Awesome Austin Foods

Locally crafted foods abound here in Austin. The list of "must" places to eat runs for long pages in the Chronicle.  Even The Onion is basically a few columns of timely humor wrapped around page after page of bars and restaurants.  Oddly enough, perhaps, for me, food is something my body demands that my mind pay attention to.  I weigh 140 pounds (64 kg) soaking wet.  Mostly, I eat food to provide uptake for vitamin pills.  And yet...  

Lovebean (here) (or info@lovebeanfudge.com) produces a confectionery fudge made from coconut oil, coconut nectar, and cacao beans.  A jar costs about $13 retail and contains the weight of four or five bars.  The problem is stopping at one bar.  I do not have a sweet tooth. I do not eat deserts.  But this stuff is great. It would be perfect with peanut butter for long bicycle treks.  They say:

"Our line is certified USDA Organic and all our ingredients are sourced for their nutritional and planetary benefits. Here’s the low down: . . . The Original Vegan Spread starts with lots of fresh-pressed Organic Coconut Milk. . . .  Our Raw Vegan Fudge Spread is never heated during processing. Not to say we don’t go over 115 F or anything, we don’t need to heat it a bit. All the magic happens at room temp in the Lovebean Raw Fudge Machine. We simply combine our 100% Raw Organic Coconut Nectar with Organic Raw Cacao Powder and Organic Raw Coconut Oil. We top it off with a touch of Raw Organic Vanilla Bean Powder . . . "

Jade Monk® Chai Spice, Cranberry Blood Orange, Lime Blossom, Palau Peach

Jade Monk (website here) teas are packets of powders.  Again, for the trekker, or your office backpack or desk drawer, I found them handy, tasty, and healthy.  The powders could dissolve a bit faster, but zen teaches patience to all grasshoppers.  You can find them on LinkedIn.  Of themselves, they say: 

Jade Monk® offers a healthy and delicious alternative to the processed, syrupy tea beverages of today's market. By blending the potency of legendary Matcha green tea with all-natural low calorie sweeteners and flavors, Jade Monk® distinguishes itself as a beneficial and alluring instant powdered functional beverage.
Ample scientific research shows Jade Monk ® matcha green tea assists the body in maintaining excellent health, serves to reduce stress and calm the mind, and provides sustained energy for up to six hours. 

But man does not live by tea alone.  We drink a lot of beer here in Austin.  Even in IT, traditionally a crowd that opts for CNS stimulants such as coffee, colas, and energy drinks, presentation meetings at user groups feature beer with the pizza.  High tech social hours are everywhere. We even have a Meetup called "Social Techies" (as if the others are just putting on).  That said, Texas beers will not win contests.  This is a southern state, recently dry, still heavily regulated.  Compared to Chicago or Portland, the local beers are just PBR and Budweiser dressed up in cowboy names.  However. . .

Technically, not local to Austin, Perdenales Brewing is located in Fredericksburg.  I met the president, Lee Hereford, at Whole Foods.  He was demonstrating his product.  You get that kind of entrepreneurship here, where the guy normally in the paneled corner office is actually behind the counter or at a desk. Personally, I like IPAs, but I had to admit that most are over-hopped.  His is not.  It is balanced, with a good grain base, and a light spice finish. 

Baby Zack's smoked hummus brings an array of Texas flavors to this international staple and snack treat.  Dip your favorite chips, or spread it on bread when making sandwiches, including burgers and franks.  Myself, I often pass up hummus because the first ingredient is water.  I prefer to pay for garbanzos (cici or chickpeas, call them what you will). With Baby Zack's you get hummus.  The spices are there for flavor, not to optimize the cost of production.  

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
South by Southwest 2013 here and also here
Dressed for Success in Austin
Austin at Night
South by Southwest 2012

Meanwhile ...

For the past three weeks, several projects took me away from blogging. "Documentation for Developers" was the topic when I addressed my Ruby on Rails group.  I spoke on the subject of private security to my local DefCon group.  Then, last week, I volunteered to present a chapter of exercises from Wireshark 101 to an OWASP lunchtime study cell.

