Rock 'n Roll Christmas

Oxford slam'n some Christmas tunes.

George Thorogood and the Destroyers



Darlene Love



Chuck Berry



Vadim

Deceased--Jacob Goldman

Jacob Goldman
July 18th, 1921 to December 20th, 2011

"Jacob Goldman, Founder of Xerox Lab, Dies at 90"

by

John Markoff

December 21st, 2011

The New York Times

Jacob E. Goldman, a physicist who as Xerox’s chief scientist founded the company’s vaunted Palo Alto Research Center, which invented the modern personal computer, died on Tuesday in Westport, Conn. He was 90.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Melvin said.

Emblematic of a time when American corporations invested heavily in basic scientific research, Dr. Goldman played an important role both at the Ford Motor Company, during the 1950s, and later at Xerox in the 1960s and 1970s, in financing such endeavors in an effort to spark corporate innovation.

In the late 1960s, Xerox, then the dominant manufacturer of office copiers, was searching for ways to move into new markets when he proposed an open-ended research laboratory to explore what C. Peter McColough, chief executive at the time, called “the architecture of information.” Computer systems were still not available in offices at that time, and little was known about the shape of what would come to be called “the office of the future.”

Xerox had recently acquired Scientific Data Systems, a California computer maker, to compete with I.B.M. in the data-processing market. At the time, however, computers were largely centralized systems that were not interactive. The minicomputer market was just being pioneered by the Digital Equipment Corporation.

Xerox did not initially have a grand strategy for entering the computing business, only an inkling that the data processing world was both an opportunity and a potential threat.

“He was the one that made sure that Xerox understood there was a revolution coming behind them that might change their business,” said Michael Hiltzik, author of “Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.”

Dr. Goldman had originally been brought from Ford to Xerox by John Bardeen, who was on the Xerox board and was also a physicist. (He helped invent the transistor at Bell Labs.) Dr. Bardeen knew Dr. Goldman in part because of his contributions as a corporate science manager and also for running a well-known poker game every year at the American Physical Society meeting, according to his son.

The Xerox laboratory was almost stillborn in 1970 when many of the company’s directors resisted the idea of a West Coast center in an area in which the company did not have an active business. It was Dr. Bardeen who backed Dr. Goldman’s early vision and persuaded the company to support the venture even though it would not bear fruit any time soon.

“It was Jack who brought the idea back to management that they could not expect to get anything useful for at least five years, but maybe in 10,” Mr. Hiltzik said. “It was this idea that they did have to look far ahead and nurture research.”

Established in 1970 in an industrial park next to Stanford, PARC researchers designed a remarkable array of computer technologies, including the Alto personal computer, the Ethernet office network, laser printing and the graphical user interface.

The technologies would later be commercialized by both Apple Computer and Microsoft, among others, and Xerox would be criticized for not capitalizing enough on the technologies it had pioneered. Years later, Dr. Goldman explained Xerox’s failure to enter the personal computing market early on as part of a large corporation’s unwillingness to take risks.

“A big company will not make the investment to bring out a new product unless they see it makes a big difference,” he said in a 1988 interview in The New Haven Advocate. “Look at the personal computer industry today. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry today. And we at Xerox could have had that industry to ourselves.”

Dr. Goldman, who was often called Jack, was born in Brooklyn on July 18, 1921. His parents, Solomon Goldman, a jeweler, and the former Sarah Goldstein, had immigrated from Russia. Jacob attended Yeshiva University and received a master’s degree and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. With expertise in magnetism, he began his career at Westinghouse in 1945, before moving to teach at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh.

Dr. Goldman also excelled as a manager. At Ford, which he joined in 1955, he went on to head the company’s research and development laboratory.

Under Henry Ford II, he was one of the company’s first high-ranking Jewish executives, as the company broke with its founder’s anti-Semitism. A lifelong Democrat, he resisted a corporate memorandum early on demanding that executives make contributions to the Republican Party, his son said. After Dr. Goldman complained, the company changed its political contribution policy.

After retiring from the company he became a private investor and served on the boards of Xerox, General Instrument, the Burndy Corporation and other companies.

In, 1975, while still at Xerox, Dr. Goldman, as a director of United Brands, temporarily served on a committee that ran the company after the death of its chief executive, Eli M. Black, a high school classmate of Dr. Goldman’s.

