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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."
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?
I don't know that you can say Linus created an evolutionary piece of software since it was basically a clone of Unix, though one can argue the forms the Linux kernel has taken since its inception have been very evolutionary. Nor did he really create a revolutionary way of software development. OSS and the GPL were around before Linux, Linus simply made them popular.
What Linus did create was a kinship among software developers that blossomed into a community. This community formed distributions and companies to market their newly created softwares. I suppose he did create a new commerce system in which OSS was popular. For this he deserves an award for changing commerce and how people everywhere are viewing copyrights for software.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
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).
Peter Singer is one of the only philosophers I know willing to accept the absurd conclusions he reaches. I've read a great deal of his writing, most of it has significant logical flaws, but his most important conclusions seem, in my opinion, justified.
Before you say something bad about him, read one of his books, with an eye toward the same sort of "absurd conclusions" (e.g., it's okay to kill a newborn, because it doesn't have a personality) as, oh I don't know, that there are as many positive odd numbers (which are all whole numbers) as all positive and negative whole numbers and fractions of two whole numbers combined. This is absurd, but any mathematician will tell you its a fact.
There was a time when it was 'absurd' that the descendent of a savage from Africa brought over to serve Europeans should have the same right to elect the officials in the given European government as the Europeans themselves. Absurd!
This reminds me much of Time Magazine's choice of Person of the Year for 2001. The guidelines for this choice tend towards choosing someone who had the largest overall impact on the world for that year, whether that impact be positive or negative.(1)
This year's choice is Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York City. I find their choice to be unwise, probably prompted by feel-good patriotism rather than by clinical reasoning and good journalistic intregrity.
In New York City, Mayor Giuliani may have had the biggest effect after the September 11 events, and possibly would loom that large in the public eye in all of New York State, but I question his impact to the world, or even the entire United States.
A better choice would have been Osama Bin Laden, in spite of how reprehensible his actions may have been, or how hated the man has become in America and other NATO countries.
Bin Laden had an unarguably huge effect throughout the world with his successful attack and toppling of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. Laws and personal freedoms throughout the world have been wrenched into a new status, and the ripple effect will be felt for years to come.
His is now a household name spoken as a curse or a blessing. We all know who he is and don't tend to have luke warm feelings towards the man.
Perhaps speculation about Bin Laden had saturated the press too much, or perhaps Time Magazine wished to focus on the positive rather than the negative, but their choice for POY 2001 is still, to me, very questionable.
Whereas I didn't agree with Time Magazine's choice for POY 2001, I don't disagree with Nature's choice of Shawn Fanning as the winner for both the categories of Entertainment and Entrepreneurship, or for being a finalist for the category of Marketing Communications.
Fanning's product and company (Napster) had a huge effect on the Entertainment industry, and he definitely qualified as a stand-out entrepreneur.
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(1) Prior precedent for individuals with a very negative effect on history was set in 1938 by choosing Adoph Hitler, and in both 1939 and 1942 by choosing Joseph Stalin.
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