Teachers Are Not The Enemy!

By Keith McDowell

Innovation! It’s the dominant pathway to more jobs, economic prosperity, and wealth generation for Americans, but it’s also a hard taskmaster requiring a steady pipeline of inquiring and prepared minds, ready and able to create the next wave of innovation at the frontier.

And it’s not a happening guaranteed to occur spontaneously and of its own accord at a level sufficient to optimally drive the growth of American industry. It takes a sustained societal investment. It takes a trained and educated workforce. It takes scientists, engineers, inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs, risk takers, venture capitalists, English majors, writers, and a host of other inspired people. And at the core, it takes teachers!

Where would we all be in our lives without those dedicated teachers who worked tirelessly for long hours and rose to the challenge of shaping and molding us into a better person?

I will never forget the endless and terrifying drumming of the rules of grammar into me by my tenth grade English teacher, Mrs. Highfill. Or the excitement and explosiveness of chemistry as taught by Rachel Roberts. Or the competent and efficient unveiling of physics by Mrs. Dockery. Or the incomparable Flossie Shaw’s algebra class. Or Betty Welch, Mrs. Holder, Louise Hunter, and the many other teachers too numerous to name who “made my day” as a teenager. I remember them all! They were my friends and my mentors.

So when did these paragons of society and the ultimate force behind innovation suddenly become the enemy? Who decided that we as a nation should redefine one of the fundamental strengths of America and turn the best of us into THEM? And why would anyone be so stupid?

Unfortunately, it’s the oldest and most often repeated mistake of humankind   It’s the game of power and control played by a few over the many under the guise of principled dogma and founded on the delusion that exploitation and plunder of the many can be sustained indefinitely. But as the Rev. Al Sharpton is fond of saying, “A lot of things were acceptable – until we stopped accepting it.”

So what does it mean for America when we turn the principle of a balanced budget, one that we all agree with, into a plan for austerity, low taxes, and little or no government in order to eliminate those who would disagree with us or vote against us in an election – whether members of a teacher’s union, those who believe in gay rights and gay marriage, those who believe in equal pay for equal work, or even those who believe in the rights of gun owners?

For the teaching profession, it means lower pay, fewer benefits, and doing more with less. It means using teachers until they have nothing else to give and then casting them aside at retirement. After all, why should tax payers front the bill for the retirement of public teachers goes the argument? It’s the same old self-centered and greedy storyline of “you’re on your own, buddy!” And who among us truly believes that the best and brightest will become teachers under these conditions?

But it’s not just the teachers themselves that will be impacted by the draconian austerity measures being served up to America these days. It’s the entire infrastructure of our modern education system that will be put at risk including the following potential outcomes:

• Larger number of students per teacher.
• No fine arts, music, or other extra-curricular activities – except football in Texas.
• Fewer essential supplies and older, out-of-date, well-used textbooks.
• Reduced maintenance and repair or upgrade of physical facilities.
• Less usage of expensive high technology tools and information technology.
• Lack of exposure to cutting edge knowledge.

And the list goes on. Is this the right formula for teaching the next generation of innovators?

Even worse, it’s not just the impact of budget austerity that should concern us, but also austerity in both the content and the manner in which teachers teach. On the curriculum side of the equation, the extremists and right-wing conservatives want a scripted and dogmatic curriculum that conforms to their rigid notions of truth, even if contrary to the facts. It’s a cookie cutter version of education guaranteed to produce obesity of the brain with fat and lazy minds, not the lean and agile minds with the necessary analytic skills required for innovation. Conservatism as a doctrine and practice is fine, if that’s what one comes to believe and accept, but it can’t be force-fed to our young unless we want stultification as the end result.

Lest you think counterfactual and anti-science based curricula are a thing of the past, let’s review a few recent events. In Texas, we have the State Board of Education continuing in its attempt to insert intelligent design into our textbooks as a scientific theory equal to the theory of evolution. How is that going to work for young Texans who want to pursue innovations in the fields of health and bio-technology where evolution reigns supreme and knowledge of the nanoscale and molecular biology are essential?