Over the years, working on projects for different companies on different platforms for different audiences, I developed a set of guidelines for creating documentation.  The focus of this presentation was that developers can begin that process by relying on tools such as Microsoft Visio to design their systems.  Other tools include Nassi-Shneiderman charts and Warnier-Orr diagrams. "Do not design in code" is the only mandate.   Creating a software system and then calling in a technical writer is like building a house and then calling in a drafter to draw the plans. Documentation is specification.

I also drew on the allusion from Joseph Weizenbaum of the compulsive programmer as a compulsive gambler.  The code developer's superstition is that one more patch, one more fix will overcome a lack of knowledge of the substantive literature of the application field.
(The slides are on Slideshare here.)

For the hackers at DefCon 512, my goal was first to overcome the common myths about security guards.  We are subjected to ridicule.  Self-deprecating humor works for Big Bang

Theory because we have A Beautiful Mind, Sneakers, Johnny Mnemonic, and Hackers (with Angelina Jolie) to provide depth and drama.  Nothing like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit exists for private security.  That pro-police propaganda is contradicted by the absolute facts that more money, more resources, more personnel exist in private security, as much as three-to-one over public policing. Most people do not know that 36 private guards died when the Twin Towers came down.   I have worked with a Ph.D. philosopher, a nuclear engineer, two ministers, and an airline flight attendant.  Security guards are not the buffoons we are caricatured to be by mass media presentations in service to the central government.  Moreover, if you let us, we prevent problems because that is the nature of all businesses: business looks to the future; government attempts to remediate the past. My PowerPoint for this is on Slideshare here.


Wireshark is a tool for computer network security analysis.  Our study group is sponsored by OWASP, the Open Web Application Security Professionals.  They meet once a week at lunch for an hour to work out of some chosen book.  Our current project is Wireshark 101 by Laura Chappell.  I volunteered to work all of the labs in Chapter 3: Display Filters.    As a technical writer, I do this all the time, coming in to some technology, getting a handle on it, and presenting it to others.  

This is Chappell's smaller book on Wireshark.  The labs are direct, step-through exercises to show how the toolbars, menus, options, and selections all work.  I captured one or more screens for each lab, and made them into a PowerPoint presentation.

Previously on Necessary Facts
The Shifting Paradigm of Private Security
Private Security in the 21st Century
Locksporting
Redshirts: Expendable in Fiction and Fact

Readability is the Only Metric

What you can measure, you can improve.  Whether you need creative content for e-commerce or step-by-step instructions for machine repair, you must reach your audience.   Microsoft Word offers metrics for readability, from the Grammar and Spelling checker, under Tools.   We have no quantified methods for creativity, invention, cleverness, or insight.  We can measure word length, sentence length, and sentences per paragraph.  

It is not perfect. In fact, it can be gimmicked, tricked, and gamed.  But it works.  On a project to develop a multiprocessor industrial controller, the other technical writer was a young guy from an advertising agency.  He did not know manufacturing, but he was good writer.  We enjoyed finding some of the many failings in the MS-Word readability scales. We still used them.  They proved that we documented the interactive debugger to a 6th grade reading level.  When the line is down, no one is looking for a literary experience. You need answers.

Texas Department of Information Resources
IT Policy - Originally at 12.9 reading level

Same IT Policy - Rewritten to 12.0 reading level.

Of the 300,000 main entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, only 3,000 are Basic English; and most of us speak only 10,000 distinct words.  The average college-educated American recognizes about 100,000 words.  Whether "fardels" in that list is putative.  So, Hamlet's rhetorical question might pass the readability score, but not carry meaning.  Whether "putative" is in your speaking vocabulary may be arguable.

The fact remains that we have an objective measure for readability. 

Also on Necessary Facts
Visualizing Complex Data
Documentation is Specification
The Art of Typography
 The Genius of Design
How to Hire a Technical Writer

How to Hire a Technical Writer

Readability is the only metric.  Microsoft Word offers a readability score under the Grammar & Spelling checker off the Tools menu.  The Readability score has flaws; and it can be tricked.  Those are old problems.  But even a stopped watch is right twice a day.  A programmer can write their own lexical analyzer.  It is just a parser with more rules.  Back in 1990, I wrote one in Fortran to prove to a manager from Digital Equipment Corporation that I write technical documentation at a ninth grade level.  It is not that programmers, engineers, or accountants cannot read.  Rather, when you are in trouble, you need answers.  You are not looking for a literary experience.

