Chapter 20 Chapter 7 Necessary knowledge (2)

After the dot-com bubble burst, enrollment at the college began to drop sharply.Li Qi, the former dean of Hewlett-Packard's Chief Technology Museum.Rich DeMillo (Rich DeMillo) pointed out: "At the time, everyone was reading about a lot of jobs being lost to India and China. The first concern of parents was, 'If all the programming work is outsourced abroad, what will happen to my children after graduation? What for?'” So DeMilo and Associate Dean Mori Bean.Merrick Furst (Merrick Furst, who was brought in from Berkeley's International Institute of Computer Science) began to visit celebrities in the business world and ask them two simple questions: what kind of talents the company hopes to hire, and how can computer experts be used to bring benefits to the company? to value?They visited CNN's headquarters in Atlanta and discovered that the network had connected vast amounts of digital and analog content.Clearly, if a computer science graduate can manage all of this content from a computer and find various ways to use it (such as TV, cell phone, video iPod or website), it will be easy for these graduates who can use technology to tell stories find a job.

Recognizing all this, in 2004 DeMiro and First re-proposed the relevant requirements of computer science and summarized them into 9 "lines".Each line combines computing skills with a skill from another field to form a synthesis of knowledge - which is what really creates value. "'Line' means that curriculum design is no longer vertical, and it is no longer the goal to teach students a set of fixed skills and knowledge," In his course introduction, First explains: "The 'line' represents the horizontal direction, and its goal is to allow students to accumulate the broad range of skills and learning experiences they will need to survive in an age of competing concepts. .'Line' provides an intuitive, flexible and mutually reinforcing curriculum that allows students to carve their own unique future."

The nine lines are computers and intelligence, computers and real-time solutions (embodiment), computers and Internet technology, computers and platforms, computers and information, computers and people, computers and media, computers and modeling, and computer foundations.Today, to get a degree in Computing from The George Institute of Technology, you have to get two streams. Take the "Computers and Media" track, for example, which requires students to take several courses in computer science, communication studies, collaboration, and literature.The line teaches students "how technology can be used to tell stories and create experiences for people," Foster said.In class, you'll be exposed to topics ranging from computer graphics to Hamlet, human sensibility to interactive fiction engines, and more.So, for example, if you want to be a top game designer, this is where you start.

The line of "Computer and Human" equips students with a certain theoretical and computer foundation, helping them understand various human-centered design, architecture and evaluation systems.Students who choose the "Computers and Humans" track may also take "Computers and Avatars," which allows them to study the interaction between humans and robots.There are almost as many permutations and combinations between these nine lines as there are coffee types at Starbucks. In an article introducing the project, DeMiro writes: "Suppose a sophomore George Institute of Technology graduate student in computing is interested in computer security issues. He might put the 'computers and information' line (learning data storage , recovery, decoding and transmission) combined with the 'computer and human' line (knowing how people use technology and learning to experiment with people)...he will carefully prepare a valuable computer identity, design , invent and build secure computer systems that allow people to safely manage their information." De Miro also said that whether it is a single line or a combination of lines, the key is to provide a set of technical models and academic qualifications Foundations that allow graduates to create value beyond the narrow model - a technology model that would certainly be valuable in the flat-world emerging market model.

DeMiro adds that 25 years ago computer science was simple, "There were clear lines between the big categories -- hardware, software and computing programs -- and you could get a job if you knew any of them. You just had to do it well. The job you are best at can be a big success. You can be responsible for hardware, you can program system software, or focus on applied computing programs. Today, 25 years later, there is no clear line between hardware, software and computing programs. Now there are business processes, change management and ERP. These are horizontal relationships and are constantly changing.

If you were an educator, how would you respond to these changes?Among the requirements for students, some remain the same: the ability to tell stories, develop intelligent products and create networks.These requirements are constant.But what's different now is that you have to bring all these requirements together horizontally.Our 9 'lines' are such a reasonable aggregation.That's why you need to manage the entire university in this way.The very idea of ​​separating the departments is foolish.You guys really need to change the whole approach, it's not something that can be fixed with tinkering. “The George Tech model is a nod to the flat world, recognizing that the flat world has provided the tools for horizontal collaboration of all kinds. It is therefore best for schools to ensure that these notions of work and collaboration are integrated into the educational process.

"That integration has to be in every curriculum," Foster said. "It can't be one curriculum, or we'll never have a competitive population as a high percentage of the population." America Still Wins If these are the jobs and pathways into the emerging middle class, is America as a whole creating a good environment?In theory, we already have the ability to provide these jobs and develop the kinds of talent that a flat world needs.Yes, we do have this capability. Let's jot down this list.First, we have a relatively flexible, deregulated free market economy, with a lot of experimentation and competition between states and universities -- like George Tech.The flexibility of the U.S. economy is a valuable asset, especially as it must constantly adjust to change in order to remain competitive.So far, the United States has bowed to neither the economic protectionists (protecting domestic jobs) nor the national security protectionists (repelling foreign labor).As Senator Jim of South Carolina.Jim DeMint

As I was told, one of the things we can't do is try to "protect the road to prosperity." It is vital that we maintain this openness and flexibility.The willingness to tear things down and start over in American culture gives us a lot of advantages in a flat world, because in a flat world we have to throw out the old and replace the new with more frequency in order to drive innovation and growth.In the past we transitioned from the agricultural age to the industrial age, and then from the industrial age to the service industry age.Now we need to move to the next stage - delivering the service to every corner of the world.Every transition in the past has been painful in its own way, but in those times we have all weathered it faster and more effectively than any other major economy because of our openness and flexibility, where we let markets regulate themselves The market has indeed played a regulating role, although it has also caused pain to many people.This transition to a flat world will cause more pain because it will likely touch more white-collar workers.However, now is by no means the time to stop the transition.

"You (Americans) have everything you need to move from the old middle class to the new middle class," Nandan of Infosys."If you get through this transition first, you will be the winners ... (However), if people panic and start implementing protectionist measures, you will lose.It's a matter of faith - you have to believe it will happen. “Under the umbrella of flexibility, the United States has countless institutional advantages. First, the United States has many universities with scientific research capabilities, which provide a steady stream of experimental results, innovations and scientific breakthroughs—from mathematics, biology, physics to chemistry." Our university system is the best," Bill Gates said, "We provide research funds to universities, which is a very magical thing.High IQ people come together, we let them innovate and turn their innovations into products.We implement a risk incentive mechanism.Our university system is competitive and adventurous.They can experiment with different approaches.More than 100 universities have contributed to the development of robotics, but each accuses the others of being wrong.This speaks to the chaotic nature of the American university system, which nonetheless remains a gigantic engine of innovation of all kinds in the world.

The American university system will continue to prosper, funded by federal tax dollars, plus philanthropic donations... We will not stop growing unless we make the dumbest mistakes.One smart way is that we can use the university education system to increase absolute wealth faster. "New inventions such as the web browser, MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), ultra-fast computers, global positioning technology, space detection equipment, and fiber-optic cables are just some of the basic university research projects. The Economics Department of the Bank of Boston has done a project called "Ma Provincial Institute of Technology: The Impact of Innovation" research. One conclusion is that MIT graduates have created 4,000 companies, created 1.1 million jobs worldwide, and achieved sales of $232 billion.

The United States is not unique in that it has the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or that its graduates drive economic growth and innovation. What is unique in the United States is that every state in the United States has a university. "There are 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States," said Allen, president of the Institute of International Education. Allan E. Goodman "There are only 7,768 institutions of higher learning in the rest of the world. There are about 130 universities in the state of California alone. Only 14 countries in the world have more universities than California." Let's take Oklahoma example.People usually don't think of this state when it comes to technological development, but now it has also established the state's Science and Technology Promotion Center (OCAST). The center describes its mission on its website as follows: "In order to effectively participate in the new economic competition, Russia The state of Oklahoma must continue to grow a well-educated population, build a university research base that cooperates with each other and each has its own expertise, and cultivate a good business environment for large and small cutting-edge companies... OCAST promotes the establishment of a university-enterprise technology center, which The center may cover many schools and enterprises, and will eventually drive the breeding of new industries, the production of new products, and the application of new technologies.” According to the Association of University Technology Administrators, American universities received a total of US$1.3 billion in patent income in 2003. In addition to having unique innovation-enabling machines such as universities, public and private laboratories, and retailers, the United States also has the most regulated and efficient capital markets in the world for turning new ideas into products and services.dick.Dick Foster, a director at McKinsey & Company and the author of two books on innovation, told me: "In America, we have an 'industrial policy'—it's called a stock exchange, whether it's The New York Stock Exchange is still Nasdaq.” Foster said that this is where venture capital is pooled and allocated to new ideas or growth companies, and there is no better and more efficient capital market in the world than the US capital market . New products and innovations are easily funded by venture capital, and this is an important factor in why the United States can benefit the most from a flat-world platform.why?Because a new round of huge breakthroughs in technology is rarely done by traditional companies. The man who invented the radio did not invent the television.CBS didn't start CNN. Lexis/Nexis didn't start Google. But letting venture capitalists and capitalists take the risk on the next Google, CNN, or other untested innovation means that those who want to get the most out of the flat world Interest, people who really understand the value of innovation in new products and forms of entertainment can be satisfied by this. The good order of the US capital market is mainly due to strict supervision.Here, the interests of minority shareholders can also be well protected.Of course, there is also fraud, deviance, and corruption in our capital markets, which are common phenomena when there is a lot of risk money in the market.The uniqueness of the U.S. capital markets does not prevent the Enron incident from happening, the fact is that these scandals did happen.What is unique is that when these scandals happen, they are usually exposed by the SEC or the financial media and corrected.What makes America unique is not Enron but New York Attorney General Elliott.Eliot Spitzer, who worked tirelessly to "clean up" the securities industry and corporate boards.Apart from New York, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo, this type of capital market is hard to find anywhere else in the world."China, India, and other Asian countries will only be successful in innovation if they have successful capital markets, and they will only have successful capital markets if they have legal mechanisms that protect the interests of minority shareholders in risky situations," Foster said. . . The United States has been experimenting in the economic field for centuries, and we are the lucky beneficiaries, and we are the experiments that have worked.” These are the core secrets of American sauce, but there are others that we should cherish and cultivate.Sometimes, in order to better appreciate these precious things, we need to exchange ideas with outsiders, such as Vivi from Wipro India.Paul (Vive Paul). "I'm going to add three more points to your list," He said to me, "One is the openness of American society." We often forget this characteristic of the United States. "Do what you say - create - go bankrupt - start over" is a very common thing in the United States.This social state is unparalleled in the world, and our openness is a great asset and attracts many foreign friends, where there are various restrictions. The second point, Paul said, is "the strength of intellectual property protection in the United States," which further encourages new perspectives.The mechanics of a flat world can incentivize the development of new products or programs because they can reach global scale in an instant.However, if you are the originator of new ideas, you naturally want intellectual property protection. "No country respects and protects intellectual property rights better than the United States," Paul said.As a result, many innovators want to come to the United States to work and register intellectual property. In addition, the US has some of the most flexible labor laws in the world.The easier it is to fire employees from a sunset industry, the easier it will be to recruit employees from a rising industry.That's a huge asset, especially when you compare the American labor market with the heavily regulated German labor market.The German government has strict restrictions on hiring and firing.The United States can quickly invest capital and labor where there are the most opportunities, and quickly reallocate resources when the initial investment has not made much profit. These flexibility are necessary in a flat world. The US "sauce" has another secret: it has the world's largest domestic consumer market and the largest number of "first-timers".This means that if you are introducing a new product, technology or service, you must not leave out the big market of the United States.All this means that the United States will have a very stable source of employment. If you wanted to sum up the static effect of all these institutions, cultural patterns, business practices, and legal systems, it would boil down to one word: trust.They create and enable a high level of trust, the most important characteristic of an open society.In many ways, trust is a product of all the ingredients in the American sauce. Dover, founder of LRN Corporation.