Dr. Goldman is survived by his wife, Rhoda Miller Goldman; his children, Melvin, Edith and Beth; his stepsons, Shalom, Ari, and Dov; a sister, Judy Crystal; eight grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

"Jack Goldman, Founder of Xerox PARC, Dies"

by

Robert McMillan

December 22nd, 2011

Wired

Jacob “Jack” Goldman — the man who founded the lab that pretty much invented the personal computer as we know it — has died at age 90.

Goldman was the Xerox Chief Scientist who in 1969 proposed that the company create a pure research laboratory that would put Xerox in the same league as IBM and AT&T, whose Yorktown Heights and Bell Labs facilities are now legendary.

The result was Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) — the birthplace of the graphical user interface, Ethernet, the laser printer, and object-oriented programming.

Goldman died Tuesday from congestive heart failure, the New York Times reports.

Goldman hired physicist George Pake to run PARC, which set up shop in Palo Alto, California, in 1970. Working on the East Coast, Goldman championed the lab to Xerox corporate management, keeping it independent from the rest of the company and free to innovate.

“He really enabled the computer scientists who got brought together at PARC to follow their noses and develop the technology,” says Michael Hiltzik, a business columnist with the Los Angeles Times who is the author of Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. “He had a more general sense that computer science was going to be an important technology in the near future in 1970 and specifically was going to be a threat to Xerox if it didn’t get its arms around it.”

Goldman made PARC great, in part, by knowing when to recognize good ideas from others. He initially wanted to locate the lab near Yale University, but he let Pake talk him into nestling the lab next to Stanford. He also deferred to Pake on the name of the laboratory, saving history from remembering the great Xerox ASS (Advanced Scientific & Systems) Laboratory.

Xerox recruited Goldman from the Ford Motor Company in 1969, and one of his first jobs was to make sense of Xerox’s disastrous $918 million purchase of now-forgotten computer maker Scientific Data Systems.

The acquisition was a mistake. But it had an upside. It gave Goldman a justification for building PARC as a new R&D lab for the company’s computer division.

Xerox PARC is generally thought of as the place that invented much of the cool stuff that Microsoft and Apple made billions ripping off, but Hiltzik has a more charitable take on the PARC’s legacy. “It wasn’t really reasonable to expect that a corporation like Xerox could shift into this entirely new market and this entirely new technology on the scale that was required,” Hiltzik says. “Everything from its conventional R&D process to its sales process was built around the copier.”

Secondhand books can be revealing

"The secret histories of secondhand books"

The personal dedications one finds in secondhand books are often as fascinating as the text. In honour of this, we're starting a new series showcasing my most intriguing finds

by

Wayne Gooderham

December 21st, 2011

guardian.co.uk

CDs, DVDS, and e-reads are all well and good when it comes to gift-giving at Christmas, but as far as I'm concerned, for sheer emotional wallop, the old-fashioned physical book is hard to beat. After all, it's the ideal opportunity to foist a well-loved novel onto someone who is now morally obliged to read the thing (and, indeed, profess to like it). Furthermore, there is generous scope / enough rope to let a carefully-chosen book speak volumes about how you feel about the receiver. For this reason, no book-as-gift is complete without a handwritten dedication on its inside cover to further make it clear, just in case there was any doubt, that the recipient absolutely MUST READ THIS BOOK AT THE EXPENSE OF ALL OTHERS!!!

With this in mind, about a year ago I wrote a piece for the Guardian confessing my bibliophilic kink of hanging around secondhand bookshops in the hope of picking up and taking home with me one or more of these discarded gifts – and the more candid the dedication within the better. These dedications offer fascinating glimpses into their books' own secret histories, imbuing the physical objects with an emotional resonance independent of – or intriguingly linked to – the actual texts. For, often, the choice of book coupled with the message within can suggest a narrative of its own. (Such as the copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Words, addressed to "mummy" with the instructions that she "read it all without prejudice", including, one presumes, the cover artwork with its text reading: "I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it.") In the 12 months since my original piece, my kink – driven by a combination of love of stories and plain old human curiosity (tinged with an element of voyeurism, no doubt) – has blossomed into a fully-fledged habit. It has given birth to a blog and now, a new series which will look at a different secondhand book and dedication from my collection each fortnight.

