Follow me on Twitter as JeffLindsay (secular) and Mormanity (religious, mostly).

In a three-week experiment, GE Research turned its 85 employees into day traders, letting them watch market movements on their screens to decide whether to buy or sell any of 62 stocks. Only the stocks were product ideas in which the company had the option to develop. At stake was $50,000 in research funding that GE would allocate to the highest-valued project.

When the markets closed, GE ended up with a prioritized list of ideas that the collective wisdom of the market thought would best help the company. Topping the list was an algorithm in the area of machine intelligence, an idea pitched directly by a researcher, not through the normal hierarchy of lab managers and senior management.

Dell looked to an even broader market for new product ideas, using Salesforce.com’s online voting service called Ideas and launching Dell IdeaStorm, where anyone can submit and vote on new features and options for Dell products. Perhaps best known of these ideas is a Linux-based laptop Dell introduced in May 2007. Starbucks uses the same voting platform, at MyStarbucksIdea.com, and took an online suggestion posted Oct. 7 by BillMac to offer a free cup of coffee Nov. 4 to anyone in the United States who voted.

The use of these collective decision-making technologies, both sophisticated prediction markets and simple voting tools, is spreading, and they’re increasingly being paired together as a component of corporate innovation programs, helping companies sort through reams of ideas–from new products to customer service to productivity improvements–to find that handful of blockbusters.

A key in any system relying on mass participation is motivating the right people to participate. The software system itself must be user-friendly and offer value, such as providing easy access to ideas that may stimulate one’s own thinking, or useful metric about that other groups in the corporation are doing. If outsiders are involved, there must be filters of some kind to pre-select those whose opinions are likely to matter. The ability to pass a CAPTCHA test is not necessarily correlated with having valuable insights.

Will “Innovation Clouds” become the way of the future? Can crowdsourcing help identify the next iPod? Or is it more likely to give us Edsels?

The data from collaborative innovation tools and voting applications can be considered in identifying key innovations, but don’t overlook the contributions of your visionary product developers and R&D personnel, especially your multidisciplinary master’s of innovation who can serve as “DaVincis in the Boardroom.”

As James Surowiecki indicated in his famous Wisdom of the Crowds, crowd-based decisions work best when the work is done with a decentralized, diverse, independent population. Will it work for corporate idea management? Not easy! People can readily fall into line and comply with corporate culture and the opinion of local influencers. We’ll stay tuned and watch how these concepts play out.

IPWatchdog.com’s page on confidentiality agreements is a good place to read about NDAs and to see some great sample documents ready for you to use.

For information on the issue of aluminum and human health, see the objective page from the Ministry of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

Seattle? Isn’t that the school district that issued a crazy definition of racism that included “future orientation” and individualism? If so, you’re dealing with insane people that aren’t going to be persuaded by facts. But they are likely to respond to politics, so organize and get parents coming in to talk and pressure them. Get a big group to show up at a Board meeting. Write letters to them, publish letters to the editor, etc. I think the key will be getting parents to care and be involve and make their voices heard. Ditto for contacting state legislators.

Insane people don’t listen to facts. Very sorry about that!!

Jeff Lindsay

Don Lindsay, CEO of Teck Cominco, paints a bleak labor picture… Lindsay traced the origins of the labor shortage back to 1997. According to him, the feeder systems were disrupted by the Bre-X scandal, the Asian Meltdown, and the commodity bear market. He expects demand to remain robust from China. Keep in mind that over two thirds of geologists in the world hail from Canadian schools. So if professional shortages exist in Canada, we have a very large problem indeed. Mirroring the crude oil roughneck labor shortage is the mining labor shortage. Another parallel exists. Lindsay points out that within a decade, 60% of all Canadian scientists working the geosciences will be at least 65 years of age. The overall impact is surely that new mine deposits will take longer to find, longer to produce, and cost more.

This is great news if you’re willing to pursue a career in geology. Many of the leaders of mining and exploration companies had their start as a geologist. If you love the outdoors and believe in work that really creates wealth, consider geology.

For investing, the shortage in skilled labor for mining means lower production in the future, and that means that prices of commodities are going to face even more pressure to go up. This is a great time to be heavily invested in gold and silver bullion, energy stocks, precious metals stocks, and uranium stocks like Dennison Mines (DNN) or my favorite, Abaddon Consolidated Resources (ABNAF.pk or ABN on the Vancouver exchange).

If you have an ink jet printer, print something in color at least one a week. You’ll use more ink, but you’ll probably use fewer ink catridges that way.

Review of Engineering with Mathcad

Jeff Lindsay
Senior Scientist
Kimberly-Clark Corporation
2100 Winchester Road
Neenah, WI 54956

Title: Engineering with Mathcad: Using Mathcad to Create and Organize your Engineering Calculations
Author: Brent Maxfield, P.E.
Publisher: Elsevier, © 2006
ISBN-13: 978-0-7506-6702-9
ISBN-10: 0-7506-6702-8
Number of Pages: 494

Brent Maxfield’s Engineering with Mathcad is a valuable contribution to the engineering community that may do much to help those in engineering and the sciences in general jumpstart their efforts to learn and apply Mathcad, or to help long-time users strengthen their skills. The book is accessible, engaging, and written from the perspective of one who has dealt the practical aspects of Mathcad for many years. It comes with a useful CD having a handbook and all the examples in the text, allowing the users to easily follow along and work with the material being discussed. The CD also can be used to install Mathcad 13 for PC or Mac with a 120-day academic license.

