Slashdot Mirror
World Technology Awards 2001
struanr writes: "Nature has published the winners and finalists of the World Technology Awards, which are run by the World Technology Network. "These are about those individuals whose work today will, in our opinion, create the greatest "ripple effects" in the future... in both expected and unexpected ways." There are some big names chosen here, and some glaring omissions."
is very hard to predict due to its nature...
of *small* things having the possibility of creating large effects..
its well understood that *large* things are capable of large effects.
It's nice to see Linus credited for such an evolutionary piece of software and a revolutionary way of software development.
I give my congratulations and my thanks.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I went to this during the summer -- I was one of the semi-finalists for HavenCo in Entrepreneurship. There were some very interesting people there -- not really any of the "big names" in the business/tech categories who won, but lots of interesting people from the media, law, etc. I met only one other person under 40, though.
My personal favorite is the University of Surrey's satellite center -- I think constellations of LEO microsatellites, using packet-switching, are going to be one of the most interesting technologies in the next 20 years. There are some ways to get the costs down to the point where you could have flatrate global email from an LEO constellation for about as much as US nationwide 2-way pager coverage, which may not seem like much, but when applied to non-human operations like trucks, containers, etc. sending telemetry, it's very exciting.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Open Source software model founded by that hippie, shoeless slob Richard Stallman? If open source didn't exist (don't know how anyone can claim they "invented" OSS anyway), how could have Linus copylefted the Linux kernel in the first place?
You have to be kidding me. Shawn Fanning wins in TWO seperate categories? All the little fuck did in 2000 was sell out and spend the rest of the year in court. Seriously, there are a thousand people more deserving of both of his wins here. What's next, Bill Gates for "Innovative Government Payouts"?
How the hell could someone partly responsible for "Cyberpunk" and "Takedown" even be considered a Journalist? Much less win awards years later?
Who are the idiots responsible for these awards? Linus responsible for "establishing" Open Source? NOT! (no disrespect to the man but jesus, he didn't invent fire either) Shawn Fanning?! That is soooo two years ago.
Here is the quick list of winners. Quite items of note are winners Linus Torvald, and Shawn Fanning (founder of Napster)
* * *
BIOTECHNOLOGY - Winner: Dr Craig Venter, President & CEO, Celera Genomics Inc., USA. Dr Venter was selected for his work on sequencing the human genome.
COMMERCE - Winner: Mr Linus Torvalds, Programmer, Transmeta Corp., USA. Linus Torvalds was selected for his work on Linux and the Open Source Software Paradigm.
COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY - Winner: Mr Robert Metcalfe, Vice-President Technology, International Data Group Inc., USA. Robert Metcalfe was selected for his work as the inventor of the Ethernet and the founder of 3Com.
DESIGN - Winner: Mr Stefano Marzano, CEO, Philips Design, Italy.
EDUCATION - Winner Dr Venkataraman Balaji, Head/Principal Scientist, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), India.
ENERGY - Winner: Dr Paul MacCready, Chairman, AeroVironment Inc., USA. Paul MacCready was selected for his considerable work in the area of flight technology and solar-powered transport.
ENTERTAINMENT - Winner: Mr Shawn Fanning, Founder, Napster Inc., USA.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP - Winner: Mr Shawn Fanning, Founder, Napster Inc., USA.
ENVIRONMENT - Winner: Dr Geoffrey Ballard, Founder, Ballard Power Systems Inc., USA. Geoffrey Ballard was selected for his work as the founder of the leading fuel-cell manufacturer, Ballard Power Systems.
ETHICS - Winner: Dr Sharon Beder, Faculty Member, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, Australia.
FINANCE - Winner: Mr Thomas Weisel, Founder and Chairman, Thomas Weisel Partners, USA.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY - HARDWARE - Winner: Mr Gordon Moore, Chairman Emeritus, Intel Corp., USA. Gordon Moore was selected for his work at IntelCorp., which he co-founded in 1968.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY - SOFTWARE - Winner: Prof. Olivier Faugeras, Research Director, ROBOTVIS Group Sophia-Antipolis Research Unit, INRIA, France. REALVIZ creates commercial products for the film and advertising industries, amongst others, using geometric information to reconstruct 3D scenes and co-ordinate artificial elements
LAW - Winner: Prof. Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law, Stanford University, USA.
MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS - Winner: Mr Mark Viken, Senior Vice President, Information Technology Products Division, Sony Electronics Inc., USA.
MATERIALS - Winner: Prof. George Whitesides, Professor of Bioorganic/Physical Organic Chemistry & Materials Science, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, USA. George Whitesides has pioneered the development of 'soft lithography'. This microfabrication technology is having a tremendous impact in many areas of micro- and nanofabrication.
MEDIA & JOURNALISM - Winner: Mr John Markoff, Technology Correspondent, New York Times, USA.
POLICY - Winner: Prof. Christopher Freeman, Professor Emeritus, Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, UK.
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP - Winner: Mr Agus Gunarto, Managing Program/NGO Worker, Yayasan Rona Alam (Rona Alam Foundation), Indonesia.
SPACE - Winner: Prof. Martin Sweeting, Director, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), Surrey Space Centre, UK. Since 1979, Professor Sweeting's team at the University of Surrey has pioneered engineering techniques for small satellites and has developed a series of highly capable, yet inexpensive micro-satellites, built for around US$3 million each.
THE ARTS - Winner: Mrs. Steina Vasulka, Artist, Art and Science Laboratory, USA & Mr Woody Vasulka, Artist, Art and Science Laboratory, USA.
TRANSPORTATION - Winner: Governor Jaime Lerner, Governor of Paraná, Brazil.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Hmm...
Glaring omissions?
Guess yer talking about Microsoft. We all know how much *THEY* innovate!
:D
Pain(n): when you're telnetting into a box doing somethin cool, and some luser calls for help with a 'critical error' ad
FINANCE
Winner: Mr Thomas Weisel, Founder and Chairman, Thomas Weisel Partners, USA.
I love it when a guy who is basically named "Weasel" wins a finance award. It reminds me way to much of the old law firm saw, "Dewie, Cheayum, & Howe"
-Frums
>Linux is one of the most important operating systems, at least as important as UNIX and MSDOS.
It is good to see that they know what they are talking about... *sigh*
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
For the Media & Journalism area, I have to congratulate Mr. Markoff, Dr. Astvatsaturian, Mr. Bader, Mr. Brockman, and Mr. Schrage; however... I do issue a stern warning to them. Be aware of the stiff competition next year, as I hear Slashdot's very own Jon Katz is quite a contender for championed journalistic accomplishments. Yes, Katz' very own way of writing about technology is well-known, and there shoud be a day where he finally gets recognized for his skills. To the execs of VA Software, Inc. I implore you: Please give Mr. Katz the full support he deserves to become contender for next year.
I note that the award is the 2001 version, after which it speaks of recognizing "recent" accomplishments.
Now, I admire Bob Metcalfe as much as anyone, but the creation of Ethernet is hardly recent. The recognition of Torvalds, Gordon Moore, and Michael Dell (a finalist) likewise begs the question: Hasn't anyone done anything in technology lately?
I would suppose that this award is like the Nobel, in that it is given once time has proved that the nominee's accomplishments are not a flash-in-the-pan.
---Any philosophy that can be put "in a nutshell" belongs there.---
I just think some of the results are odd. Also, some of them on that page did not have explanations, which is strange as well.
Shawn Fanning of Napster for Entrepreneurship? Napster was nice and all, but did Fanning really make a business? It seems to me that he had an excellent idea for a piece of software, it got big, and someone threw money at it. It sort of road the coat-tails of a technology boom. And look at them now. You can't really make a sucessful company by following their business plan. They hardly have one, and it hasn't been particularly profitable. The entertainment category award makes much more sense to me.
And I'm all for Bob Metcalf, but the blurb on him didn't really say anything about what he's done lately. Yeah, ethernet is great and all, but these are the 2001 awards. Ethernet is not new.
