Evernote: Company of the Year

Evernote is rejecting industry trends, getting customers to pay for something that's free, and reinventing the way we remember

From my article in the December 2011 issue of Inc. magazine

Phil Libin remembers the moment he left childhood behind. It was nearly four years ago, when the funding for his Internet start-up fell through. He was 35.

   It had all been so much fun until then. But at 3 a.m., out of cash and having waited in vain for a venture capitalist or angel or CEO or anyone at all to return his increasingly desperate calls, Libin knew that he would have to pull the plug on Evernote, a software application that helps people remember things. "I realized I was going to have to wake up tomorrow and lay off everyone in the company," he says....read more

Science Finds a Better Way to Teach Science

After doing some much-needed research, cognitive scienctists are suggesting a new way to boost students’ lagging scores: Get rid of the hallowed (and stultifying) classroom lecture

From my Impatient Futurist column in the the December 2011 issue of Discover

Teaching well is hard. I can cite my direct observations of the hundreds of victims of my occasional efforts over the years as a teacher of physics and writing. As I have stood lecturing brilliantly to a few dozen purportedly eager collegians, it has not escaped my attention that at any one time only three or four seem awake enough to keep up with their text messaging.
   Clearly the problem is not the content or presentation style of my lecturing, which, as I may have neglected to mention, is brilliant, or so I was once assured by a student who stayed after class to ask for a sixth extension on an assignment. Then again, from what I recall of my college days, I wasn’t exactly on the edge of my seat at my professors’ lectures, either. And most of my fellow lecturers don’t report much different. Could the problem be with the nature of lecturing itself?...read more

The Man Who Gave Us Less for More

Examining the crushing success of Steve Jobs

From my article in the January 2012 issue of Discover
(#8 of the top 100 science stories of 2011)


I was front row center when Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple Macintosh to the world in 1984 in 
Boston. While the crowd cheered and clapped 
and squealed, I was scratching my head. What did this pretty beige box offer that a hundred other computers didn’t already offer, besides a higher price, much less choice in software, and no 
compatibility with the rest of the world’s devices?...read more

Rebooting Eating Behavior with Technology

Layer by Layer

With 3-D printing, manufacturers can make existing products more efficiently—and create ones that weren't possible before

From my article in the January 2012 issue of Technology Review

GE thinks it has a better way to make jet-engine fuel injectors: by printing them. To do it, a laser traces out the shape of the injector's cross-section on a bed of cobalt-chrome powder, fusing the powder into solid form to build up the injector one ultrathin layer at a time. This promises to be less expensive than traditional manufacturing methods, and it should lead to a lighter part—which is to say a better one.

The innovation is at the forefront of a radical change in manufacturing technology that is especially appealing in advanced applications like aerospace and cars. The 3-D printing techniques won't just make it more efficient to produce existing parts. They will also make it possible to produce things that weren't even conceivable before—like parts with complex, scooped-out shapes that minimize weight without sacrificing strength. And the technology could reduce the need to store parts in inventory, because it's just as easy to print another part—or an improved version of it—10 years after the first one was made. An automobile manufacturer receiving reports of a failure in a seat belt mechanism could have a reconfigured version on its way to dealers within days...read more

In Memoriam: The Space Shuttle

With great ambivalence we note the passing of 
the first and only reusable spaceship, the space shuttle, 
on July 21, 2011. Our prayers are with NASA.

From my article in the January 2012 issue of Discover, 
(#6 of the top 100 science stories of 2011)

The space shuttle, which long served NASA and humankind as a low-Earth-orbit 18-wheeler, died on July 21 at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after gliding to an uneventful touchdown from a routine mission. It was 39 years old. The shuttle program had been suffering for several years from a wasting loss of enthusiasm for its high price tag and untamed risks. The final cause of death was failure to find any reason to keep pouring billions of dollars into an obsolete space ferry that lacked a stirring mission...read more

A Few TV Appearances

I was on John Stossel's show on Fox in September, discussing why experts often turn out to be wrong. You can watch it by clicking on the "play" icon above, or by going here.

And because of Andy Rooney's death, I thought I'd repost the CBS segment in which Rooney and I tour his office to discuss the useful role that clutter can play. You can see the clip here.

Why Economic Models Are Always Wrong

A fundamental problem with the mathematics of models ensures we'll always get unreliable predictions

From my article on the Scientific American Website, posted Oct. 26, 2011 (A companion piece to my feature article on economic models in the Nov. 2011 print edition, posted just below)

When it comes to assigning blame for the current economic doldrums, the quants who build the complicated financial risk models, and the traders who rely on them, deserve their share of the blame. But what if there were a way to come up with

simpler models that perfectly reflected reality? And what if we had perfect financial data to plug into them?

   Incredibly, even under those utterly unrealizable conditions, we'd still get bad predictions from models.

