was different from the product and investigating groups for violations in Menlo Park that would later be called the Integrity team. Which meant that no one had the complete picture. After choosing my lunch from the lavish buffet spread, I followed Ken, Clare, and Elizabeth to a long table and sat down to eat. “What we found is really alarming,” I proceeded to tell them. “I’ve never seen anything like this, but it’s clear how dangerous this can be.”


pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

It meant that I, and not a tech billionaire, could go electric and drive two hundred miles without worrying. It marked a hard-won victory over the internal combustion engine. * In the summer of 1896 Thomas Edison, the man responsible for the first workable lightbulb and the phonograph, was dubbed the ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’. Inventions seemed to flow uninhibited from his brain on an almost daily basis. On a single day when he was just over forty, Edison had noted down a hundred and twelve ideas for possible devices, including a mechanical cotton picker and an electrical piano as well as ‘Ink for the Blind’. Henry Ford, in contrast, was an unknown engineer from Michigan who worked at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, part of Edison’s electricity empire, helping to maintain the steam engines that generated electricity.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Skowronek, Building a New American State, pp. 124–25; Kolko, Railroads and Regulation, pp. 7–20; Ari Hoogenboom and Olive Hoogenboom, A History of the ICC: From Panacea to Palliative (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 1–6. 5. Robin A. Prager, “Using Stock Price Data to Measure the Effects of Regulation: The Interstate Commerce Act and the Railroad Industry,” RAND Journal of Economics 20, no. 2 (1989). 6. Kaiser Family Foundation, Health Care Costs: A Primer. Key Information on Health Care Costs and Their Impact (Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2012). 7. Munn concerned the regulation of grain elevators but was soon extended to include railroads. 8. Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics, on which much of modern neoclassical economics is based, was only published in 1890. 9. Skowronek, Building a New American State, pp. 135–37. 10.

“Should Europe Worry About Adversarial Legalism?” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 17(2):165–83. ______. 2001. Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kaiser Family Foundation. 2012. Health Care Costs: A Primer. Key Information on Health Care Costs and Their Impact. Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaplan, H. Eliot. 1937. “Accomplishments of the Civil Service Reform Movement.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 189:142–47. Kaplan, Robert D. 2000. The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. New York: Random House.


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

.: Copper Canyon Press, 2002). 15 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). 16 David Shields, quoted in Bond Huberman, “I Could Go On Like This Forever,” City Arts, July 1, 2008. 17 Roger Ebert, review of Quantum of Solace, November 12, 2008, at rogerebert.suntimes.com. 18 Matt Mahoney, “Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence,” Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the Eleventh Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (Menlo Park, Calif.: American Association for Artificial Intelligence, 1999). See also Matt Mahoney, Data Compression Explained (San Jose, Calif.: Ocarina Networks, 2010), www.mattmahoney.net/dc/dce.html. 19 Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). 20 Eric Hayot, in “Somewhere Out There,” episode 374 of This American Life, February 13, 2009. 21 Three Colors: White, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski (Miramax, 1994). 22 David Bellos, “I, Translator,” New York Times, March 20, 2010. 23 Douglas R.


Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

Alistair Cooke, commoditize, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, full employment, Future Shock, Herbert Marcuse, invention of agriculture, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics

., "Training Visual Attention." Aca- demic Therapy, Fall 1974, pp. 5-17. Murchie, Guy, Music of the Spheres. New York: Dover, 1961. The Network Project, Notebook, Vols. I-VII. 101 Earl Hal1, Columbia University, New York, 1973. 367 BIBLIOGRAPHY "New Insights Into Buying Explored," Investments in To- morrow, No. 16. Menlo Park, Ca1.: Stanford Research Institute, Summer 1975. Niehardt, John G., Black Elk Speaks. New York: William Morrow, 1932. Nielsen Television, 1975. Chicago: A. C. Nielsen, 1975. Olson, David and Richard Parker, "Why Prices Go Up When Jobs Go Down." Mother Jones, February 1977, pp. 11-12. "One Hundred Leading Advertisers."


pages: 342 words: 99,390

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history by Gregory Zuckerman

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Ponzi scheme, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Robert Shiller, rolodex, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, technology bubble, zero-sum game

ONCE AGAIN, THE PHONE RANG IN ALAN ZAFRAN’'S OFFICE. IT WAS late morning and the caller identification flashing on his assistant’'s keyboard showed a Los Angeles number. Zafran already knew who it was: Jeffrey Greene, with yet another urgent, angry call. Months earlier, Zafran had moved from Beverly Hills to Menlo Park, in Northern California’'s San Mateo County, to steer his children away from the neuroses so prevalent in the Hollywood scene. Zafran still enjoyed dealing with Greene, though. The hefty trading commissions were a big part of it, of course. But the more Zafran understood Greene’'s trade, the more he pulled for it to succeed.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Melinda Beck, an illustrator in Brooklyn, sent Google an e-mail in response to the offer. She noted that she had worked for high-profile clients like Target and Nickelodeon, which had given her work lots of exposure. Still, she pointed out, “Both clients still paid me.” The Google spirit is catching, though, as could be seen in an ad in the fall of 2009 for a law firm in Menlo Park, California, on the free classifieds service Craigslist. “The current economic climate has made it difficult for young lawyers to find paid positions,” it read. “Good experience with a top notch firm is what we offer. If you can realistically make a six to twelve month commitment and can get by without compensation (other than billable travel, mileage, parking and related expenses), this is an excellent opportunity.”


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

India: An Investor’s Guide to the Next Economic Superpower. Singapore: John Wiley & Sons (Asia), 2006, 321 pp. China and India, 2025: A Comparative Assessment. Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, 22 August 2011. Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal: Estimates of Undiscovered Oil and Gas North of the Arctic Circle. Menlo Park, CA: U.S. Geological Service, 2008. Conflict with China: Prospects, Consequences and Strategies for Deterrence. Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, October 2011. Corruption Perceptions Index 2011. Berlin: Transparency International, 26 October 2011. Cunningham, Fiona, and Rory Medcalf. The Dangers of Denial: Nuclear Weapons in China-India Relations.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Every industry has a flavor, and tech’s was the hatred of regulation, a “pervasive weltanschauung” that “manifests itself in everything from a rebel-outsider posture” to “an embarrassing lack of philanthropy.”6 Suspicion of government, she said, was “the techie equivalent to the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West. Just as, if you live in the West, you are shaped by this Judeo-Christian heritage regardless of how you were brought up,” so Randian hubris flowed through the water in Cupertino and Menlo Park.7 Borsook credited it to many things: for one, annoyance at the government’s clueless early attempts to regulate tech by, say, banning strong cryptographic protection. And then there was the simple fact that coders live, by necessity, in a logical, rule-based universe that “can put you in a continual state of exasperation verging on rage at how messy and imperfect humans and their societies are.”8 It’s all a little silly, as it was government investment that got the internet up and running in the first place, but there’s no denying that anyone put behind a keyboard for the first time comes away with a sense of autonomy: You can explore anywhere you want to go.


pages: 290 words: 98,699

Wealth Without a Job: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Freedom and Security Beyond the 9 to 5 Lifestyle by Phil Laut, Andy Fuehl

Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business process, buy and hold, declining real wages, fear of failure, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, index card, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, women in the workforce

If you are depressed or lethargic, you will not achieve your goals unless, of course, your goals are minuscule. Your goals should be big and worth pursuing. Since your goals are big, you must be in a peak mental and physical state in order to produce the desired results. Thomas Edison was a person who knew and used the five principles for achieving success. Known as the Wizard of Menlo Park, he set the record with 1,300 patents registered in his name. He was an entrepreneur. While in his 20s, he set up a laboratory employing 50 engineers. His best-known inventions include the phonograph, an automatic telegraphy machine, the stock ticker machine, the kinetoscope motion picture machine, and the incandescent light bulb, all of which owed their success to his work in the storage and transfer of electricity.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

For the first two years of Google’s gestation, while Sergey Brin and Larry Page were making some of the foundational breakthroughs, there were no headquarters at all: Brin and Page were studying at Stanford University.23 In September 1998, Google moved to the clichéd start-up location: a garage. They rented some rooms, too, in a house on Santa Margarita Street in Menlo Park. One room contained Sergey, Larry, and two other engineers. The garage itself was packed with servers. Desks were the simplest possible design: a door placed horizontally across a pair of sawhorses. Nothing could be cruder or easier to put together and take apart, or easier to hack about. One day the house’s owner, Susan Wojcicki, was expecting delivery of a refrigerator.


pages: 307 words: 97,677

The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski

Buckminster Fuller, card file, human-factors engineering, industrial robot, Menlo Park, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman

Next he had to go through the process of patenting it and, finally, setting up the infrastructure to distribute and sell his invention. Only then was the electric light bulb truly a successful innovation, and it was the long process of going from idea to acceptable product that Edison referred to as the “perspiration” part. Thus when the Wizard of Menlo Park called invention 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration, he was speaking not only about the creative act of inventing but also about the whole inventive process needed to bring more than intellectual success. Edison warned against discouragement during the perspiration phase in the following way, reminding us that we get things to work by the successive removal of bugs: Genius?


pages: 193 words: 98,671

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

There is a colossal opportunity for companies to break this logjam and organize around customer satisfaction instead of around software, around personas instead of around technology, around profit instead of around programmers. I eagerly await the enlightened executive who seizes this chance and forever alters the way software is built by providing the industry with a bold and successful example. Alan Cooper Menlo Park, California October 2003 http://www.cooper.com inmates@cooper.com What Do You Get When You Cross a Computer with an Airplane? In December 1995, American Airlines Flight 965 departed from Miami on a regularly scheduled trip to Cali, Columbia. On the landing approach, the pilot of the 757 needed to select the next radio-navigation fix, named "ROZO."


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Since then, Andreessen had made hundreds of millions of dollars investing in companies like Skype, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga…and Facebook. He also sat on Facebook’s board. I flew to San Francisco in the spring of 2016 to start briefing relevant parties on what I’d seen at Cambridge Analytica. Sheela set up a meeting at the Andreessen Horowitz offices, on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. From the outside, the building looked like a slightly upscale suburban dentist’s office, but inside, a rather bland lobby gave way to walls hung with fantastically expensive art. I met with Andreessen employees in a conference room and told them about Cambridge Analytica, the millions of Facebook profiles it had misappropriated, and the malicious way it was using the profiles to interfere with the election.


pages: 331 words: 96,989

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

Hofferth, “Home Media and Children’s Achievement and Behavior,” Child Development 81, no. 5 (September–October 2010): 1598–1619; Internet World Stats: www.Internetworldstats.com/stats.htm; Victoria J. Rideout, Ulla G. Foehr, and Donald F. Roberts, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds (Menlo Park: CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010); Amanda Lenhart, Teens, Smartphones & Texting (Washingon, DC: Pew Research Center, 2010); Jay N. Giedd, “The Digital Revolution and Adolescent Brain Evolution,” Journal of Adolescent Health 51, no. 2 (August 2012): 101–5; Stephen Nowicki and John Carton, “The Measurement of Emotional Intensity from Facial Expressions,” Journal of Social Psychology 133, no. 5 (November 1993): 749–50; Stephen Nowicki, Manual for the Receptive Tests of the DANVA2.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Onstage at the Box, Adam told the crowd that his company was not a real estate business but instead one connected to the dominant companies emerging from Silicon Valley. “Until today, we were a boutique office space,” Adam said. “Starting tomorrow, we’re going to be the world’s first ‘physical social network.’” WeWork’s business didn’t seem to share much with the tech companies taking off in the Mission or Menlo Park. The empires of the 2010s—Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb—were being built on “platforms” with “network effects” that made them more and more valuable with each user that signed up; WeWork leased office space in half a dozen buildings to people who paid rent. But Miguel and Adam had been talking about the networking aspect of WeWork since the beginning, a decade after Miguel had missed the social revolution with English, baby!


pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

And still three people have died from crashes stemming from the software, with at least ten other nonfatal crashes also under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.52 Still, it’s no coincidence that, alongside a disregard for local laws, the vast majority of wealth created over the last few decades has been concentrated in the tech industry, starting with the rise of Silicon Valley venture capital that set the stage for today’s obscene IPOs. These days venture capital is centered around Sand Hill Road, the main thoroughfare connecting Palo Alto and Menlo Park, which might as well be paved in gold. These investment groups act as a sort of way station for big money with no particular place to be, like pension funds, endowments, and trust funds, even as economic inequality in the US continues to rise to untenable levels. But that’s of little concern for the people whose only job is to make money.


pages: 341 words: 98,954

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

As Twain understood, Hank Morgan’s unwavering folk-faith in patents was rooted in a past that bore an increasingly tenuous relationship to the reality of post–Civil War America. By the middle and late decades of the century, backwoods inventors and workshop gadgeteers had been largely displaced by modern corporate research laboratories such as the one Thomas Edison established in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. Companies were not only coming to dominate entire fields of invention; they were using patents in ways anticipated by the Jacksonian redefinition of patents as simple property rights. Patents were valued—and increasingly hoarded—not to advance technological progress as per English common law and the U.S.


The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner

anthropic principle, anti-communist, Boeing 747, computer age, Dr. Strangelove, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, old-boy network, profit motive, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative

So in 1973 Jason left IDA and was installed at the Stanford Research Institute, called SRI, a research center that didn’t happen to be classified as an FCRC and so was immune from the ceiling requirement. At the time SRI was in the process of cutting its historical ties with Stanford University; it specialized in information technology and had the honor of being one of the first four nodes of ARPAnet. Its headquarters were in Menlo Park, California, but it had a satellite office in Washington, D.C. The move cost ARPA (which had meanwhile renamed itself DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) over $500,000: it left IDA’s ceiling where it was and so had to fund SRI to take on Jason. The outcome, as far as Lukasik was concerned, was a success.


pages: 345 words: 100,989

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

They were also beginning to wonder if Greensill would be the source of a major financial scandal. One loan caused particular concern. The Credit Suisse funds had loaned about $435 million to Katerra, a construction company part-owned by the SoftBank Vision Fund. The five-year-old company was based in Menlo Park, California, and claimed to be ‘transforming construction through innovation of process and technology.’ In fact, it was struggling to survive. Some projects were running well over budget, and its rapid expansion plans had stretched the company’s balance sheet to breaking point. The Vision Fund had invested $2 billion into Katerra over the previous couple of years.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

For those unfamiliar, Survival Research Laboratories is a Bay Area-based “industrial performing arts” collective famous for its pyrotechnic displays of machinic mayhem and which might typify a DIY engineering ethic often associated with the “California Ideology,” whereas Page Mill Road in Palo Alto (and Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park) have housed important clusters of important Silicon Valley venture capital firms. 21.  Nick Whitford-Dyer, “Red Plenty Platforms,” Culture Machine 14 (2013): 1–27, and Tiziana Terranova, “Red Stack Attack!” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Falmouth, Cornwall: Urbanomic and Merve Verlag, 2014), 379–400, both make explicit connections between Spufford's version of cybernetic planning, contemporary computing platforms, and my Stack thesis.