Same with Gordon Moore. His little writeup is all about stuff he did back in the day. And yeah, a lot of it is still relevant, but surely 2001 had some hardware development that's more interesting than a 'law' everyone has been quoting for years.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
But! It's really misleading. It makes it sound like the idea of giving away your code was invented by Linus and it wasn't. It wasn't invented by RMS either, but RMS would claim that he's the guy who's done the most for it. Heck, RMS doesn't even get a token "GNU/Linux" in these awards.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
I couldn't find Steve Case (CEO of AOL) in the marketing section. I mean come on, this guy should be at least a runner-up with all those billions and billions of CD's sent out. AOL *is* somewhat responsible for making the Internet as "value added" as it is today (at least according to Bob Metcalfes rule- the more people on the network the more valuable).
If you're not familiar with Singer, here's a good page about him. The short version is that he advocates infanticide until 28 days for disabled newborns and euthanasia for people with cognitive
disabilities. He first made it big in the animal rights community, but many are abandoning him after he tried to justify some forms of bestiality (see this). Here's one of his quotes:
Sounds like a real champion of animal rights, huh?
Also, as other posters have mentioned, although he's well deserving of the award, Linus didn't establish the Open Source software model. Some of the posters have said RMS did, but there are a couple issues with that:
RMS would say he's not for Open Source, he's for Free Software
The model was around long before RMS, he just successfully described & codified it in the GPL
As everyone and their brother have pointed out, OSS cannot be single handedly attributed to Linus; but more to the point, doesn't that make anyone question the merit of this award, when the grantors are so poorly informed? Especially when there are so many other legitimate reasons to give it to Linus, not a one of which is actually mentioned, just to take one example, saving the monolithic kernel from the oblivion to which industry and academia were ready to consign it 8 or so years ago.
Oops
Relative to GNU ?
Clearly it's a politica aware and not a politically correct one at that.
Strange, I thought Ballard Power systems was in Vancouver B.C. Canada (not USA as indicated).
Did the border move while I was celebrating the new year?
:-)
I think he deserves the Marketing flag, if indeed marketing types should be recognised. After all he sold the world arguably the biggest piece of crap ever: Dos/Win 3.1. In my limited experience, I can't recall anything so bad selling so well....
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
There seems to be an impression around slashdot that linux is somehow the most brilliantly advanced operating system around.
Linus and friends have created a great (the best) hobbyist operating system, so good that it stands up well even against "real" commercial operating systems. But the design of the operating system is nothing revolutionary; it is based on 30+ year-old ideas.
Anyway, I am glad to have the pressure on Microsoft (and others) and to see Open Source and Free Software benefit as well. Thanks linus!
After looking it over, there aren't many pioneers in there.
In the area of computer technology, I'd say that only Gordon Moore deserves this level of recognition. Gordon almost single-handedly created the microprocessor industry as well as provided essential direction on mp design. Say what you will about the purity of Intel's mp designs, the fact remains that designing for manufacturability is as critical as designing for pure performance.
As has been said elsewhere, Linus did something evolutionary, but they give him far more credit that is fair (he didn't create the OSS...he DID popularize it).
Bob Metcalf is a pioneer with twenty years to rest on his laurels and other networking technologies are fundamentally better, just not as popular. Bob is the next most legit candidate.
Shawn has contributed to some of the most important dialog on intellectual property and copyright laws by the actions of a curious kid, but he did this without attempting to do anything more interesting than share ripped music, so he can hardly be called cerebral or a major contributor.
"... but you can love completely without complete understanding." - Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It"
Shared ideas for productivity is human nature. The discovery of tools was shared, hence evolution. Planting edible crops was shared openly, hence agriculture. Open Source is old as the hills and the "tricks of the trade" shared across a cube or a beer are modern equivilents.
As I look through this list, it appears some of this year's winners, really haven't done anything groundbreaking in 2001. It appears they have been selected based on older achievements.
Names such as Bob Metcalfe, Shawn Fanning, and Linus Torvalds stand out.
Metcalfe, since his retirement from 3Com, really hasn't done anything useful. He's made a lot of money as a columnist, which really isn't deserving of a "World Technology Award," especially when he makes bold predictions of the internet's demise, and Linux being old technology. I know, those examples didn't happen in 2001, but to be honest I haven't paid attention to him much in 2001.
