Adam Menter’s Blog

As I was reading through December’s technology quarterly in The Economist, I came across an article about an amazing guy named Stanford Ovshinsky (“The Edison of Our Age“, 12/2/06…see also pbs, Mother Earth News, and wikipedia). I had never heard of him, but the article really amazed and intrigued me. Since I enjoyed learning about him so much, I thought I’d send him a shout out on my blog. Since 1960 he (and his wife) have been researching and developing a slew of important technologies at their company, Energy Conversion Devices (ECD). Over four decades ago he was working on things like the “Hydrogen Loop” (fuel cells, etc - to wean us off of oil) and solar power. This was long before it was fashionable. ECD was founded with the laudable goal of “using science to solve societal problems.” But Mr. Ovshinsky is no new-age dreamer with more ideals than practical ideas. He is a genius who can make things happen. Despite not having a college degree, he is an expert at “amorphous materials” – which can be used for energy generation (fuel cells), energy storage (batteries), and computing (data storage). He invented nickel-metal hydride batteries (NiMH) and holds important patents in thin-film solar cells, rewritable optical discs, non-volatile memory, and flat panel displays. His ingenuity, dedication to his ideals, and genius were compared to Thomas Edison in the article. He also reminds me of Polaroid’s Edwin Land. Anyway…thanks Mr. Ovshinsky. Society owes you one.

I spent the past five days visiting my family in Syracuse, NY. My sister was making the trip home for the holidays and I decided to surprise everyone and show up as well. You should have seen the looks on my parent’s face when I hopped out of my uncle’s pick-up truck to surprise them. It was great. We had a nice time together…cooking, hiking, baking (and eating) a lot of cookies, playing games, watching movies, and generally just catching up. And of course no visit to Syracuse is complete without a visit to the amazing Dinosaur Barbecue. It was a nice visit.

The family on a hike at highland forest.

Lora and I eating delicious homemade pasta on our back porch.

Since moving to San Francisco I have become very interested in the design world (product design, experience/interaction design, industrial design, etc). To me, design is about how we shape the world around us - how we turn resources, raw materials, and ideas into all of the things that we use and that define us as a human society. Design impacts all of our lives, everyday…but a lot of us don’t think about it very much. When most of us think of design we think of iPods, cars, and cell phones. But it is more than that. What is it? How is it done? What are designers thinking about? What tools do they use? What excites them? Enter Icon-o-Cast, a Podcast by Lunar Design, one of the world’s most well respected design consultancies. I have enjoyed these podcasts and found them very valuable as I am trying to determine how I might fit into the world of design.

Last week’s Economist has a provocative article about the food system (Good Food?..Voting With Your Trolley). It basically says that Organic, Fair Trade, and Local food may be bad for society and the environment. Having a sister who is deeply passionate about these issues and living in San Francisco where the Organic/Fair Trade/Local mantra is religion to a lot of people – this came as a shock to me. Basically, the article says that Organic food could be bad because it is far more resource intensive (much more land for the same food output). Fair Trade food isn’t great because it encourages farmers to continue producing cash crops that there is already an abundance of (instead of diversifying) and makes them reliant on this “fair” trade. Local food isn’t great because the local food supply chain isn’t as efficient (think tightly packed tractor trailors on the highway vs. individual pick ups puttering to market) and that most of the “carbon footprint” of the food we eat comes from us individuals driving to and from the store to buy it. The bottom line of the article is that if the food system is ever really going to change, it is going to take much more than consumer’s individual purchases – it is going to take a sea change in global trade and government policies/subsidies.

My personal take on this so far is that organic food is still good. Local is good. Fair trade – mostly good. The reason that organic food might be bad is due to the world’s huge population (in fact, overpopulation is the root of A LOT of society’s problems in my opinion). The reason local food might not be great is because of the way people decide to move themselves and where they decide to live. The bottom line is that I think organic and local food is good for society and the environment. Where it runs into problems is when it intersects with other less-savory aspects of our human society (what we do right doesn’t look right because of what we do wrong). For now the Economist’s argument does not have me convinced to change my personal food convictions. But it does give me more incentive to be mindful of global food politics.

I would love to hear more discussion about this topic. I submitted the article to Grist (one of my favorite environmental news sites). I haven’t seen them pick it up yet.

The article is here (but you need to subscribe to the Economist).

UPDATE (01-11-07): Grist responded to the article.  Check out their response here.

Yelp.com is a social networking site focused on helping people to discover great places in the cities they live in (or visit). It is 100% user-generated content about restaurants, clubs, bars, shops, parks, etc… People rate their experiences at places in the city (1-5 stars + comments) and then other Yelp users can use that information to make decisions about where to eat, shop, and spend time. People tell stories, bitch, rant, rave, or just keep the information quick and meaningful. It has incredibly user-friendly interactive maps. It is like Zagat meets myspace meets the Better Business Bureau. I find it immensely valuable as I am trying to navigate around my new home of San Francisco.

After writing my previous post, ‘Microfinance Needs More Than Scale,’ I was happy to read a story in Forbes that paints the other side of the microfinance picture. “Easy Money: Microcredit is booming in India, but the loans don’t often pull people out of poverty” (11/13/06) talks about some of the ‘failure stories’ and potential drawbacks of microfinance that it is so important for us to hear, especially in the Western World where we are so far removed from the on-the-ground reality. If the only things you every read about microfinance are success stories that appeal to your emotions, then there is a publication bias. (In fact, I just read about a new academic journal called “The Journal of Spurious Correlations” that is devoted to publishing negative results in social sciences. Sometimes knowing what doesn’t work and why is just as important as knowing what does. It is a great idea.)

Before you jump on me for raining on Microfinance’s parade, I want to make clear that I think Microfinance is a great tool. However, the realities that I saw working in the field for several months in India don’t always jive with what I have been reading in the Western media. I certainly saw some wonderful success stories – but I also saw failures, mistakes, and miscalculations. The Forbes article talks about some of this, saying that for many recipients, “the loans haven’t turned into new income” and many “haven’t started businesses at all. Instead…the money helped them pay for urgent expenses.”

The article also talks about some of the drawbacks of large-scale microfinance institutions that I alluded to. “The rapid growth also means that lenders are less likely to keep tabs on a borrower after a loan is made (in India there is one microfinance staffer for every 439 borrowers, in Bangladesh the ratio is 1:131)… The women in India could probably use more guidance, because it’s so difficult to run a business there: The country ranks just 134th out of 175 that the World Bank studied this year for ease of doing business.”

The Forbes article does tell the typical uplifting story of a woman (Manjula, an entrepreneur with a sari shop and an alcoholic husband) who used the loan to expand her business. However, it is also careful to point out that Manjula is not a typical loan recipient and started at a high level of competence and education. Also, even a relatively advantaged woman like Manjula has not been able to completely stop borrowing from other high-interest moneylenders.

Hooray for Forbes for having the courage to be candid!

With the Nobel Prize recently going to Muhammad Yunus, microfinance is getting more attention than ever. I recently read a BusinessWeek article entitled “Taking Tiny Loans to the Next Level” (Nov. 27, 2006). It talks about how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are starting to get involved by providing financing and technical support to microfinance organizations around the world. The fact that these Western businessmen are interested in using their brainpower to solve problems like this is fantastic. However, what I noticed in the article is a bit of naivitee about the realities of microfinance on the field. In the article Pierre Omidyar (eBay) is quoted as saying “[microfinance] is just another large-scale systems challenge.” The article then goes on to make a parallel between Bill Gates selling millions of copies of Windows to become the richest man in the world and microfinance organizations needing to grow in scale to service many millions of people to maximize their impact.

In a sense Omidyar is right about microfinance being a large scale systems challenge - in the sense that global poverty is a large scale systems challenge. This is a system that includes education, health care, family development, and global trade among other things. It is a system that involves governments and politics. Microfinance is just one tool and scale is not the only thing keeping it from alleviating global poverty. One has to remember that these loans are going to people in the developing world whose daily realities are MUCH different than most Westerners can imagine. Many have never saved money before. Many have deeply rooted problems outside of their financial lives.

As much as us Westerners would love sit here and solve global poverty by throwing money and software at it, it is going to take more than that I’m afraid. Being process-oriented is great if that process also tries to address the root cause of these people’s problems (ensuring they are receiving proper health treatments, that alcoholism is being addressed, that children are being educated, that a balanced meal is being provided, that shelter is adequate, that mothers are mindful of their baby’s early childhood development, etc). The problem is that once microfinance organizations become too big they become less adept at dealing with these underlying problems - especially when they are operating as a for-profit business. They are not as rooted in the community. Individual loan recipients become just a number with statistics attached instead of a face with a personal history attached.

In a side note: In just about every microfinance article you read, you hear a success story. It usually involves a single woman who gets a loan to start a small business and then is able to feed and educate her family (the BusinessWeek article is no exception). That is great – but that is not the fate of every loan recipient. What about the people who are applying for loans who aren’t as capable? Businesses do fail (there are only so many tailors and vegetable vendors one neighborhood needs) and often many microfinance loans aren’t even used to start businesses. We never hear the failure stories.

I wrote this poem after doing something that I regretted.

Feel the sting.
Feel the burn.
Your mind aches.
Your mind yearns.
To go back in time
and change your mind.
But you can’t.
A lesson’s learned.

Wow, this website boggles my mind. Check it out. This is one of the most intuitive , useful, and user friendly interfaces for a music website I have seen in a long time. It is great for finding new music and for quickly and painlessly satisfying your music cravings in accordance with your moods. I am not sure how large their catalog is, but I like what I hear so far. I just found the site about 5 minutes ago and it so inspired me that I had to tell all of my friends about it immediately. Enjoy.

After studying my blogging options, I have decided to use WordPress as my blogging engine. I hope to use this blog to tell anecdotes about my life, share photos, and express my thoughts.