If the campus is a sort of utopian idealization of the Google Cloud Polis itself, this version, unlike some others, at least makes some gestures toward including the outside User in its model. The project is still to be approved, if at all, by Mountain View city council, and so we shall have to wait and see what is actually built to compare the real environmental platform to that proposed.58 By contrast, looking at Frank Gehry's early proposals for a new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park (nicknamed “Zee Town” after company founder, Mark Zuckerberg) we see a plan for a more traditional corporate campus, designed, it appears, to ensure the managed serendipitous contact between employees in motion. In this encapsulated “company town” winding pathways and strategic lines of sight connecting interior and exterior views are embedded in a multilevel landscape where sub- and superterranean greenery twists and turns onto and under the collection of buildings.59 At their desks, the aggregate social graph of the on-site employee/resident population is framed and displayed to itself as it moves and involves itself within itself in airplane hangar–scale open-plan work space.


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

This is what makes Facebook powerful: It is both a global mail system and a global newspaper, part telephone network and part television broadcast. The News Feed’s algorithmic formula is like the Coca-Cola recipe. It serves billions of people and nothing close to its full explication has ever been published. Recently, I visited Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park to meet with its head of product management, Adam Mosseri, a former designer who once ran a consultancy that specialized in, among other things, museum exhibitions. I didn’t expect Mosseri to reveal the darkest secrets of his lab, as if I were Charlie Bucket staying late at the Chocolate Factory.


pages: 274 words: 93,758

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

The evidence, necessarily, must be subjective. But another smidgeon of evidence yields a similar picture. In 2006, Oakland Tribune reporter Dave Newhouse went to the fiftieth reunion of his high school class at Menlo-Atherton High School. Back in 1956, before it had become the center of “Silicon Valley,” Menlo Park/Atherton was Leave It to Beaver country: modest suburbia. For the reunion Newhouse interviewed twenty-eight classmates, publishing their reminiscences in a book titled Old Bears.49 These old grads tell their tales of joys and sadness with what seems like remarkable honesty. At this point in their lives they seem to want to set the record straight.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Cyberspace, with its disembodied voices and ethereal avatars, seemed mystical from the start, its unearthly vastness a receptacle for America’s spiritual yearnings and tropes. “What better way,” wrote Cal State philosopher Michael Heim in 1991, “to emulate God’s knowledge than to generate a virtual world constituted by bits of information?” In 1999, the year Google moved from a Menlo Park garage to a Palo Alto office, the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter wrote a manifesto predicting “the second coming of the computer,” replete with gauzy images of “cyberbodies drift[ing] in the computational cosmos” and “beautifully-laid-out collections of information, like immaculate giant gardens.”


pages: 403 words: 105,431

The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education by Diane Ravitch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, confounding variable, David Brooks, desegregation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Henig, What Do We Know About the Outcomes of KIPP Schools? (Boulder, CO, and Tempe, AZ: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit, 2008), 13; Katrina R. Woodworth et al., San Francisco Bay Area KIPP Schools: A Study of Early Implementation and Achievement, Final Report (Menlo Park, CA: SRI International, 2008), ix, 26-29, 33-34, 63. 37 F. Howard Nelson, Bella Rosenberg, and Nancy Van Meter, Charter School Achievement on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Teachers, August 2004); Diana Jean Schemo, “Charter Schools Trail in Results, U.S.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

., “Prenatal Exposure to Maternal Depression, Neonatal Methylation of Human Glucocorticoid Receptor Gene (NR3C1) and Infant Cortisol Stress Responses,” Epigenetics 3, 2 (2008): 97–106. * D. C. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” Summary Report AFOSR-3233, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., October 1962. * “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84, 3 (1977): 231–59.


pages: 359 words: 110,488

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

In May 2004, he joined the startup as its first employee and was granted a minority stake in the business. Robertson, for his part, joined the company’s board as an adviser. * * * — AT FIRST, Elizabeth and Shaunak holed up in a tiny office in Burlingame for a few months until they found a bigger space. The new location was far from glamorous. While its address was technically in Menlo Park, it was in a gritty industrial zone on the edge of East Palo Alto, where shootings remained frequent. One morning, Elizabeth showed up at work with shards of glass in her hair. Someone had shot at her car and shattered the driver’s-side window, missing her head by inches. Elizabeth incorporated the company as Real-Time Cures, which an unfortunate typo turned into “Real-Time Curses” on early employees’ paychecks.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

News Feed, the heart of Facebook’s user experience, was not yet available. The company had only nine million dollars in revenue in the prior year. But Facebook had huge potential—that was already obvious—and I leapt at the opportunity to meet its founder. Zuck showed up at my Elevation Partners office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, dressed casually, with a messenger bag over his shoulder. U2 singer Bono and I had formed Elevation in 2004, along with former Apple CFO Fred Anderson, former Electronic Arts president John Riccitiello, and two career investors, Bret Pearlman and Marc Bodnick. We had configured one of our conference rooms as a living room, complete with a large arcade video game system, and that is where Zuck and I met.


pages: 362 words: 108,359

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street by Jonathan A. Knee

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business logic, call centre, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, deal flow, discounted cash flows, fear of failure, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, if you build it, they will come, iterative process, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, proprietary trading, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, technology bubble, young professional, éminence grise

And even if he paid top dollar and made the occasional mistake, he knew at least he would not make an error on the scale of paying for a business but getting only a hollowed-out shell. So the Media Group now reported up to Chris Harland, who was sole global head of Media and Telecommunications. Cassou had by then decided to move to the Menlo Park office and establish a West Coast presence for the combined group. The only other pure “media” managing director at the time had been brought into the group at Meguid’s direction just over a year before to cover cable companies. Blond and blue eyed, Andrew Tisdale certainly looked the part and had always had solid reviews, but he had most recently worked in the backwater of Morgan Stanley’s São Paolo office and had almost no media experience.


pages: 325 words: 110,330

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace

Albert Einstein, business climate, buy low sell high, complexity theory, fail fast, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Menlo Park, reality distortion field, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Wall-E

Steve was hard-charging—relentless, even—but a conversation with him took you places you didn’t expect. It forced you not just to defend but also to engage. And that in itself, I came to believe, had value. The next day, several of us drove out to meet with Steve at his place in Woodside, a lovely neighborhood near Menlo Park. The house was almost empty but for a motorcycle, a grand piano, and two personal chefs who had once worked at Chez Panisse. Sitting on the grass looking out over his seven-acre lawn, he formally proposed that he buy the graphics group from Lucasfilm and showed us a proposed organizational chart for the new company.


pages: 445 words: 105,255

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

The very first, established by Krupp, studied the metallurgy of alloyed steels; other laboratories developed methods for atomically precise fabrication of sub-nanometer structures (which is to say, methods for organic chemical synthesis). In the United States, Thomas Edison’s “invention factory” at Menlo Park provided another early model for organized research, and during the early twentieth century industrial R&D labs proliferated (established, for example, by General Electric, Westinghouse, Bell Telephone, and DuPont). During World War II, the US federal government greatly expanded other dimensions of research support, establishing a series of National Laboratories, and in 1950, the National Science Foundation.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

Fast-moving consumer goods companies play with the packaging of key brands. Publishers sometimes offer several different covers to a magazine or a book and see what sells. Experiments have been going on in corporations behind the scenes for over a century. Thomas Edison may have been known as the Wizard of Menlo Park, but his experimentation hit a systematic, industrial scale in 1887 after he built large laboratories a few miles north in West Orange, New Jersey. He employed thousands of people in an ‘invention factory’ and made sure the storerooms were well stocked and that the physical layout of the laboratories allowed the largest number of experiments in the shortest possible time.


pages: 624 words: 104,923

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, British Empire, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Fellow of the Royal Society, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, trade route, two and twenty, V2 rocket, Vesna Vulović

The first written use of hello spelt with an ‘e’ is in a letter of Edison’s in August 1877 suggesting that the best way of starting a conversation by telephone was to say ‘hello’ because it ‘can be heard ten to twenty feet away’. Edison discovered this while testing Alexander Graham Bell’s prototype telephone. Bell himself preferred the rather nautical ‘Ahoy, hoy!’ Edison used to shout ‘hello!’ into telephone receivers at Menlo Park Labs while he was working on improvements to Bell’s design. His habit spread to the rest of his co-workers and then to telephone exchanges until it became common usage. Before ‘hello’ was used, telephone operators used to say, ‘Are you there?’ or ‘Who are you?’ or ‘Are you ready to talk?’ Once ‘hello’ became standard the operators were called ‘hello girls’.


pages: 289 words: 112,697

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

In the US Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he was later to express that his experience in the military fostered his competence in organizing. In 1962 he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and took part in a scientific study of the then-legal drug LSD in Menlo Park. In 1966, Brand conceived and sold buttons which read,“Why Haven’t We Seen A Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?” He thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol. In a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image “gave the sense that Earth is an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space.


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

The prolific inventor is well-known for having created the phonograph in 1877, but a frequently overlooked part of the story is that playing music was not the breakthrough application that Edison originally envisioned. Instead, his grand idea for commercializing the invention was “to make Dolls speak sing cry,” as he recorded in a notebook entry in 1877. Engineers at Edison’s research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, created thousands of talking dolls. They had wooden limbs and metal torsos, and stood twenty-two inches tall. Their bodies concealed crank-powered, wax-cylinder phonographs that enabled the dolls to recite classic verses such as “Hickory, Dickory, Dock,” “Little Jack Horner,” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Some began with relatively homogenous user populations who shared values and norms with one another and with the developers—for example, back when TheFacebook was open only to tech-savvy Ivy League university students.13 Many of the social norms that first emerged were familiar from college life, and the diversity of opinions, values, and intentions would be attenuated by the narrow band of people who were even there in the first place. Other sites, modeled after blogging tools and searchable archives, subscribed to an “information wants to be free” ethos that was shared by designers and participants alike.14 Facebook User Operations team members at the main campus in Menlo Park, California, May 2012. Photo by Robyn Beck, in the AFP collection. © Robyn Beck/Getty Images. Used with permission In fact, in the early days of a platform, it was not unusual for there to be no one in an official position to handle content moderation. Often content moderation at a platform was handled either by user support or community relations teams, generally more focused on offering users technical assistance; as a part of the legal team’s operations, responding to harassment or illegal activity while also maintaining compliance with technical standards and privacy obligations; or as a side task of the team tasked with removing spam.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

She knows companies will not shift to mobile unless they first transform their culture. “How can we help them learn from what Facebook is doing to hire people that are focused on impact, that are willing to move quickly, that are willing to have failures?” To prod them: “I start off by showing the photo of Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, which has the big Like sign.” Facebook’s sprawling headquarters was once home to Sun Microsystems, a seemingly impregnable tech company that fizzled and was sold to Oracle in 2009. She tells them what they don’t see on the face of the Like sign: “If you peek behind the sign you will see the old Sun Microsystems sign.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

It’s always seemed ironic to me that even as many tech titans complain about the need for public sector education reform to create a twenty-first-century workforce, they also push for tax cuts and corporate subsidies that starve government of its ability to pay for such reform. What’s true at the macro level can be seen at the micro level. I’m not the first to point out the lack of gender or many other types of diversity in Silicon Valley. Walk around any of the sprawling Menlo Park campuses or tall San Francisco towers where many tech companies now operate and you’ll see few women, people of color, or, for that matter, anyone born prior to 1980. Instead, you’ll see a lot of white men under forty, many of whose lack of social skills would put them “on the spectrum.” These are the engineers, and they are hailed as kings.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

an enthusiastic article: Christopher Schroeder, “Dubai, a New Locus of Entrepreneurial Energy,” Washington Post, November 26, 2010, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/25/AR2010112502227.html event in Dubai: Wikileaks, “Outcome of the Entrepreneurship Summit,” November 29, 2011, wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/1057 sang his praises: Judith McHale, “Remarks at the Global Technology Symposium,” Menlo Park, California, March 24, 2011, 2009-2017.state.gov/r/remarks/2011/159141.htm modernize Pakistan: Pakistan 2020, Center for Global Affairs, New York University, 2011. CHAPTER 7: IMPACT INVESTING his Gospel: Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth, and Other Timely Essays,” Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2017, first published in 1889, www.carnegie.org/publications/the-gospel-of-wealth/ women in Africa: Oxfam, “Time to Care,” January 2020, oxfamilibrary.openrepos itory.com/bitstream/handle/10546/620928/bp-time-to-care-inequality-200120-en.pdf 129 Afghans: The World Bank, data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?


pages: 408 words: 105,715

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

affirmative action, British Empire, computer age, Deng Xiaoping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, information retrieval, invention of movable type, machine readable, machine translation, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, QWERTY keyboard, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, transcontinental railway

Collins, observing the commotion, exchanged a few quick whispers with Lunde and a representative from ISO next to him. Nodding to one another, they shifted back in their chairs with their arms crossed, faces still, like they had decided to sit this one out. As far as Unicode was concerned, Collins explained to me over dim sum a couple of months later in Menlo Park, their job was already done. All the East Asian nationally encoded major character sets—previously devised by the countries themselves and set at a number that was sufficient for the characters they needed—were included in the original 1992 version of Unicode, at the time 20,902 Han characters.


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

His system of steam-driven dynamos and incandescent lightbulbs had proved to be as capable of illuminating cities, such as New York and Chicago, as they were a steamship’s cabins, such as those of the SS Columbia with its four Edison dynamos and 120 electric lights.14 But the prolific “Wizard of Menlo Park,” who would eventually amass more than a thousand patents, was unhappy with the performance of his bamboo-filament lightbulbs.15 Too often, a bulb would end up blackened and opaque, with only a peculiar sliver of clear glass remaining. Edison wanted to know why.16 On further inspection, it seemed to Edison that the bulb’s negative terminal, its “cathode,” to which one end of the filament was connected, was emitting some kind of material in all directions that then blackened the inside of the glass.