What about women’s health and, most especially, how we deal with sex education in our classrooms? Come to a Texas classroom and learn all about abstinence as the singular solution to practicing safe sex and the failure of condoms as a prophylactic. That’s right! Condoms don’t work in Texas. Thank goodness for Gail Collins who has uncovered some of the more bizarre and antiquated notions about sex being taught as truth in Texas.

And it’s not just in Texas! In my birth state of North Carolina, the Legislature is considering a bill to limit planning for the expected rise of the ocean levels due to global warming. Maybe, we should also outlaw gravity while we’re at it! It might help with our nation’s obesity problem. Folks, ignorance is the bane of innovation.

And how would you like being a well-educated teacher standing in front of a classroom of eager minds knowing full well that learning is as much a process of discovery and independent thinking as it is a process of knowledge accumulation. Good luck to you on that one and woe unto any teacher who challenges pupils to think and analyze. You’ll be on your own if modern conservatism has its way!

Making teachers the enemy is nothing more than a cynical ploy by a few who want to exploit fear and ignorance of the facts and use sloganeering – “union busting” being a prime example and “anti-abortion” another – to pursue their own selfish and personal goals. Don’t be fooled by any of this nonsense. Teachers are not the enemy! Instead, they should be nurtured and respected for they are the very heart and soul of our future as a nation of innovators.

Do We Have the Moxie?

By Keith McDowell

America in decline – it’s the message of our time broadcast daily by cable news pundits and re-enforced by a dysfunctional Congress, a polarized electorate, an unstable economy, and a barrage of negative campaign ads courtesy of Citizens United. And in the midst of the continuing sluggish rate of job growth and a recent drop in market indices, it was with some trepidation that I decided to turn off the television, prop up my feet, and singularly bore myself to death for a day or two by reading the ultimate soporific tome:  The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States, compliments of the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Economic Council, January 2012.

Commissioned by the COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 and reviewed by a brand new USDoC Innovation Advisory Board (IAC) of fifteen members, I can’t say that the lengthy report lightened my spirits, but it nonetheless serves as a well-written and reasonably quick read of our Nation’s status at the 10,000 to 30,000-foot level and the steps being taken to “startup America.” Sadly, I’m likely to be one of the few people ever to read the document.

The essential theme or premise of the report from my perspective – it’s up to you to check me out by also reading the report – is as follows: government must invest for the “public good” in the three pillars of innovation in order to cover under-investment by the private sector and to generate competitive strength as a nation through the resulting growth of private-sector  jobs – especially in manufacturing – while “ensuring that both established firms and entrepreneurs in the private sector have the best possible environment in which to innovate.”  The three pillars of innovation are research, education, and infrastructure.

Each pillar of innovation along with the state of manufacturing is dissected in a separate chapter based on a network concept of the innovation ecosystem as displayed in the following figure which is reproduced from the report.

While each chapter and the report as a whole provide an excellent review of underlying statistics and data – often painting a rather gloomy picture for the current trend lines, the issue of evaluation metrics once again arises with both proxy metrics, such as the number of patents and research publications, and economic accounting, such as the size of the labor force and number of jobs, serving as the primary measures.

Beginning with research and noting that innovation is driven by the R&D process, the report emphasizes that government investment over many decades was undertaken without commercial applications in mind and for the “public good” – especially for basic research since it usually has no direct profit incentive to drive investment by the private sector. My own personal “grade” for the research pillar is an A-minus headed for a B-plus as I’ve documented in other articles.

