By Christine Negroni

via NYTimes


The old Town Hall in Stamford, Conn. has been renovated and will become a home for aspiring entrepreneurs.

STAMFORD, Conn. — The old Town Hall here, a Beaux-Arts building on the National Registry of Historic Places, has sat unused for 25 years, a victim of Stamford’s rapid growth in the 20th century. But the Town Hall will join the 21st-century economy, with the announcement this month that it would become an incubator for business start-ups in a 10-year lease agreement with private investors.

The Stamford Innovation Center, as the venture is called, is expected to open by summer, and aspiring entrepreneurs will get work space, mentoring and access to investors.

Acting as a corporate sponsor for the venture will be Sikorsky Aircraft, the helicopter maker and military contractor based in nearby Stratford, Conn. The company, a subsidiary of United Technologies, has leased 2,000 square feet on the building’s second floor, and will coach tenants and may even invest in them, said Chris Van Buiten, the vice president for Sikorsky Innovations, a network of employees focused on finding new technologies.

Sikorsky is priming the pump by issuing five technological challenges to the public that, on the surface, are aviation related. It is seeking proposals on, among other things, ways to apply wireless monitoring to digitized aircraft and to obscure the visibility of airplanes in flight. Successful applicants will have use of the company’s space at the Town Hall for a year.

“In much the same way that Sikorsky does not make the engines or avionics that are installed into our helicopters,” Mr. Van Buiten said, “likewise will some next-generation technology solutions not be produced by us.”

The Stamford Innovation Center is renting most of the old Town Hall from the city. The Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development provided a half-million-dollar loan to turn the building into modern office space.

In 2008 the city began renovating the Town Hall, with the hope of finding a tenant. It spent $16 million enlarging the space and making it handicapped-accessible. Patty Meagher, a founder of the Innovation Center, remembers the time she and the others involved with the project first considered leasing the building as the work was completed in 2010. “Remember the line from that movie, ‘You had me at hello’? That was the initial reaction,” she said when they first saw the limestone facade, iron-railed staircase, terrazzo floors and brilliant murals on the walls of several rooms.

The location was also an asset, she said, in the shadow of Stamford Town Center mall, steps from the city’s library, theater, shopping and dining districts. There are no restrictions on the kinds of ideas that will be considered for the center, so long as the directors believe there is potential for turning them into successful businesses. A few start-ups are already working in the building on projects as varied as a GPS-enabled community news site and the use of cloned immune cells for medicine.

As fledgling businesses develop, tenants will be introduced to venture capitalists, many of whom live or work in the area, Ms. Meagher said. The investors and entrepreneurs, she said, “will be meeting each other, interacting, and that’s how these companies could very well get funded.”

Business incubators are very of-the-moment across the country. In Chandler, Ariz., the City Council financed a biotechnology-themed center, while a center in Portland, Ore., focuses on sustainability. Nearly three-quarters of these enterprises are sponsored by economic development agencies, governments or academic institutions, according to the National Business Incubation Association. The Stamford Innovation Center is among the 25 percent that are private, with aspirations to become profitable businesses based on rents charged to tenants and educational programs offered to the public.

Over the last five years there have been 150 incubation centers opened nationwide, the association said. While no studies cite the recession as motivating that growth, Linda Knopp, the group’s research and policy director, said she believed the economy played a role. “More communities at least start considering the business incubation concept during economic downturns,” she said, “as they’re looking for ways to stimulate economic growth and create jobs.”

Certainly that is the goal in Stamford, with a population of 122,643, which has an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent, lower than the state and the nation as a whole, but which has lost jobs in the financial and manufacturing sectors and has had an increase in office vacancies. One quarter of the city’s 13 million feet of business space is unoccupied, said Laure Aubuchon, the director of the Stamford Office of Economic Development.

“We are a victim of our own success, because we keep building space,” Ms. Aubuchon said. But she said the upside is that when the entrepreneurs are ready to start their businesses they will be able to find affordable rents in Stamford.

Sikorsky has set a goal of incubating at least two viable companies a year. Barry Schwimmer, a founder of the Innovation Center who is managing the opening, said Sikorsky was setting an example that he hoped other large companies would follow.