 "Austin on Rails" is a meetup for Ruby on Rails software developers.  On Tuesday, May 28, I will be the "Introductory" speaker.  My topic will be "Documentation for Developers."  A software developer can rely on a hefty toolbox of programs for planning code.  Those plans are among the key documents.

Warnier-Orr for Greeting Guests

Ideally, the user manual is the first product. I look to the Warnier-Orr method for that.  According to Warnier-Orr, you start with your intended final output and work back to the primary inputs.  Warnier-Orr helps to plan large data structures.  It can include decisions and loops. Mostly, however, other tools make that work easier.  

Traditional flowcharts are well known. However, they have their own grammar, which is often violated.  For example, lines should not cross.  If they do, you have a potential problem in the flow of work.  Ideally, you should be able to "pick up" a flowchart by its Start, "shake" it, and have it "hang loose" with no tangles.  

For applications with deep and broad arrays of processes, the Nassi-Shneiderman method delivers clear pictures.  

Any significant project will be documented best with several tools. Narratives are among them.  Good technical writing uses short, declarative sentences.  Active voice identifies responsible parties.  The present tense and indicative mood deliver the sense of reality, and intention of purpose.  Convoluted sentences built from subordinate and dependent clauses in passive voice and conditional mood and future tense are concatenated confessions that this stuff should not be worried about.  If it is important, then say so.

Nassi-Shneiderman
for Order Entry

Managers who do not publish professionally think that they need to find a writer who knows some specific package.  After all, their firm has an investment in FrameMaker or InDesign, or RoboHelp.  That investment is quantifiable.  But they never ask me to quantify the readability of my work.  They assume that anyone who claims to be a writer must be good at it.  

Worse, a pernicious sense of democracy lets them believe that all writers are created equal, that we are endowed with interchangeable skills, and replaceable talents, that among these powers are grammar, syntax, and vocabulary; that technical writers are given to project managers to enhance the value of their products, and that when users, customers, and clients cannot find fitness or merchantability in the product, then a long train of abuses will be consequentially deflected to others.  

But I say to you, blessed are the writers.  Ours is the world of ideas.  We are the dream makers.  A writer who does not publish poetry cannot publish schematics.  

You need a master's degree level of literacy to understand the Declaration of Independence.  A child can understand the Sermon on the Mount.  Millions of people have died as martyrs to their religions.  Far fewer went to the barricades for liberal democracy.  Communication matters.  If you  believe in your product or service, then you want other people to accept its truth: you want committed customers.  Information systems win loyalty with technical documents that are alive with the truth of value in the product.

Previously on Necessary Facts: "Documentation is Specification" here.

The Sermon on the Mount is readable at Grade 5.3

Grade level 18.0 to understand the
Declaration of Independence

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Knowledge Maps
Readability is the only Metric
Documentation is Specification
The Genius of Design
The Art of Typography 

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma

He walked from Hungary to Tibet and brought the language of Tibet to the West.  His grammar of their language is also the foundation of our knowledge of their religion because he worked from the holy books of Lhasa monks.  His name is variously rendered: Alexander Csomo de Körös is also accepted.  He called himself a “Siculo-Magyar” and I thought that (like me) he was Sicilian and Hungarian, but, in fact, “Siculo” is a latization of Szekel, the hereditary guardians of the Hungarian frontier who claim direct descent from the remnants of the Huns. 

Portrait by August Schoefft
from surreptitious sketches

For over a hundred years, the life story of this obscure scholar was presented in a single biography by Theodore Duka, M.D., first written in 1885 and then reprinted in a limited edition of 1000 by Manjursi Publishing House of New Dehli in 1972.  Then in 2001, Short Books of Croyden, Surrey, came out with a new work by Edward Fox, much shorter, but obviously benefiting from resources liberated by the fall of communism.  Fox’s story illuminated details of Kőrösi Csoma’s depth of character. He was consistent, principled, and self-generating. He hoarded the cash coins in gold and silver which others invested with him for his travels and research, while he lived on figs and less.  Trekking with caravans, he had passed himself off successfully as “Sikander Beg” a Persian. 

