Monday, April 29, 2002

But then, all this blather about HP is just about money. Robert X. Cringely's son, Chase, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Now Bob wants to do something for the one in 2,000 babies who will otherwise succumb to SIDS every year. So here is what I propose. It is my plan to devote much of my resources and a good portion of the rest of my life to combating SIDS. I can't cure it, but I think I can help babies to evade it. The trick is to first develop a very cheap, very accurate, recording medical sensor. I imagine a $10 device that can be strapped or stuck or otherwise attached to, 100,000 little babies, measuring and recording respiration, heartbeat, body temperature, and anything else we can think of. At least 50 of those babies will die of SIDS, but through the use of these monitors, we'll gather more SIDS data than has ever been gathered before. And rather than follow the traditional scientific method of first stating a hypothesis that we prove or disprove, I want the data to speak for itself. I want to get the best rocket scientists on Wall Street to apply their neural nets and other tools to divining from all this data a real leading indicator for SIDS. It can be done, and once it is done, we can reprogram those same monitors into devices that actually CAN predict SIDS and help to prevent it, either through detecting babies most at risk or by literally predicting the onset of SIDS in time to evade it. That's my plan, but I can't do it by myself. I need your help. I need hardware engineers, software engineers, I need people experienced with biomedical sensors and sifting mountains of data. I need folks who make tiny processors and RAM chips. I need people who know more about this stuff than I do. Yet they must also be people who are willing to believe that there is an answer, since the medical establishment seems to have given up. Nobody will make money from this, but everybody will benefit. Whatever we learn will be given to the world for free I can't think of a better memorial. 11:23:44 PM     In writing about the more general topic of how corporate America goes about building value, Doc Searls bemoans the fate of Hewlett-Packard today. I guess I'm just a sentimental fool of an ex-engineer. When I worked at Lockheed shooting rockets into the sky, one of the fun extracurricular activities many of us enjoyed was playing with the latest Hewlett-Packard calculators. Soon after I graduated from college, the HP-35 came out. Somewhat later, I spent the agonizing price of $325 for an HP-45. But when HP introduced the HP-41, I essentially sent them my credit card. Programmability. Expansion modules. A magnetic card reader. An external printer. Extra memory. Function modules. What a kick. OK, OK, this is nerd humor, but I loved the fact that HP engineers were milling about in Corvallis making all this great stuff. The machine was rugged, the keys felt just right, and the whole thing functioned just the way I liked. When things went wrong, they fixed it. And when the design turned out to be inadequate, they fixed that, too. I felt that I was using a product designed by engineers for engineers. Marketing only got involved later to con the poor schnooks who didn't already know about the HP-41 into buying the thing. As Doc constantly points out, there was a conversation between the builders and the customers, and the result was damn near brilliant. And now what do we get? A merger with Compaq. Financial wizards in charge. The HP way tossed into the nearest trash container. Disappointing, really disappointing. 11:04:52 PM     So much for economics being the dismal science. 10:59:53 PM

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