   The reason is that current methods used to “calibrate” models often render them inaccurate....read more

A Formula for Economic Calamity

Despite the lessons of the 2008 collapse, Wall Street is betting our future on flimsy science

From my article in the November 2011 issue of Scientific American

The market crash of 2008 that plunged the world into the economic recession from which it is still reeling had many causes. One of them was mathematics. Financial investment firms had developed such complex ways of investing their clients’ money that they came to rely on arcane formulas to judge the risks they were taking on. Yet as we learned so painfully three years ago, those formulas, or models, are only pale reflections of the real world, and sometimes they can be woefully misleading....read more

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

[Includes my Atlantic article profiling meta-researcher John Ioannidis]


From the introduction, by Mary Roach:

...Good science writing is medicine. It is a cure for ignorance and fallacy. Good science writing peels away the blinders, generates wonder, brings the open palm to the forehead: Oh! Now I get it! And sometimes it does much more than that.... (See the book.)

Doing Business in China

Michael Lee is on the verge of becoming the first American entrepreneur to build big in the world’s most populous country

From my article in the Oct. 2011 issue of Inc. magazine

Michael Lee is eerily quiet as his world comes down noisily around him. Packed into a cramped conference room in his company's modest offices in Nanjing, China, Lee's key managers are at one another's throats. The more angrily they spit blame at one another for the disastrous, unsalvageable situation the company finds itself in, the more enervated Lee seems to become, until finally he is no more than a slumped statue following the action only with slight movements of his eyes....read more

Why US Green-Tech Firms Are Moving to China

Boston Power's move reflects China's willingness to provide incentives for companies in electric vehicles and other strategic industries

From my Sep. 9, 2011, article on the Technology Review Website

Many in the U.S. have an interest in getting clean-tech ventures off the ground. Among them are the government, capital markets, industry, and science labs. But China seems ready to do more on every front to make such projects happen, and to do it right now—without red tape or concern about economic turmoil.
     Leading-edge battery maker Boston Power appears to have come to that conclusion. The company is set to move to China, where the government is helping to cut the firm a $125-million deal that no one else is likely to match. The deal could leave the company poised to be a part of what could be a mushrooming market there in electric vehicles.....read more

The Triumph of New-Age Medicine

Carefully controlled studies have shown alternative medicine to work no better than a placebo. But now many doctors admit that alternative medicine often seems to do a better job of making patients well

From my story in the July/August 2011 issue of The Atlantic

...You might think the weight of the clinical evidence would close the case on alternative medicine, at least in the eyes of mainstream physicians and scientists who aren’t in a position to make a buck on it. Yet many extremely well-credentialed scientists and physicians with no skin in the game take issue with the black-and-white view espoused by Salzberg and other critics. And on balance, the medical community seems to be growing more open to alternative medicine’s possibilities, not less.
   That’s in large part because mainstream medicine itself is failing. “Modern medicine was formed around successes in fighting infectious disease,” says Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate... read more

How to Fix the Obesity Crisis

Although science has revealed a lot about metabolic processes that influence our weight, the key to success may lie elsewhere

From my cover story in the February 2011 issue of Scientific American

Obesity is a national health crisis—that  much we know. If current trends continue, it will soon surpass smoking in the U.S. as the biggest single factor in early death, reduced quality of life and added health care costs....
   Why are extra pounds so difficult to shed and keep off? It doesn’t seem as though it should be so hard. The basic formula for weight loss is simple and widely known: consume fewer calories than you expend. And yet....almost everybody who tries to diet seems to fail in the long run—a review in 2007 by the American Psychological Association of 31 diet studies found that as many as two thirds of dieters end up two years later weighing more than they did before their diet....
   Maybe someday biology will provide us with a pill that readjusts our metabolism so we burn more calories or resets our built-in cravings so we prefer broccoli to burgers. But until then, the best approach may simply be to build on reliable behavioral psychology methods developed over 50 years and proved to work in hundreds of studies. These tried-and-true techniques, which are being refined with new research that should make them more effective with a wider range of individuals, are gaining new attention. As the NIH puts it in its proposed strategic plan for obesity research: “Research findings are yielding new and important insights about social and behavioral factors that influence diet, physical activity, and sedentary behavior....” read more (Subscription or payment to Scientific American needed to read full article, but I hope to be able to make more of it available here soon. Meanwhile, I see a university has posted the full article here.)

Jump-Starting the Orbital Economy

Why NASA's plan to get out of the manned spaceflight business may (finally) make space travel routine

From my article in the December 2010 issue of Scientific American

Two years ago deceased Star Trek actor James “Scotty” Doohan was granted one last adventure, courtesy of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. SpaceX, a privately funded company based in Hawthorne, Calif., had been formed in 2002 with the mission of going where no start-up had gone before: Earth orbit. In August 2008 SpaceX loaded Doohan’s cremated remains onto the third test flight of its Falcon 1, a liquid oxygen- and kerosene-fueled rocket bound for orbit. Yet about two minutes into the flight Doohan’s final voyage ended prematurely when the rocket’s first stage crashed into the second stage during separation. It was SpaceX’s third failure in three attempts....read more