Politicality

At a time of looming budget cuts, advocates of government financing of technology research argue that it is an investment in the nation’s future.

by STEVE LOHR, New York Times

LUIS VON AHN, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, sold one Internet start-up to Google in 2009, and is now on to another. With the new company, Duolingo, he hopes to tap the millions of people learning languages online to create a crowdsourced engine of translation. “We want to translate the whole Web into every major language,” Mr. von Ahn says.

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Ambitious, sure, but Duolingo recently attracted $15 million of venture capital. The investors are betting on Mr. von Ahn, his idea and his growing team of 18 engineers, language experts and Web designers.

Mr. von Ahn, 33, personifies some of the essential ingredients of America’s innovation culture, when it works well. An immigrant from Guatemala, he has intelligence and entrepreneurial energy to spare. And he has received a helping hand from the federal government. Duolingo began as a university research project financed by theNational Science Foundation.

That pattern has been repeated countless times over the years. Government support plays a vital role in incubating new ideas that are harvested by the private sector, sometimes many years later, creating companies and jobs. A report published this year by the National Research Council, a government advisory group, looked at eight computing technologies, including digital communications, databases, computer architectures and artificial intelligence, tracing government-financed research to commercialization. It calculated the portion of revenue at 30 well-known corporations that could be traced back to the seed research backed by government agencies. The total was nearly $500 billion a year.

“If you take any major information technology company today, from Google to Intel to Qualcomm to Apple to Microsoft and beyond, you can trace the core technologies to the rich synergy between federally funded universities and industry research and development,” says Peter Lee, a corporate vice president of Microsoft Research. Dr. Lee headed the National Research Council committee that produced the report, titled “Continuing Innovation in Information Technology.”

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Few of us will ever forget the events that transpired in Newton, MA on Friday, December 14, 2012 and the visceral battle that ensued between pro and anti-gun forces in the days that followed.

If Republicans continue to be led by a base that denies global warming after Sandy and refuses to ban assault weapons after Sandy Hook, then the party has no future.

Excerpts from column by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NY Times

Republican politicians today have a choice: either change your base by educating and leading G.O.P. voters back to the center-right from the far right, or start a new party that is more inclusive, focused on smaller but smarter government and market-based, fact-based solutions to our biggest problems.

But if Republicans continue to be led around by, and live in fear of, a base that denies global warming after Hurricane Sandy and refuses to ban assault weapons after Sandy Hook — a base that would rather see every American’s taxes rise rather than increase taxes on millionaires — the party has no future. It can’t win with a base that is at war with math, physics, human biology, economics and common-sense gun laws all at the same time.

...Because they control the House, this radical Republican base is now holding us all back. President Obama was moving to the center in these budget negotiations. He reduced his demand for higher tax revenues to $1.2 trillion from $1.6 trillion; he upped the level at which Americans who would be hit with higher taxes to those earning $400,000 a year from $250,000; and he made his own base holler by offering to cut long-term spending by lowering the inflation adjustment index for Social Security. It seemed that with a little more Republican compromise, Obama would have met them in the middle, and we could have had a grand bargain that would put the country on a sounder fiscal trajectory and signal to the markets, the world and ourselves that we can still do big hard things together. That will have to wait. Now the best hope is some mini-, crisis-averting, Band-Aid. [MORE]