Tag: Technology

Joe Selvaggi talks with Pioneer Institute Senior Fellow Dr. Bill Smith about the benefit of the Bayh-Dole Act’s protection of intellectual property rights for university research patents and the risk posed to the nation and the local economy from recent efforts to consider price controls on products developed from patented discoveries

Is feminism compatible with progress? Reactionary feminist Mary Harrington thinks not. In this interview, she discusses the history of feminism, her own journey from proponent to radical opponent of progress, the impact of technology on women and society, and, of course, her new book, Feminism Against Progress (Regnery, 2023).

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd and widely-published essayist. You can her book, Feminism Against Progress here.

Joe Selvaggi talks with financial market and monetary policy expert Dr. Norbert J. Michel about the causes for the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and what its demise portends for depositors, the banking sector, and the regulatory regime that governs it.

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“The narrative that old books are worthless is designed to keep you from discovering that they are not.” Spencer Klavan, author of “How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises” discusses the West: why it’s so important to preserve it, how its greatest ideas can still help us today, and the limits of science and technology in addressing our modern dilemmas.

Spencer Klavan received his PhD in Classics from Oxford and is Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books and Features Editor at the American Mind.

Critic Adam Kirsch joins Brian Anderson to discuss his new book, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, out now.

Find the transcript of this conversation and more at City Journal.

Flying Cars

 

I’m sitting in a hotel room in New Hampshire, on a business trip to spend a few days with my biggest client. I’ll spend the next few days making machines move, the aspect of software writing that I enjoy the most.

A few minutes ago, I received a message from a friend in Ghana. He’s a doctor, building a hospital clinic in a rural and underserved portion of the country. I asked him, a few days ago, what he needed most desperately. He tells me it’s reinforced steel bar and concrete. (I’ve watched him and his workers making their own bricks, baking mud in the sun. Apparently that doesn’t work for every aspect of construction.)

Author and investor Michael Gibson joins Brian Anderson to discuss the work of the 1517 Fund and the Thiel Fellowship, why real technological progress has stalled and how elite universities contribute to that stagnation, and what some promising new educational models and institutions look like. His book, Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University, will be published November 29.

Find the transcript of this conversation and more at City Journal.

Then and Now: What My Great Grandmother Saw

 

Great Grandma was born in 1900 and died in 1998. What would it have been like to witness these advances in medicine, technology, and opportunity for all?

  In her early years  By the end of her life 
  Expansion and Development: The American West was dominated by miners, ranchers, and cowboys who wouldn’t hesitate to use guns to defend themselves and rode horses right into the saloons.  A hub of innovation and wealth, the West is irrigated, tame, and high-tech, with fantastic freeway systems. 
  Education for the Masses: Schooling was basic, and students were still taught in one-room schoolhouses. Not many advanced beyond grade school.   Most students are encouraged to go on to college and beyond. Schooling for the wealthy looks similar to education for the middle and lower classes. Scholarships and loans abound for both the ambitious and not so ambitious.  
Travel: Continental train travel was just beginning. Horses were still the norm, and roads were rough. Travel by land or sea took weeks.   We board a plane, watch in-flight movies, reach our destination in a matter of hours, and consider an overnight delay to be a huge failure of the system. We all own efficient, fast vehicles. 
Air and Space Technology: Flight had not yet been invented.   Supersonic jets, moon landing, the launch of the International Space Station  
  Quality of Daily Living: The majority of our ancestors still sustained themselves on farms or in factories, going barefoot in the South and getting hookworms, supporting large families, and laboring with cooking and cleaning. Refrigerators and indoor bathrooms were slow in coming. Daily bathing and showering was not a thing.   Most people expect to own their own homes, enjoy modern appliances and daily entertainment, have access to more mass-produced and affordable goods. The way is paved for politicians to use the lack of in-home Internet as an example of poverty in the US. Most people take hot showers or baths every day.  
Medicine: Diabetes was a killer. The first open-heart surgery was decades away. Years of agonizing trial and error lay ahead to pave the way for advanced life-saving surgeries. At least we’d stopped bleeding patients and knew about germs.  Heart, liver, and kidney transplants. Diabetes as a manageable disease. Standardized care and efficiency. We all know someone who wouldn’t be here without modern medicine.   
Mysteries of Life: There were painstaking fruit fly experiments to isolate inherited traits and recognize patterns in genetics.  We began to sequence worm genomes. Human eggs could be fertilized outside the womb.  

Mark explores the role of robots and artificial intelligence in boosting the supply of (cheaper) oil and gas critical to economies. He is joined by two leading “imagineers” who are inventing the future: Nic Radford, founder and CEO of Nauticus Robotics, and Jon Ludwig, founder and President of Novi Labs.

