A PhD in particle physics can be a stepping stone to a career outside physics research.

One of the web’s master entrepreneurs has devised a novel way to expand his domain. Jeff Bezos explains how Amazon, already home to 59 million active customers worldwide, hopes to beguile increasing numbers of developers to use web services that the company evolved for its own operations.

Bezos’ plan involves renting out the “guts of Amazon” -- the servers and software code and networking behind the online shopping giant. He describes a trio of services. The first, Mechanical Turk, named for a 19th century chess automaton (actually run by a human) “makes it possible to encode human intelligence inside a software application,” Bezos informs us. At Amazon, Mechanical Turk employs simple software to allow individuals to “vote” on product detail pages to help eliminate duplicate images and products. Work traditionally done by an in-house unit can be performed by a distributed group of Internet users, at their own convenience and for little cost. Bezos is making this software routine available to outsiders now, for such applications as podcasting transcription.

THIS newspaper was established in 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress”. One of the chief ways in which intelligence presses forward is through innovation, which is now recognised as one of the most important contributors to economic growth. Innovation, in turn, depends on the creative individuals who dream up new ideas and turn them into reality.

The Economist recognises these talented people through our annual Innovation Awards, presented in seven fields: bioscience, computing and communications, energy and environment, social and economic innovation, business-process innovation, consumer products and a flexible “no boundaries” category. The awards were presented at a ceremony in London on November 9th by John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of The Economist. And the winners were:

• Bioscience: Marvin Caruthers, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder, for the development of automated DNA synthesis—in essence, the ability to “print out” arbitrary strands of genetic material. Dr Caruthers’s methods were licensed to Applied Biosystems, which has subsequently become one of the largest analytical and life-science instrument companies in the world. Used in research laboratories around the world, automated DNA synthesis has been essential for the advancement of such applications as chromosome mapping, genomic sequencing, and the study of interactions between DNA, RNA and proteins.

• Computing and communications: Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström of Skype, for the development of internet file-sharing and telephony using peer-to-peer technology. Messrs Friis and Zennström are famous for shaking up two industries with peer-to-peer software, which allows millions of computers to link up over the internet without the need for central co-ordination. KaZaA, launched in 2000, became the dominant means of sharing music and video files, despite attempts by the entertainment industry to shut it down. Skype, launched in 2003, lets users make free phone calls over the internet, forcing traditional telephone services to slash their prices. Skype was acquired by eBay in 2005.

• Energy and environment: Johannes Poulsen, former chief executive, Vestas Wind Systems, for the commercialisation of wind energy. In 1987 Mr Poulsen took the helm at Vestas, then a small, bankrupt Danish firm with 60 employees. By the time he retired in 2002, Vestas had 5,000 employees and a quarter of the world market for wind turbines. Under Mr Poulsen, Vestas greatly improved the efficiency of wind turbines, reducing the cost of electricity generation and making wind power more competitive with other power sources.

• No boundaries: Pierre Omidyar, founder and chairman of eBay, for the development of electronic marketplace technology and his promotion of access to markets as a tool for social change. Mr Omidyar wrote the original software for eBay in 1995, with the aim of creating an electronic marketplace accessible to any internet user. The business was profitable by 1996, and last year made a profit of $1.1 billion on revenues of $4.6 billion. People all over the world buy and sell items in over 45,000 categories. Some users make a living buying and selling on eBay. In 2005, Mr Omidyar and his wife Pam created the Omidyar Network, an investment group that promotes universal access to information, markets and opportunities.

• Social and economic innovation: Hernando de Soto, founder and president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, for the promotion of property rights and economic development. Mr de Soto has long argued that bureaucracy and the lack of formal property rights are major causes of poverty in developing countries. Red tape and the lack of legal title to property, preventing its use as collateral, make it hard for the poor to build or expand businesses. While serving as economic adviser to the Peruvian government, Mr de Soto initiated a property-titling scheme which benefited 1.2m families and legitimised nearly 400,000 firms. Similar reforms have been implemented in El Salvador, Haiti, Tanzania, and Egypt. Mr de Soto has also championed the publication of league tables to shame governments into cutting red tape.