The Global Citizen: A Guide to Creating an International Life and Career by Elizabeth Kruempelmann

Berlin Wall, business climate, corporate governance, different worldview, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, global village, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, young professional

S H O R T-T E R M W O R K A N D A U - PA I R P R O G R A M S Working for the summer or for a short period of time is an excellent way to get your feet wet without making a long-term international commitment. Summer and shortterm work mostly consists of jobs in the service, tourism, or agricultural industries, such as bartending or working on a farm or kibbutz. I NTERNATIONAL C OOPERATIVE E DUCATION www.icemenlo.com 15 Spiros Way Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: 650-323-4944 Fax: 650-323-1104 International Cooperative Education arranges two- to three-month paid work and internships in retail sales, hotels, restaurants, au-pair situations, agriculture, education, banking, and business. Students must be under the age of thirty and some programs require a language background.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

But nationalism, religion and culture divide humankind into hostile camps and make it very difficult to cooperate on a global level. 5 COMMUNITY Humans have bodies California is used to earthquakes, but the political tremor of the 2016 US elections still came as a rude shock to Silicon Valley. Realising that they might be part of the problem, the computer wizards reacted by doing what engineers do best: searched for a technical solution. Nowhere was the reaction more forceful than in Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. This is understandable. Since Facebook’s business is social networking, it is most attuned to social disturbances. After three months of soul-searching, on 16 February 2017 Mark Zuckerberg published an audacious manifesto on the need to build a global community, and on Facebook’s role in that project.1 In a follow-up speech at the inaugural Communities Summit on 22 June 2017, Zuckerberg explained that the sociopolitical upheavals of our time – from rampant drug addiction to murderous totalitarian regimes – result to a large extent from the disintegration of human communities.


pages: 393 words: 115,217

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

At the time, Dugan and others at DARPA were looking for a way to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the internet, recognized in computer circles as the 1969 launch of ARPANET. (The remote network went live on October 29, 1969, when Charley Kline’s computer at the University of California in Los Angeles communicated with a computer at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. Kline typed the “l” and “o” of “login” and then the computers crashed.) Wickert’s idea was to test the power of the internet to unite people around the country in solving a time-critical problem. So he floated an idea for a novel challenge—balloons. Red balloons. DARPA would place ten red weather balloons in ten undisclosed public parks across the country and see how quickly they could be found.


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

In high school, Kaphan met Stewart Brand, the writer and counterculture organizer, and the summer after he graduated, Kaphan took a job at the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand’s seminal guide to the tools and books of the enlightened new information age. Sporting long hippie-ish hair and a bushy beard, Kaphan worked at Brand’s Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park, a mobile lending library and roving education service. He tended the cash register, filled subscriptions, and packed books and catalogs for shipment to customers. After earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in an on-again, off-again decade at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Kaphan logged time at a number of Bay Area companies, including the ill-fated Apple-IBM joint venture called Kaleida Labs, which developed media-player software for personal computers.


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

the Promise TV box: Rupert Goodwins, “Four-Strong Team Builds Digital TV Revolution,” ZDNet, March 25, 2012, accessed March 23, 2013, www.zdnet.com/four-strong-team-builds-digital-tv-revolution-3040154872/; “What is Promise.tv?” Promise TV Web site, accessed March 23, 2013, www.promise.tv/what-is-it.html. “You can integrate your new ideas more easily”: Douglas C. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework” (Menlo Park, CA: Stanford Research Institute, 1962), accessed March 23, 2013, www.invisiblerevolution.net/engelbart/full_62_paper_augm_hum_int.html. when we use word processors we’re more iterative: Christina Haas, “How the Writing Medium Shapes the Writing Process: Effects of Word Processing on Planning,” Research in the Teaching of English 23, no. 2 (May 1989): 181–207; Ronald D.


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

“Worldwide Demand for Silicon,” graph attributed to Dataquest, Inc., in Electronic Business Today 22, no. 5 (May 1996): 39. 27.Linley Gwennap, “Revised Model Reduces Cost Estimates,” Microprocessor Report 10, no. 4 (25 March 1996): 18, 23. 28.Price Waterhouse, Inc., Technology Forecast: 1996 (Menlo Park, Calif.: Price Waterhouse Technology Centre, October 1995), 21. 29.“Worldwide DRAM Market in Billions of Units,” graph attributed to Bernstein Research, Inc., in Electronics 68, no. 2 (23 January 1995): 4. 30.Donald Keck, “Fiber Optics: The Bridge to the Next Millenium,” Corning Telecommunications Guidelines 10, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 2. 31.U.S.


pages: 426 words: 115,150

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford

asset allocation, book value, Buckminster Fuller, buy low sell high, classic study, credit crunch, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, fudge factor, full employment, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index card, index fund, intentional community, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Menlo Park, money market fund, Parkinson's law, passive income, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, software patent, strikebreaker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

press_ID=2582. 14 New American Dream Time Day poll, August 2003, www.newdream.org. 15 http://www.timeday.org/right2vacation/poll_results.asp. 16 Amy Saltzman, Downshifting: Reinventing Success on a Slower Track (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), op. cit., p. 16. 17 Ibid., p. 200. 18 Michael Phillips, The Seven Laws of Money (Menlo Park: Word Wheel, 1974), p. 8. 19 At the Crossroads (Spokane: Communications Era Task Force, 1983), p. 22. 20 Desmond Morris, The Biology of Art (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), pp. 158–59. 21 Willis Harman, “Work,” in Alberto Villoldo and Ken Dychtwald, editors, Millennium: Glimpses into the 21st Century (Los Angeles: J.P.


pages: 422 words: 113,830

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

An indictment of the CPI penned in 2007 by Bloomberg News columnist John Wasik, besides charging that “the government casts a blind eye to total homeownership expenses,” made the same case regarding inadequate treatment of medical expenses: “It wasn’t that long ago when employers could cover almost all of an employee’s health-care bills. Now workers are shelling out an average of $3,281 from their paychecks for family coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Menlo Park, California. The average premium for a family policy is more than $12,000 annually. Since 2001, health premiums have risen 78 percent while wages have only gained 19 percent. The government’s inflation measure during that stretch was 17 percent.”26 The United States is hardly the only major Western nation where the public disbelieves the low-inflation assertions of the official bean counters.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

McAfee listened sympathetically—he’s obviously heard scores of versions of the You just don’t understand; my work is different argument—and then said, “I imagine there are a bunch of really smart geeks at IBM taking notes as guys like you describe this situation. In their heads, they’re asking, ‘How do I model that?’” Undaunted, I tried another tack on Khosla when we met in his office in Menlo Park. “Vinod,” I said, “in medicine we have something we call the ‘eyeball test.’ That means I can see two patients whose numbers look the same”—things like temperature, heart rate, and blood counts—“and my training allows me to say, ‘That guy is sick [I pointed to an imaginary person across the imposing conference table] and the other is okay.’”


pages: 404 words: 113,514

Atrocity Archives by Stross, Charles

airport security, anthropic principle, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, defense in depth, disinformation, disintermediation, experimental subject, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, hypertext link, Khyber Pass, luminiferous ether, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, PalmPilot, pneumatic tube, Snow Crash, Strategic Defense Initiative, the medium is the message, Y2K, yield curve

I don't ask how they know that, I'm just grateful that there's only five more minutes of standing here among the waterlogged trees, trying not to stamp my feet too loudly, wondering what I'm going to say if the local snouts come calling. Five more minutes of hiding round the back of the QA department of Memetix (UK) Ltd.--subsidiary of a multinational based in Menlo Park, California--then I can do the job and go home. Five more minutes spent hiding in the bushes down on an industrial estate where the white heat of technology keeps the lights burning far into the night, in a place where the nameless horrors don't suck your brains out and throw you to the Human Resources department--unless you show a deficit in the third quarter, or forget to make a blood sacrifice before the altar of Total Quality Management.


pages: 384 words: 112,971

What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

“The MBTI has experienced”: Geldart, “Katharine Downing Myers and the Whole MBTI Type—an Interview.” “The Biggest Financial Asset”: John Wasik, “The Biggest Financial Asset in Your Portfolio Is You,” New York Times, February 11, 2013. The market for workplace personality assessments: Facebook IQ, “The Annual Topics & Trends Report from Facebook IQ,” Facebook, Menlo Park, Calif. 2017. “ENTJ”: Jenna Birch, “Your Dating Style, Based on Your Myers-Briggs Personality Type,” Teen Vogue, August 28, 2017. “The market is glutted”: Kelley Holland, “What a Test Can Say About Your Style,” New York Times, April 21, 2017. Take, for instance, these: David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, Please Understand Me (New York: Prometheus Nemesis Book Company, 1984).


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

Popp, Popular Evolution: Life-Lessons from Anthropology (Lake Jackson, TX: Man and Nature Press, 2000), xviii. “Basically, all of the seminal papers”: Author interview with Robert Sapolsky, June 12, 2000. “greater damage”: Joseph L. Popp and Irven DeVore, “Aggressive Competition and Social Dominance Theory: Synopsis,” in The Great Apes, ed. David A. Hamburg and Elizabeth R. McCown (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1979), 323. “Life is merely an artifact”: Popp, Popular Evolution, 1–2. “speculative stories”: Stephen Jay Gould, “Sociobiology: The Art of Storytelling,” New Scientist 80, no. 1129 (November 16, 1978): 531. “I went to places”: Joseph L. Popp, “The Primates of Eastern Africa: An Adventure Book” (unpublished manuscript, 2006).


pages: 357 words: 121,119

Falling to Earth by Al Worden

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, California energy crisis, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, lost cosmonauts, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley

Yet I never had the feeling that he was only doing all of this work for the possibility of another flight. Dick is a trouper and seemed delighted to be on a crew backing us up. If he was sad that he would probably never walk on the moon, he never let on. I received some additional training from the photo geologists of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, and learned a good deal about how they analyzed images for information. This training helped me when learning how to take photographs. Nevertheless, for three years before the mission, I also did personal training, which helped me even more. I figured that learning to take photos was like practicing the piano: it takes a long time just to learn a little bit, but the more you play the better you become.


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

To add to the problems, some of these indices include big companies for which nanotechnology is only one of many activities. It is easy to see why a nanotechnology bubble might form, but if so, it will be nothing like as big as the ill-fated internet one, for several reasons. One of them is offered by Steve Jurvetson at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a venture-capital firm based in Menlo Park, California: the number of people who can enter the business is limited by the number of science graduates available. In America, there is currently a shortage of science phds. Business school graduates working in banking or consulting cannot start nanotechnology companies in the way they created new internet companies. 323 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY Another anti-bubble factor is the high capital cost of setEstimate for “the market for nanotechnology”, $bn ting up business in nanotechPredictions made in*: 2002 2003 2004 2001 nology.


pages: 397 words: 121,211

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

affirmative action, assortative mating, blue-collar work, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, gentrification, George Gilder, Haight Ashbury, happiness index / gross national happiness, helicopter parent, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Tipper Gore, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working-age population, young professional

Evanston, Glencoe, Kenilworth, Wilmette, Winnetka. i. Except for Beverly Hills, census tracts where the wealthy lived in Los Angeles have changed enough that reconstructing comparable neighborhoods for 1960 and 2000 was not possible. j. Mill Valley, Sausalito, Tiburon. k. Atherton, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Portola Valley, Stanford. 4 How Thick Is Your Bubble? A new upper class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else but increasingly doesn’t know much about how everybody else lives is vulnerable to making mistakes. How vulnerable are you? NO VICE OF the human heart is so acceptable to [a despot] as egotism,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville.


pages: 399 words: 122,688

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

banking crisis, corporate raider, fail fast, fear of failure, fixed income, index card, intangible asset, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley

Bowerman phoned me, excited, and told me about his experiment. He wanted me to send a sample of his waffle-soled shoes to one of my new factories. Of course, I said. I’d send it right away—to Nippon Rubber. I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop, Mrs. Bowerman carefully helping, and I get goosebumps. He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardenclyffe. Divinely inspired. I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue, that he was the Daedalus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he’d done.


pages: 387 words: 119,409

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

As a young man, Romulus goes on to found the city of Rome. Baby Kal-El rockets to earth as his home planet Krypton explodes behind him, landing in Smallville, Kansas, to be raised by the kindly Martha and Jonathan Kent. Moving to Metropolis, he takes on the mantle of Superman. Thomas Alva Edison opens a lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. He brings together an American mathematician, an English machinist, a German glassblower, and a Swiss clockmaker who develop an incandescent lightbulb that burns for more than thirteen hours,17 laying the foundation for the Edison General Electric Company. Oprah Winfrey, born of an impoverished teenage mother, abused as a child, and shuttled from home to home, goes on to become an honors student, the youngest and first black news anchor at WLAC-TV in Nashville, and one of the most successful communicators and inspirational businesspeople in the world.18 Vastly different tales, yet all teasingly similar.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

It provided what a computer user today would call an outliner—a program with expandable and collapsible nodes of hierarchically structured lines of information. But this outliner could be shared across a network—not only within a single office but remotely, between the downtown San Francisco auditorium and the SRI office in Menlo Park, thirty miles away, as Engelbart showed his suitably impressed 1968 crowd. Today the NLS’s flickery monochrome screens and blurry typography look antediluvian, but its capabilities and design remain a benchmark for collaboration that modern systems have a tough time matching. Engelbart showed the 1968 audience how easy it was to use NLS to make and store and share a grocery list.


