“For the antiquarian shipbuilders who are painstakingly restoring the world’s only surviving wooden whale ship here, an essential ingredient can be very hard to find: lumber that’s big enough and strong enough for a massive 19th- century seafaring vessel, and cheap enough for a restoration project’s budget. Restorers of the Charles W. Morgan at Mystic Seaport had relied on fallen live and white oak trees from the Deep South, where hurricanes like Hugo and Katrina had uprooted many. But supplies were running low last June and officials wondered where they would find more. Then construction crews working in Charlestown made an accidental and historic discovery.”
Reminds me of the oak beam story from New College in Oxford, UK.
Is this a Pandora/Last.fm/Netflix/(put in the name of your fave recommendation, collaborative filtering tool) for brews? [Wondering all the possible biz models and social networking this can promote.]
“The small industries and biotech freelancers springing up are, in some ways, like the divisions of the old behemoth drug company, but connected only by the tendrils of the Internet, and the relationships that grow so easily there. Rienhoff is contemporary biotech’s answer to the lost Renaissance man. He pulls the renaissance effect out of the network around him, using the terrible complexity of the global community to fight the terrible complexity of disease. It’s the way science ought to work.”
An interesting, if “anemic” article, on FerroKin, a virtual drug company developing chelating agents to treat excess iron due to blood transfusions (fixing the fix, I guess).
This is the second virtual drug developer I have hear about. In hi-tech, virtual programs managers are common, developing products across different companies – coder, hardware design, production, distribution. No reason to think that can’t be done in biotech. Especially with all the communication tools available.
“Developing countries lack both clean water and clean energy sources. By converting soiled water into energy and clean water, a new project could wipe away both problems.”
Every since an organic waste conference I attended a few months ago, I’ve had anaerobic digestors on the mind – for farm, for municipal waste to energy, even for small-scale home systems. Decomposition of poop is an ancient process and we’re just ignoring it and pissing away the benefits. In a smaller and smarter planet, we’re going to have to take more control of the whole organics process – from food, to distribution, to waste, to energy and fertilizer. [I sense a new brainwave coming on…]
Data and bugs
My name is Charlie Schick. I am Director of Marketing, Public Sector at Netezza, an IBM company (read the announcement). I am also a determined practical microbiologist with a wide range of interests (listed in part on my About page).
What happens here? I haven’t been as prolific as in the old days. Also, I am sure I irritated everyone with site changes in the past months (moved to new hosted platform). So if you’re still reading this site, thanks a ton for still thinking I have something of value for you. I hope at least that I have expanded your mind as I travel into cutting edge areas in biology and data.
Standard Disclaimer (riffing off of Cringley)
Everything I write here on this site is an expression of my own opinions, NOT of my employer, IBM. If these were the opinions of IBM, the site would be called ‘IBM something’ and, for sure, the writing and design would be much more professional. Likewise, I am an intensely trained professional writer :-P, so don’t expect to find any confidential secret corporate mumbo-jumbo being revealed here. Everything I write here is public info or readily found via any decent search engine or easily deduced by someone who has an understanding of the industry.
On the flip side, this is my personal site. Please don’t flood me with ideas that you think IBM might be interested in. There are other channels for such biz dev, and this site is not part of them.
For the past 22 months I have commuted daily 30 miles each way to work (excepting holidays and storms, of course). If the railway were as efficient and pleasant as I had grown accustomed to while living in Europe, then maybe I wouldn’t really care. But in the end, the commute sapped my time, motivation, and sanity.
While I didn’t keep any sort of accurate records of each of my commutes, I can guess how many I did, how much it cost, and how far the commute was. My commute was mostly by train from my home station, but occasionally I drove to another station or all the way into work.
Here’s my final tally:
22 months commuting
1,500 hours sitting in a car or train
$6,500 in tolls, parking, rail passes, gas
10,200 miles driving (to station, to town)
20,000 miles on train
more than 800 miles walking (to and from station, including extended out of the way walks)
New stat (28may11): gained about 15 lbs
On the train inbound I usually had a table to work on. Outbound I usually stood (probably a total of 300 hours!), so really could only read. I read the Economist (95 weeks of it), read a few books, read a ton of science papers and articles printed out for the ride home, wrote and replied to countless emails, wrote dozens of blog posts, and spent many hours on Twitter.
In the car, I listened to more than 200 hours (practically every driving moment) of Science Friday, NOVA, Long Now seminars, and Melvyn Bragg’s In our Time, and gathered enough wool to clothe China. Sigh.
While the commute to my new job is quite short – a round trip less than 3 miles, 10 minutes by car – I can’t say how long it may last. Also, in my job that’s ending, there was no inter-city travel (only two trips, to Austin). Day 1 in my new job already starts with a 320 mile round trip to HQ and back. And I am sure I’ll need to do at least 20% traveling, so I’ll rack on miles and more wear on me (though probably not like my weekly London commutes back in 2007). But, for sure, any travel will be a different sort than a daily rail commute.
One thing I’ll miss from my commute: my extended 35-40 min walk down Bolyston and through the Fens.