All of which raises an ethical question. It was fine when the books were kept for my own private perusal, but I did feel a twinge of conscience when it came to presenting them to the world wide web via my blog and now to (presumably) a slightly larger audience here. After all, these messages – be they the gauche outpourings of an adolescent's heart or the bitter recriminations of a jilted lover – were intended for the eyes of the dedicatees only; did I have any right to show them to the world? But my reasoning was that the fact that they are no longer in the dedicatees' possession means that – for whatever reason – they have been given away for re-sale and have therefore passed, as it were, into the public domain. Some may have been accidentally lost through no fault of the owner – but to counter this, here could be a chance to reunite said owner with the lost book. So please: if you spot a dedication you recognise, let me know. I'd love to reunite you with your book.

For now, though, since tis the season to be jolly, let's start with something heartwarming – though not entirely pathos-free. The first book appears to be a present from a child to their father, who brilliantly describes his gift as "a short letter with 300 pages attached".

This, surely, is the essence of what these books are about. As such, may any books you receive this Sunday contain a dedication just as heartfelt. And if you're doing the giving, may you choose your words just as carefully.

Deceased--John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain
April 16th, 1927 to December 21st, 2011

"John Chamberlain, Who Wrested Rough Magic From Scrap Metal, Dies at 84"

by

Randy Kennedy

December 21st, 2011

The New York Times

John Chamberlain, who almost singlehandedly gave automotive metal a place in the history of sculpture, smashing and twisting together a poetic fusion of Abstract Expressionism and Pop from fenders, fins, bumpers and hoods, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 84.

His wife, Prudence Fairweather, announced his death but declined to give a cause. He had spent his last years mostly in Shelter Island, N.Y.

In a restless career of almost half a century, Mr. Chamberlain worked with a broad range of materials, some as pliant as foam rubber and as ephemeral as brown paper bags. But he returned again and again to the more substantial stuff of the scrap yard, explaining the attraction as one of practicality. “I saw all this material just lying around against buildings, and it was in color,” he said, “so I felt I was ahead on two counts.”

But auto bodies also provided him with a material that could bear more than its weight in art-historical significance: as a chaotic riff on Duchamp’s readymades, as a renegade form of truth-in-materials Minimalism, as a bridge between the raw expressiveness of the New York School painters and the assembly-line deadpan of Warhol.

Critics often saw his crumpled Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles as dark commentaries on the costs of American freedom, but Mr. Chamberlain rejected such metaphorical readings. He turned to making sculpture from other things partly because he grew so tired of the automotive associations.

“It seems no one can get free of the car-crash syndrome,” he told the curator Julie Sylvester in 1986. “For 25 years I’ve been using colored metal to make sculpture, and all they can think of is, ‘What the hell car did that come from?’ ”

Years later, he said: “I think of my art materials not as junk but as garbage. Manure, actually; it goes from being the waste material of one being to the life-source of another.”

Mr. Chamberlain devoted his life to challenging traditional notions of sculpture and to eroding the boundaries between sculpture and painting. He was among a wave of late-modernist sculptors who put color on an almost equal footing with form, and he had an uncanny ability, as the curator Klaus Kertess wrote, “to make roundness into color and color into roundness.”

Donald Judd, who enshrined many of Mr. Chamberlain’s pieces at the art complex he built in Marfa, Tex., observed that Mr. Chamberlain’s colors in his early years were quintessentially American, “the hard, sweet, pastel enamels, frequently roses and ceruleans, of Detroit’s imitation elegance for the poor.”

Mr. Chamberlain felt that even the word “sculpture” was limiting in describing art that, while functioning in three dimensions, could be made from almost anything.

“A sculpture is something that if it falls on your foot, it will break it,” he said. (Well into his career, some people still had a tough time seeing his sculptures as works of art; in 1973, two 300-pound metal pieces were mistaken for junk and carted away as they sat outside a gallery warehouse in Chicago.)

Mr. Chamberlain’s early influences included few sculptors. He gravitated to poets and to the Abstract Expressionist painters he met at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village after moving to New York from Chicago in 1956, chiefly to Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.

“Kline gave me the structure,” he once said. “De Kooning gave me the color.”

They also helped fuel a love of drink that contributed to his reputation as an art-world hellion, especially during the heyday of Max’s Kansas City, the Cedar’s successor as New York’s art-world clubhouse. At six-foot-four, with a broad, toothy smile full of mischief and menace, he looked, and sometimes acted, like a character from a Sam Peckinpah movie. In 1964, the year he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, he was arrested in the Village after a drunken street fight with a police officer. Mr. Chamberlain’s lawyer defended his client by saying the fight was the fault of the officer, who had repeatedly and “needlessly struck Mr. Chamberlain on the head with a nightstick.”