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Such inventions, created to meet the needs of the Martians, will prove invaluable on Earth, and the relevant patents, licensed on Earth, could produce an unending stream of income for the Red Planet. Indeed, if the settlement of Mars is to be contemplated as a private venture, the creation of such an inventor's colony—a Martian Menlo Park—could conceivably provide the basis for a fundable business plan. To those who ask what are the “natural resources” on Mars that might make it attractive for settlement, I answer that there are none, but that is because there are no such thing as natural resources anywhere. There are only natural raw materials.


pages: 435 words: 127,403

Panderer to Power by Frederick Sheehan

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California energy crisis, call centre, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, place-making, Ponzi scheme, price stability, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, VA Linux, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Silicon Valley is a tribute both to American ingenuity and to the financial system’s ever-increasing ability to supply venture capital to the entrepreneurs who are such a dynamic force in our economy.”16 Wall Street firms that had opened offices in Silicon Valley during the IPO mania could not have hired a better public relations representative. Their behavior was often scandalous (that, we knew at the time) and criminal (as the courts would decide, in due course). Greenspan capped off his ode to the venture capitalists who lined Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, in a stellar summation: “More recent evidence remains consistent with the view that this capital spending has contributed to a noticeable pickup in productivity.”17 Within weeks, Michael Wolff, an entrepreneur who had taken full advantage of the pickup in productivity, published his memoir.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

The choice is ours: we have a man in the White House likely with a sealed indictment awaiting him—trust me, the dictator that scrambles to stay in place is more dangerous than ever. He may go to jail if he loses this next election: consider that for a moment. He refused to interview with Mueller and instead just slanders him on social media. You may be guaranteed that he will wield any tools possible to retain power. Secondly, we have a man in Menlo Park who is also in power-grab mode: his latest announcement of Libra, a blockchain payments ecosystems I wish I could support, but cannot. Libra, a consortium of big corporations, such as Facebook, Uber, and Visa, that want to launch their own financial system, would allow for data abuse so rife that governments around the world have risen up to stop our generation’s most negligent manager of our digital assets from becoming the world’s new digital central bank.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

How many people have followed the Jobs model and failed? Who knows? No one writes books about them and their failed companies. But venture capitalists (VC) have data on the probability of a garage start-up becoming the Next Big Thing, and here the survivor bias is of a different sort. David Cowan, a VC at Bessemer Venture Partners in Menlo Park, California (and a good friend), told me in an email: For garage-dwelling entrepreneurs to crack the 1 percent wealth threshold in America, their path almost always involves raising venture capital and then getting their startup to an Initial Public Offering (IPO) or a large acquisition by another company.


Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, blue-collar work, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Edward Jenner, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Herman Kahn, informal economy, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mass immigration, Menlo Park, nuclear winter, oil shock, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Productivity paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Robert X Cringely, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

As it is, earthquakes still take an average of ten thousand lives and cost $400 million a year worldwide. Seismologists agree there is a strong chance of a major earthquake affecting northern or southern California by the year 2020; estimates have ranged between to percent and 6o percent probability. Yet according to Allan G. Lindh, chief seismologist of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, the S100 million cost of a major California earthquake is modest compared to the $15 billion annual benefits of agriculture, energy, and shipping that the San Andreas Fault has made possible. Without California's mountain-building and faulting it would be hard to imagine the Central Valley, San Francisco Bay, the gold fields of the nineteenth century, the Peninsula.


pages: 580 words: 125,129

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System by Chet Haase

Andy Rubin, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, commoditize, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Ken Thompson, lock screen, machine readable, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, pull request, QWERTY keyboard, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, web application

See the discussion in the Jargon appendix at the end for more on Java ME. 53 Open Multimedia Applications Platform: OMAP was a series of processors from Texas Instruments (TI) for mobile devices. 54 The system that the team eventually built and shipped stayed true to the vision laid out in the pitch deck, except for this part about revenue from carrier services, which went away entirely. 55 This street running through Palo Alto and Menlo Park is home to many of the Silicon Valley venture capital firms. 56 Google co-founder 57 Google’s other co-founder 58 Swetland said, “I don’t recall the discussion, but certainly believe it could have happened.” His memory of Danger was fresh and strong at that time. The dynamic at Danger of being beholden to the carrier and manufacturer for product decisions was not something he wanted to repeat.


pages: 478 words: 142,608

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy and the New Fundamentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tiger, L. (1979). Optimism: The Biology of Hope. New York: Simon & Schuster. Toland, J. (1991). Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. New York: Anchor. Trivers, R. L. (1985). Social Evolution. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings. Unwin, S. (2003). The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation that Proves the Ultimate Truth. New York: Crown Forum. Vermes, G. (2000). The Changing Faces of Jesus. London: Allen Lane. Ward, K. (1996). God, Chance and Necessity. Oxford: Oneworld. Warraq, I. (1995).


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

“The advertisements appeared after a Harris poll, the I.R.S. had begun testing the use of computerized life-style information, such as the types of cars people own, to track down errant taxpayers, while an F.B.I. advisory committee had recommended that the bureau computer system include data on people who, though not charged with wrongdoing, associate with drug traffickers.” David Burnham, “The Computer, the Consumer and Privacy,” New York Times, March 4, 1984. 37. “When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.


pages: 446 words: 138,827

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, California energy crisis, clean water, cotton gin, deal flow, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, high net worth, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, microcredit, new economy, proprietary trading, rolling blackouts, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, telemarketer, traffic fines, work culture , young professional

I can wait.” 52 Twenty Thousand Lives a Year BUSINESS IS A TOOL TO SUPPORT WHAT YOU BELIEVE Joe Belanoff’s Big Picture came into focus in the last couple of years. He’s forty-four. If you don’t know where you’re headed when you begin, it can take that long, easily. But it’s worth it. Joe is an easygoing, amiable guy. We met the first time at his office, which was inside a law firm in Menlo Park, but I’ll reveal later what his office is for and what he’s doing there. He’s not a lawyer. Ironically, Joe worked at this very law firm the summer after college, 1979. He was an English major at Amherst and figured he might go to law school, but one summer in the xerography department cured him of that idea.


pages: 404 words: 131,034

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, dark pattern, dematerialisation, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, time dilation, Tunguska event

de Laguna, Frederica. Under Mount St. Elias: History and Culture of Yacutat Tlingit. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972. Emmons, G.T. The Chilkat Blanket. New York: Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, 1907. Goldsmith, D. and Owen, T. The Search for Life in the Universe. Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings, 1980. Klass, Philip. UFO’s Explained. New York: Vintage, 1976. Krause, Aurel. The Tlingit Indians. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1956. La Pérouse, Jean F. de G., comte de. Voyage de la Pérouse Autour du Monde (four volumes). Paris: Imprimerie de la Republique, 1797.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Users can click on “Like” on a story. “Like” clearly indicates a positive stance. The “Like” button is also embedded in millions of web pages globally, and the blue thumbs-up sign that goes with the “Like” button is Facebook’s symbol, prominently displayed at the entrance to the company’s headquarters at One Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California. But there is no “Dislike” button, and until 2016, there was no way to quickly indicate an emotion other than liking.38 The prominence of “Like” within Facebook obviously fits with the site’s positive and advertiser-friendly disposition. But “Like” is not a neutral signal. How can one “like” a story about a teenager’s death and ongoing, grief-stricken protests?


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Zipcar and Netflix are harnessing a combination of new technology and the zeitgeist (“Sharing is clean, crisp, urbane, postmodern,” says the New York Times’s Mark Levine. “Owning is dull, selfish, timid, backward.”) to pioneer a new model of collaborative consumption.13 Zipcar made $130 million in profits in 2009, a year in which car sales fell by 40 percent, and Netflix made $359.6 million. Bag Borrow or Steal allows you to rent a glamorous purse. TechShop, in Menlo Park, California, rents “tinkering space” and equipment to thousands of inventors, hobbyists, and fanatics. Other pioneers of “collaborative consumption” have gone further, dispensing with the idea of buying inventories of their own and contenting themselves with the role of brokers. CouchSurfing connects people who have a spare couch with people who are willing to pay for the privilege of using it.


pages: 421 words: 128,094

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone by David Carey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Future Shock, Gordon Gekko, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, risk tolerance, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, éminence grise

With $8 or $10 of debt for every dollar of equity in its fund, KKR could now contemplate a portfolio of companies together worth $50 billion or $60 billion. The media took to calling Kravis “King” Henry, and he quickly came to personify the buyout business. (Kravis’s press-shy cousin Roberts lived and worked in faraway Menlo Park, California, off the New York media and social radar. Jerry Kohlberg resigned from KKR in 1987, after clashing with his former protégés over strategy and lines of authority.) When KKR chased by far the biggest buyout of all time, that of RJR Nabisco in 1988, that too was largely with Drexel money.


pages: 465 words: 134,575

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, desegregation, edge city, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, moral panic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

So the cops wore slacks and blazers instead of military-like uniforms. Instead of using Army ranks like sergeant or lieutenant, they took titles like “field advisor.” Rank-and-file cops were called “agents.” The Lakewood experiment was short-lived: by 1973, they were back to using traditional titles and the conventional police blues. Similar efforts in Menlo Park and Beverly Hills, California, hadn’t gone quite as far, but had been somewhat more successful. Stamper’s proposal was relatively mild by comparison. As he writes in his book Breaking Rank: I knew there’d be a shit-rain of opposition—military titles are a cultural icon in civilian policing, as much a part of the cop culture as mustaches, sidearms, and doughnuts.


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

He would create a workstation for organizing all of the information and communications needed for any given project.”5 Engelbart’s ideas were similar to Licklider’s, if a bit further along in their development. But neither was as yet close to describing how one might practically wed human and computer capacities. Eventually Engelbart’s work caught Licklider’s attention, and with that, ARPA funding flowed to Engelbart to create the “Augmentation Reseach Center” at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. His immediate objective was finding better ways to connect the human brain to the power of a computer—what we now call “interfaces.” It’s easy to forget that computers once took all of their questions and delivered all of their answers in numerical form. The basic ideas of a screen, a keyboard, and, most famously, a mouse are owed to Engelbart, who was the first to model those concepts, however crudely.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

For other interviews of Baran, see Stewart Brand, “Founding Father,” Wired (March 2001), available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran_pr.html; interview by David Hochfelder with Paul Baran, electrical engineer, Newark, New Jersey (October 24, 1999), available at http://ieee.org/organizations/history_center/oral_histories/transcripts/ baran.html; interview by J. O'Neill with Paul Baran, Menlo Park, California (March 5, 1990); George Gilder, “Inventing the Internet Again,” Forbes (June 2, 1997), 106 (lengthy article about Baran); Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, “Casting the Net,” The Sciences (September 1, 1996), 32. 15 American Telephone & Telegraphy Co., Telephone Almanac, foreword (1941). 16 Interview with Paul Baran. 17 Ibid. 18 Peter Huber, Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest (New York: Free Press; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994), 268-69; Huber, Kellogg, and Thorne, 416. 19 And the decision was reversed by the D.C. circuit.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

But the candle was the only revolutionary improvement in lighting technology before the end of the eighteenth century. Energy technology changed fundamentally in the nineteenth century. Gas and electricity were produced centrally and distributed locally. Good-quality domestic lighting became affordable. When Thomas Edison demonstrated electric lighting at Menlo Park in 1880, huge crowds gathered to see. In the twentieth century the cost of light has fallen much more rapidly than the cost of energy. Without these improvements in the efficiency of lighting technology, we would not be able to live the lives we now do: there would not be enough energy. But what exactly do we mean by efficiency improvements?


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

* * * While it can feel as if everyone in the Valley is into bitcoin—just as it can feel as if everyone outside the Valley is against it or has little interest—the truth is that the clique of fervent believers is still relatively small. Some in the VC community have serious doubts—they just don’t seem to express them often. In a post on the StrictlyVC blog by Connie Loizos titled “A Bitcoin Bear in Silicon Valley, It’s True,” Josh Stein, the managing director at Tim Draper’s Menlo Park firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is quoted describing himself as a “bitcoin bear.” Stein, whose firm has invested in Twitter, Skype, and Tesla, argued that transaction-cost savings on bitcoin weren’t much more competitive than electronic wires or new dollar-based payment technologies, and that bitcoin, unlike gold, had no “intrinsic value.”


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

A Treatise on Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930. Kirchik, Jamie. “Angry White Man.” TNR, January 8, 2008. https://newrepublic.com/article/61771/angry-white-man. Kirzner, Israel. Competition and Entrepreneurship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. ———. The Economic Point of View. Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1960. Klausinger, Hansjörg. “Academic Anti-Semitism and the Austrian School: Vienna, 1918–1945.” Atlantic Economic Journal 42, no. 2 (2014): 191–204. ———. “From Mises to Morgenstern: Austrian Economics during the Ständestaat.” QJAE 9, no. 3 (2006): 25–43. ———.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Doerr was an unassuming man, slight of frame, with wire-rimmed glasses resting atop his pointed nose. He looked like he would be more at home in a laboratory fabricating silicon chips—something he once did back at Intel in the ’70s—than zooming around the Valley hosting dinners for Barack Obama. As a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the storied Menlo Park venture firm, Doerr made an early investment in Netscape, a company that eventually became the world’s first consumer internet browser. Doerr was early to spot the potential of Amazon, back when Jeff Bezos’s operation was selling books in a run-down warehouse in Seattle. And perhaps most famously, in 1999 Doerr invested $12 million in Google, then just a search engine run by a couple of engineers in a garage.


pages: 759 words: 166,687

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics by David A. Mindell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computer Numeric Control, discrete time, Dr. Strangelove, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, Turing machine

Hazen, the son of a lumber and coal dealer from Three Rivers, Michigan, had been introduced to the machine shop by his Sunday-school teacher, and he built electromechanical inventions in his father’s basement. He arrived at MIT in the fall of 1920 and would remain for nearly 60 years. Small models of power networks were not new; Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory built one around 1880, and by the 1920s they were becoming increasingly common for both AC and DC analysis. 34 Between 1919 and 1923, O. R. Schurig, of G.E., developed a DC calculating table for analysis of short-circuit conditions in networks. When Schurig built a more generally applicable AC model, however, the machine itself developed a stability problem, “hunting itself out of synchronism” and “shaking apart” when more than a few elements (e.g., miniature motors and generators) were connected together. 35 While electrical parameters (transmission lines) could easily be replicated in miniature, mechanical components (motors and generators) did not scale well, hence the instability.


pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

Professors Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper found this in their iconic study.12 From the point of view of merchants wanting our dollars, this means many of us don’t purchase any product, which, of course, the merchants don’t like. Professors Iyengar and Lepper set up a tasting booth on two consecutive Saturdays in an upscale supermarket in Menlo Park, California. The booths offered six or twenty-four different flavors of Wilkin & Sons jam. They monitored the amount of traffic at the tasting booth and the number of sales of Wilkin & Sons jam. To test for choice overload, they wanted to make sure that the customers didn’t simply try the familiar flavors, like strawberry and raspberry.


pages: 530 words: 145,220

The Search for Life on Mars by Elizabeth Howell

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, British Empire, dark matter, double helix, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Google Earth, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Skype

Though there have been warmer periods, nobody really knows how long they lasted, and the same goes for exactly how transient any water on the surface was. * * * One leading expert on the question of water on Mars is Dr. Michael Carr, a veteran of nearly all of America’s first wave of planetary missions. Now retired, he worked for many years for the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco. He was chief of the Branch of Astrogeological Studies and has written two standard reference books on the Red Planet, entitled simply Water on Mars and The Surface of Mars. Born in Leeds, Carr joined the brain drain from the United Kingdom in the 1960s and was leader of the camera team for the Viking orbiters.