“It is a fairly unique model,” he said, adding that such communication between large, established businesses and small, untested ones was “virtually unheard-of.”

What is developed here will most likely have wider applications, Mr. Van Buiten of Sikorsky said. He offered the example of paint that changes color on a military helicopter, which could also be sold to the automobile industry. “We’d be willing to spend a lot of money,” he said of a product like that. “But think of how that would appeal to teenagers if a car company could offer that kind of paint on a Scion at $1,500.”

By Steve Lohr
via nytimes.com

Good with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.

Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.

To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.

The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. A 28-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, he combined math with political science in his undergraduate and graduate studies, seeing “an opportunity because the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive.” His research involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread.

The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”

Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.

Rick Smolan, creator of the “Day in the Life” photography series, is planning a project later this year, “The Human Face of Big Data,” documenting the collection and uses of data. Mr. Smolan is an enthusiast, saying that Big Data has the potential to be “humanity’s dashboard,” an intelligent tool that can help combat poverty, crime and pollution. Privacy advocates take a dim view, warning that Big Data is Big Brother, in corporate clothing.

What is Big Data? A meme and a marketing term, for sure, but also shorthand for advancing trends in technology that open the door to a new approach to understanding the world and making decisions. There is a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years, estimates IDC, a technology research firm. It’s not just more streams of data, but entirely new ones. For example, there are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air.

Link these communicating sensors to computing intelligence and you see the rise of what is called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Improved access to information is also fueling the Big Data trend. For example, government data — employment figures and other information — has been steadily migrating onto the Web. In 2009, Washington opened the data doors further by starting Data.gov, a Web site that makes all kinds of government data accessible to the public.

Data is not only becoming more available but also more understandable to computers. Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases.

But the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.

Those artificial-intelligence technologies can be applied in many fields. For example, Google’s search and ad business and its experimental robot cars, which have navigated thousands of miles of California roads, both use a bundle of artificial-intelligence tricks. Both are daunting Big Data challenges, parsing vast quantities of data and making decisions instantaneously.

The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing — a virtuous circle of Big Data. Machine-learning algorithms, for example, learn on data, and the more data, the more the machines learn. Take Siri, the talking, question-answering application in iPhones, which Apple introduced last fall. Its origins go back to a Pentagon research project that was then spun off as a Silicon Valley start-up. Apple bought Siri in 2010, and kept feeding it more data. Now, with people supplying millions of questions, Siri is becoming an increasingly adept personal assistant, offering reminders, weather reports, restaurant suggestions and answers to an expanding universe of questions.

To grasp the potential impact of Big Data, look to the microscope, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before — at the cellular level. It was a revolution in measurement.

Data measurement, Professor Brynjolfsson explains, is the modern equivalent of the microscope. Google searches, Facebook posts and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior and sentiment in fine detail and as it happens.

In business, economics and other fields, Professor Brynjolfsson says, decisions will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition. “We can start being a lot more scientific,” he observes.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of the payoff from data-first thinking. The best-known is still “Moneyball,” the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, chronicling how the low-budget Oakland A’s massaged data and arcane baseball statistics to spot undervalued players. Heavy data analysis had become standard not only in baseball but also in other sports, including English soccer, well before last year’s movie version of “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt.

Retailers, like Walmart and Kohl’s, analyze sales, pricing and economic, demographic and weather data to tailor product selections at particular stores and determine the timing of price markdowns. Shipping companies, like U.P.S., mine data on truck delivery times and traffic patterns to fine-tune routing.

Online dating services, like Match.com, constantly sift through their Web listings of personal characteristics, reactions and communications to improve the algorithms for matching men and women on dates. Police departments across the country, led by New York’s, use computerized mapping and analysis of variables like historical arrest patterns, paydays, sporting events, rainfall and holidays to try to predict likely crime “hot spots” and deploy officers there in advance.

Research by Professor Brynjolfsson and two other colleagues, published last year, suggests that data-guided management is spreading across corporate America and starting to pay off. They studied 179 large companies and found that those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.

The predictive power of Big Data is being explored — and shows promise — in fields like public health, economic development and economic forecasting. Researchers have found a spike in Google search requests for terms like “flu symptoms” and “flu treatments” a couple of weeks before there is an increase in flu patients coming to hospital emergency rooms in a region (and emergency room reports usually lag behind visits by two weeks or so).