This week on “The Learning Curve,” co-hosts Gerard Robinson and Cara Candal talk with Prof. Paul Israel, Director & General Editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University, and author of Edison: A Life of Invention, the definitive biography of America’s greatest inventor. Professor Israel describes Edison’s public and private life, as well as the impact of his world-changing inventions, such as the hot-filament light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion-picture camera. Called the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” Edison is still the American with the most individual patents — 1,093 in the U.S. and 1,200 in 34 foreign countries. They discuss what educators and students in the 21st century can learn from how Edison ran the country’s first industrial research laboratory in New Jersey, and the importance of the U.S. Patent Office in protecting inventors’ exclusive right to profit from their inventions. They also discuss what students should learn about the role inventions have played in the historic success of the United States and in the highly dynamic and competitive global economy. Professor Israel concludes with a reading from his biography.

Stories of the Week:  The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) is celebrating its 75th anniversary of providing education for the children of American service members. Today, DoDEA operates 160 schools in eight districts across 11 countries, seven U.S. states and two U.S. territories for more than 67,000 students. (Read Pioneer’s related 2015 report.) In West Virginia, the Professional Charter School Board approved three applications for the state’s first ever charter public schools, which will provide another option for families who want and need a different learning environment.

A Disillusioned Generation

 

I’m 25 years old.

I arrived on this planet in the midst of a technological revolution. In my lifetime, my generation traveled from VHS to VR.  The generation before me had seen a man land on the moon.  With the internet, the knowledge of the world was now at our fingertips. Disney said “dream big,” our parents said, “aim high.”  The impossible was now possible. “We will do great things!”

A Few Small Thoughts

 

I’ve been busy. A customer is building a specialized milling machine, and I’m writing the software to create the tool paths — the motions the machine will have to make — required to manufacture sets of a few hundred slightly different precision parts that have to fit together fairly precisely. I’ve never done something quite like this, and it’s taken several iterations to get the math right and the paths precise down to the “tenths” (engineer talk for 0.0001″) required by the machine, and to do so without devouring the spinning cutting bits.

I’m very happy with the results so far. I’ll be at it the rest of this week and then, I hope, back to life as usual.

Member Post

 

First, the funny.  LGBT is coming to a classic sitcom near you!  Paramount is going to stream a new series called Dragging the Classics.  Here is what’s in store for viewers: https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/06/26/hollywood-reimagining-classic-tv-sitcoms-like-brady-bunch-with-drag-queen-makeovers/ Preview Open

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This week on “The Learning Curve,” Gerard Robinson and guest co-host Kerry McDonald talk with Naomi Schaefer Riley, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of several books, including Be the Parent, Please. They discuss findings from her book on how excessive technology use negatively impacts children’s intellectual, social, and moral development – which was even more of a challenge with the wide usage of remote learning during COVID-19. The conversation turns to Riley’s extensive commentary on the relationship between religion and education in American society, and lessons K-12 education policymakers should learn from higher education’s handling of faith on campus. She delves into why religion and church-state issues remain such a stark fault line across American K-12 education. They also talk about the development of anti-intellectual efforts on college campuses, and in the larger society, to use speech codes, political correctness, wokeness, and now cancel culture to shut down the free exchange of ideas, and why such campaigns to undermine the fundamentals of democracy persist.

Stories of the Week: EducationWeek reports that over 1.3 million American students did not return to school this year due to the pandemic-related closures. School districts are scrambling to lure them back, but will it work? Juneteenth, which honors the 1865 ending of slavery in this country, has officially become a U.S. federal holiday.

Member Post

 

Something incredible happens when teamwork happens the way it’s supposed to happen. Ultimately, when everyone on your team is equally invested in the overall purpose and goal, the performance and success of the project(s) skyrocket. You have each other’s backs, work faster, find and fix mistakes more easily, and innovate more.  Preview Open

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Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at Utah State University, joins Brian Anderson to debunk myths about the great stagnation, discuss new technologies that are on the precipice of unleashing growth, and detail the regulatory strictures and complacency that stand in their way.

Find the transcript of this conversation and more at City Journal.

Member Post

 

Prof. Ed Roberts of MIT Sloan – Startup Prof Listen here: https://www.angelinvestboston.com/ed-roberts-mit-startup-prof Ed Roberts started the scholarly study of startups. Learn from this brilliant academic pioneer and seasoned investor in Sohu.com and HubSpot about the keys to success in founding a tech company. Along the way you will be entertained and charmed by his most engaging […]

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The entrepreneurial spirit among immigrants and refugees allows them the flexibility to pursue unexpected courses of action, adapt, accept risk and make the most of opportunities they didn’t even know of before. For Dr. Amar Sawhney from India, that started at the University of Texas at Austin with 30 job rejections out of 30 applications. But he charted a path that would see him go in directions hitherto unknown to him: getting a PhD, helping found a company, journeying to Boston, and starting a string of new companies, using his chemical engineering background to save lives through remarkable local therapy innovations. To date, he has founded eight companies accounting for 4,000 jobs and more than $2 billion in revenue. He’s been named a “Champion of Change” by The White House, one of the “five most innovative Medical Device CEOs” by MassDevice, the EY regional entrepreneur of the year, The Immigrant Learning Center’s own Immigrant Entrepreneur Awardee for Life Science Business. But his influence extends well beyond that space into environmental conservationism, safeguarding refugees, mentoring and promoting STEM education, and building public understanding of America’s Sikhs, as you’ll hear in this week’s episode of JobMakers.

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