John Angus Chamberlain was born on April 16, 1927, in Rochester, Ind., the son of a fifth-generation saloonkeeper. He was raised above a meat market until he was 4, when his parents divorced. His mother, a sometime waitress, took him to Chicago, where he was left in the care of his maternal grandmother, Edna Brown Waller, whom he described as a strong, voluble presence in his life.

In his teens, he grew to love classical music but decided he didn’t have enough talent to pursue a music career. Mostly to stay out of trouble, he joined the Navy at 16 in 1943, lying about his age, and served in the Pacific and Mediterranean before returning to Chicago to study hairdressing on the G.I. Bill — an occupation he saw partly as a good way to meet women. Between shifts as a hair and makeup instructor at a modeling school, he tried to teach himself to draw but grew frustrated and enrolled in private art classes. He later entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but lasted only a year and a half because of quarrels with instructors he accused of being narrow-minded.

Through a friend, Mr. Chamberlain found Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which he attended in 1955 and 1956. It introduced him to like-minded artists, most of them poets including Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. Shortly after leaving the school he met and married Elaine Grulkowski, his second wife, and the couple had three sons. Two, Angus and Duncan, survive him, as does his fourth wife, Ms. Fairweather, and her daughters, Alexandra Fairweather and Phoebe Fairweather. Elaine Chamberlain died in 1973, and a son, Jesse, died in 1999. Two other marriages ended in divorce.

Early on, Mr. Chamberlain was drawn to the totemic welded constructions that David Smith made from old tools and machine parts. But in 1957, he had an epiphany while staying with the painter Larry Rivers in Southampton, N.Y. Using two fenders he pulled from a 1929 Ford rusting on Mr. Rivers’s property, he made a sculpture by running over the pieces repeatedly with a truck to bend them the way he wanted, then he fitted them together almost like puzzle pieces.

The sculpture, “Shortstop,” opened his eyes to the potential of pre-painted junk metal. And work like it, heavily indebted to his Abstract Expressionist mentors, attracted admirers like the influential collector Allan Stone, who described the young Mr. Chamberlain as “a gruff, hairy” character, “more like a north woodsman than a sculptor.” Many critics saw his early work as an affront. One, writing in The New York Times in 1959, described a Chamberlain work as “a construction from the wreckage of a motor car.”

Even admirers like the critic Peter Schjeldahl seemed unsettled by the apparent randomness of Mr. Chamberlain’s crushing machines. “As with a sunset or a snowstorm, you don’t know whether there’s an operating intelligence behind it all or not,” he wrote in 1969, “so you learn to accept the manifestations for themselves.” He added: “The mangle is the message.”

Mr. Chamberlain was rarely happy working for long in one place. Besides New York, he lived in New Mexico, California, Connecticut and Sarasota, Fla., where he kept a houseboat and a yacht in addition to two sprawling studios. He continued to work and sail after settling in Shelter Island (while living part-time in Manhattan). At 74, he took up the saxophone. He also made headlines in 2011 by leaving his longtime gallery, Pace, for the larger empire of the Gagosian Gallery.

His pieces — with punning, portmanteau titles like “Awesomemeatloaf,” “Schizoverbia” and “Anything Goethe” — were not usually intended to be figural. But, depending on the vantage point, they could evoke dancing or hobbled human forms, trees, flowers, boats and birds. A 1982 sculpture called “The Lineup (Dedicated to the Sarasota Police Dept.)” looked like a row of reprobates hauled in for public indecency.

In the late 1960s he switched from car parts to unpainted galvanized steel, then made pieces from resin-coated crushed paper bags. He also began using blocks of foam rubber that, when tied with cords, resulted in forms strikingly like his car-metal pieces, underscoring the seeming softness of such rigid pieces. In 1968, Mr. Chamberlain took a detour into filmmaking, the most notable result of which was the cult hit “The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez,” filmed in Mexico with Warhol regulars Taylor Mead and Ultra Violet in various states of intoxication and undress.

In 1970, the year he was given a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, he began working with heat-shaped Plexiglas and aluminum foil. But he returned to car bodies in 1974.

Mr. Chamberlain’s work is in the collections of dozens of museums, including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art and Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y.; this year an older piece sold at auction for $4.7 million, a record for his work.