pages: 510 words: 138,000

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

Ron Gilbert is an artist. Monkey Island is real art. But the process is collaborative.” “That’s all well and good,” said I, delighting in my crassness, “but tell me about this girlfriend.” They met when he moved to the Bay Area, introduced by mutual friends. She lived in San Francisco, he resided near Menlo Park. The first year went well enough that when her lease expired, she made the daft suggestion they find a place together. Nash Mac thought it was surely too soon, but worried that saying no would end the relationship. She discovered a two-bedroom apartment in the Marina. She was fine. He was fine.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Hurley began dreaming of his own company at the dawn of Web 2.0—websites filled with the work of regular folk, not professionals. Web surfers rushed to post online diaries, photo albums, poems, recipes, screeds, whatever they liked. “Everyday people,” Hurley would call them. For months, Hurley and his pals had batted around proposals for a new internet business, meeting at his house in Menlo Park or a café nearby, where they discussed popular Web 2.0 fixtures to emulate, like Friendster, a social network, and the blogging websites growing like weeds. More often they talked about Hot or Not, a skeletal site that let people upload photographs of a face and vote on its attractiveness. Crude, but so popular.


pages: 575 words: 140,384

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

That creates a certain complacency.” Over at Netflix, Hastings took the Bewkes jab in stride. Weeks after the belittling remark, Hastings gathered his top seventy executives for a regularly scheduled business meeting at the Rosewood Sand Hill, a sumptuous hotel and retreat studded with olive trees, in Menlo Park, California, not far from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Jonathan Friedland, a former communications executive at Netflix, says that at the meeting, Hastings “kind of made fun of” Bewkes. Like an NFL coach printing out an insulting quote about his team made by a rival player and then hanging it in the locker room during the run-up to a big game, Hastings used Bewkes’s insult as “bulletin board material” for the Netflix pep rally, part inspiration, part rallying cry.


pages: 515 words: 136,938

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge

fear of failure, ghettoisation, global village, light touch regulation, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the medium is the message, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

Nigg. 2006. What causes ADHD? New York: Guilford Press. Forty-three percent of U.S. children two years or younger watch television daily: V. J. Rideout, E. A. Vandewater, and E. A. Wartella. 2003. Zero to six: Electronic media in the lives of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Publication no. 3378. Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation, 14. a quarter have TVs in their bedrooms: J. M. Healy. 2004. Early television exposure and subsequent attention problems in children. Pediatrics, 113(4): 917–18; V. J. Rideout, E. A. Vandewater, and E. A. Wartella, 2003, 7, 17. Healy…in her book Endangered Minds: J.


pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Every schoolchild knows that Edison invented, or made substantial contributions to, the phonograph, the stock ticker, the telephone (along with important mechanical improvements to Bell’s original machine, Edison also coined the word hello), movies, and, of course, electric light. But two of Edison’s greatest inventions are seldom mentioned because, by their nature, they couldn’t be patented. One was perhaps his greatest invention of all, the industrial research laboratory. Edison established his own laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, and it was there that he created the phonograph (1877), the electric light (1879), and hundreds of other inventions. It was, in essence, an invention factory where engineers, chemists, and mechanics turned new technological possibilities into practical—and, most important, commercially viable—products.


pages: 514 words: 152,903

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

Such robots will put automation within range of companies like Federal Express and United Parcel Service that now employ tens of thousands of workers doing such tasks. The start-up behind the robot, Industrial Perception Inc., is the first spinoff of Willow Garage, an ambitious robotics research firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. The first customer is likely to be a company that now employs thousands of workers to load and unload its trucks. The workers can move one box every six seconds on average. But each box can weigh more than 130 pounds, so the workers tire easily and sometimes hurt their backs. Industrial Perception will win its contract if its machine can reliably move one box every four seconds.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

B7. 29. A concise introduction to the academic investigation of anarchy can be found in Gordon Tullock, ed., Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy (Blacksburg,Va.: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1972). See also Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market.. Government and the Economy (Menlo Park, Calif., 1970); and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 30. See Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: The Leader as Servant and the Humane Uses of Power Among the Indians of the Americas (New York: Urizen Books, 1977); and Jones, op. cit. 31. Lane, "Economic Consequences of Organized Violence," op. cit., p.403. 32.


Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

More New Investment Forms 279 table 8.2 Venture Capital Firms 1991 2001 2011 No. of VC Firms in Existence 362 917 842 No. of VC Funds in Existence 640 1,850 1,274 3,475 8,620 6,125 4 45 45 40 325 173 No. of Professionals No. of First Time VC Funds Raised No. of VC Funds Raising Money This Year VC Capital Raised this Year ($B) 1.9 39.0 18.7 VC Capital Under Management ($B) 26.8 261.7 196.9 Avg VC Capital Under Mgt per Firm ($M) 74.0 285.4 233.8 Avg VC Fund Size to Date ($M) 37.4 95.4 110.6 Avg VC Fund Raised this Year ($M) 47.5 120.0 108.1 1,775.0 6,300.0 6,300.0 Largest VC Fund Raised to Date ($M) Source: “2012 National Venture Capital Association Yearbook,” National Venture Capital Asso ciation and Thomson Reuters, last modified 2012, http://www.finansedlainnowacji.pl/wp-content/uploads /2012/08/NVCA-Yearbook-2012.pdf, 9. technology. The first Silicon Valley initial public offerings were of Varian in 1956, HP in 1957, and Ampex in 1958. Sand Hill Road, in Menlo Park, California, became the hub for venture capital institutions, with today’s quite recognizable firms (Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) coming to life in 1972. Furthermore, California has almost four times more venture capital–backed companies than any other state, with a focus in all sectors, but especially consumer Internet.42 Compared to venture capital investment in the United States, the amount of venture capital funds invested in other areas of the world does not reach the same level.


pages: 490 words: 150,172

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski

business climate, Charles Babbage, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen

Edison tried numerous different materials until he hit upon the right one, and when asked if the long quest ever discouraged him, he reportedly replied that it had not, for every failed filament taught him something—namely, one more material to exclude from further consideration. Charles Batchelor, Edison’s co-worker at Menlo Park, described the failure of one such experiment: “Made hemp fibres with clamps of plumbago, graphite such as used in lead pencils—they have got too much stuff mixed with them for us—seem to swell up and form gases or arcs which bust up the lamps.” The lead pencils that Batchelor found too adulterated as a source of graphite were dear to Edison for other reasons, however, and they were not beneath his attention, for “Edison liked short pencils and he persuaded a pencil factory to turn out short pencils especially for him.”


pages: 443 words: 51,804

Handbook of Modeling High-Frequency Data in Finance by Frederi G. Viens, Maria C. Mariani, Ionut Florescu

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business process, buy and hold, continuous integration, corporate governance, discrete time, distributed generation, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, housing crisis, implied volatility, incomplete markets, linear programming, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Menlo Park, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, power law, principal–agent problem, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process

Deboeck GJ, editor.. Trading on the edge: neural, genetic, and fuzzy systems for chaotic financial markets. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 1994. Decker K, Sycara K, Zeng D. Designing a multi-agent portfolio management system. Proceedings of the AAAI workshop on internet information systems. AAI Press, Menlo Park, CA; 1996. Dempster M, Leemans V. An automated FX trading system using adaptive reinforcement learning. Expert Systems with Applications (Special issue on financial engineering) 2006;30:534–552. Dempster M, Romahi Y. Intraday FX trading: an evolutionary reinforcement learning approach. Proceedings of the Third International conference on intelligent data engineering and automated learning IDEAL 02, Manchester, UK, August 12–14, 2002, Volume 2412 of Lecture notes in computer science.


pages: 641 words: 153,921

Eon by Greg Bear

dematerialisation, Future Shock, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Ralph Nader, urban renewal

He had flown the famous Charlie Baker Delta route over Florida, Cuba and Bermuda during the Little Death, refueling the planes of the Atlantic Watch whose vigilance had played such a crucial role in limiting thee war. After the armistice, he had received an OK from the Navy to take his expertise in aerospace engineering over to Orbi-corn, which was tuning up its world-wide civilian Mononet. There had been a few calls at first to Orbicom headquarters in Menlo Park, California, then requests for help on position papers, then an abrupt and unexpected transfer to the Orbi-eom building in Washington, which he later learned had been engineered by Homan. There was no question of romance —how often had he quelled that rumor?—but their ability to work together was remarkable in a Washington atmosphere of perpetual partisan bickering and funding squabbles.


pages: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Animal Behavior. New York: Time. Tomasello, Michael. 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tononi G. 2008. “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto.” Biological Bulletin 215 (3): 216–42. Trivers, Robert. 1985. Social Evolution. Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin/Cummings. Turing, Alan M. 1936. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs Problem.” Journal of Math 58 (345–363): 5. —. 1960. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind: 59: 433–460. von Neumann, John, and Oskar Morgenstern. 1953 (©1944). Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.


pages: 863 words: 159,091

A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Eighth Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers by Kate L. Turabian

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, illegal immigration, information security, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Steven Pinker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two and twenty, W. E. B. Du Bois, yellow journalism, Zeno's paradox

American Newspapers 1821–1936: A Union List of Files Available in the United States and Canada. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1937. 4. Kirkus Reviews. New York: Kirkus Service, 1991–. 4. Library of Congress Subject Catalog. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Also at http://catalog.loc.gov/. 4. National Newspaper Index. Menlo Park, CA: Information Access. Also online from multiple sources. 4. New York Times Index. New York: New York Times. 4. Newspapers in Microform. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International. 4. Periodical Abstracts & General Periodicals. Research II. University Microfilms International. 1990s–. 4.


Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology) by Geoffrey C. Bowker

affirmative action, business process, classic study, corporate governance, Drosophila, government statistician, information retrieval, loose coupling, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Occam's razor, QWERTY keyboard, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, sexual politics, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, William of Occam

Regions nf tht Mind: Brain Research and the Quest for Scientific Certainty. tanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Star, Susan Leigh. 1989b. "The Structure of lll-Strucmred Solutions: Hetero­ geneous Problem-Solving, Boundary Objects and Distributed Artificial Intel­ ligence." In M. Huhns and L. Gasser (eds.). Distributed Artificial Intelligence 2. Menlo Park, CA: Morgan Kauffmann, �7-54. Star, Susan Leigh. 199la. "The Sociology of the Invisible: The Primacy of Work in the Wrilings ofAnselm Strauss." In David Maines (ed.). Social Orga.ni­ Ullion and Social Process: Essays i11 Ho11or of Anselm Strauss. Hawthorne, Y: Aldine de Cruyter, 265-283. Stai� Susan Leigh. 199lb.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

Making it work for a few thousand gets harder; if a lot of people try to send or receive pictures from your database all at once, signals can get crossed. If you have millions? It was, Krieger discovered, like managing traffic in downtown Manhattan. “It’s terrifying,” he told me years later, as he poured a complex, bespoke coffee for me when I visited him at Instagram’s offices in Menlo Park, California. “I was, for a while, one of two people who was running the entire city. And if there’s a fire over there, you gotta go put it out. And while that fire’s happening, it causes this traffic jam! It’s an organism way more than it is a knowable system. And it’s totally not deterministic.


pages: 653 words: 155,847

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

Morton answered that the problem had not yet been solved: “Large amounts of power have been transmitted to distances of 1 or 2 miles, and small amounts of power have been transmitted for long distances, such as 30 miles, but the combination of large amounts of power and long distances has yet to be realized in practice.”56 Doing so, Morton thought, would require developing new electrical machinery. Adams cabled Edison, then in Paris for the Paris Centennial Exhibition, for his opinion. The Sage of Menlo Park responded, “No difficulty transferring unlimited power”—meaning, of course, via direct current. “Will assist.”57 Edison had investigated Niagara in 1886, when the plan for local waterwheels powering local mills was still under discussion. Now he offered the alternative he had envisioned then. Instead of water-powered mills for nonexistent factories in remote areas, he proposed a system of direct-current electrical generation via a tunnel of water turning turbines connected to generators, with insulated and waterproofed electric cables laid in the riverbed to carry the power upriver to Buffalo.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

In 1997, they changed the name to Google, which played to their love of math and scale (a googol is 10100). They chose the variant spelling for two reasons: the googol.com web domain was taken, and Larry thought they wouldn't be able to trademark a number. Larry was a very shrewd businessman—but we'll get to that. Within a year, Larry and Sergey had taken leave from Stanford and set up in the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, the college roommate of Sergey's girlfriend. Google's traffic began climbing and the company began hiring. They incorporated in September 1998, and when they outgrew Susan's garage in early 1999, they moved to an office at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. Six months later, having talked two venture capital firms out of $25 million, they moved into an industrial park at 2400 Bayshore Parkway in Mountain View.


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

We were not short of ideas, but everything about future revenues felt too unknown. There were more away days. McKinsey had been brought back into the building. No one was raising any urgent red flags. But there was, for a while, a slight feeling of rabbits and headlights.19 But, while the consultants consulted, the deathwatch beetle was still at work. In Menlo Park, California, 5,000 miles away, the engineers and developers had been intensely querying the world of data – in particular interrogating the advertising software companies. By 2012/13, according to Antonio García Martínez in his book, Chaos Monkeys: ‘Facebook, Google, and others have achieved the holy grail of all marketers: a high-fidelity, persistent, and immutable pseudonym for every consumer online.


How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

It was early 2000, and the tech-heavy NASDAQ had doubled in little over a year, though it had started to drop. The beleaguered “old economy” Dow was in retreat. Equity trumped cash and e-commerce elbowed out brick and mortar. Netscape had gone public five years earlier, Google had begun operating in a garage in Menlo Park two years earlier, and eToys had a value of $7.8 billion on its first day public in 1999. Idealab, founded by a small, wiry, constantly-in-motion engineer turned entrepreneur named Bill Gross, was worth $9 billion and comprised more than forty dot-com companies, including eToys, Pets.com, Friendster, NetZero, and CarsDirect.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

As it happens, the last epic antitrust case was one brought twenty-two years ago to stop the newest computer monopolist at the time from crushing smaller competitors in its quest to dominate the suddenly commercializing Internet. In the months right after the government filed that antitrust case, United States v. Microsoft, Microsoft and the tiny Menlo Park start-up Google had both launched search engines, Amazon announced it would start selling things other than books—and Charles Koch’s libertarian Cato Institute held a conference in San Jose called “Washington, D.C., vs. Silicon Valley.” Eighty-six-year-old Milton Friedman was a featured speaker.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It took three days to confirm that it was a Lyme disease infection, and finally the doctors gave Natalie intravenous antibiotics directly into the large vein next to her heart. She received that treatment every day for nearly a month. She is okay now, but it was clear to everyone involved, especially Natalie, that we desperately need to be applying twenty-first-century technologies to diagnosing infectious diseases. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Menlo Park, California, I’ve helped gather a group of very smart folks—infectious disease doctors, microbiologists, geneticists, mathematicians, and software engineers—to develop tests that can rapidly and unambiguously tell physicians what an infection is and how best to kill it, using “high-throughput sequencing.”


pages: 1,132 words: 156,379

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57. Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man: 1871–1971 (pp. 136–179). Chicago, IL: Aldine Press. Trivers, R. L. (1985). Social evolution. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings. Trivers, R. L. (2002). Natural selection and social theory: Selected papers of Robert Trivers. Oxford University Press. Turkheimer, E. (2000). Three laws of behavior genetics and what they mean. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 160–164. Tybur, J. M., Miller, G.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 263–288; Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 67.On Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, see Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968; New York: Bantam Books, 1969). 68.Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, 1st ed. (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1968). 69.Anna Wiener, “The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s ‘Whole Earth Catalog,’ ” New Yorker, November 16, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-complicated-legacy-of-stewart-brands-whole-earth-catalog, accessed April 10, 2021; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalogue, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 61–62; Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin Press, 2019).


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

By mid-1994, there were 23,500 commercial websites, up from 2,700 a year earlier. Even stodgy IBM had a web page. All of those web pages were delivered by UNIX servers and accessed by Netscape clients. The web was being run, in other words, by non-Microsoft software. Microsoft wasn’t “in Silicon Valley.” David Marquardt, a venture capitalist in Menlo Park, California, explained: “When you’re here, you feel it all around you.” When Marquardt broached the issue with Gates, Gates replied that the internet was free. He just couldn’t see the business opportunity. The Internet Tidal Wave While Bill Gates wondered how he could make money from the internet, others saw how he could lose it.


pages: 923 words: 516,602

The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup

combinatorial explosion, conceptual framework, database schema, Dennis Ritchie, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, higher-order functions, index card, iterative process, job-hopping, L Peter Deutsch, locality of reference, Menlo Park, no silver bullet, Parkinson's law, premature optimization, sorting algorithm

The C++ Programming Language Third Edition Bjarne Stroustrup AT&T Labs Murray Hill, New Jersey Addison-Wesley An Imprint of Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. Reading, Massachusetts • Harlow, England • Menlo Park, California Berkeley, California • Don Mills, Ontario • Sydney Bonn • Amsterdam • Tokyo • Mexico City ii Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and Addison-Wesley was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters or all capital letters The author and publisher have taken care in the preparation of this book, but make no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assume no responsibility for errors or omissions.

Nackman: Scientific and Engineering C++. Addison-Wesley. Reading, Mass. 1994. ISBN 1-201-53393-6. [Berg,1995] William Berg, Marshall Cline, and Mike Girou: Lessons Learned from the OS/400 OO Project. CACM. Vol. 38 No. 10. October 1995. [Booch,1994] Grady Booch: Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. Benjamin/Cummings. Menlo Park, Calif. 1994. ISBN 0-8053-5340-2. [Budge,1992] Kent Budge, J. S. Perry, and A. C. Robinson: High-Performance Scientific Computation using C++. Proc. USENIX C++ Conference. Portland, Oregon. August 1992. [C,1990] X3 Secretariat: Standard – The C Language. X3J11/90-013. ISO Standard ISO/IEC 9899.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Netscape set in motion a tidal wave of technology companies in Silicon Valley, companies that didn’t require prohibitive amounts of capital to get going, because they were based on the Internet—companies that could be started by college grads, students, and dropouts. The dot-com boom was just beginning when Thiel returned in 1996. He moved into an apartment in Menlo Park and set up a hedge fund, Thiel Capital Management, raising a million dollars from friends and family. But something else was in the air. People he knew were getting involved in start-ups, and Thiel wanted to do the same. He wanted, he said, “to build constructive noncompetitive relationships with people.


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

The Pentagon needed its own core group of advisors, American scientists at the leading edge of biology. The Jason scientists were contacted. Since leaving the Institute of Defense Analyses in 1973, the Jason scientists had had several homes. For the first eight years they received their defense contracts through the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. SRI was a longtime ARPA contractor and an information technology pioneer, and had been one of the first four nodes on the ARPANET. Under the SRI in the 1970s, the Jasons brought several computer scientists and electrical engineers into their ranks. And because they no longer served ARPA alone, their client list had expanded.


pages: 661 words: 169,298

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctoral Regions of America, During the Years 1799–1804. London: Bell, 1942. Warhaft, Sidney, ed. Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982. Warner, Deborah Jean. Alvan Clark and Sons: Artists in Optics. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968. Watson, James D. Molecular Biology of the Gene. Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin, 1965. Textbook by the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule. Wallace, Alfred Russel. Letters and Reminiscences. New York: Arno Press, 1975. Memoirs of the co-discoverer of Darwinian evolution. —————. Man’s Place in the Universe. A Study of the Results of Scientific Research in Relation to the Unity or Plurality of Worlds.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Maybe nerves were not just like wires; maybe they were wires, carrying messages from the nether regions to the sensorium. Alfred Smee, in his 1849 Elements of Electro-Biology, likened the brain to a battery and the nerves to “bio-telegraphs.”♦ Like any overused metaphor, this one soon grew ripe for satire. A newspaper reporter in Menlo Park, discovering Thomas A. Edison in the grip of a head cold, wrote: “The doctor came and looked at him, explained the relations of the trigeminal nerves and their analogy to an electric telegraph with three wires, and observed incidentally that in facial neuralgia each tooth might be regarded as a telegraph station with an operator.”♦ When the telephone arrived, it reinforced the analogy.


pages: 504 words: 89,238

Natural language processing with Python by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, Edward Loper

bioinformatics, business intelligence, business logic, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, duck typing, elephant in my pajamas, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, information retrieval, language acquisition, lolcat, machine translation, Menlo Park, natural language processing, P = NP, search inside the book, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, text mining, Turing test, W. E. B. Du Bois

[Shieber et al., 1983] Stuart Shieber, Hans Uszkoreit, Fernando Pereira, Jane Robinson, and Mabry Tyson. The formalism and implementation of PATR-II. In Barbara J. Grosz and Mark Stickel, editors, Research on Interactive Acquisition and Use of Knowledge, techreport 4, pages 39–79. SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, November 1983. (http: //www.eecs.harvard.edu/ shieber/Biblio/Papers/Shieber-83-FIP.pdf) [Simons and Bird, 2003] Gary Simons and Steven Bird. The Open Language Archives Community: An infrastructure for distributed archiving of language resources. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 18:117–128, 2003.


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

In a string of books—including The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (1917), The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918), The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919), and Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (1923)—Thorstein applied evolutionary economics, a field he pioneered, to the problems of society looming large at the time. He helped found the New School of Social Research, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Technocracy movement. His books were widely read, but his warnings widely disregarded, and he died, discouraged, in Menlo Park, California, on the eve of the Great Depression, in 1929. “He heard members of his family, long since dead, speak to him in Norwegian,” a neighbor noted near the end.1 Oswald Veblen, Thorstein’s nephew and the first of Andrew Veblen’s eight children, attended public schools in Iowa City, followed by the University of Iowa, where he was awarded one prize in sharpshooting and another prize in math.


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences, vol. 365, no. 1554 (September 27, 2010): 2853–67. http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2853.full. “The U.S. Government and International Family Planning and Reproductive Health Fact Sheet.” Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Menlo Park (CA), with Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, April 2012. Vidal, John. “One Quarter of US Grain Crops Fed to Cars—Not People, New Figures Show.” Guardian (UK), January 22, 2010. Weisman, Alan. “Endgame.” Dispatches, August 2009. _______.“Three Planetary Futures.” Vanity Fair, April 21, 2008. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/envirofuture200804?


pages: 554 words: 164,923

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

Menlo Park, New Journalism

.; Gamble, p. 328. 24 Sasaki’s advice: Affidavit, Louis Zamperini, in file of Nakakichi Asoma, 1945–1952, RG 331: RAOOH, WWII, SCAP, Legal Section, Administration Division (10/02/1945–04/28/1952?), Charges and Specifications, 1945–1948, NACP. Chapter 23: Monster 1 Appearance of Omori: Bush, p. 150. 2 POW likens Omori to the moon: Wade, p. 83. 3 No birds: Ray “Hap” Halloran and Chester Marshall, Hap’s War (Menlo Park, Calif.: Hallmark, n.d.). 4 Watanabe’s appearance: Weinstein, p. 228; Tom Wade, telephone interview, January 2, 2005. 5 Liken to paws: Draggan Mihailovich, email interview, August 3, 2007. 6 Louie meeting Watanabe: Louis Zamperini, telephone interview. 7 This man: Frank Tinker, telephone interview, February 20, 2005. 8 Building fire: Louis Zamperini, telephone interview. 9 Watanabe’s history: Martindale, pp. 92–93; Wade, pp. 103–04; Yuichi Hatto, written interview, August 28, 2004; James, p. 278; Mutsuhiro Watanabe (Sgt.), vols. 1–3, 1945–1952, POW 201 File 1945–1947, SCAP, Legal Section, Administrative Division, RAOOH, RG 331, NACP; “From Chief of Hyogo Prefectural Police Force,” November 21, 1950, report, from papers of Frank Tinker. 10 Japanese sign but don’t ratify Geneva Convention: Tanaka, p. 73. 11 Slavery: Martindale, p. 90; Wade, pp. 97–99, 129; Bush, pp. 152–53; Johan Arthur Johansen, Krigsseileren, issue 3, 1990, translated from Norwegian by Nina B.


pages: 568 words: 162,366

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve Levine

Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, computerized trading, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fixed income, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, John Deuss, Khyber Pass, megastructure, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil rush, Potemkin village, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, trade route, vertical integration

In short, they had to select the precise location, in a thousand-square-mile field, where there was the greatest likelihood of an extremely rich find. If the consortium did not quickly strike paydirt, its members might walk away from Kashagan rather than pony up millions more for additional test wells. Enter Harry Cook, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey office in Menlo Park, California. A local newspaper characterized the dressed-down, bearded Cook as the “Indiana Jones” of rocks, and the sixty-year-old Santa Barbara native did in fact bear some resemblance, both physically and professionally, to the film character. Cook combined adventurousness, geological skill, and a flair for relating his exploits to audiences.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Media of the age celebrated these accomplishments, in journals like Popular Science magazine, founded in 1872. In American cities, lectures on scientific topics, demonstrations of new inventions, and even public dissections were must-see events. The newspapers closely followed Thomas Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” and Americans prided themselves on his ingenuity. The Wright brothers, who invented the heavier-than-air plane, and Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, also became celebrities and heroes (in the case of Lindbergh, notwithstanding his repellent personal views).


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

Mundell, born in Ontario, Canada, on October 24, 1932, took an interest in economics while studying at the University of British Columbia. He enrolled in graduate school at the University of Washington and began a rapid professional ascent, finishing his doctorate at MIT and then joining the Stanford faculty. There, “on that Sunday afternoon in November 1958, in my Menlo Park apartment, just a month before the birth of my first son,” Mundell had the epiphany that shaped his career. The young professor was hunched over a table, drawing graphs, when into his mind popped the kernel of a new model of the global economy. He later wrote, “I was so taken with the idea — elated might be a better word — that I put pencil and paper down, to prolong the enjoyment of the suspense about what would, with a little more work, unfold.”3 Economists at the time studied national economies as self-contained systems, every nation an island.


pages: 520 words: 164,834

Bill Marriott: Success Is Never Final--His Life and the Decisions That Built a Hotel Empire by Dale van Atta

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, book value, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate raider, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, financial innovation, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, index card, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Kintsugi, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, profit motive, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, stock buybacks, three-martini lunch, urban renewal

On the face of it, Saga was a robust company, but internally it was torn by dissension between the CEO, Charles Lynch, who fancied himself as a turnaround artist, and a board that didn’t see the need for a turnaround. Marriott saw an opening, but as chairman of the Saga board, Lynch had packed it with people who would not welcome a takeover. That meant Bill would have to engineer a hostile takeover, which was not in his nature. The board authorized Bill to open negotiations, and he flew to Menlo Park, California, to meet Lynch. It was Bill’s hope that he could convince Lynch to agree to a friendly merger, but Lynch had his back up. When Bill offered $30.50 a share, or $366 million, Lynch said he thought it was “too low” but he would present it to the board. They agreed to sell to someone, but not to Bill at that price.


pages: 632 words: 163,143

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

Chua and Alexander Rehding, titled, respectively, ‘Music Theory in Space’ and ‘Musicologists in Space’, both in IMS Musicological Brainfood 1/1 (2017) pp. 3–7; David Trippett, ‘The Voyager metaphor: 40 years on’, Sound Studies 4/1 (2018), pp. 96–9. 2http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum9/HTML/001191.html 3The Philosophical Review 83/4 (Oct. 1974), pp. 435–50. 4See Ellington’s standard on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDQ pZT3GhDg; Beethoven wrote that in the manuscript of his Missa Solemnis; Ali Khan, cited https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/432416001697466927/ 5Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (New York: Crown Publishers, 2007). 6Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Portamento and Musical Meaning’, Journal of Musicological Research 25 (2006), pp. 233–61. 7José Bowen, ‘Tempo, Duration, and Flexibility: Techniques in the Analysis of Performance’, Journal of Musicological Research 16 (1996), pp. 111–56. 8Robert D.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Within a decade, Facebook would boast 2 billion users, a community larger than any nation on earth. The volume of conversation recorded each day on Facebook’s servers would dwarf the accumulated writings of human history. Zuckerberg himself would be like William Randolph Hearst transposed to the global stage, entertaining visiting ministers and dignitaries from his beige cubicle in Menlo Park, California. He would show off a solar-powered Facebook drone to the pope and arbitrate the pleas of armed groups battling it out in Ukraine. In his hands lay more power and influence than that young teen or any of the internet’s pioneers could have imagined. But that future hadn’t arrived quite yet.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

We have struggled to define this threat, partly because the very term hacker has morphed over time to encompass a dizzyingly wide variety of behaviors; organizational gurus celebrate “life hacks” and large Silicon Valley companies continue to embrace the freewheeling ethos where their technologies began; the address of Facebook’s corporate headquarters is One Hacker Way, in Menlo Park. This multisided nomenclature has complicated efforts to police cyberspace. The law—and the media—prefers clear, easily definable terms. A terrorist is a terrorist no matter what tools he or she is using. A criminal can exist online or offline. But hacks and hackers can be good or bad, welcome or invasive, a noun or a verb, a person or a tool.


pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

Edison canceled the bulb, but Dally continued working with Röntgen rays. Burns on his hands became cancerous; both of his arms were amputated to save his life. It didn’t work, and he died in 1898 at the age of thirty-nine, becoming the first human known to be killed by X-rays. His death stopped Edison’s Röntgenmania for good; the wizard of Menlo Park never worked with radiation again. Blessing, with menace. X-rays started being used for medical diagnosis eight weeks after Röntgen announced his discovery. A student at Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago, Emil Grubbe, stuck his hand in an X-ray machine and noticed that, after a while, the skin from that hand was falling off.


pages: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

Sustained progress demanded a widening epistemic base of technology so as to make the process faster, more efficient, and better able to avoid blind alleys and reinvented wheels.5 Inventors can acquire this knowledge by accessing it through a variety of social connections, such as consulting or hiring individuals who possess it (as Edison famously did by hiring formally trained experts at his Menlo Park facility). Hence the degree of interconnectedness described by Henrich in modern society includes many factors that determine access costs to useful knowledge; hence it affects not only the rate of diffusion but also the rate at which innovations themselves occur. Moreover, the interconnectedness described by Henrich implicitly assumes that the transmission of cultural features occurs typically on a one-to-one basis.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Ping would send out an electronic message that would bounce off the other computer and indicate if it was awake and ready for a two-way conversation. Ping also had a clock that would tell you how long it took for the electric pulse to go down the wires and back. “I hadn’t used ping in more than a decade,” Bucksbaum told me over breakfast in September 2015. But for the fun of it “I sat down at my computer in my house in Menlo Park and pinged a bunch of computers around the world the other day,” just to see how fast the pulse could get there and back. “I started pinging computers in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Imperial College London; the Weizmann Institute in Israel; and the University of Adelaide in Australia. It was amazing—the speed was more than half as fast as the speed of light,” which is two hundred million meters per second.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The remnants of River Rouge are not far away. The museum’s centerpiece is a life-size replica of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Inside are the homes and workshops belonging to men whose genius Ford felt was modest next to his own. The Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop was reassembled here, as was Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory. The latter was the world’s first industrial research and development lab for what would later become GE. As host, Jeff Zhao was joined by the vice mayor of Beijing. They had come to send a message: after sorting through the wreckage of America’s financial collapse, China was going on a shopping spree.


Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima by James Mahaffey

clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, it's over 9,000, loose coupling, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Richard Feynman, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Suez canal 1869, uranium enrichment, wage slave, wikimedia commons

Pierre enjoyed lighting up a party at night using glass tubes, coated inside with zinc sulfide and filled with a radium solution, showing off their discovery to amazed guests. He got it all over his hands, and on swollen digits the skin peeled off. Surely, the cause and effect were obvious.7 In 1904 Thomas A. Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” had been experimenting with x-rays for several years. Edison thought of using x-rays to make a fluorescent lamp, and he proceeded to test a multitude of materials to find which one would glow the brightest under x-rays. His faithful assistant was a young, eager fellow, Charles M. Dally, who had worked for him for the past 14 years.


pages: 666 words: 189,883

1491 by Charles C. Mann

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Gary Taubes, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, land tenure, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, phenotype, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, stem cell, technological determinism, trade route, zoonotic diseases

“Burning Down the Brewery: Establishing and Evacuating an Ancient Imperial Colony at Cerro Baúl, Peru.” PNAS 102: 17264–71. ———. 2001. The Incas and the Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru. New York: Thames and Hudson, rev. ed. ———. 1975a. “Chan Chan: Andean Alternative of the Preindustrial City.” Science 187:219–25. ———. 1975b. The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization. Menlo Park, CA: Cummings. Moseley, M. E., and G. R. Willey. 1973. “Aspero, Peru: A Reexamination of the Site and Its Implications.” AmAnt 38:452–68. Moseley, M. E., and A. Cordy-Collins, eds. 1990. The Northern Dynasties: Kingship and Statecraft in Chimor. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. Motolinía, T. 1950.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

It was, indeed, a scuzzy place for hellraisers of all types and, looking back, a fitting birthplace for the internet. Few of the customers today know it, but the entire digital universe is in orbit around one picnic table out back where computer scientists relayed the first message over the internet one summer afternoon in 1976. That August, scientists from SRI International—the research institute in nearby Menlo Park—pulled up to the Zott’s parking lot in an old bread truck to perform a demo for Pentagon officials who’d flown in for the occasion. The choice of locale was an inside joke; the SRI geeks had hoped there’d be some Hells Angels bikers in the mix. Sure enough, when they greeted the generals that day, one asked: “What are the hell are we doing in the parking lot of a biker bar?”


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

In spite of the long hours and the risk of death or injury at the hands of corporations that cared little or not at all for worker safety, US jobs were very good ones by international standards.12 They were jobs worth moving five thousand miles for, from, say, Hungary or Lithuania to suburban Pittsburgh or New Jersey. It is traditional at this point in any economic history to talk about Thomas Alva Edison—the most famous inventor in the world, “the wizard of Menlo Park,” New Jersey, who would register more than a thousand patents and found fifteen companies, including what is now called General Electric. But Edison’s story is already widely known and in fact obscures the global reach of the revolution. Let’s talk instead about another migrant, who, like Herbert Hoover, moved west—but in this case someone who moved west from Croatia to America: Nikola Tesla.13 Tesla was born on July 10, 1856, in the town of Smiljan, in the Krajina region of the province of Croatia in the Habsburg Empire—then ruled by the young emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna.


pages: 717 words: 196,908

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

Rockefeller created Standard Oil Company in the oil fields of western Pennsylvania. The following year J. Pierpont Morgan founded Drexel, Morgan and Company and became the most powerful banker in the world. In 1876 Andrew Carnegie created the prototype of all industrial corporations, United States Steel, Thomas A. Edison opened his lab at Menlo Park and Alexander Graham Bell presented his first working telephone at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The exposition itself stood as a striking symbol of the dominance of the engine and machine over the new American landscape.40 During the same period the nation’s population doubled. Most of the increase was due to the first great wave of mass immigration, bringing to American shores more than ten million people between 1860 and 1890.


pages: 721 words: 197,134

Data Mining: Concepts, Models, Methods, and Algorithms by Mehmed Kantardzić

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, backpropagation, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, data acquisition, discrete time, El Camino Real, fault tolerance, finite state, Gini coefficient, information retrieval, Internet Archive, inventory management, iterative process, knowledge worker, linked data, loose coupling, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NP-complete, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, phenotype, random walk, RFID, semantic web, speech recognition, statistical model, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, text mining, traveling salesman, web application

Chawla, Introduction to Spatial Data Mining, in Spatial Databases: A Tour, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2003. Shekhar, S., P. Zhang, Y. Huang, R. Vatsavai, Trends in Spatial Data Mining, in Data Mining: Next Generation Challenges and Future Directions, H. Kargupta, A. Joshi, K. Sivakumar, Y. Yesha, eds., AAAI/MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA, 2004. Wasserman, S., K. Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994. Wu, Q., et al., On Computing Mobile Agent Routes for Data Fusion in Distributed Sensor Networks, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 16, 2004, pp. 740–753.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Occasionally, we need to watch an advertisement that has been specifically designed to suit our needs, but privacy settings put us in the driver’s seat and nobody gets hurt, right? If only it were that straightforward. The reality of the bargain we’ve made is much more disconcerting. Take Google as an example, a company founded in 1998 by two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California. The pair invented a groundbreaking algorithm that vastly improved search results on the nascent World Wide Web and attracted a loyal following drawn in by their simple interface and high-quality search results. In 2000, they began selling ad keywords for particular products aligned with any given search phrase.


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

About that time, Johnson met a local pharmacist, Fred Kilmer, who for the next forty-five years would serve as J&J’s de facto head of research and development, in the process becoming “the most revered pharmaceutical chemist in the country,” according to the editors of Time.2 When Johnson met “Doc” Kilmer, the pharmacist was running a drugstore in New Brunswick frequented by Thomas Edison, whose laboratories were located in nearby Menlo Park. Over the years Kilmer would prove to be as prolific an inventor as his friend and customer Edison, starting with the creation of Johnson’s Baby Powder in 1890. Kilmer later developed the surgical products J&J made available, gratis, to the US military during the Spanish-American War, and to victims of the devastating 1900 Galveston hurricane and 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire (within hours of learning of the latter disaster, the company was loading boxcars full of cotton gauze, bandages, and plaster to be sent west).3 In 1906 Kilmer played a significant role in shaping the landmark 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, setting a precedent for future J&J cooperation with government agencies.


Guide to LaTeX by Helmut Kopka, Patrick W. Daly

centre right, Donald Knuth, framing effect, hypertext link, invention of movable type, Menlo Park

A Guide to A LT X E and Electronic Publishing Fourth edition Helmut Kopka Patrick W. Daly Addison-Wesley Harlow, England ˆ Reading, Massachusetts ˆ Menlo Park, California New York ˆ Don Mills, Ontario ˆ Amsterdam ˆ Bonn ˆ Sydney ˆ Singapore Tokyo ˆ Madrid ˆ San Juan ˆ Milan ˆ Mexico City ˆ Seoul ˆ Taipei © Addison Wesley Longman Limited 2004 Addison Wesley Longman Limited Edinburgh Gate Harlow Essex CM20 2JE England and Associated Companies throughout the World. The rights of Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly to be identified as authors of this Work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.


pages: 927 words: 216,549

Empire of Guns by Priya Satia

banking crisis, British Empire, business intelligence, Corn Laws, cotton gin, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, hiring and firing, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, technological determinism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, zero-sum game

Falling into a deep depression, she sought help from a spiritualist, who told her that she was being haunted by the spirits of Native Americans, Civil War soldiers, and others killed by the Winchester rifle. They had caused the untimely deaths of her daughter and husband. She could escape a similar fate if she moved west and built a great house for the spirits. As long as construction did not cease, she would remain safe. Sarah came to Menlo Park, California, where her niece lived, and from there she found the site for her new home in San Jose. She began building in 1884, and over the next thirty-eight years she produced the “Winchester Mystery House.” She also owned homes in Atherton, Los Altos, and Palo Alto. Her financial resources were virtually inexhaustible, thanks to the thousands of shares she still held in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company—just under 50 percent of the company’s capital stock, producing an income of $1,000 a day.


pages: 795 words: 215,529

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

Let them bend their definitions to accommodate the genius composers who succeeded Mozart, with their increasingly direct pipelines to the emotions. In America what newspapers already called the machine age was under way. The consummate genius, the genius who defined the word for the next generation, was Thomas Alva Edison. By his own description he was no wizard, this Wizard of Menlo Park. Anyone who knew anything about Edison knew that his genius was ninety-nine percent perspiration. The stories that defined his style were not about inspiration in the mode of the Newtonian apple. They spoke of exhaustive, laborious trial and error: every conceivable lamp filament, from human hair to bamboo fiber.


pages: 702 words: 215,002

Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones

Asilomar, clean water, corporate raider, financial independence, gentrification, haute couture, Menlo Park, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, streetcar suburb

But Oz thought he knew someone else who might work well with Jim, and recommended Jim speak to his fellow Vagabond puppeteer, Jerry Juhl. Juhl, unlike Oz, did want to be a puppeteer. Born Jerome Ravn Juhl in St. Paul, Minnesota, the twenty-one-year-old Juhl had been building and performing puppets since the age of eleven—and after moving to Menlo Park, California, had founded the Menlo Marionettes while still in high school. After graduating from San Jose State College with a degree in speech and drama, he had joined, then headed, the Vagabond Puppets—where he tapped the young Frank Oz as his assistant—and co-created and performed the puppet Pup on the local children’s television show Sylvie and Pup.


pages: 660 words: 213,945

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Colonization of Mars, double helix, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tragedy of the Commons, warehouse robotics

And now with Earth on the far side of the sun, and the nearest continuous shuttle destroyed, it was the security forces who were looking under siege, big cities or not. A call came from the physical plant. They were having some trouble with the computers, and wanted Arkady to come have a look. He left the city offices and walked across Menlo Park to the plant. It was just after sunrise, and most of Carr Crater was still in shadow. Only the west wall and the tall concrete buildings of the physical plant were in sunlight at this hour, their walls all yellow in the raw morning light, the pistes running up the crater wall like gold ribbons.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

The Computer Utility: Implications for Higher Education. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1969. Dwyer, D. “We’re in This Together.” Educational Leadership 54(3), 1996, 24–26. Ellul, J. The Technological Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964. Engelbart, D. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Menlo Park, CA: Stanford Research Institute, 1962. Evans, Rupert. Another String to My Bow. Urbana, IL: Prairie Publications, 2001. Fields, C., and J. Paris. “Hardware-Software,” in Computer-Based Instruction: A State-of-the-Art Assessment, H. F. O’Neill, Jr., ed. New York: Academic Press, 1981, 65–90. Finley, K.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

The first real efforts started with Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, two rival scientists and the first of what we now would call electrical engineers. While working on various ways to transmit electricity, Edison and Tesla both experimented with radio-control devices. Because of his eccentric personality and lack of a good public relations team like Edison, Tesla would not gain the same place in history as his rival, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” and died penniless. Tesla, though, did perhaps the most remarkable work at the time with remote-control devices. He first mastered wireless communication in 1893. Five years later, he demonstrated that he could use radio signals to remotely control the movements of a motorboat, holding a demonstration at Madison Square Garden.


pages: 1,201 words: 233,519

Coders at Work by Peter Seibel

Ada Lovelace, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Conway's Game of Life, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, Fermat's Last Theorem, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Guido van Rossum, history of Unix, HyperCard, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, Ken Thompson, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Multics, no silver bullet, Perl 6, premature optimization, publish or perish, random walk, revision control, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, slashdot, speech recognition, systems thinking, the scientific method, Therac-25, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, type inference, Valgrind, web application

Seibel: So you actually ended up doing your degree in broadcasting; after that what did you do? Crockford: I started a master's program in educational technology. But I felt like I was so far ahead of where the program was that I was just wasting time. I left that after about a year and went to work at SRI in Menlo Park, as a researcher. Then I went to a company called Basic Four, which was making small business minicomputers and spent a lot of years there. I developed a word-processing system for them and started doing some research into portable machines and PCs. I tried to push that company into PCs; I bought the first PC in the company and left it open on my desk so that the engineers could come look at it and see what IBM had done, but ultimately I couldn't change the culture there—they were pretty set in what they were doing.