Global Pulse, a new initiative by the United Nations, wants to leverage Big Data for global development. The group will conduct so-called sentiment analysis of messages in social networks and text messages — using natural-language deciphering software — to help predict job losses, spending reductions or disease outbreaks in a given region. The goal is to use digital early-warning signals to guide assistance programs in advance to, for example, prevent a region from slipping back into poverty.

In economic forecasting, research has shown that trends in increasing or decreasing volumes of housing-related search queries in Google are a more accurate predictor of house sales in the next quarter than the forecasts of real estate economists. The Federal Reserve, among others, has taken notice. In July, the National Bureau of Economic Research is holding a workshop on “Opportunities in Big Data” and its implications for the economics profession.

Big Data is already transforming the study of how social networks function. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram of Harvard used packages as his research medium in a famous experiment in social connections. He sent packages to volunteers in the Midwest, instructing them to get the packages to strangers in Boston, but not directly; participants could mail a package only to someone they knew. The average number of times a package changed hands was remarkably few, about six. It was a classic demonstration of the “small-world phenomenon,” captured in the popular phrase “six degrees of separation.”

Today, social-network research involves mining huge digital data sets of collective behavior online. Among the findings: people whom you know but don’t communicate with often — “weak ties,” in sociology — are the best sources of tips about job openings. They travel in slightly different social worlds than close friends, so they see opportunities you and your best friends do not.

Researchers can see patterns of influence and peaks in communication on a subject — by following trending hashtags on Twitter, for example. The online fishbowl is a window into the real-time behavior of huge numbers of people. “I look for hot spots in the data, an outbreak of activity that I need to understand,” says Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell. “It’s something you can only do with Big Data.”

Big Data has its perils, to be sure. With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of “false discoveries.” The trouble with seeking a meaningful needle in massive haystacks of data, says Trevor Hastie, a statistics professor at Stanford, is that “many bits of straw look like needles.”

Big Data also supplies more raw material for statistical shenanigans and biased fact-finding excursions. It offers a high-tech twist on an old trick: I know the facts, now let’s find ’em. That is, says Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician at George Mason University, “one of the most pernicious uses of data.”

Data is tamed and understood using computer and mathematical models. These models, like metaphors in literature, are explanatory simplifications. They are useful for understanding, but they have their limits. A model might spot a correlation and draw a statistical inference that is unfair or discriminatory, based on online searches, affecting the products, bank loans and health insurance a person is offered, privacy advocates warn.

Despite the caveats, there seems to be no turning back. Data is in the driver’s seat. It’s there, it’s useful and it’s valuable, even hip.

Veteran data analysts tell of friends who were long bored by discussions of their work but now are suddenly curious. “Moneyball” helped, they say, but things have gone way beyond that. “The culture has changed,” says Andrew Gelman, a statistician and political scientist at Columbia University. “There is this idea that numbers and statistics are interesting and fun. It’s cool now.”

By: E.B. Boyd
Via: Fast Company

Tech companies can’t find enough engineers. So why not train them yourself? For free. And then make $20K a pop on recruiting fees.


The shortage of engineers is a perennial source of woe in Silicon Valley. Once they’re done combing the graduating classes at places like Stanford and MIT, tech companies start sniffing in each other’s backyards, hoping to lure over desperately needed talent with juicy salaries and tasty perks.

When David Albert and two partners joined Y Combinator, a VC firm that invests a small amount of money in a large number of startups in exchange for stakes in the companies, in the summer of 2010, they thought they could help solve that problem with a sophisticated algorithm that would match candidates and jobs. But what they’ve come up instead with is something surprisingly analog: a real-world school, based in New York, where they spend three months at a time helping people who already program get better.

What’s revolutionary about the program is both its business and operational models. There are certainly other schools that have set up shop recently, to help crank out engineering talent. In Chicago, Code Academy offers 11-week courses in web design and development, and at San Francisco’s Dev Bootcamp, students learn the fine points of Ruby on Rails and HTML5.