Sandor Kőrösi Csoma believed that the homeland of the Hungarians was in the Himalaya Mountains.  The theory was widely asserted in his day.  The point is still in dispute.  By our best knowledge today, the Magyars are Finno-Ugritic people, cousins to the Samoyed, Ostyak, Vogul, and Finns of northwest Asia but “influenced” linguistically if not genetically, by Turkic peoples of central Asia.  The Hungarian word for “dog” is “kutya” and would be understood directly by the Ostyaks and Voguls.  The Hungarian word for “three” is “három” which obeys rules supporting the Finnish near-cognate “kolme.”  But in Hungarian, the vowels in a word all have the same pitch, as in Turkish.  For example, a noun becomes an adjective by adding “sag.”  The word for politically or legally free is “szabad”; and “liberty” is szabadsag.  But a nice word for your brother is “tesztver” and “fraternity” is “tesztvereseg”.  The deeper “a” becomes the higher “e” to maintain the consistency of sound within the word.

100-forint commemorative coin
celebrating the 200th anniversary
of the birth of Sandor Kőrösi Csoma.

But all that came after the lifetime of Sandor Kőrösi Csoma: 1784 to 1842.  In his time, Hungary was suffering under the Austrian crown for their revolts, especially that of Ferenc II Rákóczi from 1703 to 1711.  However, that struggle brought sympathy and support from England, evidenced by a trust of ₤11,000 raised and held by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Hungary always had a strong Protestant minority. Csoma’s primary and secondary education was at a Calvinist school where he eventually became a lecturer in poetry. So, Csoma found ready support from British consuls and merchants as he walked from Egypt to Persia, Afghanistan, and India.

Monastary at Zanskar
(Wikimedia Commons)

He was 35 years old when he left Bucharest on November 1, 1819.  He had studied and mastered languages all his life, including formal enrollment at the University of Göttingen to attend lectures in philology.  His letters to Captain C. P. Kennedy, assistant political agent at Subathú, summarizing his journey and explaining his intentions, were in English.

Csoma spent eighteen months with the abbot of Zangla in the Zanskar region of what is today the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir in the Himalayas.  He compiled a 40,000-word dictionary and a grammar of Tibetan.  These he left with the Royal Asiatic Society at Calcutta before traveling back into the mountains where he died of a fever at Darjeeling.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Sacred Silver from the Roof of the World
Financing a Revolution
My Grandmother and Science
Linguistics Debate: What Colors are Your Rainbow?

The Success of the WEIRD People

No single cause explains our standard of living.  From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and now the information age, the upward rise in standard of living is the material evidence of deeper attributes.  The aggregate of those beliefs – largely unstated and accepted as “normal” – does explain our success. 

“The Weirdest People in the World: How representative are experimental findings from American university students? What do we really know about human psychology?” by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan (all from the University of British Columbia Department of Psychology and  published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol33; 2-3 , June 2010, pp 61-83; available from the authors here) explains that we have

made ourselves – the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic people – the standard for “human nature.”  They say cogently that psychological experiments which supposedly tease out the basic patterns of “human nature” really tell us only about a small group: undergraduates in psychology departments, their friends, and sometimes their young children. The paper demonstrates that most people on Earth seem to hold entirely different views than we do.  And “views” is the basic problem.  What we accept as standard optical illusions work differently or not at all among different peoples around the world.  The paper is well worth the time to read through and mark up.

I found in their thesis the unintended corollary argument that our success is the result of those very attributes that set us apart from everyone else on Earth. 

The acronym WEIRD is nice, but does not place the elements in order.  Being educated first led to our becoming rich, and therefore democratic.  That this happened in “the west” (northwest Europe and the English colonies) is observable; but why here and not elsewhere may be an intractable problem.  The Renaissance started in Italy.  The Enlightenment was born in France.  How the Glorious Revolution of 1688 allowed James Watt’s steam engine to empower the middle class of America is complicated; but the facts are observable.

