New Mexico Dilemma #1

In New Mexico, you must have a physical postal address in order to get a voter registration card. Since nearly ONE-THIRD of the people living in the state do not have a physical postal address, the electorate could be unbalanced and swayed one direction or another. State House Democrats will propose a method to fix the problem by allowing the use of map coordinates as physical addresses for not only voter registration, but emergency responders and disaster coordinators as well.

See Brad Feld's excellent Patriot Act Nonsense article for other ramifications of the federal government over-reaching under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Stupid Stupid Stupid

UC Awarded LANL Contract

Announcment of Los Alamos Contract Decision

NEWS MEDIA CONTACT: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Rebecca Neale, 202/586-4940 Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Media Advisory
Secretary Bodman to Announce Los Alamos Contract Decision

WASHINGTON, DC – Tomorrow, Wednesday, December 21, Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman will announce the selection of the new management and operating contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Feng Wu-chun Does it Again

Too bad he's leaving the Lab.

Researchers find 10 Gigabit Ethernet as speedy as customized interconnects

Safety Rule #6

From Forky:

Don't throw rocks at Bears

See: Summer of 1986 at Philmont

Safety Rule #49

From Cody:

Don't give explosives to visitors.
Read about the Accident at LANL

The Holidays

I've been thinking a lot abut the holiday season today. Christmas has always been a time, the only real time, my family spends together. We have never been apart on Christmas until this year. My friends can’t imagine spending 41 holiday seasons together with their entire family—something always seems to come up…but not us. We’re together. Period. End of story. No matter what.

While we’ll all be together in Virginia, this is the first Christmas since Dad passed away last summer. I never really got along with Dad, and he never understood who I am, or what motivates me, but we are all family, and he will be missed this year.

Rules of the Road #11

Mobile Telephone: If a call is dropped the person who initiated the call has the responsibilty to re-establish the commnication link.

The Income & Education Gap

New Mexico has one of the largest income gaps in the nation. Los Alamos county was recently recognized as having the highest median income in the U.S. (see Los Alamos County Wealthiest in Nation: http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/35676.html). What to do about this disparity is not a new topic, but is fraught with a cultural and economic divide wider than the Rio Grande.

Traditionalists are under the impression that New Mexico can stay an agriculture/artisan centric state, while the reality is that the state’s number one employer is government. The love//hate relationship with tourists in parts of the state further complicates and increases the income gap, as most folks love the tax dollars (or at the very least what can be afforded because of those revenues) but hate the seasonal crowding, low-paying service sector jobs, and what they see as a dilution of local cultures by those tourists who come and stay, instead of just leaving.

New Mexico has a wind-fall this year of an extra $1 billion from oil and gas leases which can only be spent on capital improvements, and upwards of an extra $100 million per year for the increase in the gross receipts tax (GRT) that will come from changing the Los Alamos National Laboratory operating contract from a non-profit (the University of California) to an limited liability corporation (LLC). No matter who wins the operating contract, UC-Bechtel or University of Texas-Lockheed Martin, the new LANL operator will be an LLC.

So, what to do with all of this extra money?

My modest proposal is to use the capital funds to bring all state K-12 facilities up to a higher standard of quality, along with building three regional science and math magnet high schools (one north, one south and one in the middle of the state). As for the increase in GRT, the state should spend the $100 million per year on the state’s K-12 teachers.

Although many tactics have been attempted in raising the per capita income in specific regions, the one tactic that consistently produces higher personal income is to increase educational standards (which is not to be confused with standardization through testing, but actual higher standards in facilities, curricula, and quality teachers). New Mexico has hovered for years in the bottom five of the fifty states in terms of education quality. This is an unbelievable abomination considering that New Mexico has the highest concentration of Ph.D.s, computing power, and government facilities of any state in the U.S.

It’s time the state higher education institutions and federal labs rub off on the general populous. These are easy answers to be sure, but difficult to implement unless the state legislature, the Govenor, regional stakeholders, parents, and lobbyist don’t commit to real change.

2005 Fortune Innovation Conference

30 Nov & 1 Dec New York City
Fortune magazine’s annual conference has focused the last couple of years on the topic of innovation. The first Fortune conference I attended was in NYC back in 2001, just a couple of weeks after the 911 attacks on New York and DC. That conference was all about the busted tech bubble, and featured Gary Hamel, who at the time was heralding Enron as a prototype for a wildly successful firm, one that moves quick to totally dominate new market opportunities.