• Business-process innovation: Sam Pitroda, chief executive of WorldTel, for pioneering India’s communications revolution. In 1987 Mr Pitroda was asked by Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, to help democratise access to telecommunications. His response was to deploy instantly-recognisable yellow telephone kiosks in every town and village. In the process, he helped to release the Indian telecoms industry from state control and opened it up to dozens of private companies, paving the way for India’s telecoms boom. Through WorldTel, he now promotes similar policies in other parts of the developing world.

• Consumer products: Nicolas Hayek, chairman of Swatch, for revitalising the Swiss watch industry. During the 1980s Switzerland’s legendary watch industry fell into decline, with exports falling by half within a decade as a result of Japanese competition. Mr Hayek’s response was to buy majority stakes in to watchmakers and merge them to create the Swatch Group. It went on to beat the Japanese at their own game, selling inexpensive plastic watches, creating the bestselling watch brand in history and becoming the largest watchmaker in the world, with a quarter of the market. Mr Hayek did not invent the Swatch, which was based on an existing design, but he saw the opportunity to turn it into a successful consumer product.

Steve Wozniak tells the tale of Apple’s early years with such illuminating details and brio that engineers (and ordinary mortals) will feel they’d actually been on the scene. While lots of books recount this story, Wozniak says many of them “got it wrong.” So he decided to set down his own version, by book and lecture.

A ham radio licensee in 6th grade, Wozniak envisioned becoming an engineer, building “radios, TVs or guidance systems.” It was a time when one “couldn’t hope to see a computer, and never own one because it cost as much as a house.”

Wozniak put himself through U.C. Berkeley by working in electronics firms, including Hewlett Packard. All the while he was designing primitive computers. Then came the fateful day when he met Steve Jobs, with whom he had an immediate affinity. “A lot of my life is driven by how you should live, your goals and values. A lot came from the pop music of the day, and we had similar tastes, like Bob Dylan.” Both Wozniak and Jobs were fascinated by the early video games, like Pong, which had simple displays and controls. Wozniak stumbled on to the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, and was inspired by the idea of typing and seeing words appear on a video screen. ‘I said, Wow, I can design my own computer and build it almost for free.”

Wozniak devised a microprocessor with some memory and created the first “local computer.” Jobs set out to sell the invention. The Apple 1 was born, and in record time, they had an order for 100 computers, at $666.66 each. The famous garage was a staging area where Wozniak tested the machines for defects. He notes about this time, “You can do things amazingly fast when you don’t have any lawyers.”

In 1977, Wozniak’s new and improved Apple 2 added basic programming language, as well as color and graphics, sound and paddles. This was the machine that convinced the world that computers didn’t just belong in big companies, but in everyone’s homes. “It was the biggest eureka moment of my life,” Wozniak says, when he realized that with software on a computer “you could do in half an hour what would take you a lifetime in hardware.” Whether with games, spreadsheet calculations or recipes, his computer had seized the imagination of an entire nation.

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/400/

Emanuel Derman, director of the Columbia University financial engineering program, and Head of Risk at Prisma Capital Partners, will speak at the Academy on October 19 about his unusual career path, from theoretical physics to Wall Street, where he became known for co-developing the Black-Derman-Toy interest-rate model at Goldman Sachs. Derman's book, My Life As a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, published in 2004, became a New York Times bestseller.

www.nyas.org

A few years ago, the government of Singapore summoned Mitch Resnick to help crack a problem. Although thousands of schoolchildren in that country were designing and building robots using the Lego Mindstorm kits Resnick helped invent, Singapore businesses complained that when these same students hit the workplace, they lacked creativity and initiative. Resnick discovered, in conversations with teachers, that robot building was an after-school activity, and classroom time was devoted to math and science drills.

This is Resnick’s issue in a nutshell, he explains. “The way technology is getting out there is limited.” If the “richest learning experience happens when people are actively designing, experimenting and exploring,” then why can’t we extend this approach into the school curriculum? Computers and technology should not be used merely to impart information, but to engage kids to design, create and invent – much as little kids do with blocks and paint in kindergarten.

Resnick demonstrates the creations of children who participated in special engineering and software designing courses. He had posed the challenge of inventing something that could be useful to them in everyday life. The results included such unique items as an odometer for roller blades, a diary security system, an automatic toilet paper dispenser and a mobile, wearable juke box. Resnick has launched Computer Clubhouses in locations around the world where kids often have no access to computers. He believes that “success for an individual or a country as a whole will depend on acting creatively.”

mit.edu