Start with education.  Other cultures have knowledge, even broad, deep, complicated, and consequential.  The difference is that ours is arguable.  It is important that charlatans such as Paul Feyerabend and Jacques Lacan be kept around to remind us of our limitations.  After all, their claims were rooted in the statements of real scientists who themselves explained that discovering deep truths did not come from following the recipe of the scientific method.  (See The Double Life of RNA by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and PBS Nova about the work of Nobel laureate Thomas R. Cech.)  Insight and intuition nonetheless must be subjected specifically to that scientific method – and must be validated by independent testing.  We test our beliefs and abandon the ones that do not work.  It is not perfect or consistent; but in the main, culturally, our society operates by trial and error, argument and proof.

In her foundation essay, “Bourgeois Virtues,” (on her website here) Dierdre McCloskey pointed out that while the patrician Achilles was subjective and the peasant St. Francis was objective, the bourgeois Benjamin Frankin was conjective.  In other words: price is open to discussion.  She also noted that in commerce we do not convince (conquer), but rather, persuade (soften; sweeten).  That is different from the attitudes of other peoples. 

In the Ultimatum game, one party is given a largess with instructions to share whatever they want with the other party.  If the other party feels that the split is inequitable, no one gets anything.  In our society, most people draw the line at a 70-30 share.  If the recipient does not get at least 30%, then no deal.  Some other people are more rational in the pure market sense: any gain is better than nothing. Some other cultures feel that the distributor is under no obligation to share anything.  Some people (especially in Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia) will engage in "altruistic punishment" where they would pay out from their own share without recompense to bring a loss to an unfair distributor. 

It is hard to say whether any of those is provably better.  But our willingness to accept a 70-30 split but deny an unfair cut explains much about how our democracy works: majority rule; minority rights.  

The fact that 90% of the world is not "individualistic” does explain why 90% of the world is poor.  But that is changing.  Global capitalism brings American (western) values to everyone.  Not every person in every place needs to adopt every aspect of our culture, but education, wealth, individualism, democracy seem to be mutually integrated.

Entrepreneurship

Writing over 300 newspaper and magazine articles about business, technology, and culture, I have interviewed very many entrepreneurs. Perhaps my personal favorite was "The Business of Musical Theater: The Dough behind the Do-Re-Mi" for the New Mexico Business Journal.  I have met all kinds of successful entrepreneurs and all kinds of not-so-successful. "All kinds" describes both the limitations and the potentials. In other words, there is no formula. The Austrian School of Economics has worried this problem for over 75 years. As the leading advocates for laissez faire capitalism, the Austrians have never agreed among themselves what entrepreneurship "is."

Part of the problem is that we were raised in schools to want short definitions that are easy to memorize, like Orwellian newspeak.  The very complexity of enterprise works against that.  The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics from the Online Library of Liberty offers this multi-faceted explanation:

“An entrepreneur is someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise. An entrepreneur is an agent of change. Entrepreneurship is the process of discovering new ways of combining resources.”  Entrepreneurs also increase the value of the resources under their control. “Schumpeter stressed the role of the entrepreneur as an innovator who implements change in an economy by introducing new goods or new methods of production. In the Schumpeterian view, the entrepreneur is a disruptive force in an economy.” (Read the entire article here.)

Peter Schumpeter, Israel Kirzner, and Frank Knight are among the Austrian school economists who have thought through entrepreneurship.  Of course, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek also addressed it, but their focus was on other problems and their treatment of entrepreneurship was undeveloped. Even though they were passionate advocates for the open market, they did not study the differences between capitalism and enterprise, innovation and invention, market efficiency and marketing.  

“Kirzner's procedure is based on an analogy, or parallel, between what he calls the entrepreneurial element in individual decision-making and entrepreneurship in the market interaction…He isolates the entrepreneurial element by contrasting routine optimizing behavior with what he claims we can know about true individual action …  Individuals spontaneously discover means of satisfying their wants. … Another term he uses is alertness to hitherto undiscovered opportunities.”  This is not mere “economizing” but a deeper insight. “Third, he identifies what he regards as a crucial kind of action in a market economy -- arbitrage. He associates entrepreneurship in the market economy primarily with this action.” Arbitrage is the engine of efficient allocation. (See “Kirzner” by Prof. James Patrick Gunning, Feng Chia University, Taiwan, on Constitution dot Org here.)