You don’t hear much from Gary any more…wonder why?

In any case, back to innovation. The event was in the new Jazz Centre at the Time Warner building on Columbus Circle; much better than a hotel ball room. The Fortune staff went out of their way to ensure the two days stayed on time, that all the attendees had fun, and all were well fed. Not an easy feat with 1,000 people in attendance. The topics surrounded every conceivable aspect of innovation, but the speakers themselves could have been much better.

Here’s some of what I took away:
Sir Ken Robinson (http://www.speakers.ca/robinson_ken.aspx) pointed at that all successful organizations put innovation at their core; that when young, people believe much more in themselves and are less self conscious about being wrong; and that everyone is or can become creative (your job title might not make it sound that way, but that’s up to you to rectify the situation).

Change is being driven by technology and demography (the free flow of ideas and of people), and that the hard part of creating an innovation organization is to make these (and other valuable) concepts operational. Ken also said the most obvious but, for some unknown reason hard to grasp in the U.S., concept: education is the key to innovation and one must be careful to not confuse raising standards with standardization (such as standardization through testing).

Many of the speakers, including Fred Smith, FedEx founder & CEO and Scott Cook, Intuit (Quicken and QuickBooks) founder, innovate in the most simple manner. No rocket science nor engineered life forms were required for FedEx to talk the USPS into flying the overnight mail (and saving the Postal Service $300 million a year to boot).

I think the one thing all true innovators have in common is curiosity and a thirst for knowledge…about anything. So think about that the next time one of you guys tells me I’m boring because I know how the best Kona coffee beans have been trained to grow on vines like grapes.

The Fortune conference has inspired me to make innovation something that can be modeled and, more importantly, repeated. I’m fond of saying that marketing is a rigorous science with intentional inputs and predictable outputs. The idea of now modeling the process of innovation fascinates me.

I’ve been going to NYC for business for the last 15 years but, until this trip, hadn’t spent more than a day there in three years. Observations:

New York City isn’t a melting pot, it’s a blender;
The people there work very hard;
It’s as expensive as London (food, transportation, martinis);
New Yawkers are more paranoid than ever (especially after 911).

MIT Venture Capital Forum

I’m attending the MIT Venture Capital Forum this week-end in Cambridge, MA. Unlike other VC fests, this one is organized by the grad students at the MIT Sloan School of Management (http://mitsloan.mit.edu/). It’s not an opportunity for companies to pitch potential investors, but rather a chance for the regional venture capitalists to get together and chat about the state of their industry. Two observations are noteworthy:

The East Cost VCs seem to suffer from a bit of envy regarding their Left Coast brethren. Many comments and even a few discussion points focused on the lack of Left Coast funds making investments in East Coast companies. You would think the regional VCs would want a deeper pool from which to drink instead of having California interlopers come in and drive up the price (and therefore lower the returns) of the deals, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. This is example number 724 of the “grass is always greener” theorem espoused by Erma Bombeck.

The community around MIT has spawned some 10,000 firms, and the immediate area is ripe with biotech firms, but MIT and the Sloan School in particular still continue to look for ways to get more complete technology in the market place, to train entrepreneurs in business skills and knowledge, and to reinforce these facts with the investment community. Sloan has a small entrepreneurship program office that coordinates student and faculty activities, in many cases focusing on the large body of Sloan alumni…which they continue to educate and, more importantly, network with in order to place Sloan and MIT grads. None of this is original, but MIT does have enormous momentum.

Russell Siegelman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (http://www.kpcb.com/) spoke at dinner Friday night about Kleiner reaching out to Asia for investment opportunities and about globalization/the “flat earth” in general. Russ made the point that they are two reasons to look overseas for business opportunities: 1. the quality of tech talent (and their associated one-third cost); 2. the emerging and potentially enormous market opportunities. While I can find as many examples of bad labor output from India, China, and Asia as good, I was struck by Russ’ optimism that the Asian workforce is getting better at producing engineered products and IP with higher and higher quality. (I’ll save my diatribe concerning whether earth really has, or is about to become, economically “flat” for another time.)

Russ said that venture funds can reach out to Asia in three ways: 1. spend a lot of time flying there (not sustainable), 2. hire someone on the ground and in country to help recruit and manage portfolio firms (risky, and of minimal use in extending the fund’s brand), 3. move someone from the firm to the country or region in question. Russ’ overall point is that he would “rather increase the firm’s awareness of emerging hot labor and market opportunities than not.”