But at Hacker School, there’s no tuition. Students attend for free. (Though Albert and his partners, Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock and Sonali Sridhar, do vet for talent and aptitude.) The three make money through Hackruiter, a seperate [sic] arm of their venture, when companies like Airbnb snap up the participants. (The average recruiting fee is $20,000, the industry standard.)

And once school opens, there’s no instruction. Instead, participants work side-by-side on personal projects, usually involving open-source software. The learning comes by being jammed together in the same place and having smart people nearby to learn from and ask questions of. “It’s like a writers retreat for computer programmers,” Albert tells Fast Company. “You don’t learn English at a writers retreat, but you hone your craft.”

The venture has attracted funding from Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Founder Collective, which includes entrepreneurs like Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake and Meetup cofounder and CEO Scott Heiferman

David Lee, of SV Angel, tells Fast Company that Hacker School and Hackruiter are emerging at a time when the tech world is rethinking the conventional wisdom that says you have to graduate from a school of higher learning in order to become a programmer. “There’s not the same sort of blind faith that people had in institutions and the conventional way of doing things,” Lee says. “There are now ways of demonstrating that you’re the best coder without going to a four-year college.”

Hacker School’s first session–a test drive–took place last summer with about half a dozen participants. Just about all–five out of six–were later hired. Same with a second session of 12 people. The third session starts next week with two dozen students.

Given that there are no classes, it might look to outsiders like the school’s founders aren’t really doing anything, and still earning some cushy dough for their efforts. What’s to prevent someone else from copying the idea and stealing Hacker School’s clientele? The answer: It actually takes skill to create an environment where self-motivated learners can develop skills and get better, Lee says. “It’s like throwing a party. Some people do it better than others.”

To that end, Albert and his partners plan to see if they can grow the school to 200 students. Along the way–in true Y Combinator iterate-as-you-go-style–the business model might evolve.

“The goal in the long term is to create an awesome school for programmers and hopefully inspire more people to want to be craftspeople,” Albert says. “How it’s going to do that in the long run, we’re not exacty [sic] sure.” But as long as the school pays for itself (and their expenses are low–mostly just salaries for the three founders), he explains, “that gives us license to experiment.”

By Catherine Rampell
via economix.blogs.nytimes.com

We’ve written several blog posts about the small share of American college students majoring in the so-called STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — with the implicit premise that more bachelor’s degrees in technical fields is both desirable on a macroeconomic level and is professionally advantageous at the individual worker level. A former dean of an engineering school suggests that thinking may be wrong.

Daniel Jelski, a chemistry professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz and previous dean of New Paltz’s School of Science & Engineering, argues in a New Geography essay that humanities degrees may be more important for tomorrow’s job market than is generally believed.

He bases this on three “Laws of Future Employment”:

Law #1: People will get jobs doing things that computers can’t do. Law #2: A global market place will result in lower pay and fewer opportunities for many careers. (But also in cheaper and better products and a higher standard of living for American consumers.) Law #3: Professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have a steady job.

The implications of Laws #1 and #2, he says, are that STEM jobs will not be particularly safe in the future, since he believes they are “easily computerized and tradable.”

The more valuable skill sets, he argues, will be those that computers can’t offer, like empathy and sociability — skills that you might be more likely to learn in an English course than one in linear algebra.

By Peggy Lowe
via npr.org


Recruiting doctors to live and work in rural America is a chronic problem. Most health centers try to attract workers with big salaries and expensive homes.

Shots previously reported that one center in Maine was trying to lure medical students to the countryside for their final two years with the hope that they stick around.

The Ashland Health Clinic, a tiny hospital in southwest Kansas, is trying a different tack — a reverse-recruitment model. It’s called mission-focused medicine, and it’s based on serving problems most commonly found in third-world countries.

Ashland, population 855, sits about a five-hour drive south of Kansas City. It’s one of the last outposts on the Kansas open range, where buffalo still really roam along the rolling, dusty plains. There’s no gas station, unless you count the pump at the farmer’s co-op that uses dial-up for credit card approval. The nearest Starbucks is 160 miles away.

The Ashland clinic has 24 beds. The next closest center is 50 miles north, in Dodge City. (Yeah, the same one from those old cowboy movies.)