 A more subtle approach is being pursued by Nicolai Foss, Peter Klein, and Mario Rizzo who follow Frank Knight and Ludwig von Mises on the entrepreneur’s judgment of uncertain future market conditions.  “Judgment is exercised in the act of investing in  and allocating resources to specific time-consuming production processes that are organized and controlled by the entrepreneur until the completion and sale of the product.  For Foss and Klein the entrepreneur is therefore a capitalist and owner.” (See “Klein Versus Kirzner” by Joseph Salerno on the “Bastiat”pages at Mises dot Org here.)

Traditional college classes in economics teach that markets move toward “equilibrium” that some magical point exists where supply meets demand at a price.  This is not mere observation, but an implicit worldview.  The goal is a static social world of sustainable predictability.  The Austrian school has a different weltanschauung.

Anousheh Ansari of the
X-Prize Foundation

 “I think it is highly useful to think in non-equilibrium terms, to be open to the possibility of change and surprise. You certainly cannot do good economics without understanding the role of surprise. But if one pursues this to the point where the surprises tend to overwhelm the regularities, then I don't believe you have a science that reflects existing realities. … Entrepreneurship is not always equilibrating. …  The idea I reject is this: there is successful entrepreneurship, there is unsuccessful entrepreneurship, and it's a toss-up which is going to outweigh which in the end. … The fundamental Misesian insight into human action is that it involves a tendency to be right rather than to be wrong. People have an interest in being right. …  This does not guarantee "equilibration always." And certainly a permanent equilibrium is out of the question. It would be incorrect even to imply that in any given time period, the changes we observe are necessarily equilibrating. But there are tendencies which tend to overwhelm disequilibrating forces in the market, most of the time.”(Austrian Economics Newsletter, Interview with Israel Kirzner, Spring 1997, Volume 17, Number 1 here.)  (See also "Supplies and Demands" here on Necessary Facts.)

  

Felicia Day:
Acting as Entrepreneurship

Moreover, traditional business management classes teach that the unremitting failures of inventors and early adopters prove that they are wrong.  Success, the B-schools claim, comes from following the wreckage to where the markets are now ready for a mature product or service.  

The modern history of computing echoed much of the early history of railroading in America.  Failures and successes both combined to re-direct existing capital (whether trackage and rolling stock or software and hardware) and did so to attract ever larger investments.  (See The Man Who Found the Money: John Stewart Kennedy and the Financing of the Western Railroads by Saul Engelbourg and Leonard Bushkoff (Michigan State University Press, 1996).  In the days of railroading, the term “venture capitalist” would have sounded redundant. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Venture Capital
Engines of Creation
Objective Intellectual Property Law
Open Secrets
The Genius of Design

KALLIOPE

Last night, on patrol, I met a Muse.  Kalliope, the muse of epic poetry passed by at 6th and Congress.  She was coming from 6th and San Jacinto where she had been performing.  

I thought that she was a student in the Classics department at UT even though she did not look a day over 2500, but she said that she is a working artist.  She said that it takes about three hours to put on her make-up and that she recites epic Greek poetry on the streets downtown during festivals.  

She handed me a slip of paper. "Q: What did Athena say to Medusa? ... A: I haven't seen you in Aegis."  I tossed some coins into her lekythos (no handles, so it was not an amphora) and said, "Ephkaristi" but then corrected myself and pronounced in the archaic "e-u-karisti" and bade her "Kalli nikti" (modern Macedonian accent, but that was how I learned it.)  

I have interviewed numismatists from Oxbridge who shared their experiences of having learned Greek from Homer and Thucydides then tried to take a taxicab or order dinner and found themselves like tourists in the UK attempting to communicate in Elizabethan English learned from Shakespeare. 