I hope I use my new-found time and money wisely. For example, one goal is to get back into running. The long commute required I leave home early and arrive back late – not conducive to a regular running schedule out here in our semi-rural suburbs without lighting and sidewalks.
After I left Nokia, I thought I was done with Mega-Corporations. But an opportunity came by that seemed to have most of the things I need right now that I had to take it.
As of 01 June, I’ll be joining Netezza, an IBM company, where I will be Director of Marketing, Public Sector (that covers Health Care, Life Sciences, Government, and Education). This new role will allow me to mix my product, biz, and marketing skills together and still talk science.
About Netezza
Netezza got bought by IBM for big bucks (Article: “IBM’s Most Disruptive Acquisition Of 2010 Is Netezza”). I only found out about it after I started talking to Netezza. I did pause a bit to consider if I wanted to dive back into a mega-corp, but I see my experience with Borg mentality and Jello could come in handy as Netezza integrates into IBM. [That’s not fair to IBM. I’ve been given some corporate reading to do prior to joining and see lots of very good elements that are anti-Borg and anti-Jello; though, of course, mega-corp Jello made me wait 6 months to be hired. We’ll just have to see how things transpire.]
Netezza is the leader in data warehousing appliances. It is all about Big Data, something I’ve been fiddling with in my mind for a long time, a direct descendant of a progression ideas stretching back to my Lifeblog days. IBM has bet big on Big Data, and I have been seeing a ton of signals that Big Data is, well, big, and growing fast. Netezza CEO, Jim Baum, says it best:
“And while [reporting and dashboarding] are very important, they’ve also become sort of foundational because most companies are already doing it. And that means most BI value today is historical in nature and is all about looking in the rearview mirror. But, the way business analytics and optimization are heading, it’s much more toward the forward-looking and actionable information—the advanced analytics and more predictive solutions and the business impact they can have.”
Better fit
I learned a lot about organizations while at Children’s, and I learned about what environments I thrive in. While IBM is a swing back to my Nokia days (and in some way reminds me of when I first joined Nokia), it’s a better place for me than any “adjacent possible” work I could do at Children’s. [Though, I would like to find some middle ground between the hyper-organized mega-corp and the set-o-pants management style of the org I worked with at Children’s.] Also, any of the other potential things I could do were through some big obstables of time and chance [For example, there were other things I really wanted to do at Children’s, except that they were not “adjacent possibles”. And, natch, the job market and financing and what I have in hand played a lot in this, too].
Furthermore, the offer from Netezza had so many things I had been looking for, that it was hard to turn down. One unexpected benefit of Netezza: the office is a 20 min walk from home. Right now I ride the (woefully incompetent) commuter rail, about 1h45m-2hrs door-to-door each way. I hope I use my new-found time wisely.
What about them bugs?
At my core, I am still a scientist and a determined practical microbiologist with a wide range of interests (listed in part on my About page). In the 20 months I have been in the Boston area, I have not really been able to properly meet the goals I had set with respect to biology and science. I hope that with the benefits Netezza will afford me (in many special ways, thank you), I’ll be able to finally reach those goals.
For example, the past 6 months that I was waiting to close the deal with Netezza were well spent doing some due diligence around some of the top ideas I have for a biotech biz. Also, I hope to interact more with the MIT Media Lab (I’ve known the incoming director for many years) and the DIYbio community.
Yes, I am committed to Netezza for a long while. This move provides a good mix of energy, learning, ideas, and opportunities at work and at home.
Watch this space to see how it goes!
Here’s a darn cool video about IBM, which is turning 100 this year.
From the article: Researchers have come up with a new idea for a light microscope. They placed between the light source and the object a lens made from a slab of a crystalline substance called gallium phosphide. This design drastically reduces the theoretical minimum size of a visible object. However, for complex technical reasons, no one has ever managed to get close to this theoretical minimum with a standard lens made of gallium phosphide. So the researchers took a different tack. They started by etching the lens with sulphuric acid, producing a frosted surface that, far from focusing the light, scattered it randomly in all directions. They then used a computer to design an incoming light wave that, when scattered by the lens, would focus to a point. This process of randomize and reconstruct produces a tighter focus than simply focusing the light with a traditional lens.
“By borrowing the tools of the manicurist’s trade, marine biologists have found a way of attaching satellite-tracking tags to turtle hatchlings. The tags will help uncover what turtles get up to in the critical few months after they leave the beach of their birth.”
This is a really cool story about simple solutions arising out of the most unsuspected places. Also, this is a great use of tracking tech.
“At least 17 incidences of viral contamination in biologics have been reported, but industry insiders say that many more go unreported. Rather than risk negative publicity and lawsuits, companies have largely chosen to keep the details of contamination, and even their occurrence, secret — even, at times, from government regulators. Genzyme’s experience, which legally had to be made public because it caused a significant drug shortage, may have only deepened industry’s fears of going public.”
This has triggered a few thoughts about the future of biotech. I guess I’m primed by the “Windup Girl” book I read recently. Yet, if this were as prevalent and dark as the article suggests, we would have heard more on this. I can’t think that Genzyme is the only one who had to fess up about contamination of an existing product (though there might be contaminated products in biotech pipelines).