Shawn Fanning.. in the beginning of 2001, I don't think Napster was completely deactivated, but I'm pretty sure it was crippled beyond usefulness by all the record-company imposed filters. Furthermore, he had the idea first. It wasn't a new idea, or something that nobody else would have come up with, and he certainly didn't do the best implementation of peer to peer. If he had to win at all, it should have been in 2000, if not 1999. By the end of 2001, Napster had become totally irrelevant.
And last, Linus Torvalds.. What he did is remarkable, but it seems kind of arbitrary picking 2001 as the year to give him a prize. I don't know about this one, maybe he deserved it. But why 2001?
Ballard isn't the only player in the fuel cell game, but they have done a great job of promoting themselves, and do have good tech.
Anarchists never rule
Did the border move while I was celebrating the new year?
Yes. The US Government in its continuing efforts to fight terrorism both at home and abroad have annexed Canada, except for Quebec. (We don't like them either.) This newly expanded United States of American will solidfy its collective boarders, integrate its armed forces (hehe), and boldly move forward in this Global War on Terriorism.
So, Americans everywhere, join us in welcoming are newest canuck brothers to this our new United States. Just for the record, the former Canadian provinces will not be represented by stars on the new flag. Instead they will be little maple leafs. Likewise, when Mexico, Brazil, and the rest of Central and South America are annexed later next month, they will represented by little cannibas leaves.
Touching really...
i dont understand how come he has been categorized at "commerce". the kernel is not commercial.
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
Many of the WTN's choices are in fact questionable. The nominations are somewhat well-balanced, but going through the list of winners reminds one of the good old boy network -- senescent, white has-beens and businessmen caught up in an orgy of co-promotion and intralaudatory gibberish.
How could it be any different, with an awards committee co-chaired by the likes of GlaxoSmithKline, CNBC, and Enron? And don't forget how hard Nature has been trying to broaden its readership. On reflection, it seems clear that the point of this exercise was not - as advertised - to recognize achievement going forward, so much as to allow companies in need of makeovers to associate themselves with names they consider to be influential in the present public consciousness.
In the most charitable interpretation, one can see this as their attempt to honor achievement as they recognize it.
That, my friends, is an honor that most of us could do without.
- Cantankerous in Cantabrigia
P.S. -- What on earth has Michael Schrage ever done to merit the press' accolades -- besides strenuously cultivating his friendships?
I've done a bit of a summary of who-won-what for handiness and bragging rights; the results are quite interesting.
:)
/. lameness filter sucks when you're trying to do a graph.
No. of wins - No. of finalists --- Pop. in millions
USA : 12.5 - 60 --- 263
UK : 2 - 12 --- 58
Japan : 0 - 7 --- 125
India : 1 - 4 --- 936
France : 1 - 3 --- 58
Brazil : 1 - 2 --- 156
Germany : 0 - 3 --- 82
Switzerland : 0 - 2 --- 7
Finland : 1 - 1 --- 5
Netherlands : 0 - 2 --- 15
South Africa : 0.5 - 1 --- 41
Italy : 1 - 0 --- 57
Australia : 1 - 0 --- 18
Indonesia : 1 - 0 --- 195
Iceland : 0 - 1 --- 0.27
Taiwan : 0 - 1 --- 21
Canada : 0 - 1 --- 30
Russia : 0 - 1 --- 148
Kenya : 0 - 1 --- 31
For pure weight-of-numbers there's no competition; the USA is miles ahead, with the UK and Japan fairly entranched in 2nd and 3rd places. More intersting is to compare this with their population.
When you do this, the USA is still very successful, with the UK only marginally ahead (probably due to it's univeristy system). Iceland however steals the show; although they only got a finalist, their population is a tiny fraction of most of the countries' major cities. *
It's also clear that many countries are majorly underachieving; Sweden, Belgium and Sapin spring to mind as non-appearers, and Russia, Canada Austrialia and the Netherlands didn't do spectiacularly well.
How much of this is due to the innate bias in the selection process is debatable, but then doing an analysis on these figures is pretty random anyway, so what the hell.
