Menlo Park

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pages: 440 words: 132,685

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World
by Randall E. Stross
Published 13 Mar 2007

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
Published 1 Jan 2005

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
Published 26 May 2008

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
Published 22 Mar 2022

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
Published 31 Aug 2006

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
Published 21 May 2012

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 and Cecilia Kang
Published 12 Jul 2021

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
Published 31 Aug 2006

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
Published 25 Feb 2020

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
Published 28 Sep 2014

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
Published 6 Apr 2020

“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 and Matthew Lyon
Published 1 Jan 1996

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.

Pinedale, Wyo., 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
Published 13 Feb 2018

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
Published 6 Sep 2021

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
Published 18 Dec 2007

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
Published 30 Oct 2008

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
Published 27 Jun 2016

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

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
Published 7 Nov 2017

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
Published 13 Jun 2022

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 and Jennifer Bradley
Published 10 Jun 2013

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
Published 8 Jul 2019

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
Published 31 Mar 2017

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
Published 30 Apr 2018

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
Published 14 Oct 2013

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: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
by Andrew Blum
Published 28 May 2012

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: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

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: 224 words: 91,918

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe
Published 1 Jan 1968

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: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

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 and Paul Freiberger
Published 19 Oct 2014

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: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World
by Neil Gibb
Published 15 Feb 2018

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
Published 14 May 2000

"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
Published 13 Apr 2020

* * * 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
Published 14 Feb 1995

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
Published 20 Sep 2021

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
Published 1 Jun 1984

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.

by Nathan Keyfitz in Demography, 1966, vol 3, #2, p. 581. 104 Integrator concept and Gutman quote from "Population Mobility in the American Middle Class" by Robert Gutman in [241], pp. 175-182. 106 Crestwood Heights material is from [236], p. 365. 107 Barth quote from [216], pp. 13-14. 109 Fortune survey in [84], pp. 136-155. 110 I am indebted to Marvin Adelson, formerly Principal Scientist, System Development Corp., 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
Published 5 Mar 2019

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
Published 23 Apr 2018

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
Published 2 Sep 2019

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
Published 1 Jan 2009

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
Published 1 Jan 1981

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
Published 8 May 2023

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
Published 10 Sep 2018

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
Published 10 Sep 2012

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 and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

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
Published 9 Oct 2006

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
Published 11 May 2013

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).

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
Published 15 Nov 2019

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: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
by Ben Mezrich
Published 20 May 2019

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.

pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors
by Edward Niedermeyer
Published 14 Sep 2019

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
Published 20 Mar 2017

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
Published 24 Aug 2015

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
Published 14 Feb 2023

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
Published 18 May 2015

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
Published 15 Feb 2003

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 and Jennifer Levitz
Published 20 Jul 2020

Macy and who conspired with Singer to rig the SAT for daughter Sophia Agustin Huneeus Jr., 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
Published 2 Aug 2021

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
Published 4 Sep 2013

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
Published 8 Oct 2018

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
Published 15 Mar 2021

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
Published 15 Mar 1974

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?

pages: 250 words: 73,574

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers
by John MacCormick and Chris Bishop
Published 27 Dec 2011

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: 270 words: 75,803

Wall Street Meat
by Andy Kessler
Published 17 Mar 2003

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: 1,136 words: 73,489

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia Eghbal
Published 3 Aug 2020

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.

v=UIDb6VBO9os. 197 Roy Revelt (revelt), “But guys, this package is not . . .,” Core-js Issues comment, GitHub, June 13, 2019, https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/571#issuecomment-501661663. 198 Tristanleboss, “@revelt Forking is one thing . . .,” 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.

pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

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.

pages: 223 words: 71,414

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

My imagination filled with visions of charming hills and cable cars and biking across a red bridge in the low sun. Before I heard back from Facebook, and before I even talked to the team, I was sold on the basis of the location alone. Facebook’s offer turned out to be similar, but Facebook would have me work in their Menlo Park office, about an hour’s drive south of San Francisco, and that seemed much less glamorous. Anyway, I had already signed my Google offer. Both companies offered shockingly good pay, especially compared to my part-time wages of $15 CAD an hour. After running some basic calculations, I concluded that I would make about $20,000 USD that summer after taxes, with transportation and housing all paid for by my employer.

My first half hour at work was typically spent soaking up sunbeams as the morning rays carved out wisps from the fog curling underneath the bridge, feeling astonished at just how unbelievably lucky I was to be here. Other companies in the area were equally dedicated to luring interns with free food, drinks, and expensively-arranged fun. My Facebook recruiter invited me to an intern carnival at their Menlo Park campus, and I carpooled over with other Google interns to find an entire ersatz amusement park on their manicured lawns. And payments startup Square, founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, hosted a party for Bay Area interns featuring a full sit-down dinner that ended with cupcakes topped by an edible Square logo.

This book could not have been written without you. And finally, an unequivocal thanks to my other half: for putting up with my all-nighters and half-closed lids during the frenetic last weeks of writing this book, and for tolerating my ceaseless tirades about the tech industry even as you boarded the shuttle to Menlo Park every day so that we could continue to have health insurance. You’ve taught me so much in the short time we’ve known each other, and I’m so grateful to have you in my life, both as a life partner and as a source of political inspiration. Thank you Jason. Repeater Books is dedicated to the creation of a new reality.