“We are a nation of high trust because we agree to be bound by values ​​and principles reflected in our institutions and laws — those that are more authoritative and enduring than any individual,” said Dov Seidman. LRN is a firm that provides ethics and governance advice to global corporations, which I discuss in Chapter 11.These models and institutions make everything predictable, which in turn leads to trust – trust that innovation will be protected, trust in currency stability, trust in our legal system.All of this drives innovation, Seidman argues. why?Because in societies with a high level of trust, such as the United States, people know they can rely on certain frameworks of rules and principles to govern their personal and business lives. "If you're jumping from sand and someone else is jumping from hardwood," Seidman asked, "who's going to jump higher? The one who's jumping from hardwood, of course. Trust is that hardwood.The predictability it gives you allows you to jump higher...no risk without trust, no innovation without risk...if you want more people to take the necessary risks that come with innovation, you need more Much trust. "Societies with low levels of trust will not produce lasting innovation. In a flat world, more and more value is created and complex problems are increasingly solved, and a society with a high degree of trust will be an advantage. "In a collaborative world, having full trust is critical," Seidman added, “Because the more people trust each other or their leaders, the more likely they are to work well together.” The United States has indeed become one of the important meeting points of the globe.Here, all kinds of people mingle, learn to trust each other and form horizontal friendships and alliances.An Indian student who was educated at the University of Oklahoma got his first job in a software company in Oklahoma City after graduation, and this relationship of trust and understanding was really important for future cooperation. important, even if one day he returns to work in his own country.Nowhere is this more evident than when Yale University outsourced its research to China. Richard, president of Yale University.Levine explained to me that Yale University has two major research centers in China, one at Peking University and the other at Fudan University.“Much of this inter-institutional partnership doesn’t come from administrative orders from the university, but rather from longstanding friendships between scholars and individual scientists,” Levine said. How did the cooperative relationship between Yale University and Fudan University come into being?Levin said, first of all, it was because Xu Tian, ​​a professor at Yale, was closely related to the two institutions.He completed his undergraduate studies at Fudan University, and then received his Ph.D. at Yale. “Professor Xu’s five collaborators at Fudan were all Yale-trained,” Levin explained. One of them was a graduate student at Yale with Professor Xu, one was a visiting scholar in the laboratory of Professor Xu’s colleague at Yale, and the other came to Yale as an exchange student and returned to Dana for a Ph.D. , and two are doing postdoctoral research in Professor Xu's laboratory.Similarly, the Plant Molecular Genetics and Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center jointly established by Peking University and Yale University has a similar story. Professor Xu is a top expert in genetics and has been awarded by the National Institutes of Health and Howard Hughes The foundation receives special funds for research on the relationship between genetics and cancer and other neurodegenerative diseases.This kind of research needs a lot of experimental support, and needs to study gene mutations in animals."In order to find specific genes that cause certain diseases, you need to test a lot of genes, you need to do a lot of experiments. Naturally, the increase in manpower is a big advantage." So Yale actually created the Fudan-Yale Biomedicine The research center outsourced the experimental work to Fudan University.Each university covers its own labor and research costs, so there is no exchange of funds between them.But China is mainly engaged in basic technical work, which requires a large number of technicians and experimental animals. The cost of this research is much lower than that of Yale.Yale is mainly engaged in high-end work such as data analysis.Through cooperation, Fudan teachers, students and technicians can get access to high-end research, and Yale can also get support from large-scale experiments.If Yale tried to build the same scale of research as Fudan in New Haven (where the school is located), the cost would be prohibitively high.Moreover, a project like this will only have 30 technicians in the US support lab, but there will be 150 in Fudan. "The payoff goes both ways," Levine said. "What our experimenters got was a dramatic increase in productivity, and the Chinese trained their graduate students, and their young teaching staff became collaborators with our professors. The latter are leaders in this field. This cooperation has increased human capital for China and brought innovation to Yale." Postgraduate students from the two universities can visit each other, and the relationship established will undoubtedly pave the way for more cooperation in the future.At the same time, Levine added that Yale also made a lot of legal preparations during the cooperation process to ensure that Yale can obtain the intellectual property rights in it. "Science has no borders," Levin said, "this type of international division of labor is very reasonable." He said that Yale University insists that the working conditions of the Chinese laboratory are world-class, and the cooperation between the two parties will also help improve The quality of various equipment in China. "The living conditions of the laboratory animals also met American standards," "This is not a sweatshop for rats," Levine said. If you put all of the above together, you have America's mystical "sauce," a mixture of institutions, laws, cultural patterns that create trust, innovation, and the ways we can keep adding dynamism and Partnerships that improve living standards.There's nothing Americans can't cope with in a flat world, as long as we roll up our sleeves to educate our young the right way and keep enriching our sauce.Are we doing this? That's what the next two chapters are about, but let me give you a hint: the answer is no.