We learn a funny kind of ancient Greek anyway, "Erasmian" pronunciation from the English Renaissance.  For one thing, in discussing the atomic theory, Aristotle called S and D the "atoms" of Z.  So, we know that "one letter one sound" is not entirely correct.   The Phi we say like the fricative f.  However, the Romans brought the world "philosophia" into Latin, but they had the fricative F as in Flavius and Forum.  They wrote what they heard and it was not "filosofia" as in modern Italian.  Speak each sound separately: p-hilosop-hia." Concerning vowels, to keep the meter in poety, vowel pairs such as EU (Eutrope, Europa), must be spoken as glides, as if in English "ay-oo tro pay" and "ay-oo-ropa."  And the R is rolled: RHo.  The Y was our U: "Thucycides" should have two of them.   (For more, see Vox Graeca by W. Sidney Allen,  itself now a classic. )

Disruptive Diagnostics and the Business of Science

Former UT professor Tom Kodadek returned to address the postdoctoral student association of the School of Biological Sciences on April 25. He met a full house of about 250. The title of his talk was “The Ups and Downs of Moving ‘Disruptive’ Diagnostic and Therapeutic Technology from the Lab to the Real World.”  Dr. Kodadek is now with the Scripps Research Institute, in Jupiter, Florida.  Originally funded by the NIH, his work is now marketed by OPKO Health, Inc., which found the angel funding he needed to bring his theories to realization.

He first identified the standard approach to any drug therapy:

1. Perform basic research on the disease mechanism,.

2. Identify molecules in the blood that are unique to that disease, or whose levels change drastically.

3. Develop a specific method to measure the level of that molecule in the blood.

4. Commercialize.

This fits our standard model for diagnosis.  The patient feels bad and goes to a doctor for treatment.  Tests are run.  A cause is hypothesized and treatments begin while the patient’s course is monitored.  The shortcomings with the standard approach begin with the fact that we have to wait until we feel bad to get a diagnosis.  Also, tests are heterogeneous: any symptom suggests many tests.

Dr. Thomas Kodadek (left) at the Reception.

 Kodadek then offered a better approach.  His theory is that antigens must exist before symptoms reach perceptible levels: you are sick before you have a fever. With pre-symptomatic screening we could monitor for any active disease in its early stage, before the symptoms appear.  His recommended course is to routinely monitor the levels of dozens of disease-specific antibodies as part of any periodic medical check-up.  

To achieve that, we need to develop a large, broad, and deep array of synthetic artificial molecules that act as antigen surrogates. This is possible through combinatorial chemistry.

He then rapidly outlined the some of the details of his methodology for the audience of post-doctoral biologists at the School of Biological Sciences before re-aligning his presentation to the business community. 

Having left the University of Texas, he thought that he was about to go to San Francisco to present his ideas to venture capitalists.  However, he first was invited to speak to a group at  the Scripps Research Institute.  Feeling somewhat challenged to be sharing the stage with six Nobel laureates, he thought that he handled it well.  After the talks, the president of Scripps, Dr. Richard Lerner, came up to him and graphically explained that he was about to get screwed. Dr. Lerner introduced him to Phil Frost of OPKO Health, Inc.

Opko had just suffered a failed third-stage test of a major product initiative.  Phil Frost had a company in need of new work.  Opko also acquired Cytochroma, Inc., a company with “a suite of products for treatment of secondary hyperparathyroidism and hyperphosphatemia in chronic kidney disease patients.”  Another Cytochroma product screens for vitamin D deficiency.  In fact, said Kodadek, we may find that we are in the midst of an epidemic and not know it because we only now are coming to understand the many functions of that essential nutrient.  

Opko is also pursuing a screen for neuromyelitis optica (NMO). NMO is marked by the presence of AQP4 (aquaporin 4) and anti-AQP4 antibodies. With Bindu L. Raveendra, Hao Wu, and others, Kodadek published “Discovery of Peptoid Ligands for Anti-Aquaporin 4 Antibodies,”in Chemistry and Biology, (vol 20:3; 21 March 2013, pp 351-359).  In the same issue, working with Yu Gao, Kodadek published “Synthesis and Screening of Stereochemically Diverse Combinatorial Libraries of Peptide Tertiary Amides,” (Pages 360-369). 

Tom Kodadek with his friends at the Reception

Dr. Thomas Kodadek closed by  summarizing his experiences. “Work on important projects, not widgets. Incubate for as long as possible in the university before taking your work to the market.  Angel investors are better than venture capitalists.  Focus early on the people you bring in to start the organization.”