Robot Futures
by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh
Published 1 Mar 2013

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
Published 2 Nov 2021

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.

pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

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.

pages: 297 words: 35,674

Slide:ology: the art and science of creating great presentations
by Nancy Duarte
Published 15 Nov 2008

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).

pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

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.

pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

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.

pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt
Published 30 Sep 2017

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!

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More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 1 Jan 2006

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.

pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

“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.”

pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

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
Published 14 May 2011

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
Published 1 Aug 2022

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 and Dana Mackenzie
Published 1 Mar 2018

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: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
by Frank Partnoy
Published 15 Jan 2012

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: 323 words: 92,135

Running Money
by Andy Kessler
Published 4 Jun 2007

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: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
by Kai-Fu Lee
Published 14 Sep 2018

“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: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
by Hamish McKenzie
Published 30 Sep 2017

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: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

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: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

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
Published 9 Jul 2018

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
Published 4 Apr 2018

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
Published 16 May 2016

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
Published 2 Jul 2015

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: 744 words: 142,748

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
by Phil Lapsley
Published 5 Feb 2013

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: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader
by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Published 24 Mar 2015

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: 559 words: 157,112

Dealers of Lightning
by Michael A. Hiltzik
Published 27 Apr 2000

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 and Maria Popova
Published 5 Sep 2016

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

pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Published 4 Sep 2013

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.

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl
by Issa Rae
Published 10 Feb 2015

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: 39 words: 4,665

Data Source Handbook
by Pete Warden
Published 15 Feb 2011

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.

From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture
by Theodore Roszak
Published 31 Aug 1986

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: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking
by Richard E. Nisbett
Published 17 Aug 2015

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
Published 6 Feb 2018

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.

pages: 207 words: 63,071

My Start-Up Life: What A
by Ben Casnocha and Marc Benioff
Published 7 May 2007

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: 282 words: 63,385

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance
by Matthew Brennan
Published 9 Oct 2020

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: 223 words: 60,909

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Published 9 Oct 2017

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: 256 words: 60,620

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 6 Nov 2012

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.

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Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
by Xiaowei Wang
Published 12 Oct 2020

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: 524 words: 120,182

Complexity: A Guided Tour
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 31 Mar 2009

“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

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).”

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Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms
by Jeffrey Bussgang
Published 31 Mar 2010

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: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets
by Andy Kessler
Published 13 Jun 2005

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: 262 words: 65,959

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
by Simon Singh
Published 29 Oct 2013

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: 363 words: 123,076

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
by Marc Weingarten
Published 12 Dec 2006

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.

pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia
by Dariusz Jemielniak
Published 13 May 2014

Retrieved from http://www.newstatesman.com/digital/2011/01/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-site Beschastnikh, I., Kriplean, T., & 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).

pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
by Charles Montgomery
Published 12 Nov 2013

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.

pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
by Susan Pinker
Published 30 Sep 2013

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.

De Decker et al., “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
Published 16 Apr 2004

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.

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Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

Franken put one on the calendar for July 2012, but Bedoya ran into a problem: Facebook initially refused to send anyone to testify. Facebook had just acquired the company that had helped build its facial recognition–based tagging system—Israel-based Face.com—and moved most of the startup’s employees from Tel Aviv to Menlo Park. But it wasn’t keen to be the sole industry representative at the hearing, responsible for answering all the lawmakers’ questions about the private sector’s plans for the tech. Bedoya assured the company that there wouldn’t be any surprising issues at the hearing—it would be the same questions everyone was already asking—and the company acquiesced.

On that Wednesday afternoon in July 2012, he said he did not know what the company would look like “five or ten years down the road.” It was difficult, he said, to address a hypothetical. * * * — ONE AFTERNOON, A little less than five years later, in early 2017, in Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, an engineer named Tommer Leyvand sat in a leather chair with a smartphone strapped to his head. The phone contained a radical new tool known only to a small group of employees. Leyvand, an Israeli engineer who had joined Facebook in 2016 after a decade at Microsoft, wore jeans, an olive green sweater, and a blue baseball cap.

With technology like that on Leyvand’s head, Facebook could prevent you from ever forgetting a colleague’s name, remind you at a cocktail party that an acquaintance had kids to ask about, or help you find someone you knew at a crowded conference. Facebook had been busy since that congressional hearing Bedoya had pulled together. When Facebook acquired Face.com, one of the employees who moved to Menlo Park was its chief technologist, Yaniv Taigman, a handsome engineer with an easy sense of humor. The algorithm that Taigman had developed in his startup’s scrappy office in Tel Aviv could identify one person out of three hundred possibilities with incredible precision, which he thought was as powerful as needed because the average Facebook user had about that many friends at the time.

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
by Leslie Berlin
Published 9 Jun 2005

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
Published 18 May 2010

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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The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work
by Richard Florida
Published 22 Apr 2010

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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Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future
by Luke Dormehl
Published 10 Aug 2016

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.

pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 26 Jun 2013

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.

pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

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.

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech
by Sally Smith Hughes

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 fill 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.

He appears not to have had a close connection with the Harvard team, perhaps because Gilbert was considering commercial possibilities of his own.7 PROCURING A FACILITY AND STAFF 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: 284 words: 75,744

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

For one, Facebook was a website accessed through web browsers on laptop or desktop computers; it did not launch its first mobile app until 2007. The company introduced the News Feed in 2006 and added the infamous thumbs-up emoji indicating “like” in 2009 (today, a monumental replica stands outside Facebook’s headquarters on Hacker Way in Menlo Park). Yet from its earliest days, Facebook was an online space for people to congregate and remember the dead. For Facebook, the company’s shift to informal mourning platform was an uncomfortable development. Technologists did not design social media platforms with death in mind, particularly because they were created by and for young people.

In addition to informal conversations at various in-person conferences and through a number of email exchanges, I also interviewed him via Skype for this book; the quotations included here are from our formal interview. 63. Lustig, “Facebook Death Rate.” 64. Sandberg, “Making It Easier to Honor a Loved One on Facebook.” Chapter 2. Networked Death 1. The Stanford Research Institute became SRI International after its 1970 split from Stanford University, and it is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. 2. Co-founded by Larry Brilliant and Stewart Brand in 1985, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link is one of the oldest virtual communities. The name is based on Brand’s countercultural magazine, the Whole Earth Catalog. The WELL is still alive and well today; such prominent technologists as Ellen Ullman still use their WELL email addresses. 3.

pages: 485 words: 143,790

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway
by Doug Most
Published 4 Feb 2014

“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 and Pei Wang
Published 1 Jan 2007

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)
Published 26 Apr 2012

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.

pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

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.

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

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
Published 14 Sep 2020

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.

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Published 14 Apr 2001

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
Published 20 Feb 2020

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.

M. here, here b4bo here bin Laden, Osama here, here, here birthrates here, here Bissonnette, Alexandre here, here BitChute here bitcoin here, here, here Blissett, Luther here Bloc Identitaire here blockchain technology here bloggers here Blood & Honour here Bloom, Mia here Bloomberg, Michael here Böhmermann, Jan here Bowers, Robert here Breed Them Out here Breitbart here, here, here Breivik, Anders Behring here, here ‘Brentonettes’ here Brewer, Emmett here Brexit here, here Britain First here British National Party (BNP) here, here, here Broken Heart operation here Brown, Dan here Bubba Media here Bumble here, here Bundestag hack here, here BuzzFeed here C Star here, here ‘Call of Duty’ here, here Cambridge Analytica here, here Camus, Renaud here Carroll, Lewis here CBS here Channel programme here Charleston church shooting here Charlie Hebdo here Charlottesville rally here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Chemnitz protests here, here Choudary, Anjem here Christchurch terror attacks here, here, here, here Christian identity here Chua, Amy here CIA here, here, here Clinton, Bill and Hillary here, here, here, here, here, here, here Cohn, Norman here Collett, Mark here Cologne rape crisis here Combat here, here Comey, James here Comvo here concentration camps here Conrad, Klaus here Conservative Political Action Conference here Constitution for the Ethno-State here Corem, Yochai here counter-extremism legislation here counter-trolling here Covington, Harold here Crash Override Network here Crusius, Patrick here cryptocurrencies here, here, here, here Cuevas, Joshua here Cyberbit here Cyborgology blog here ‘Daily Shoah’ podcast here Daily Stormer here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Weev and here Damore, James here Dark Net here Data and Society Research Institute here Davey, Jacob here Dawkins, Richard here, here De La Rosa, Veronique here de Turris, Gianfranco here Dearden, Lizzie here deep fakes here, here DefCon here, here Der Spiegel here Deutsche Bahn here Diana, Princess of Wales here, here Die Linke here Die Rechte here ‘digital dualism’ here digital education here disinformation here, here, here Disney here Domestic Discipline here, here Donovan, Joan here Doomsday preppers here doubling here Dox Squad here, here doxxing here, here, here, here, here Doyle, Laura here, here Draugiem here DTube here Dugin, Alexander here Dunning–Kruger Effect here Dutch Leaks here Dylan, Bob here Earnest, John here 8chan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here EKRE (Estonian fascist party) here El Paso shooting here Element AI here Emanuel, Rahm here encryption and steganography here Encyclopedia Dramatica here English Defence League here, here, here, here Enoch, Mike here environmentalism here, here ethno-pluralism here, here ‘Eurabia’ here, here ‘European Israel’ here European National here European Parliament elections here European Spring here Evola, Julius here executions here Facebook friends here fashions and lifestyles here, here Fawcett, Farah here Faye, Guillaume here FBI here, here, here, here, here Fearless Democracy here, here FedEx here Feldman, Matthew here Ferdinand II, King of Aragon here Fiamengo, Janice here Fields, James Alex here Fight Club here Finkelstein, Robert here Finsbury Mosque attack here, here, here Fisher, Robert here Foley, James here Follin, Marcus here football hooligans here, here Football Lads Alliance (FLA) here For Britain party here Fortnite here 4chan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party) here, here, here, here, here Frankfurt School here Fransen, Jayda here Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights here Freedom Fighters, The here freedom of speech here, here, here, here F-Secure here FSN TV here Gab here, here, here, here, here, here Gamergate controversy here GamerGate Veterans here gamification here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Ganser, Daniele here Gates of Vienna here Gateway Pundit here Gawker here GCHQ here GE here GellerReport here Generation Identity (GI) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Generation Islam here genetic testing here, here German elections here, here German Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies here German National Cyber Defence Centre here Gervais, Ricky here Ghost Security here Giesea, Jeff here Gigih Rahmat Dewa here Gionet, Tim here gladiators here Global Cabal of the New World Order here global financial crisis here, here global warming here GNAA here Goatse Security here GOBBLES here Goebbels, Joseph here GoFundMe here Goldy, Faith here Goodhart, David here ‘Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber’ here Gorbachev, Mikhail here Graham, Senator Lindsey here Gratipay here Great Awakening here, here Great Replacement theory here, here, here, here, here ‘Grievance Studies’ here grooming gangs here, here Guardian here, here H., 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
Published 25 Feb 2020

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: 277 words: 81,718

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

But the UK takes the prize for personal indebtedness, with average debt of 148 per cent of disposable income. The British consumer is quick to latch on to new forms of borrowing, of which the latest is ‘BNPL’ – ‘buy now, pay later’ – dominated by market leader Klarna. The company is owned by US investors, led by Sequoia Capital of Menlo Park, California.42 Life-as-a-Service, with its unavoidable and potentially crippling outgoings, has become a way of life not just for millions of consumers but for UK companies and the government. Organisations have signed up en masse to pay monthly for software and other services. There has been exponential growth in ‘cloud computing’ such as Software-as-a-Service (programs), Platform-as-a-Service (hardware and software for running apps), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (hosting of websites) and Communications-as-a-Service (communications systems).

Ten years later in 2018, California’s Silver Lake private equity group spotted the business and made an offer, even though Zoopla was ‘not on the market’. The business, including Primelocation, was bought for £2.2 billion and a high proportion of UK property owners now look up the value of their home, and maybe sell it, through Menlo Park in California.49 Private equity buyers such as Silver Lake seek out and digest their targets systematically. While a British predator might look for a single juicy takeover target, each US private equity company is itself a machine for takeovers. They are pursuing the highest returns possible – whether that means disposing of parts, selling the whole business or holding on and investing in it – and for this they have built teams of experts rather than relying on just one or two senior executives.

pages: 371 words: 36,271

Libertarian Idea
by Jan Narveson
Published 15 Dec 1988

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: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World
by Peter W. Bernstein
Published 17 Dec 2008

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: 506 words: 152,049

The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 1982

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: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

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: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America
by Stephen Fry
Published 1 Jan 2008

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: 313 words: 94,490

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 18 Dec 2006

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 and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

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: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

: 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: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution
by Henry Schlesinger
Published 16 Mar 2010

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: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

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.

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Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
Published 4 Apr 2016

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: 350 words: 96,803

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 2002

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.

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The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 14 Jul 2012

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
Published 31 Oct 1994

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
Published 12 Jan 2016

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
Published 23 Oct 2011

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
Published 18 May 2014

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: 309 words: 101,190

Climbing Mount Improbable
by Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward
Published 1 Jan 1996

Terzopoulos, D., Tu, X., 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: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Yonck
Published 7 Mar 2017

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
Published 29 Sep 1999

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: 325 words: 97,162

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.
by Robin Sharma
Published 4 Dec 2018

“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.

pages: 319 words: 100,984

The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton
Published 1 May 2019

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
Published 6 Jun 2014

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.

Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design
by Giles Colborne
Published 14 Sep 2010

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
Published 15 Jan 2004

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
Published 2 Jun 2016

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
Published 4 Oct 2016

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
Published 2 May 2023

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
Published 20 Jul 2021

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
Published 1 Jan 1996

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.

pages: 336 words: 113,519

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
by Michael Lewis
Published 6 Dec 2016

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: 440 words: 117,978

Cuckoo's Egg
by Clifford Stoll
Published 2 Jan 1989

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: 377 words: 115,122

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Published 24 Jan 2012

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.

pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet
by Charles Arthur
Published 3 Mar 2012

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.

The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick
by Jonathan Littman
Published 1 Jan 1996

"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: 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
Published 30 Jan 2017

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.

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
by James Howard Kunstler
Published 31 May 1993

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.

Y., 155 McGraw-Hill Building (New York, N.Y.), 75 Mackay, Clarence Hungerford, 12 McKim, Charles Follen, 62-63, 64, 75 McKinley, William, 67 Madison, James, 153 Madison, Wis . , 254 Magic Kingdom (Disney World), 219, 222 Main Street, USA (Disney World), 220-21, 224, 226 Maison Carree (Nimes, France), 153 Manchester, Vt., 271-72 mandatory open spaces, 267 Marceline, Mo., 219-20 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 159 Marin County, Calif. , 261 Marx, Karl, 60 Marx, Leo, 57 Mashpee, Mass. , 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: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

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
Published 11 May 2017

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
Published 15 Feb 2000

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: 502 words: 124,794

Nexus
by Ramez Naam
Published 16 Dec 2012

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: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

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: 410 words: 120,234

Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings
by Earl Swift
Published 5 Jul 2021

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
Published 25 Sep 2017

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
Published 31 Aug 1996

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

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
Published 28 Feb 1995

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
Published 1 Jul 2019

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: 520 words: 129,887

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future
by Robert Bryce
Published 26 Apr 2011

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: 474 words: 136,787

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
by Matt Ridley
Published 14 Aug 1993

, 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.

A., 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.

pages: 455 words: 133,322

The Facebook Effect
by David Kirkpatrick
Published 19 Nov 2010

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.

pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid
Published 27 Jun 2016

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.

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry
by Martin Campbell-Kelly
Published 15 Jan 2003

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.

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
Published 27 Apr 2014

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
Published 1 Dec 2000

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."

pages: 433 words: 127,171

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
by Gretchen Bakke
Published 25 Jul 2016

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.

pages: 420 words: 143,881

The Blind Watchmaker; Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 1986

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: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

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
Published 8 Jun 2004

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: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever
Published 2 Apr 2017

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: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money
by George Gilder
Published 23 Feb 2016

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: 220

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business
by Mikkel Svane and Carlye Adler
Published 13 Nov 2014

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: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 31 Dec 1998

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: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

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: 660 words: 141,595

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking
by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett
Published 30 Jun 2013

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
Published 18 Oct 2009

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
Published 6 Apr 2020

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.

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Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

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
Published 14 Sep 2020

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.

Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area
by Nick Edwards and Mark Ellwood
Published 2 Jan 2009

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: 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
Published 24 Apr 2017

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.

Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 68 Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 7, 218, 309, 310, 340, 545 Harvard Law Review, 293 Harvard Law School (HLS), 11, 20, 26–27, 48, 55, 164, 199, 282, 310, 334, 507 Harvard Management Company, 549 Harvard Management Update, 303 Harvard Medical School, 11, 20, 25, 81, 310, 545 Harvard School of Education, 310 Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 533 Harvard School of Public Administration, 160 Harvard Studies in Business History, 243 Harvard Summer School, 572 Harvard University, 8 14, 67; Bok as president, 334–41; CIA and, 230; Department of Chemistry, 67; Department of Economics, 19, 160; Department of Fine Arts, 67; Department of Social Relations, 221; elective principle, 12; endowment, 533; George Fisher Baker Professorship in Economics, 67; Graduate School of Applied Science, 34; HBS as financial heart of, 75; HBS as separate world from, 407–8; mission of, 12; science curriculum, 12; social elite and, 15–16, 20; Widener Library, 258 HarvardWatch, 401, 522–23 Hawthorne Works study, 83–85, 87, 88 Hayashi, Alden, 304 Hayes, Robert, 346–49, 443, 452, 456 Hayes, Rutherford B., 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.

pages: 176 words: 55,819

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Published 14 Feb 2012

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 and Alan Eagle
Published 15 Apr 2019

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: 192 words: 63,813

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees
Published 18 Apr 2022

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 diagnosis. 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: 192 words: 59,615

The Passenger
by AA.VV.
Published 23 May 2022

It’s a classic tale: a clarinet player drops out of music school, starts a coffee business and then retires. This tart, green, gourmet drink, which Americans think of as Italian will, five years down the road, eventually make its way to Italy. And we shall see then what Italians think of it ... Taking a selfie in front of the Facebook sign at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park. But it’s not just food crazes that eventually make their way back to the Old World; revolutions and innovations in personal habits travel, too. Just a few miles south of San Francisco, in Foster City, lies the pharmaceutical giant Gilead. In 2012 this company introduced Truvada to the market, a drug better known as PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis).

pages: 212 words: 64,724

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
by Eckhart Tolle
Published 1 Jan 1997

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: 216 words: 61,061

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed
by Alexis Ohanian
Published 30 Sep 2013

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: 243 words: 61,237

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
by Daniel H. Pink
Published 1 Dec 2012

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: 256 words: 58,652

The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993
by Jordan Mechner
Published 30 Jan 2012

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: 554 words: 167,247

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System
by Steven Brill
Published 5 Jan 2015

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
Published 3 Jun 2014

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
Published 4 Jun 2013

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
Published 22 Feb 2022

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.”

pages: 543 words: 163,997

The Billion-Dollar Molecule
by Barry Werth

Andrew Carnegie was thirty-five when he traveled to England in 1872, witnessed the Bessemer process for making steel, and “got the flash,” as he liked to say: came to understand that steel would replace iron for building railroads and bridges, which ignited him to “press inordinately” to build his own steel company from the ground up. Three years later he opened his first steel plant. In 1901, twenty-six years later, he sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan, allowing Morgan to create U.S. Steel and making Carnegie the world’s richest man. Thomas Edison moved to Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, establishing his first full-scale industrial research laboratory, combining electrical and chemical labs with an experimental machine shop. He was twenty-nine. Three years later he invented the carbon-filament lamp, then three years after that opened new offices in lower Manhattan and started construction of the first permanent electrical power station.

Throughout his forties, as he introduced the phonograph and a system for making and showing motion pictures, Edison labored to develop a method for processing low-grade iron for use by eastern smelters. The effort collapsed after the discovery of rich new mines in the Midwest. In 1901, twenty-five years after launching his Menlo Park “invention factory,” its descendant General Electric organized the first modern R&D lab. Nowadays the chief reference point for anyone charting the dramatic arc of an innovative company and its visionary founder is the triumphal three-act history—so established in the culture that it’s become a meme—of Apple and Steve Jobs.

pages: 259 words: 67,456

The Mythical Man-Month
by Brooks, Jr. Frederick P.
Published 1 Jan 1975

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.

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
Published 9 Jan 2009

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: 229 words: 67,869

So You've Been Publicly Shamed
by Jon Ronson
Published 9 Mar 2015

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 and Karl Weber
Published 14 Jun 2010

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
Published 17 Apr 2017

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 and Kevin Krizek
Published 17 Aug 2015

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: 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
Published 21 Jan 2020

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.

Shampoo Planet
by Douglas Coupland
Published 28 Dec 2010

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: 206 words: 68,757

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
by Oliver Burkeman
Published 9 Aug 2021

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: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey
Published 12 Oct 2017

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: 246 words: 70,404

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free
by Cody Wilson
Published 10 Oct 2016

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.

pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
by Jacob Goldstein
Published 14 Aug 2020

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.”

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
Published 15 Dec 2020

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.

Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side
by Simon McCarthy-Jones
Published 12 Apr 2021

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: 257 words: 75,685

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better
by Rob Reich
Published 20 Nov 2018

The Fifteen Largest Local Education Foundations (LEF) in the Bay Area, Ranked by Net Assets, 2000 Foundation Net assets ($) Net assets per pupil ($) Woodside School Foundation 11,308,243 24,690 Cupertino Educational Endowment Foundation 8,822,870 563 San Francisco Education Fund 8,207,907 137 Hillsborough Schools Foundation 3,517,164 2,510 Portola Valley Schools Foundation 2,688,720 3,847 Every Child Can Learn Foundation 2,409,876 40 KIDDO!—Mill Valley Schools Community Foundation 2,360,500 1,019 Petaluma Educational Foundation 1,729,572 221 Marcus A. Foster Educational Institute 1,641,393 30 Ross School Foundation 1,454,616 3,637 Piedmont Educational Foundation 1,115,254 417 Menlo Park-Atherton Education Foundation 1,069,295 546 Los Altos Educational Foundation 932,538 237 Educational Foundation of Orinda 836,517 343 Source: Author’s dataset. Note: Suburban districts italicized. Those who have examined the phenomenon of private fund-raising have sought to explain it as the effort of parents to avoid court-mandated or legislative efforts to equalize public school funding at the state level.⁴⁰ Or they have sought to celebrate and expand the practice, seeing it as the virtuous effort of parents and local citizens to support their public schools.

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
by Anna Lembke
Published 24 Aug 2021

That’s why I don’t ever want to tell people what I’m thinking.” Through it all, Chris went to class and got As, except one B in the Interpersonal Basis of Abnormal Behavior. He went home at Christmas and didn’t return. In the fall of 2010, Chris made one last half-hearted attempt to matriculate at Stanford. He rented a room off campus in Menlo Park and declared yet another new major: human biology. A few days in, he stole pain pills from his landlady and got a prescription for Ambien, which he crushed and injected. He made it five miserable months, then left Stanford with no hopes this time of ever returning. Back home in Arkansas, Chris spent his days getting high.

pages: 291 words: 77,596

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell
Published 15 Feb 2009

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.

pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext
by Belinda Barnet
Published 14 Jul 2013

‘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
Published 27 Aug 2007

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: 238 words: 73,824

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

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.

Raw Data Is an Oxymoron
by Lisa Gitelman
Published 25 Jan 2013

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: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists
by Linda McQuaig
Published 30 Aug 2019

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.

pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
by Diane Coyle
Published 11 Oct 2021

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: 232 words: 72,483

Immortality, Inc.
by Chip Walter
Published 7 Jan 2020

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?

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention
by Simon Baron-Cohen
Published 14 Aug 2020

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: 654 words: 204,260

A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
Published 5 May 2003

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: 589 words: 197,971

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
by Neil Sheehan
Published 21 Sep 2009

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: 291 words: 87,296

Lethal Passage
by Erik Larson
Published 27 Jul 2011

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: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit
by Marina Krakovsky
Published 14 Sep 2015

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
Published 31 Jul 1999

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: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World
by David Kerrigan
Published 18 Jun 2017

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: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

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: 362 words: 86,195

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet
by Joseph Menn
Published 26 Jan 2010

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
Published 15 Sep 2010

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: 271 words: 82,159

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
by Malcolm Gladwell
Published 30 Sep 2013

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: 283 words: 81,163

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present
by Thomas J. Dilorenzo
Published 9 Aug 2004

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: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier
Published 5 Mar 2013

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: 627 words: 89,295

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy
by Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter
Published 14 Sep 2020

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: 314 words: 86,795

The Comedy Film Nerds Guide to Movies
by Graham Elwood and Chris Mancini
Published 31 May 2012

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: 249 words: 81,217

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age
by Claudia Hammond
Published 5 Dec 2019

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: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

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: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

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: 287 words: 85,518

Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel
by Josh Riedel
Published 17 Jan 2023

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
Published 13 Sep 2005

“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
Published 6 Dec 2016

” * * * 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
Published 7 Sep 2020

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: 509 words: 92,141

The Pragmatic Programmer
by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas
Published 19 Oct 1999

" • 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: 264 words: 90,379

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
Published 1 Jan 2005

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: 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
Published 9 May 2016

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: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

“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: 310 words: 89,838

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science
by Ian Sample
Published 1 Jan 2010

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
Published 15 Jan 2007

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: 290 words: 94,968

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years
by Tom Standage
Published 14 Oct 2013

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
Published 1 May 2013

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.

Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming
by Stephen Laberge, Phd and Howard Rheingold
Published 8 Feb 2015

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.

Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology
by Adrienne Mayor
Published 27 Nov 2018

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: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
by Claire L. Evans
Published 6 Mar 2018

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: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

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
Published 10 Oct 2012

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.

pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

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.

pages: 263 words: 92,618

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
by Michael Lewis
Published 2 Oct 2023

The funny thing about Ramnik Arora was that all he’d really been looking for was a chance to walk to work. He’d grown up in India, completed a master’s in computer science at Stanford, done a stint at Goldman Sachs, and was now married and settled in the East Bay. For three years he’d had a miserable commute, from Berkeley to a job at Facebook in Menlo Park. He’d started on a team working on real-­time auctions for online ads—­with the goal of showing the perfect ad to the perfect person at the perfect time—­then moved to another team trying to launch Libra, Facebook’s doomed bid to create its own cryptocurrency. Somewhere between Goldman Sachs and Facebook, Ramnik had given up looking for passion in his work.

pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

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: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

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
Published 19 Oct 2022

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: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

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: 307 words: 97,677

The Evolution of Useful Things
by Henry Petroski
Published 2 Jan 1992

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: 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
Published 3 Nov 2009

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.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
by Jerry Mander
Published 1 Jan 1977

Mulholland, Thomas B., "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: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

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
Published 23 Apr 2012

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.

pages: 193 words: 98,671

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
by Alan Cooper
Published 24 Feb 2004

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."

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
Published 1 Mar 2011

.: 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.

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 and Andy Fuehl
Published 12 Sep 2004

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
Published 3 Oct 2016

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: 331 words: 96,989

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
by Adam L. Alter
Published 15 Feb 2017

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.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

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.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

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: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
Published 19 Oct 2020

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
Published 5 Apr 2021

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
Published 7 Jan 2022

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.

pages: 345 words: 100,989

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal
by Duncan Mavin
Published 20 Jul 2022

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.

The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite
by Ann Finkbeiner
Published 26 Mar 2007

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: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

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: 624 words: 104,923

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John
Published 7 Oct 2010

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: 403 words: 105,431

The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education
by Diane Ravitch
Published 2 Mar 2010

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: 289 words: 112,697

The new village green: living light, living local, living large
by Stephen Morris
Published 1 Sep 2007

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: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

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: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson
Published 7 Feb 2017

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: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

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: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

Oberlander et al., “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: 274 words: 93,758

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception
by George A. Akerlof , Robert J. Shiller and Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller
Published 21 Sep 2015

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: 325 words: 110,330

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
Published 23 Jul 2009

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
Published 6 May 2013

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: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta
Published 4 Jun 2018

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: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

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: 359 words: 110,488

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
Published 20 May 2018

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: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think
by James Vlahos
Published 1 Mar 2019

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: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

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: 362 words: 108,359

The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade That Transformed Wall Street
by Jonathan A. Knee
Published 31 Jul 2006

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: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
by Tarleton Gillespie
Published 25 Jun 2018

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: 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 and Will Louch
Published 14 Jul 2021

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
Published 18 Jan 2022

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
Published 22 Aug 2023

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
Published 14 Jul 2002

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: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines
by George Dyson
Published 28 Mar 2012

“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 and Monique Tilford
Published 31 Aug 1992

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
Published 31 Mar 2008

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: 404 words: 113,514

Atrocity Archives
by Stross, Charles
Published 13 Jan 2004

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: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

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: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age
by Robert Wachter
Published 7 Apr 2015

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: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

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: 384 words: 112,971

What’s Your Type?
by Merve Emre
Published 16 Aug 2018

“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: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

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
Published 19 Mar 2019

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: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime
by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden
Published 24 Oct 2022

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: 410 words: 115,666

American Foundations: An Investigative History
by Mark Dowie
Published 3 Oct 2009

Roberts and Kravis are joined only at the wallet. In every other respect they are as different as Godzilla and Bambi. Kravis is a bombastic, highprofile socialite who parties hard with Manhattan's elite, squires their decorators about town, and is a fixture of the nation's gossip columns. Roberts, who lives and works in Menlo Park California, is introverted, temperate, and reputedly much smarter than his cousin. The personality and lifestyle contrasts are reflected in their philanthropy. Kravis's $62-million New York City Investment Fund, though steeped in the rhetoric of "job promotion," "economic growth," and "disadvantaged neighborhoods," is in fact a fairly traditional loan fund for New York industrialists and developers eager to build socially impressive projects on socially marginal real estate.

pages: 397 words: 121,211

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
by Charles Murray
Published 1 Jan 2012

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
Published 25 Apr 2016

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: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006

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: 387 words: 119,409

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
by Laszlo Bock
Published 31 Mar 2015

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: 357 words: 121,119

Falling to Earth
by Al Worden
Published 26 Jul 2011

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.

pages: 435 words: 127,403

Panderer to Power
by Frederick Sheehan
Published 21 Oct 2009

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.

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

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: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
by Michael Shermer
Published 8 Apr 2020

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.

pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin
Published 30 Apr 2019

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: 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
Published 21 Oct 2019

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: 580 words: 125,129

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System
by Chet Haase
Published 12 Aug 2021

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.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
by Edward Tenner
Published 1 Sep 1997

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: 404 words: 131,034

Cosmos
by Carl Sagan
Published 1 Jan 1980

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: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

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: 446 words: 138,827

What Should I Do With My Life?
by Po Bronson
Published 2 Jan 2001

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: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

* * * 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: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu
Published 2 Nov 2010

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: 465 words: 134,575

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
by Radley Balko
Published 14 Jun 2013

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: 421 words: 128,094

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone
by David Carey
Published 7 Feb 2012

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: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 14 Jul 2001

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: 759 words: 166,687

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics
by David A. Mindell
Published 10 Oct 2002

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 and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

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: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

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: 478 words: 142,608

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006

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
Published 6 Feb 2018

“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: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
by Zeynep Tufekci
Published 14 May 2017

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: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas
by Janek Wasserman
Published 23 Sep 2019

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: 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
Published 29 Nov 2011

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: 510 words: 138,000

The Future Won't Be Long
by Jarett Kobek
Published 15 Aug 2017

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: 530 words: 145,220

The Search for Life on Mars
by Elizabeth Howell
Published 14 Apr 2020

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: 515 words: 136,938

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science
by Norman Doidge
Published 15 Mar 2007

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: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

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 and John Koblin
Published 1 Nov 2022