* Yes I know, one isn't a very good sample size
Brown
PS. If anyone's wondering, I considered a win to be a bit better than a finalist, but not that much.
PPS. The
there are more UC Berkeley names than stanfUrd!
GO bears!
Am I the only one who noticed the amusing similarity between Entrepreneurship finalist #4 (Mr. Robert Terwilliger) and Sideshow Bob (Mr. Bob Terwilliger). Is Bob getting into business now?
Commerce
1. Mr Jeffrey Bezos, Founder, Amazon, USA.
I am so tired of hearing about Jeff Bezos. Give me a break! He's the number one finalist in commerce? Exactly what did he do that has made him so talked about besides raise a lot of money from a bunch of rubes who thought that doing commerce on the internet was so, like, *totally* different than opening a store physically.
We're just gonna' have a web site! Oh yeah, we'll need to worry about the supply chain and inventory management and IT staff, too -- and uh, yeah we'll have to worry about packing and shipping and returns. That's okay though, because we're gonna' lose a ton of money by not learning *anything* from companies that have been doing these things with catalogs for decades!
C'mon. Commerce on the web was a forgone conclusion. He didn't invent *anything*. If anybody should get a commerce award it should be Tim Burners Lee -- he invented the web.
Note that just because the awards were given away in 2001, doesn't mean that the WORK they were awarded for had to be completed in the same year. Often the impact of an award is not apparent for a number of years after the award is given -- if you wish to give out awards based on long-term consequences of a work, and not just "flash-in-the-pan" results, you have to sit back and see how history unfolds. Just look at the list of Nobel Prizes and you will see this is quite true -- only rarely, when an obviously stunning piece of research comes out (ie, high T_C superconductors) is a prize awarded in the short-term.
Also, since this prize has not been around for that long, it still has to contend with "queued" up winners, just as the Nobel did in its early days. Is it really fair to hand out the award for hardware to an individual of lesser importance when someone like Gordon Moore is sitting in the wings without a prize?
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Ballard is located across the bridge in Burnaby, B.C. They moved from North Vancouver a few years ago.
http://www.ballard.com/facilities.asp
I'm not sure how they categorized people, for example Linus Thorvalds wins a commerce price, although the overall commercial impact of Linux may not be that great compared to Microsoft's stuff, so why didn't say Bill Gates win (although I prefer to use Linux). Michael Dell might have
been been a better fit in commerce than Information technology hardware. J.D. Tygar
was conspicuously absent from the commerce and software lists, yet his work has had (and is likely to have) profound impact.
Other notable omissions or strange characterizations are Michael Dell under
Information Technology hardware side by side with Patterson and Bill Joy (I always thought Bill Joy was a software guy, silly me!).
And Bezos, he is dangerously close to being the poster child for what NOT to do when starting a business.
...was even mentioned as a finalist. Even more amazing is that Micheal Dell was!!!
Princeton doesn't tend to appoint crackpots to its faculty, and they haven't in this case.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Linus Torvalds wrote the kernel of Linux and established the Open Source software model, which is a revolutionary way of creating software. In doing so, he not only designed one of the most important pieces of software ever, but he also created a new paradigm for software engineering."
Linus did a great job writing Linux (which is a kernel), but the rest of this citation is utter rubbish. He is always ready to point out that he could never have accomplished what he did without the earlier work of the Free Software Foundation.
IMHO the FSF deserves the credit for establishing the free software movement, but others will doubtless differ. We should all be able to agree though that it wasn't Linus Torvalds.
Entertainment should have John Carmack on the list. He helped create a whole genre of gaming? Instead, they have Sonic the Hedgehog on the list. Gimme a break! I would even accept Richard Garriot over the nobody's listed there. Also, the only reason Napster succeeded is because it got so much press and legal suits. The very beast that made it rise to the top also brought it down. I'm quite happy with Gnutella and LimeWire thank you.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Tim certainly deserves a lot more credit than the popular press gives him. Why are we getting all worked about about a stupid article from a stupid magazine? :-) We just can't help it, I guess.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai