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December 17, 2009

Building small, big and fast aircraft: The power of startups

Just saw a video (see below) of the newly-built SpaceShipTwo aircraft, a plane that will take a small number of super well-off to the end of the universe as we know it, or just above the atmosphere, to be precise. It's a fascinating design, but what's much more fascinating is the enterpreneurship story behind this.

Since 2004, two small companies managed to develop two spacecraft and two carrier aircraft (jets); the first combination winning the 10M$ X-Prize in 2005, the second in the process of achieving FAA approval.

Second, take the gliders (sailplanes) that I enjoy flying. All of them are developed and built at affordable prizes by small companies such as the German companies Grob, Schempp-Hirth, or Schleicher. They are built to withstand much higher G-forces than those airliners and reach amazing efficiency and high speeds. (Great powered aircraft are similarly built by small and medium-size aviation companies such as the American Cirrus.)

Those gliders have been made from composite materials (fiberglass+gel coat) since the late 70's. I'm just mentioning this because I'm now introducing the herculanean efforts building the Boeing 787, the first composite airliner, taking the dedication of thousands of engineers and mechanics over a decade to build. The Airbus A380, the world's largest airliner, wasn't different.

Of course, the comparison is ridiculous, even in the case of the pressurized, jet-propelled space craft+carrier planes that fly faster and higher than airliners, and that are built to comparable safety standards. Is the technical challenge that different when scaling up a pressurized jet from a dozen to a few hundred passengers?

It seems clear: aircraft development doesn't scale well. I bet that very similar cases can be made for software development - compare the behemoth that is Windows (maintained by thousands of programmers at Micrsoft) to the Mac operating system that was initially developed by far fewer people at NeXT. Why is that so? It's a fascinating and unanswered question from the point of view of research into emerging collaboration in teams and of communication networks to explain the apparent loss in efficiency.

Posted by dr at 5:18 PM | Comments (0)

December 9, 2009

Are we better off without religion?

Christmas is coming up, and just in time the Guardian goes over some recent research in the social sciences asking the question: are we better off without religion?

Sociologist Gregory Paul's view is that religion is a sign of dysfunctional societies. Generally, societies with higher "popular religiosity" also fare worse when it comes to measures of community success, such as the number of jailed people, sexually transmitted diseases, corruption, and the like (Paul, 2005, 2009). The causality of this is not clear, but Paul argues that religiosity is the result rather than the cause. One should note that such correlations depend on a subjective, albeit wide-ranging Successful Societies Scale: if socio-economic factors would be weighted heavily, the most-religious country (US) would end up close to the the least-zealous societies (Sweden, Japan).

One may wonder how much of the originally intended "good" is left in the world's religions - the good that stabilized societies through more or less arbitrary rule systems. The good that kept people healthy ("no pork!") and made communities stronger ("Love thy neighbor!"). The good that allowed some preachers and some movements out of many to evolve and develop into world religions. Note Pope Benedict II's (Joseph Ratzinger's) views on liturgy, which argue that the "new" forms have made church-goers self-indulgent and ignorant of views from outside (the priest turning to the congregation, preaching in their language - his conclusion: back to the Latin mass, is, of course, ridiculous).

Christmas traditions are a good example of a combination of religious and pagan traditions that have lost their meanings. I for one am glad to avoid Santa Clauses, Christmas shopping in stores, and I greatly enjoyed my department's "non-denominational Holiday party".

Paul, Gregory S., Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies: a first look. Journal of Religion & Society. 7, 2005.

Paul, Gregory S., The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions. Evolutionary Psychology 7(3). 2009.

Posted by dr at 2:53 AM | Comments (0)