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: 375 words: 127,360

The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts
by Loren Grush
Published 11 Sep 2023

Steve understood her desire to escape, though he didn’t think it was particularly responsible in these circumstances. Finally, after a week of absence, she called Steve to tell him she was okay and that she had skipped off to California, as he had suspected. She’d taken refuge with Molly and Molly’s partner in Menlo Park, making sure that an appearance on the Bob Hope special wouldn’t be imposed on her. It was beginning to dawn on Sally that she needed some help. All her life she’d been a happy individual, excited to wake up and start each day. Now, she realized she wasn’t that same happy person. She woke up nervous, filled with anxiety about what each day might bring.

pages: 443 words: 51,804

Handbook of Modeling High-Frequency Data in Finance
by Frederi G. Viens , Maria C. Mariani and Ionut Florescu
Published 20 Dec 2011

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
Published 2 Jan 1985

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: 490 words: 150,172

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
by Henry Petroski
Published 2 Jan 1990

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: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

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
Published 1 Jan 2013

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: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
by Douglas Edwards
Published 11 Jul 2011

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.

Investment: A History
by Norton Reamer and Jesse Downing
Published 19 Feb 2016

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: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State
by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg
Published 3 Feb 1997

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.

pages: 1,132 words: 156,379

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
by Steve Stewart-Williams
Published 12 Sep 2018

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.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie
Published 19 Sep 2016

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: 653 words: 155,847

Energy: A Human History
by Richard Rhodes
Published 28 May 2018

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.

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology)
by Geoffrey C. Bowker
Published 24 Aug 2000

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: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 7 Feb 2017

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: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

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.

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
Published 14 Apr 2007

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.

pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

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: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

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 and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

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: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro

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: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Bernstein, ed., 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: 923 words: 516,602

The C++ Programming Language
by Bjarne Stroustrup
Published 2 Jan 1986

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: 568 words: 162,366

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea
by Steve Levine
Published 23 Oct 2007

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: 504 words: 89,238

Natural language processing with Python
by Steven Bird , Ewan Klein and Edward Loper
Published 15 Dec 2009

[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.

pages: 661 words: 169,298

Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris
Published 30 Jun 1988

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.

Turing's Cathedral
by George Dyson
Published 6 Mar 2012

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: 554 words: 164,923

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
by Laura Hillenbrand
Published 16 Nov 2010

.; 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: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

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
Published 14 Sep 2015

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: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

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: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Published 7 Mar 2017

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).

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

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 and Garrett M. Graff
Published 15 Oct 2018

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: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
by Alan Weisman
Published 23 Sep 2013

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: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

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
Published 14 Aug 2019

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
Published 31 Mar 2021

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.

pages: 544 words: 162,085

The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Published 15 Nov 2004

Following this line of reasoning, he commissioned Fructuos Gelabert to shoot yards and yards of film in the corridors of The Angel of Mist, in search of signs and visions from the other world. Despite the cinematographer's noble efforts, the scientific pursuit of Jausa's phantoms proved futile. Everything changed when Gelabert announced that he'd received a new type of sensitive film straight from the Thomas Edison factory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The new stock made it possible to shoot in extremely low light conditions - below candlelight - something unheard of at the time. Then, in circumstances that were never made clear, one of the assistants in Gelabert's laboratory accidentally poured some sparkling Xarelo wine from the Penedes region into the developing tray.

pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

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.

pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era
by Craig Nelson
Published 25 Mar 2014

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: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

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: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
by Joel Mokyr
Published 8 Jan 2016

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.

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima
by James Mahaffey
Published 15 Feb 2015

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
Published 8 Aug 2005

“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
Published 9 Feb 2021

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

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

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
Published 8 Jan 1997

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
Published 2 Jan 2003

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
Published 24 Feb 2015

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
Published 29 Dec 2018

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 and Patrick W. Daly
Published 15 Feb 2008

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: 660 words: 213,945

Red Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 23 Oct 1992

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: 702 words: 215,002

Jim Henson: The Biography
by Brian Jay Jones
Published 23 Sep 2013

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: 795 words: 215,529

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
by James Gleick
Published 1 Jan 1992

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: 927 words: 216,549

Empire of Guns
by Priya Satia
Published 10 Apr 2018

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: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear
Published 14 Jun 2017

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
Published 1 Jan 2010

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: 826 words: 231,966

GCHQ
by Richard Aldrich
Published 10 Jun 2010

Truman (HSTL) Published Documents, Reports, Diaries and Autobiographies Aitken, J., Pride and Perjury (HarperCollins, 2000) Barker, N., Beyond Endurance: An Epic of Whitehall and South Atlantic Conflict (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2002) Bearden, M. and Risen, J., The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (NY: Random House, 2003) Benjamin, R., 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.

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Coders at Work
by Peter Seibel
Published 22 Jun 2009

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: 848 words: 240,351

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
by David McCullough
Published 1 Jun 2001

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 and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

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
Published 14 Aug 2008

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
Published 11 Oct 2010

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
Published 1 Jan 1974

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 and Seif Haridi
Published 15 Feb 2004

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: 1,079 words: 321,718

Surfaces and Essences
by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander
Published 10 Sep 2012

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.

pages: 1,106 words: 335,322

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1997

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.

The Art of Computer Programming: Sorting and Searching
by Donald Ervin Knuth
Published 15 Jan 1998

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

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
Published 15 Jan 2001

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
Published 15 Oct 2010

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

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.