Mr. Chamberlain spoke of his work with reluctance and often humility, deriding the over-intellectualizing tendencies of his questioners. “Everyone always wanted to know what it meant, you know: ‘What does it mean, jellybean?’ ” he told Julie Sylvester, adding: “Even if I knew, I could only know what I thought it meant.”

But he trusted his instincts and seemed to follow them to please himself more than anyone else. “When a sculpture is nearly done, you can put things on and you take them off and it doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “Stopping is the key; you have to know when to stop. If I feel so glad that a sculpture is here, and I don’t care who did it, then I figure it’s a good piece.”

John Chamberlain [Wikipedia]

Humanoid robots...where are they?

"Where’s Our Rosie? Why We Don’t Have Domestic Robots Yet"

What it will take to develop a multitasking, humanoid domestic robot—and whether we even really need one.

by

Keith Wagstaff

December 21st, 2011

Time

On The Jetsons, Rosie was the robot maid with a heart of silicon and the voice of an aging cocktail waitress. She did everything: cook, clean, take care of the kids. Today, a robot can help you disarm a bomb in Afghanistan, but it can’t make you an omelette.

So, where is our Rosie? Why don’t we have robots in our homes that can do the cleaning, cooking and housework that we don’t want to do? Sure there are robots that can mow your lawn, clean your pool and vacuum your floors, but nothing like the do-it-all domestic robot that helped George, Jane, Judy and Elroy go about their daily lives.

Recently Greg Shirakyan, the Microsoft Robotics developer responsible for the roaming party photographer robot, penned a fascinating blog post exploring the question “What is a household robot?” His definition: “A device that can intelligently move parts or all of itself around a home and do useful stuff” and that is “not being continuously controlled by a person, and not getting stuck.” Simple, right?

Not quite. Shirakyan points out that our homes are set up to accommodate full-grown human beings. We make minor adjustments for children and pets because we are emotionally attached them. Thus, we have two options: reconfigure our homes to accommodate appealing, useful robots or create robots advanced enough to navigate and manipulate environments made for us.

Let’s posit that our end goal is some variation of Rosie, a humanoid, multi-tasking domestic robot that takes commands through speech and visual cues. What, exactly, is holding us back?

Intelligence & Autonomy

One reason you don’t have a robot housekeeper is that robots just aren’t that smart right now. Not that they can’t perform complicated tasks, it’s just that they can’t perform them autonomously. While footage of Honda’s ASIMO pouring a fresh glass of juice is impressive, you probably don’t have time to lay out a thermos of juice and a cup on a tray every morning; if you did, you’d probably just pour yourself the juice and save the robot the trouble.

Let’s put it this way: If you had a butler and you asked him to make you a sandwich, clean your bedroom and do your laundry, you’d be pretty annoyed if you had to take all of the ingredients out of the refrigerator for him, lead him by hand to your bedroom to clean it and then separate all of the colors in your laundry basket before letting him put your clothes in the washing machine.

Make no mistake, there have been some amazing advances in robot autonomy lately. It’s just that the human standard for autonomy is pretty high—a 7-year-old learning about responsibility can take on more household chores than even the most advanced robot.

Materials

Metal! Good for strength and durability, not so good for fragile human skin and fine china. Imagine Little Tommy accidentally running into a 120 lb. aluminum robot in the hallway and you can see why homeowners would be reluctant to buy the Chore-Bot 2000. Not to mention that most robots today work in factories, where their hard grips are an asset, not a liability like they’d be in a home full of breakable eggs and wine glasses.

That’s why researchers are working to create machines out of softer materials that would leave grandma unharmed if her robot was on the fritz. Earlier I covered the research of Eduardo Torres-Jara of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who is working on a soft robotic arm with tactile sensors on its fingertips that could handle delicate objects and be manipulated by human hands, meaning you could gently pull its fingers apart if it grabbed something it wasn’t supposed to without fearing for your safety.

This also has ramifications when it comes to people accepting and even embracing a robot presence in their homes. No one wants the Terminator walking around their kitchen. But a soft, cuddly robot that you could store in your closet? Much more appealing.
Cost

Robots have to be cost-competitive with human labor if any company hopes to sell them on a large scale. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary for a housekeeper last year was $21,150. Willow Garage’s PR2, which one UC Berkeley professor programmed to fold laundry, sells to researchers for $400,000.

Let’s say in the future they could drastically improve its capabilities and keep it at the same price point. You’d still have to own the robot for nearly 20 years before you could justify its cost compared to a housekeeper’s annual wage, not counting any maintenance or updates that might be required.

The Future?

We may never have the equivalent of Rosie the Robot in our lives, both because such a robot would be incredibly complicated and expensive and because, quite frankly, we might have no need for it.

“The idea that a humanoid robot with arms would push a vacuum cleaner is an image that has set many expectations and, in some ways, has set back the industry,” says Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot. The man knows a thing or two about robots, considering the Roomba has sold more than 6 million units worldwide, making it by far the most widely adopted domestic robot ever invented.

“I get frustrated with the ‘great demo’ that has no economic value,” he says. “I am a vigorous proponent and champion of growing the robot industry. What we need to do is solve problems people are willing to pay for at a price point lower than what they were initially willing to pay. And that’s actually really, really hard.”

Robots like ASIMO and Boston Dynamics’ PETMAN look really cool but, honestly, who really needs something like that in their home? A $300 disc that can vacuum your floor by itself is pretty amazing when you stop and think about it.

The future is much more likely to be a bunch of simple, inexpensive robots performing different household tasks than a single, wisecracking robot maid that will do everything. It might not be Rosie, but look at it this way–at least you won’t have to do any housework.

Well, this might be a reason...more innterest here.

Deceased--Norman Krim

Norman Krim
June 3rd, 1913 to December 14th, 2011

"Norman Krim, Who Championed the Transistor, Dies at 98"

by

Dennis Hevesi

December 20th, 2011

The New York Times

Norman Krim, an electronics visionary who played a pivotal role in the industry’s transition from the bulky electron vacuum tube, which once lined the innards of radios and televisions, to the tiny, far more powerful transistor, died on Dec. 14 in a retirement home in Newton, Mass. He was 98.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Robert said.

Mr. Krim, who made several breakthroughs in a long career with the Raytheon Company and who had an early hand in the growth of the RadioShack chain, did not invent the transistor. (Three scientists did, in 1947, at Bell Laboratories.)

But he saw the device’s potential and persuaded his company to begin manufacturing it on a mass scale, particularly for use in miniaturized hearing aids that he had designed. Like the old tube, a transistor is a semiconductor that amplifies audio signals.

As Time magazine wrote in 1953: “This little device, a single speck of germanium, is smaller than a paper clip and works perfectly at one-tenth the power needed by the smallest vacuum tube. Today, much of Raytheon’s transistor output goes to America’s hearing aid industry.” (Germanium, a relatively rare metal, was the predecessor to silicon in transistors.)

That was just the start. “Now there are over 50 million transistors on a single computer chip, and billions of transistors are manufactured every day,” Jack Ward, curator of the online Transistor Museum, said in an interview. “Norm was the first to recognize the potential and led Raytheon to be the first major transistor manufacturer.”

Thousands of hearing-disabled people benefited from Mr. Krim’s initial use of the transistor in compact hearing aids. But not every transistor Raytheon made was suitable for them, he found.

“When transistors were first being manufactured by Raytheon on a commercial scale, there was a batch called CK722s that were too noisy for use in hearing aids,” said Harry Goldstein, an editor at IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

So Mr. Krim contacted editors at magazines like Popular Science and Radio Electronics and began marketing the CK722s to hobbyists.

“The result was that a whole generation of aspiring engineers — kids, really, working in their garages and basements — got to make all kinds of electronic projects,” Mr. Goldstein said, among them transistor radios, guitar amplifiers, code oscillators, Geiger counters and metal detectors. “A lot of them went on to become engineers.”

Mr. Ward called Mr. Krim “the father of the CK722.”

Before the transistor, Mr. Krim had already made significant contributions to the industry. In 1938 he led a Raytheon team that developed miniaturized vacuum tubes for use in battery-powered radios. He also realized that the small tubes could replace cumbersome packs that hearing-aid users had to strap onto themselves in those days.

“Zenith, Beltone, Sonotone are some of the American companies that used his improved, more affordable hearing-aid technology,” said Chet Michalak, who is writing a biography of Mr. Krim. “His devices were about the size of today’s hand-held phones.” They were also a precursor to the transistor hearing aid his team later developed.

Norman Bernard Krim was born in Manhattan on June 3, 1913, one of four children of Abraham and Ida Krim. His father owned several luncheonettes. By the age of 12, he was tinkering with the refrigerator motor in his home.

After graduating from George Washington High School at 16, he was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where in his junior year he built an “electrical brain” that, according to newspaper articles at the time, seemed to be able to make childlike choices, deciding whether it preferred beets or spinach, for example.

“He considered it a carnival act,” Mr. Michalak said.

Raytheon hired Mr. Krim after his graduation in 1934, at 50 cents an hour. By the time he left the company in 1961, he was vice president of the semiconductor divisions.

Mr. Krim’s wife of 52 years, the former Beatrice Barron, died in 1994. Beside his son Robert, he is survived by another son, Arthur, and four grandchildren. Another son, Donald, a leading film distributor, died in May.

After leaving Raytheon, Mr. Krim bought two electronics stores in Boston called RadioShack. By the time he sold the business to the Tandy Corporation two years later, it had seven stores; today the chain has about 7,300.

Mr. Krim was a marketing consultant to Raytheon and several other companies until 1997.

Transistor Museum

Wikimedia UK vs Wikimedia Foundation and, John Duns Scotus

"Wikimedia UK stonewalling effort to see documents"

by

Gregory Kohs

Examiner

A few weeks ago, a new organization identifying itself as a "charity" appeared in Great Britain. It calls itself "Wikimedia UK", and its purported purpose is to "help collect, develop and distribute freely licensed knowledge (and other educational, cultural and historic material)." While at first glance there appears to be redundancy between the organization and the San Francisco based Wikimedia Foundation, it's clear that at least one trustee of the Wikimedia UK has a somewhat "cheekier" approach to free knowledge than his more conservative brethren in California.

At the time of this writing, a British educator named Edward Buckner is rallying an effort to persuade the UK Charity Commission to take a second look at Wikimedia UK's application for non-profit, tax-exempt status. Today, we interview Mr. Buckner, who taught at the University of Bristol. He is a writer who has recently completed a translation of the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus and is now working on a book about Wikipedia. We touch base with him at home in London, to ask him about philosophy, working on Wikipedia, and why he thinks people shouldn't donate content to Wikipedia or money to the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikimedia UK.

Examiner: Edward, you have just spent four years completing a translation of and commentary on an early work by Duns Scotus, in collaboration with Jack Zupko, chair of the Philosophy department at the University of Winnipeg. Who was Duns Scotus, and why would anyone buy a book about him?

Buckner: Duns Scotus was a Franciscan philosopher and theologian who died in the early fourteenth century. I don't think many people will buy the book. If it is published, it will be published on the 'traditional model', sold at a fairly high price, mainly to university libraries, and students of medieval philosophy will get it out of the library. It's not for the general public, and you won't find it in even the largest consumer bookstores.

Examiner: That's pretty much against the whole philosophy of the Wikipedia movement, isn't it?

Buckner: It is, but it is hard to make a name in the academic world except by using the traditional model. There are signs this may be changing, but it's too late for my book. In any case, I publish other things under the free model.

Examiner: You mean in the Logic Museum?

Buckner: Yes. That's a collection of public domain medieval Latin texts, together with translations into English that I have released under a Wikipedia-style 'copyleft' license. That means anyone can publish it or use it, so long as under the same license and applying proper attribution. That's pretty much on the Wikipedia model. I'm very supportive of the free publishing model. Academic writers often don't earn anything from some of their work, so they might as well publish that sort of content free. The cost of learning should reflect the cost of teaching alone. In medieval times a university's reputation was partly based on its library, because of the high cost of a scribe copying a book. Printing, and more recently the advent of the Internet, should have changed that.

Examiner: But the Logic Museum, despite its content being in the public domain, is banned from Wikipedia isn't it?

Buckner: Correct. Due to a blacklist that was supposed to block spam, you can't make an outbound link to the Logic Museum, even though it contains hundreds of rare works, and it is the sole source anywhere in the world for many of them.

Examiner: That's because you are banned from Wikipedia, right? Why are you banned?

Buckner: More than two years ago, I accused someone of editing Wikipedia with a conflict of interest, who turned out to be an important member of their administration. In Wikipedia, that's called 'disruption', and it is a banishable offense. What a mistake that was!

Examiner: Doesn't Wikipedia have a policy about 'ignoring all rules' if it improves the encyclopedia?

Buckner: It does, but the nature of Wikipedia is that most of its administrators are amateurs, and many of them are also very young -- as young as my teenage children, often. Medieval philosophy, which was written hundreds of years ago, in fact nearly a thousand years ago, is completely unimportant and irrelevant to their lives. The administrator who blocked the link to the Museum mainly works on articles about the television show, Dr. Who. The science fiction series began in the 1960s, which for him is ancient history. He doesn't know any better. Which is a shame, because producing and distributing an encyclopedia is precisely about getting people to know better.

Examiner: And now you are campaigning against the recent charitable status of Wikimedia UK? Isn't that going to hurt Wikipedia?

Buckner: Not at all. People who donate to Wikipedia do so imagining that their money will go to the encyclopedia. You know, improving articles about bridges and Jane Austen and the UK economy and the capital of New Zealand. Even about Duns Scotus! In fact, the Wikimedia UK even laments how many unsuspecting donors make out their cheques payable to "Wikipedia".

Examiner: And the money doesn't go to that?

Buckner: Silly -- of course it doesn't. Wikipedia is written almost entirely by volunteers. They don't get paid anything at all. The Wikipedia servers cost something to run, but that is a fraction of the amount that the Wikimedia Foundation receives in donations. Removing Wikimedia UK's charitable status will not hurt Wikipedia one bit.

Examiner: So where is the Wikimedia UK money going?

Buckner: That's what I would like to know. The problem is that Wikipedia got completely taken over by a small group of people who are fanatical about 'open production' of knowledge. That's a way of working based on 'open source' software, where it is open to anyone to contribute. Most of the money you contribute to Wikipedia is going towards a sort of marketing campaign or movement to promote 'open production'. Think of Scientology, but with an Encyclopedia instead of E-meters.

Examiner: Isn't open access to knowledge a good idea, though?

Buckner: Well, if people understood exactly what they were contributing to, if they understood they were contributing to a movement, an ideology, and not necessarily the improvement of the encyclopedia project, then that's fine. As long as the Wikimedia fundraiser makes this clear to donors, that's fine. But it doesn't.

Examiner: Would people donate if this distinction were made clear?

Buckner: I'm not sure they would. The 'open model' depends on anyone being able to contribute. This may work fine for software, where you need a certain basic expertise even to get started, but I'm not sure it translates to philosophy, or economics, or any of the humanities subjects. It's a worldview that Larry Sanger calls "epistemic egalitarianism". He says that Wikimedians are offended by the idea that a specific person might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than the collective sum of everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content (of a claim) itself, not its source. That's nonsense, of course.

Examiner: The other co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, said that no one should have the last word on truth, and that in an argument between a 17-year-old and a professor who has studied the subject for 40 years, "it often happens that the 17-year-old is right, and the professor is wrong".

Buckner: Which is also nonsense. It certainly doesn't happen 'often', and I have never seen it happen at all. Even if it happened sometimes, that would hardly justify the open model. The constant fighting with people whose ignorance is in inverse proportion to their arrogance is so off-putting that it drives the more knowledgeable people from the project. I have seen this happen many times. You would have to be insane in a quite special way to want to work on Philosophy articles in Wikipedia, for example.

Examiner: But don't Wikipedians argue that their model has 'worked'? Larry Sanger launched Citizendium, the main rival to Wikipedia, and that is widely regarded as having failed. Jimmy Wales would argue that Wikipedia is, by comparison, a success.

Buckner: Larry found it hard to attract experts to Citizendium -- probably for the reasons I mentioned above. The traditional publishing model works for academics, the open one cleary does not, at least as it currently stands. As for Wikipedia, I don't believe the model has worked, at least not in the sense of their model having produced quality content of a serious encyclopedic nature. As Sanger points out, you only have to compare the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy to Wikipedia's Philosophy section. Philosophy in Wikipedia is a complete mess, and experts in economics and history have told me it is pretty much the same in their areas.

Examiner: One might say that's an elitist perspective.

Buckner: I'll echo Larry again. If it's Truth versus Equality, then as much as I love Equality, I'm on the side of Truth.

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Examiner notes that Edward Buckner has repeatedly asked the Wikimedia UK trustees to share publicly the key information that they provided the Charity Commission, the information that provided assurances that the trustees exercise some level of control over the content of Wikipedia, especially those ever-contentious biographies of living persons. Thus far, the trustees have refused Buckner's repeated requests, even though the information ultimately would have to be made available under a Freedom of Information request, which is the next step.