pages: 826 words: 231,966

GCHQ by Richard Aldrich

belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial exploitation, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, friendly fire, illegal immigration, index card, it's over 9,000, lateral thinking, machine translation, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, New Journalism, operational security, packet switching, private military company, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, social intelligence, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, undersea cable, unit 8200, University of East Anglia, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

., Five Lives in One: An Insider’s View of the Defence and Intelligence World (Tunbridge Wells: Parapress, 1996) Benn, T., Out of the Wilderness, Diaries 1963–67 (Hutchinson, 1987) —Office Without Power, Diaries 1968–72 (Hutchinson, 1988) Benson, R.L. and Warner, R., Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–57 (Menlo Park, CA: Aegean Park Press, 1997) Bilton, M. and Kosminksy, P., Speaking Out: Untold Stories from the Falklands War (Grafton, 1987) Blake, G., No Other Choice (Jonathan Cape, 1990) Blix, H., Disarming Iraq (NY: Pantheon, 2004) Blunkett, D., The Blunkett Tapes: My Life in the Bear Pit (Bloomsbury, 2006) Borovik, G., The Philby Files (Little, Brown, 1995) Bryant, T., Dog Days at the White House: The Outrageous Story of a Presidential Kennel Keeper (NY: Macmillan, 1975) Callaghan, J., Time and Chance (Collins, 1987) Calvocoressi, P., Threading My Way (Duckworth, 1994) Campbell, A., The Blair Years: Extracts From the Alastair Campbell Diaries (Hutchinson, 2007) Carrington, Lord, Reflections on Things Past: The Memoirs of Lord Carrington (Collins, 1988) Castle, B., The Castle Diaries 1964–70 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984) Cavendish, A., Inside Intelligence (Collins, 1990) Cherkashin, V., Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer (NY: Basic 2005) Clark, A., Diaries: Into Politics (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000) Clayton, A., The Enemy is Listening: The Story of the Y Service (Hutchinson, 1980) Cole, D.J., Geoffrey Prime: The Imperfect Spy (Robert Hale, 1998) Colville, J., The Fringes of Power (Hodder and Stoughton, 1985) Comptroller and Auditor General, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ): New Accommodation Programme (The Stationery Office HC 955, 2003) Coote, J., Submariner (NY: Norton, 1992) Cradock, P., Experiences of China (John Murray, 1994) de la Mare, A., A Jersey Farmer’s Son in the Diplomatic Service (Jersey: La Haule Books, 1994) de Silva, P., Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Use of Intelligence (NY: Times Books, 1978) Donoughue, B., Downing Street Diary: With Harold Wilson in No.10 (Pimlico, 2006) Elliott, G. and Shukman, H., Secret Classrooms: An Untold Story of the Cold War (St Ermin’s, 2002) Evans, H., Good Times, Bad Times (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983) Fahey, J.A., Licensed to Spy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002) Falconer, D., First Into Action: A Dramatic Personal Account of Life in the SBS (Little, Brown, 2001) Flicke, W.F., War Secrets of the Ether (Laguna Hills CA: Aegean Park Press, 1994) Frost, M., Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Intelligence Establishments (Toronto: Doubleday, 1994) Garner, J.R., Codename Copperhead: My True Life Exploits as a Special Forces Soldier (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1994) Gibson, S., The Last Mission (Stroud: Sutton, 2005) Gilchrist, A., Cod Wars and How to Lose Them (Edinburgh: Q Press, 1978) Haines, J., Glimmers of Twilight (Politico’s, 2003) Hampshire, S., Innocence and Experience (Allen Lane, 1989) Harvey-Jones, J., Getting It Together (Heinemann, 1991) Healey, D., The Time of My Life (Michael Joseph, 1989) Heath, E., The Course of My Life: The Autobiography of Edward Heath (Hodder and Stoughton, 1998) Heseltine, M., Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography (Hodder and Stoughton, 2000) Howe, G., Conflict of Loyalty (Macmillan, 1994) Hunt, R., Russell, G. and Scott, K, Mandarin Blue: RAF Chinese Linguists – 1951 to 1962 – in the Cold War (Oxford: Hurusco Books, 2008) Ingham, B., Kill the Messenger (HarperCollins, 1991) Jenkins, R., Life at the Centre (Macmillan, 1991) Joint Technical Language Service, Arabic Personal Names: JTLS Working Aid 97(E)/93 (Cheltenham: GCHQ, 1993) Jones, R.V., Most Secret War (Hamish Hamilton, 1978) —Reflections on Intelligence (Heinemann, 1989) Kalugin, O. and Montaigne, F., The First Directorate: My First 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West – The Ultimate Memoirs of a Master Spy (NY: St Martin’s Press, 1994) King, C.H., The Cecil King Diaries, 1965–1970 (Jonathan Cape, 1972) Kot, S., Conversations with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963) Lamphere, R.J. and Shachtman, T., The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story (W.H.


pages: 848 words: 240,351

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, pneumatic tube, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway

Simple, ingenious devices were coming along one after another, changing the way people lived and the look of the land in the most astonishing fashion—barbed wire and ready-made windmills for settlers on the Great Plains, to name but two. In Hartford, Connecticut, Mark Twain was busy working on Huckleberry Finn. Edison was working on electric light at Menlo Park, New Jersey. Carnegie had built the Edgar Thomson works, the biggest steel mill on earth, at Braddock, Pennsylvania, and was producing Bessemer steel in quantities unheard of at the start of the decade. Big corporations were growing bigger, and though some railroads were going bankrupt, other lines kept right on expanding.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

See particularly papers by Landauer and Bennett. Proceedings of the Physics of Computation Workshop, Dallas (October 1993). IEEE Press. See particularly papers by Merkle, Hall, and Koller. Watson, J.D., Hopkins, N.H., Roberts, J.W. Steitz, J.A., and Weiner, A.M. (1987) Molecular Biology of the Gene, 4th edn. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings. Originally published in Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought13 (1994). Copyright © Max More. 19 Immortalist Fictions and Strategies Michael R. Rose Introduction: Something Like Penicillin for Immortality I have worked in the field of aging research for 35 years, as of this writing.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

They had seen all of that go through, and they were looking around for “what’s the next thing?” and this Internet thing started to smell kind of like it. So John During had a lot of experience in that. Livingston: So you said, “Let’s do it”? Kahle: Yes, and moved out to San Francisco, started the company in a Menlo Park mansion, sort of on the Thinking Machines model. That was as far north as I thought I could put the company and still be connected in with the Apples and the Suns and the other technology companies. In 1992, San Francisco wasn’t the place for companies. That happened in the mid ’90s, with the whole South of Market rebuilding.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Over the next thirty years, International Business Machines (IBM) sold smaller but still monstrous machines to the West’s corporations, but the real transformation followed the invention of the microprocessor in 1971. As so often, the innovators came from the fringes of the elite—in this case, not from ultrarespectable firms such as IBM but, like Steve Wozniak, from garages in places such as suburban Menlo Park in California. Starting with just $91,000 capital and a few geeky friends, Wozniak and his business partner Steve Jobs released their Apple I microcomputer into the world in 1976. By 1982 Apple’s sales had reached $583 million and IBM had invented the Personal Computer to compete. By then the Harvard dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen had founded Microsoft and relocated to the West Coast.


The Art of Computer Programming: Fundamental Algorithms by Donald E. Knuth

Charles Babbage, discrete time, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fear of failure, Fermat's Last Theorem, G4S, Gerard Salton, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, linear programming, linked data, Menlo Park, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, sorting algorithm, stochastic process, Turing machine

DONALD E. KNUTH Stanford University :']¦ ADDISON-WESLEY An Imprint of Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. Volume 1 / Fundamental Algorithms THE ART OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING THIRD EDITION Reading, Massachusetts • Harlow, England • Menlo Park, California Berkeley, California • Don Mills, Ontario • Sydney Bonn • Amsterdam • Tokyo • Mexico City is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society METflFONT is a trademark of Addison-Wesley Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knuth, Donald Ervin, 1938- The art of computer programming : fundamental algorithms / Donald Ervin Knuth. — 3rd ed. xx,650 p. 24 cm.


pages: 931 words: 79,142

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming by Peter Van-Roy, Seif Haridi

computer age, Debian, discrete time, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, fault tolerance, functional programming, G4S, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Menlo Park, natural language processing, NP-complete, Paul Graham, premature optimization, sorting algorithm, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, Turing complete, Turing machine, type inference

Fundamentals of Computer Security Technology. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1994. [5] Ross J. Anderson. Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems. John Wiley & Sons, 2001. Gregory R. Andrews. Concurrent Programming: Principles and Practice. Addison-Wesley, Menlo Park, CA, 1991. [6] [7] [8] Joe Armstrong. Higher-order processes in Erlang, January 1997. Unpublished talk. Joe Armstrong. Concurrency oriented programming in Erlang, November 2002. Invited talk, Lightweight Languages Workshop 2002. [9] Joe Armstrong. Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors.


pages: 1,106 words: 335,322

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, God and Mammon, Gregor Mendel, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, New Journalism, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, plutocrats, price discrimination, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, yellow journalism

Rockefeller knew that if he got greedy, other products could be substituted for kerosene, and this, too, curbed his appetite for excess profits. Oil was just one of many fossil fuels and kerosene one of many potential illuminants. In the fall of 1878, America’s wunderkind, Thomas Alva Edison, boasted to reporters at Menlo Park, New Jersey, that he had dreamed up a practical electric lightbulb; within a year, he had created a miraculous bulb that glowed brightly for one hundred straight hours and directly threatened Rockefeller’s kerosene business. The new Edison Electric Light Company enlisted affluent bankers, including the august Drexel, Morgan and Company.


pages: 1,079 words: 321,718

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

From Eggs to Acorns, From Oxen to Oaks Even if we forget about people who steal eggs and oxen, the notion that things can become bigger and better over time is everywhere to be found around us, for after all, grownups were once children; today’s multinational giants were once fledgling outfits; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak made the first Apple computer in a garage before going on to found their legendary firm; Sergey Brin and Larry Page incorporated Google in a humble dwelling in Menlo Park; Albert Einstein first learned to read and write before developing his theories of relativity; popes were once priests in little churches; conquerors of Everest climbed small hills before moving on to the big time; major acts of philanthropy were preceded by minuscule acts of charity; every great friendship was once just a tentative affinity; virtuoso instrumentalists were once musical novices; every chess master had to learn the rules at some point; powerful ideas gave rise to modest fruit before resulting in huge advances… All of this is far from egg-stealers turning into ox-stealers, but it nonetheless deserves a proverb or two, along with the rich category that any proverb covertly symbolizes.


The Art of Computer Programming: Sorting and Searching by Donald Ervin Knuth

card file, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Fermat's Last Theorem, G4S, information retrieval, iterative process, John von Neumann, linked data, locality of reference, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, p-value, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, sorting algorithm, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

DONALD E. KNUTH Stanford University TT ADDISON-WESLEY An Imprint of Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. Volume 3 / Sorting and Searching THE ART OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING SECOND EDITION Reading, Massachusetts • Harlow, England • Menlo Park, California Berkeley, California • Don Mills, Ontario • Sydney Bonn • Amsterdam • Tokyo • Mexico City is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society METRFONT is a trademark of Addison-Wesley Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knuth, Donald Ervin, 1938- The art of computer programming / Donald Ervin Knuth. — 2nd ed. xiv,780 p. 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Don’t worry: you’ll get your vintage car fix here too. Parking is $5. The adjacent, outdoor Greenfield Village (adult/child $22/16; 9:30am-5pm daily mid-Apr – Oct, 9:30am-5pm Fri-Sun Nov & Dec) features historic buildings shipped in from all over the country, reconstructed and restored, such as Thomas Edison’s laboratory from Menlo Park and the Wright Brothers’ airplane workshop. Plus you can add on the Rouge Factory Tour (adult/child $15/11; 9:30am-3pm Mon-Sat) and see F-150 trucks roll off the assembly line where Ford first perfected his self-sufficient, mass-production techniques. The three attractions are separate, but you can get a combination ticket (adult/child $32/24) for Henry Ford and Greenfield Village.


The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Ervin Knuth

Abraham Wald, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, G4S, Georg Cantor, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, NP-complete, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, sorting algorithm, Turing machine, Y2K

DONALD E. KNUTH Stanford University TT ADDISON-WESLEY An Imprint of Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. Volume 2 / Seminumerical Algorithms THE ART OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING THIRD EDITION Reading, Massachusetts • Harlow, England • Menlo Park, California Berkeley, California ¦ Don Mills, Ontario • Sydney Bonn • Amsterdam • Tokyo ¦ Mexico City is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society METRFONT is a trademark of Addison-Wesley The quotation on page 61 is reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knuth, Donald Ervin, 1938- The art of computer programming / Donald Ervin Knuth. — 3rd ed. xiv,762 p. 24 cm.


California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Stanford Theatre ( 650-324-3700; 221 University Ave) This restored 1925 movie house screens some vintage Hollywood gems and international classics, accompanied by a ‘mighty’ Wurlitzer organ. Getting There & Around Palo Alto is about 35 miles south of San Francisco and 15 miles north of San Jose. The easiest way to get here from either end of the Peninsula is via Caltrain ( 800-660-4287, 650-817-1717), which stops in Menlo Park, Palo Alto and Stanford (for football games only), with faster ‘Baby Bullet’ commuter service at the Palo Alto station. Departures are every 30 or 60 minutes on weekdays and hourly on Saturdays and Sundays. San Francisco to Palo Alto takes about an hour (40 minutes on the baby bullet) and costs $5.75.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Don’t worry: you’ll get your vintage car fix here too. Parking is $5. The adjacent, outdoor Greenfield Village (adult/child $22/16; 9:30am-5pm daily mid-Apr – Oct, 9:30am-5pm Fri-Sun Nov & Dec) features historic buildings shipped in from all over the country, reconstructed and restored, such as Thomas Edison’s laboratory from Menlo Park and the Wright Brothers’ airplane workshop. Plus you can add on the Rouge Factory Tour (adult/child $15/11; 9:30am-3pm Mon-Sat) and see F-150 trucks roll off the assembly line where Ford first perfected his self-sufficient, mass-production techniques. The three attractions are separate, but you can get a combination ticket (adult/child $32/24) for Henry Ford and Greenfield Village.