Following the talk the School of Biological Sciences hosted a reception.  About 50 people attended.  I met old friends Maggie Bishop of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, Benjamin Grosse-Siestrup of Antimicrobial Test Laboratories and Ken Russell of Metabolic Therapy, as well as new acquaintances Dr. Gregory Daniel Frank of XBiotech, and Dr. Priya Sridharan of the UT department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and neurobiologist Dr. Sangeetha Iyer. (Dr. Iyer and I actually crossed paths in 2012 during South by Southwest. I was flattered that she remembered me.)

  

Previously on Necessary Facts

BioBash: Chamber Replicates Success

Austin Winter 2012 BioBash
BioPunks: DIY Scientists Hack the Code of Life
Bob Swanson and Genentech
Epigenetics
Mayim Bialik

OBJECTIFIED

Objectified is a film by Gary Hustwit about design, designers, and the objects that they create.  Dieter Rams of Braun and Apple’s Jonathan Ive appear, of course. (See, The Genius of Design below.)  So do thirty other designers, and a couple of supportive critics, such as Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art.  IKEA and Target both get cameo roles as they deliver to us the magic of inexpensive mass produced items that ennoble us, their owners, with the spiritual benefits of good design.  You and I also appear in anonymous walk-ons because in the words of Andrew Blauvelt, “anything that is touched by man, is transformed by man, is by its very nature designed.” The human-built environment is design.

Dirt Devil by Karim Rashid

Karim Rashid works for the “techno-organic world.” As a teenager, he owned a Claritone stereo radio and a Braun alarm clock and through his teenage angst, looking at them alone in his room brought a sense of comfort.  He calls our time the “third technological revolution.” To him, our living room furniture is like a kitsch stage prop. “When I get up from my laptop and my iPod, do I get into a horse and carriage? No.”

Claritone stereo similar to Karim Rashid's.

According to Andrew Blauvelt, the design concept has three layers. First form begets form, the formal logic of form.  Then come symbols and symbolism, the cultural symbols.  From that comes the contextual symbolism of making coffee, for instance, the bigger scenario of the human-object relationship.  The little rituals define the fork and knife.  The vacuum cleaners from Dirt Devil and Dyson extended the horizons for a single-use product into designer goods for display. Ultimately, the Roomba programmable robot vacuum allowed an undreamed of level of hacking as user interaction.

Alice Rawsthorn of the International Herald Tribune points out that if you were a Martian and you came to Earth, you could pick up a spoon or a chair and pretty much get a feel for their purpose.  Now, the digital age removes that.  Objects can take any shape.  This leads to tensions and conflicts in design. 

But objects do not take just any shape.  Some seem intractably wedded to their pasts.

Three principals from IDEO of Palo Alto shared a common theme in their different experiences of design.  "I inherited my father’s leather briefcase and it got better with time and I look to passing it on.  I look to designing things for wearing in versus wearing out.  ... I designed the case for the GRiD “Compass” computer in 1987, the first laptop.  When I got it home I realized that the beautiful case and clever latches were irrelevant to the user experience, so I came to study software interfaces.  ...  "

"... because in that moment it moves you,
you have an emotion"
-- Hella Jongerius

Naoto Fukusawa designs hardware interaction. Subconscious actions develop the mind and soul: design dissolving in behavior. “A very important turning point for me was the term "obsessive sketch" by Takahama Kyoshi, the haiku master. When the poet’s sentences are overly visible the audience may become uncomfortable. Japanese ritual is the opposite.” 

Rob Walker of the New York Times Magazine asks rhetoically, when the hurricane is coming and you have twenty minutes to pack, what do you grab? Not the object that got a great review in some design magazine, but the object that means the most to you.

Paola Antonelli insists that “democritization of design is an empty slogan.” According to Paola Antonelli, “design takes revolutions and progress and makes it into objects that we can use.”

Speaking of his work on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, Jonathan Ive says that the curse of being a designer is always looking at everything and wondering “why does it have to be that way and not some other way?”

Ad hoc design: wine cork as doorstop

Ad hoc design: section of plastic cup as bicycle fender

I want things that do not exist, that you cannot go out and buy, what is going to happen, not what has happened. – Marc Newson.

Within Karim Rashid's apartment

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Knowledge Maps

Documentation is Specification

The Genius of Design

Art & Copy

Start the Presses