Technology

Problems in Higher Education

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Over at alternet, a liberal/progessive news source, there is an article about the demise of higher education. This author immediately set off my loony-toons indicator with her “big business is secretly subverting higher education” conspiracy, but even beyond that I think most of her points can be directly argued against.  The problems she brings up (if they are problems at all) cannot simply be fixed by 1. remembering that higher education is about expanding our minds and 2. getting more funding for our schools (but no funding from corporations!)  However, she does make a few reasonable observations.

beer-pong
We’re just here to expand our minds.

1. Defunding education:

“For example, in the University of Washington school system, state funding for schools decreased as a percentage of total public education budgets from 82% in 1989 to 51% in 2011.” That’s a loss of more than a third of its public funding.” (Lone quotation was original to text). Just because the percentage of the budget is decreased, does not mean the amount of money going to schools has decreased. For instance, if the funding for public education doubled from 1989 to 2011 (this is hypothetical), then that means funding to schools actually increased over that time period by 25%. (Statistics!!) But we should also seriously question where public education funds are going, if not to schools. I don’t believe Washington state, a known liberal state, is defunding its schools for “corporatism” if it is defunding its schools at all, it’s probably just wasting that extra money, which is on to the next point.

“Newfield explains that much of the motive behind conservative advocacy for defunding of public education is racial, pro-corporate and anti-protest in nature.” This is a huge jump to conclusions. How many elite and liberal schools have to force racial diversity on their campuses? Higher education is, in general, an elite white man’s game (or with current statistics, white woman’s) and to claim that it’s different in that regard to corporate America, or that it’s the fault of conservative forces outside the institution, is ridiculous. To immediately claim a conservative racist reason may be easy, but it has no justification.

humanities-vs-Science

Also, it’s offensive that this author tries to claim that only humanities “train[s] and expand[s] the mind”. Nothing teaches you to think like mathematics and logic, which are also practical in the job market. As nice as it is to think about art, philosophy, and gender studies, those aren’t actually useful skills to most jobs. Trumpeting liberal arts education over any practical education is basically saying “higher education isn’t for getting a job, it’s for learning about culture.” That’s all well and good unless you’re in a suffering job market at graduation time. [ref]I have only attended liberal arts universities (except one very long semester at UM) and specifically went to a Humanities specialty high school program because I knew I would major in the math in college, and I wanted to be well-rounded. I like Humanities, but for most people it can never be more than a hobby. And it’s usually a rich person’s hobby.[/ref] And to deny the important ways science and mathematics teaches you to think is hurting our students, her acclaimed era of liberal arts education in the 50s and 60s would have required much more in science and math than universities require today.

2. Deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s).

Oh, this gets me. Why are there a surplus of PhDs? Because people get PhDs in things like philosophy, art, and gender studies. Good luck finding a job in gender studies outside of lobbying. You know why there are PhDs, even in STEM, that will work for adjunct pay (and please note, adjuncts get paid less than graduate students because they have no unions)? Because people get PhDs and then refuse to work outside of academia [ref]This is my goal, so I feel for them.[/ref]  (or have degrees in subjects where they can’t possibly get a job outside of academia).There is a limit to the number of professors we can have at our universities. And at most universities with graduate programs, the professors only have to teach 1 class a semester! We could solve the problem of adjunct pay, by getting rid of adjuncts all together and making professors teach at least 2 classes a semester. But then there would be even fewer jobs in academia for all those PhDs who refuse to get other jobs. It’s not a pretty picture, but corporatism/universities aren’t doing this on their own.

3. Move in a managerial/administrative class that takes over governance of the university.

“The money wasn’t saved [by hiring adjuncts], because it was simply re-allocated to administrative salaries, coach salaries and outrageous university president salaries.” OK, I’m totally with this lady here, and may I also add outrageous housing, athletic, and dining facilities. This point is spot on. This is a huge problem not just in higher education, but also in K-12. The problem is more complex though, it seems the more we pour into schools, the more bloated our administrations get. Consider, again a hypothetical, the example of doubling our school budgets. If we have 50% to administration and the rest to teaching, and then we double our budgets, but give our administration 62.5%, we have increased our teaching budgets by 50% (even though their share now is only 37.5% of the total), but those administrators are still making out even better. I don’t know if this is exactly how it happens, but more funding can easily lead to this. Frugality whenever it comes to non-teaching school projects and administration is the solution. Conservatives believe bloated administration is a reason to cut funding, but unfortunately the administration decides where those cuts actually take place None of the funding “problems” can begin to be fixed without first substantially fixing administration internally.

4. Move in corporate culture and corporate money.

“When corporate money floods the universities, corporate values replace academic values. As we said before, humanities get defunded and the business school gets tons of money.” I do find business school to be particularly insidious, but that’s probably because I’m an introvert in computer science who doesn’t understand the need to go to school for schmoozing. I digress. I’m not really sure the problem with businesses funding business schools? Business schools cost a lot (due to supply and demand in the market) and if corporate America takes up part of the tab, doesn’t that help with funding our schools – less to take away from the Arts and Sciences? But then the author moves directly into her point that anything that is non-Humanities is not mind-expanding and not important to higher education, so businesses should only be funding humanities?

“Serious issues of ethics begin to develop when corporate money begins to make donations and form partnerships with science departments – where that money buys influence regarding not only the kinds of research being done but the outcomes of that research.” Sure, this is a problem, if you view it in the most sinister way possible. But guess what, if corporate money isn’t funding our science research, the government is. Let’s not pretend that government has no self- or political-interests.  I’m sure I could find a large swath of college-educated people across the country who would shudder at the idea of George W. Bush once upon a time being in charge of our university science research.[ref]Lots of research in the sciences continues to be funded by both the government and scary places like Google, Intel, and Microsoft. (sarcasm) [/ref] And again,this corporate money helps the funding problem. And all the research coming out of America’s universities (in the sciences) is highly peer-reviewed, even by people who are funded by other corporate or government interests.

5. Destroy the students.

graduate

“Instead, more and more universities have core curriculum which dictates a large portion of the course of study, in which the majority of classes are administrative-designed “common syllabi” courses, taught by an army of underpaid, part-time faculty in a model that more closely resembles a factory or the industrial kitchen of a fast-food restaurant than an institution of higher learning.” My liberal arts university had a lot of core curriculum. In fact, as a math major, it was because of this core curriculum that I got a “mind-expanding” experience in philosophy, literature, poetry, sociology, history, theatre, and dance. But even if we only consider big state schools, I’m really not going to cry over here about all the sociology majors who also have to take a science and calculus, or, heaven forbid, statistics. Yes, engineering departments may churn out a bunch of over-processed engineer-bots, but those kids are all getting jobs (I know, according to the author, getting a job is not the point. Unfortunately I did not, and I believe most other students did not (by the author’s next point, even), grow up in a family rich enough to allow me the freedom to not consider my job opportunities upon graduation).

“You make college so insanely unaffordable that only the wealthiest students from the wealthiest of families can afford to go to the school debt-free.” Government subsidized loans are a form of government funding. It may put most of the burden on the student, but as someone who has unsubsidized loans, those interest rates can be substantial. I read a comment on an article somewhere that “if the government was giving out $500 loans for a loaf a bread, bread would start to cost $500.” And this all hearkens back to administrations building huge housing, athletic, dining, and lounge facilities. If college was just about class and a place to study, sleep, and keep our stuff, college could be a lot cheaper. With the loans and student expectations feeding off each other, it becomes a downward cycle of unaffordability.

donations

So, yes, there are problems in bloated administration and student costs at universities. But this isn’t some kind of corporate take down of navel-gazing education. Administration is a problem with colleges, as organizations themselves, not because of conservative or corporate America. And the burden of cost is partially on all Americans – for raising kids who want the best and prettiest dorm rooms (private bathrooms, please), exercise facilities, dining experiences, and football teams to go along with expanding their minds. [ref]I’d really like to see a study of current college students ranking the importance of partying/getting drunk versus expanding their minds while at college.[/ref] However, more funding will not directly fix these problems, and may only make the problems worse. With good peer review, outside funding is not going to warp our research institutions. And telling kids that they should consider job prospects (and that PhDs in some subjects are nothing more than mind-expanding hobbies) will not pervert a good liberal arts institution.

An Objective Net Neutrality Overview

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2014-09-10 Net Neutrality

I found this blog post on net neutrality to be a pretty good, unbiased overview of the debate. I’m actually somewhat undecided on the issue. The cons are pretty obvious. If ISPs are allowed to create different tiers for different kinds of Internet traffic, this will end up being a threat to the kind of innovation that has so far characterized the Internet and made all of our lives better. But there are also some potential upsides to a tiered approach to bandwidth because not all packets[ref]Internet traffic is broken up into discrete chunks called packets[/ref] are equal. As a consumer, I would be interested in treating packets for VOIP and gaming traffic as higher-priority (lower-latency) than packets for video streaming (high latency). You can’t really do that under the current system.

I think it’s possible that something more nuanced than complete and total net neutrality (all packets are treated identically) might be in order, but I’m not sure I trust regulators to be able to come up with reasonable, simple rules that give consumers more flexibility without introducing easy ways for people to game the system. I support net neutrality for now, but only as a kind of “least bad” alternative. I just can’t get all excited about the ideology of the argument.

Police Tool Used to Steal Nude Pics from iCloud

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2014-09-09 Formal Informal Institutions and the Future

I’m sure everyone has heard of the scandal / sexual crime[ref]The way the story is labeled is a story unto itself. I prefer crime to scandal for obvious reasons: the victims didn’t do anything wrong.[/ref] in which hackers grabbed nude photos of celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton and then posted them online. What isn’t being reported, but is being covered by Wired, is that a key tool used in the hack is actually a piece of software designed for use by law enforcement agencies.

On the web forum Anon-IB, one of the most popular anonymous image boards for posting stolen nude selfies, hackers openly discuss using a piece of software called EPPB or Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker to download their victims’ data from iCloud backups. That software is sold by Moscow-based forensics firm Elcomsoft and intended for government agency customers. In combination with iCloud credentials obtained with iBrute, the password-cracking software for iCloud released on Github over the weekend, EPPB lets anyone impersonate a victim’s iPhone and download its full backup rather than the more limited data accessible on iCloud.com. And as of Tuesday, it was still being used to steal revealing photos and post them on Anon-IB’s forum.

There isn’t any suggestion that it’s actually law enforcement officers who are doing the hacking, of course, because it turns out the software is just not that hard to come by:

Elcomsoft’s program doesn’t require proof of law enforcement or other government credentials. It costs as much as $399, but bootleg copies are freely available on bittorrent sites. And the software’s marketing language sounds practically tailor-made for Anon-IB’s rippers.

“All that’s needed to access online backups stored in the cloud service are the original user’s credentials including Apple ID…accompanied with the corresponding password,” the company’s website reads. “Data can be accessed without the consent of knowledge of the device owner, making Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker an ideal solution for law enforcement and intelligence organizations.”

So obviously the main take away is that your data isn’t safe. Unless you’re going to invest the time to become a full-time computer expert, you may as well just assume it’s not safe. This has all kinds of implications for the conversation about rape culture and sexual violence in our society: do we tell women it’s a bad idea to have nude photos of themselves (supply side) and pass laws against “revenge porn” (demand side)? Or is addressing the supply side at all a form of victim-blaming? I’m not going to debate that here.

Instead, here’s something totally different: this story shows one of the subtle but profound ways in which future society is going to be markedly different from past societies. One of the defining characteristics of modernity is the supremacy of formal institutions and of those formal institutions the most powerful is the nation-state. The reason for this supremacy is the wide power-differential between formal institutions (like governments) and informal instutions (like a mob of angry citizens). As recently as the 18th century, a bunch of angry colonials[ref]That would be us Americans[/ref] could stand against a global empire or a bunch of angry Parisians could topple their own government. In the centuries since then, the level of power available to a group of citizens (informal institution) vs. a state (formal institution) has diminished drastically. Governments have fighter jets and aircraft carriers. Insurgents can make car bombs, sure, but there’s a reason this kind of warfare is known as asymetric: only governments have the resources to field military-grade hardware these days. That is a big part of why we see formal institutions as being so dominant in our society. But it’s changing.

The software put out by Elcomsoft is government-grade, but it’s easily available to consumers and, for that matter, Elcomsoft is not exactly Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. Meaning that small companies and even individuals can put together top-flight software. Another example is TrueCrypt, an open-source harddrive encryption utility whose future is in jeopardy today, some believe, precisely because despite being free and open-source it was military-grade encryption for the every man.

In a lot of ways, we’re returning to the era when a bunch of farmers and their muskets were at least in the same ballpark as professional armies: all they needed was to steal a few canons to make a war of it. Or, going back farther, to the days when peasants and farming or hunting implements quite literally were an army in terms of training and hardware. A world where informal institutions like organized crime, militias, political movements, and the like can actually pose a threat to nation-states is not a world we’ve never seen before. But it might be a world we never thought we’d see again, at least not in the developed parts of the globe. But the power of formal institutions is on the wane.

 

Wired: NASA validates ‘impossible’ space drive

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2014-08-26 nasa-space-drive-emdrive.si

So there are two really cool sci-fi propulsion technologies that folks at NASA  are working on these days. The first, which I’ve written about before, is the  Alcubierre drive. That’s a highly theoretical concept for traveling faster than light that made headlines in 2012 and again this year.[ref]I’m not betting I’ll see one in my lifetime, but it’s still exciting.[/ref] Now, I’d say one sci-fi propulsion announcement per year is pretty good, but back in July there was a flurry of articles about a completely separate, exotic propulsion possibility.

As Wired wrote:

Nasa is a major player in space science, so when a team from the agency this week presents evidence that “impossible” microwave thrusters seem to work, something strange is definitely going on. Either the results are completely wrong, or Nasa has confirmed a major breakthrough in space propulsion.

Now, this propulsion technology, called the EmDrive or  RF resonant cavity thruster, isn’t faster-than-light but it’s still really exciting. Here’s why: standard propulsion theory says that in order to make your spaceship go one way, you need to make something else go the other way. This is called conservation of momentum, and in practice it means that rocketships have to carry their fuel with them. This is a debilitating limitation on the range and speed of spacecraft because when you load up extra fuel to go faster, you also make the ship heavier. So the more fuel you add the less benefit you get from adding more fuel.

There are two hypothetical ways to get around this limitation. The first is a Bussard ramjet. It is basically gigantic stellaar bulldozer (thousands of kilometers wide) that collects sparse hydrogen atoms from space as the ship moves, then compresses them and shoots them out the back. In other words: it gathers fuel as it goes. It’s a cool idea, but it only works for very large ships traveling very fast. And it doesn’t work at all yet, given the technology we have today.

The EmDrive works, well, no one actually knows why it works although there are theories. The point is, you put electric power in (but no fuel) and you get propulsion out. And it works. People have been claiming it works forever and NASA got tired of saying it probably didn’t so they tested it. And it did. Not a lot, mind you, but working at all is more than anyone expected. So, what can we expect?

If the technology can be figured out and refined, it would make satellites a lot cheaper for starters: they wouldn’t need to carry fuel (extra weight) and would be able to move around almost indefinitely (increasing their useful lifespan). But why stop there? “Say hello to deep-space missions and distant world exploration at a fraction of the cost and at 100 times the speed,” says RT.com. Without any need for fuel, travel around the solar system would be much, much faster (lighter ships accelerate and slow more easily) and even trips to other, nearby worlds might become feasible in relatively short (multi-year) periods.

Now that is exciting!

A Working Hard Drive In Minecraft

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2014-08-20 Minecraft Hard Drive

That picture, from this Imgur thread, is a working hard disk drive created entirely inside the game Minecraft. Minecraft, for those of you who live underneath a rock, is sort of like Legos but for video games: you can use cubes from a variety of different materials to build whatever you want in the game. In addition to the standard cubes, there are some rudimentary machines (like railroad carts and pistons) that you can power using something called redstone, which basically works like electricity.

Well, if you can build electric circuits then you can build a computer. So someone did. Well, the hard drive anyway.

2014-08-20 Minecraft Hard Drive 2

By using a whole bunch of pistons and some basic logic circuits made out of redstone, they created a fully-working, one kilobyte hard disk drive.[ref]Modern hard drive capacity is measured in gigabytes, which are millions of kilobytes. So it’s not a very large-capacity hard drive.[/ref] There’s a control room that allows you to specify a location in the hard drive and then either read the data (see what is stored there) or write new data to that location. It even has indicator lights to let the operator know when the drive is busy and when it is available for new operations.

It’s a little bit past what my kids are ready for–although I did teach them to build redstone-powered roller coasters already–but it just goes to show how truly creative people can be when you give them the right tools. And Minecraft is a pretty nifty tool. As one commenter put it:

one day we will build a full computer in minecraft, then play minecraft on it.

In principle, there’s no reason why someone couldn’t do that. Give it another year or two, and we probably really will have have a fully-functioning Minecraft version of the Apple II or a Babbage difference engine.

“The Cooperative Advantage” of International Trade

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Charles Kenney of the Center for Global Development has an excellent article in the Summer 2014 issue of the Breakthrough Journal (published by the Breakthrough Institute) on how international trade and innovation actually benefit everyone involved. He begins with a little history on the 19th-century Guano Islands Act, by which Americans were authorized to seize unoccupied islands filled with dry bat or bird poop. This was

at a time when guano was the world’s best fertilizer and source of saltpeter, a vital ingredient of gunpowder. Around 100 islands were claimed by the United States under the law, including Midway. And it wasn’t just the United States that scrambled for control of guano deposits: Peru, Spain, Bolivia, and Chile fought wars over them. That might have seemed reasonable at the time: everyone was desperate for the same source of nitrogen fertilizer. But in 1909, Fritz Haber developed a method of producing ammonia from nitrogen in the air, enabling chemists to manufacture fertilizer on an industrial scale. This new technology, the Haber process, provided the world with a less smelly and more widely replicable way to meet our nitrogen needs, slashing the strategic value of poop-covered real estate. Nonetheless, the Guano Islands Act remains on the books, representing a way of thinking about international relations that is as anachronistic as it is enduring: the idea that countries must compete for a set amount of resources, land, or wealth.

This fear-based approach to international relations fuels much of the isolationism and protectionism we see today. But Kenney argues that “the increasing success of emerging markets, in part the result of their adopting ideas and institutions pioneered by industrial economies, is binding the world’s countries together into ever closer relationships of mutual benefit.”

After reviewing the evidence, he concludes,

All of this suggests that we need to develop a new view of the international economy as a positive-sum game (to borrow from Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf), one that acknowledges that advances in wealth, technology, or wellbeing in one part of the world are likely to enhance rather than hurt prospects for progress elsewhere. Seeing the planet today through the decayed eyes of Malthus and Machiavelli — and framing engagement with developing countries as zero-sum — simply does not make sense in a non-rival, globally integrated world.

In our positive-sum world, cosmopolitanism and compassion increasingly align with self-interest. This is a far nicer situation than one in which the two conflict, and it is surely a leading reason to hope that the world will keep on becoming a better place to live. It’s time to shift our thinking about Asia, Africa, and Latin America, emphasizing cooperation and mutual gain rather than competition and fear. Thinking of the developing world’s growth in the 21st century as primarily a threat makes about as much sense as trying to run a modern empire on bird poop.

Check it out.

A History of Air Conditioning

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Popular Mechanics has a fun timeline of air conditioning.  Given that it is the middle of summer and I live in Texas, I can’t imagine living without A/C. It is sometimes easy to forget that the first home-based air conditioning unit was installed for the first time 100 years ago “in the Minneapolis mansion of Charles Gates” and was “approximately 7 feet high, 6 feet wide, 20 feet long and possibly never used because no one ever lived in the house.” In 1970, only 36% of U.S. households had air conditioning. This percentage rose to 68% by 1993 and 87% by 2009 (this includes 81.6% of poor households). It also takes less energy in homes today, dropping to under 50% of U.S. home energy use. And to think no one before 1914 had one. 

So, enjoy your A/C along with an extra dose of gratitude.

G. I. Joe: Devil Eyes

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My favorite part of the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is when the mage, Mr. Norrell, is recruited as part of the war effort against Napoleon. The plan is to terrify Napoleon by troubling him with nightmares. The plan fails because the bookish old antiquarian is useless at imagining horrors. The worst he can come up with is a captain of dragoons hiding in Napoleon’s wardrobe.

Truth, however, is stranger than fiction.

As part of the effort to rid Bin Laden of a support base, the CIA commissioned a demonic action figure of Bin Laden. Unsuspecting parents in, say, Karachi, would buy their children an innocent looking Bin Laden toy, and after bringing it home the action figure would react to the heat, its original face being replaced by a demonic, red one. To make things even better, this mix between Get Smart and Team America was designed by Donald Levine, one of the creators of G.I. Joe. He designed the toy, and secretly manufactured it in China. Thus Habsboro’s role in the War against Terror. I personally can’t picture anyone being spooked by this toy, not even in regions were belief in devils, demons, and jinns is widespread, and the CIA seems to agree. They shelved the toy, but one source says that hundreds of toys actually made their way to Pakistan.

Who knows, there might be hope for a collector’s item after all.

Reason.com: Video Game Nation

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The libertarian website Reason.com has a special collection of articles and videos on video games coinciding with the June 2014 issue of their magazine. I’ve never been a huge gamer, mainly because I wasn’t allowed to have a video game system growing up. But I’ve always loved them when I had the chance to play. I especially became interested in their impact on people after reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter and Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. I even recently bought Liel Leibovitz’s God in the Machine: Video Games as Spiritual Pursuit. I don’t see them as the “waste of time” that I was often told they were.

Reason‘s collection looks at the interaction of gaming and society from various angles. Check it out.

The Future is Now: Solar Freakin’ Roadways!

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2014-05-23 Solar Roadways

This is without doubt the most exciting kickstarter-style project I have ever in my life seen. The concept is simple, but the results are far-reaching and profound. Ready for the concept? Here it is: build all of our roads out of interlocking hexagonal solar panels. Hey look, there’s a video!

So there’s a little more to it than that, obviously. First: yes, the panels are strong enough for use as roadways. Second: they generate a lot of power. The estimate in the video is that they could generate 3x our entire national energy usage. Third: they are more than just solar panels. They also include heating elements to keep roadways clear during winter, LED panels for safety (and fun, when used on playgrounds or driveways, etc.), and come with conduits designed to allow buried power and telecommunications cable on one hand, and handle water run-off on the other.

One thing the video doesn’t mention, that it should, is the possibility of using these roadways to make self-driving cars infinitely easier and safer. The historical debate for self-driving cars has always been smart roads vs. smart cars. Smart roads are a lot easier in terms of technology, but require vast investment. But if we’re replacing all our roads anyway, then there’s no reason not to network them and make the network available to your smart car. Then you’d get an exact, real-time map of all the roads that would take some of the strain off of smart cars. (They would still need to be smart, but now you’ve got redundancy and have made their job easier.)

Obviously there are concerns. The issue of cost is not fully addressed. Neither is the issue of maintenance. There are a lot caveats and exceptions to consider, such as handling bridges and tunnels. Some parts are just not necessarily going to work that well. Replacing pained lane-markers with LEDs sounds awesome… but will they be readily visible in the middle of the day? And generating 3x the required power supply is great… except that it’s all generated during the day. The same issue that has always plagued solar power still applies: storage. Then there are the political considerations. Are global power suppliers (everything from nuclear to fossil fuels to other alternatives) going to just twiddle their thumbs while their market literally disappears? And generating enough power for all our cars to run off of the electricity from the roadways is great, but we’d actually need to all transition to electric cars first, which means phasing out hundreds of millions of cars currently in existence.

AND YET! And yet this idea, over the long run, feels like it has the potential to really change our world in a fundamental way for the better. It’s the kind of technological advance that I can see people taking for granted in the future, never realizing how much immeasurably better everyone’s lives have become by something that would be taken for granted not long after being implemented precisely because of how much everyone would depend on it every day. For me, it seems like it would be up there with, I don’t know, running water or electricity, or the interstate highway system. The kinds of things we don’t really appreciate, even though they define our modern world.

Maybe the current iteration of the tech doesn’t address all these problems, but I can’t help but feel that we’re close.[ref]Example: maybe LEDs don’t work under bright, daylight conditions. So why not use e-ink instead?[/ref] And that this would be the kind of massive public project that I would love, love to support even as a conservative. Go support the IndieGoGo campaign now!

EDIT: The campaign has 8 days left. They  have raised over $400,000, but their goal is $1,000,000. The money will be used for moving from prototype to production, primarily by hiring additional engineers. I think it’s a worthy cause, but I’d like to know more about the short-term business model. Seems like selling to early-adopters who want to use the material to pave their driveways would be awesome, then moving up to commercial installations as parking lots to improve / prove the technology works. Replacing our national roadway system seems like the final phase, not the next step.