So when Benjamin Anderson interviewed for the clinic’s CEO job in 2009, he says the board chairman was exceedingly blunt.

Anderson says the chairman told him, “Ben, our facilities are 55 years old. Our finances are challenged. Our morale is low. Turnover is up. We’ve been without an administrator for six months. We’ve been without a doctor for seven or eight months. We really need this facility in this community. And if we don’t have this facility, we’ll lose our school. And if we don’t have our hospital and our school, this will become a ghost town very quickly.”

That pitch clicked for Anderson. He gave up his physician recruiter job in Dallas and moved with his wife out here to become Ashland’s new CEO.

“I’ve always had to have a job that matters,” he says. “I have to have a position that I know it’s not just a paycheck.”

Anderson is now well known on Ashland’s Main Street. But he knew he needed doctors for the hospital to succeed, and he knew he had to offer something different than the thousands of small towns he was competing with.

So he came up with a novel plan. He offers potential candidates eight weeks off to do missionary work overseas. Because he’s found that a doctor who is willing to sleep on a cot in the Amazon or treat earthquake victims in Haiti is ready to serve in rural Kansas. He calls it mission-focused medicine.

“When you recruit a mission-focused provider, they want to see the ghettos,” he says. “They want to know that there’s no Spanish-speaking provider in more than a one-hour drive. They want to see houses that are falling down, widows that are uncared for. They want to know that there’s need and that by them coming there, they would fill a disparity that would otherwise not be filled. So we reversed it.”

It worked. Last July, Dr. Dan Shuman and his family moved here from the Austin, Texas, area. The difference between here and all the other needy areas was his ability to continue his missionary work in Haiti and Mexico during his eight weeks off. But Shuman says Ashland’s own challenges were equally attractive.

“When you’re primary focus is sort of a mission-based focus, when you get into things in order to try to relieve suffering or work toward eliminating disparities,” Shuman says, “then you want to know about those things. It’s appealing to see opportunities.”

Studies suggest that finding primary care providers in rural areas is at crisis levels. More medical students are specializing, so general practitioners are very hard to find. And those who can deal with the lower pay and isolation in rural areas? Even harder. So Anderson raised the bar by shooting for a higher cause. At every staff meeting, he’s part cheerleader, part chaplain.

Indeed, things are looking up for Ashland. In addition to Shuman, Anderson has recruited a nursing director. And that doc who slept on the cot in the Amazon was recently in Ashland for interviews.

Peggy Lowe is a reporter for Harvest Public Media.

By Liz Dwyer, Education Editor
via www.good.is



With the unemployment rate hovering near the 10 percent mark—and hiring freezes and layoffs still the norm—an increasing number of college grads are turning to the one employer who’s always hiring, even in tough economic times: Uncle Sam. The number of bachelor’s degree holders enlisting in a branch of the United States Armed Services is on the rise.

Over the past two years, the Army’s seen the biggest spike in diploma-holding enlistees. In 2010, almost 6,000 college graduates signed up for duty, 2,000 more than in 2008 when the economy still seemed healthy. The Navy saw 1,425 college graduates enlist, up from 1,000 in 2008 and the Air Force bumped its college graduate enlistment up to 900 from 2008′s total of 553.

We may be at war, but Ben Harris, a political science and communications double major from Ohio State University, isn’t dwelling on the possibility of dying in combat. He graduated two years ago, and given the realities of the recession, he had to settle for a job at a “chicken-finger place” and shack up with his parents. Instead of heading off to graduate school to wait out the tough economy—and rack up more student loans—Harris told the Columbus Dispatch that he’s considering joining the Army or the Air Force because, “I’ll get more skills and more education.”

The perks—VA benefits, access to military base stores, preference for government jobs, and a reduction in student loans (the Army will repay up to $65,000 of a soldier’s qualifying student loans, the most of the armed services branches)—are undeniable. Plus, when you enlist with a bachelor’s degree, you enter as an officer, which means you receive higher pay.

The only branch to not see a significant enrollment bump is the Marines. According to Maj. John Caldwell, a spokesman for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command, “Young men and women join our ranks to become a United States Marine. They do not see the Marine Corps as a path to something else but rather as a destination unto itself.”

photo (cc) via Flickr user Boston Public Library