The book covers a broad scope of material effectively, and should provide useful new insights even for power users. However, the book is not intended to provide a comprehensive guide to the functions and plotting features of Mathcad. For example, there is no significant discussion of solving differential equations. Indeed, many of the engineering applications covered are relatively basic, with the emphasis being more on how to use Mathcad effectively rather than how to tackle complex engineering problems. Given the burgeoning scope of Mathcad’s tool and the many powerful features it has that experienced users may have been missing, Maxfield’s approach represents a reasonable editorial decision to cover Mathcad broadly rather than to teach engineering mathematics or dive into the complexities of any of the numerous areas of interest in engineering.

The book may be especially valuable for those who are relatively new at Mathcad or who, like myself, have Mathcad experience but may not have used it for some time and need a refresher. But a carefully selected swathe of sophisticated aspects of Mathcad are treated that may be helpful to longtime Mathcad users who simply had no idea about some of the tools and capabilities they were overlooking.

With his years of Mathcad experience, Maxfield offers many tips, sometimes subtle, to guide users in creating worksheets, preventing errors, maintaining readability, selecting useful variable names, and so forth.

While the companion CD is useful and highly appreciated, advanced engineering students who are facing challenges with differential equations or other common topics would clearly benefit from additional more advanced sample worksheets. I think future editions of the book would do well to add additional workfiles on the companion CD. When I saw the entries on the CD for chapter 24, hinting at pages on seismic loads, beams and joists, etc., I though such examples might be there, but they are just placeholder pages for demonstrating the use of hyperlinks in a table of contents.

Indeed, for the future, not only would I recommend a more extensive set of examples on the CD, but also the addition of a Website where registered owners of the book or others could contribute solutions, discuss the text, and look at more detailed and complex examples, or receive additional tips from the author.

In general, I recommend Maxfield’s book as an easy-to-read, well organized guide to help a wide range of Mathcad users learn techniques useful for engineering and many other fields as well.

A few minor quibbles: The chapters entitled “Useful Information” could use more descriptive titles, or be added as sidebars or summary sections elsewhere. I think they create a confusing table of contents.

For engineering calculations, the precision of computations may be important. I did not notice a description of Mathcad’s limitation of 15 digits. “Precision” is not an entry in the table of contents (though the term is a paragraph header on page. 98). Pp. 102-103 would have been one good place to discuss this.

Some discussion of differential equations would be helpful.

Organizationally, I also think the first chapter might well contain a rapid-fire overview of some of the features of Mathcad to give those new to Mathcad but with advanced engineering and scientific skills a strong flavor of the power of this sophisticated tool.

And perhaps a list of additional online resources would be good – most preferably a reference to a Website prepared by or for the author that can be updated with the best online resources, additional worksheet examples, corrections of any weaknesses in the text, etc.

In general, I congratulate the author for an excellent book that I think will be helpful to numerous Mathcad users.

]]> http://www.jefflindsay.com/blog/2007/review-of-engineering-with-mathcad/feed/ 0 http://www.jefflindsay.com/blog/2007/heavy-metals-and-autism/ http://www.jefflindsay.com/blog/2007/heavy-metals-and-autism/#comments Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:55:13 +0000 jeff http://www.jefflindsay.com/blog/2007/heavy-metals-and-autism/ While there have been many concerns from parents and some researchers about the possibility of a link between vaccines and autism, the medical community has generally dismissed the concerns, noting that some major studies have not found a statistically significant link between the two. A primary concern among those worried about vaccines has been the use of mercury in preparing the vaccines, resulting in the addition of a small amount of mercury into young children receiving some common forms of vaccinations (not all use mercury).

Interestingly, a new study of French children shows a possible link between autism and heavy metals in their bloodstream. As reported in The New Scientist, May 27, 2006, p. 21, Dr. Richard Lathe of Pieta Research of Edinburgh conducted the study of hundreds of French school children, monitoring the amounts of porphyrin proteins in their urine. Porphyrins are precursors of haem, the part of hemoglobin that carries oxygen. When there are unusual levels of heavy metals in the body, they block haem production and cause porphyrins to accumulate. Children with autism had one form of porphyrin at levels 2.6 times as high as normal children. Richard Lathe believes he has found a link between these levels and heavy metals in the body, versus a genetic factor. His group found that by using chelation therapy to remove heavy metals, the porphyrin levels were brought back to normal. It’s unknown whether chelation diminishes the symptoms of autism.

The key point here is that heavy metals may be a factor related to autism. And for those concerned about vaccinations, yes, mercury is one of the more notorious heavy metals – but even if Dr. Lathe’s conclusions are right, that still doesn’t necessarily mean that vaccinations have any link to autism. Further work is needed. And the medical community generally notes that the benefits of vaccination to millions surely outweighs the occasional risk to some. Do your own due diligence on this matter.

FYI, Dr. Lathe has authored a controversial book, Autism, Brain, and Environment (2006, ISBN 1-84310-438-5), suggesting that environmental factors may play a role in autism.

Imagine how much more secure our nation would be if we had continued to heed the warnings of George Washington.