The education pillar deserves a grade of “B” from my perspective, not as bad as often claimed by media pundits, but headed down due to a failure of government support for education and a switch to state-assisted instead of state-supported, not to mention the anti-government stand of the Tea Party movement and its negative effects on education. The DoC report focuses specifically on the STEM issue as an exemplar of the bigger story in education. While an adequate survey of the situation, I personally continue to be unconvinced that the so-called shortfall of STEM workers is of the magnitude portrayed by many. I’m happy to be convinced otherwise, but hard data seems to point to a different conclusion as I’ve described elsewhere.

In terms of the infrastructure pillar, everyone agrees that America gets a grade of D-minus! Although the information technology sector which includes fiber, cable modems, satellites, cell phone towers, and the like is doing better than other sectors, we are nonetheless behind the curve on wireless, cloud computing, and access to open innovation – to name a few critical areas. And what about the need for a “smart grid” for the transmission of electricity and a movement toward clean energy systems? If anything, America’s grid systems are in significant decay with bridges, sewer, and water systems getting an “F” from me and others. As noted by the report, “our society has affirmed repeatedly that we would like all of our citizens to have access to certain technologies” meaning principally telephone, electricity, roadways, and now high-speed Internet, but that could be changing in the current political climate.

Without investment by both the government and the private sector in the three pillars of innovation, America is in trouble since “Innovation is the key driver of competitiveness, wage and job growth, and long term economic growth.” And that means we need a healthy manufacturing sector propelled by a new thrust in advanced manufacturing innovations including advanced technology products. The Obama Administration’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership is a good start in that direction.

But competitiveness defined as a “set of institutions, policies, and factors that determine level of productivity of a country” requires much from us. At the national level, we must balance protecting intellectual property and its transfer against the competing element of accelerating commercialization into the marketplace. The America Invents Act of 2011 is a step forward and new experiment for the nation in that regard. At the local and regional level, research universities must serve as the anchor for co-located industry, start-up companies, business incubators, entrepreneurs in residence, “proof-of-concept” centers with funding, innovation centers, and communities of innovation all connected and bound through public-private partnerships collaborating in a regional innovation cluster.

Nothing on the global scale required for America to compete happens overnight and it can take years to recognize a return on the investment, even if the return for government is in the form of the “public good.” But government must invest and the planning laid out by the Department of Commerce report is a very positive step. The question of the day for us is simple: do we have the moxie to get this done? 

ToeMayToe, ToeMahToe - It's All Ketchup to Me!

By Keith McDowell

Let’s see, should I go straight to the knife and dig away in the bottle like some country bumpkin, or should I turn the bottle over on its lid on the table and await the inevitable effect of gravity? I could display a Type A personality by pounding on the heel of the bottle, or better, a Type B by tilting and gently tapping on the neck while engaging my dinner partner in scintillating conversation, sure to last for several minutes. But then who has ketchup with French cuisine? Julia Child would be appalled.

Fortunately, such acts of feigned sophistication designed to cloak abject frustration may soon become a thing of the past; that is, if we believe the engineers at MIT. Of course, seeing is believing and like most of you over the Memorial Day weekend, I chowed down on my ketchup-coated hot dog and watched with fascination the endlessly repeated video-clip of ketchup sliding effortlessly from the ketchup bottle. Dear God, I thought. It’s the end of an era as I munched away and hummed Paul Simon’s tune Slip Slidin’ Away.

It’s called LiquiGlide. Designed by Dave Smith, an engineer in the MIT laboratory of the

Kripa Varanasi Research Group, LiquiGlide is a revolutionary, super-slippery coating likely to become a disruptive technology and innovation. And even better, it’s FDA approved. Let’s hope it doesn’t slide away into oblivion like the Facebook IPO.

LiquiGlide is by no means the first non-stick coating to be invented. Do you remember Teflon? Teflon was discovered accidentally in 1938 by Roy Plunkett while working at Kinetic Chemicals. Subsequently in 1954, the French engineer Marc Grégoire used Teflon to create a non-stick pan that entered the US market in 1961 as “The Happy Pan” – never “happy” for those husbands who stupidly used a metallic spatula while burning their fried eggs when their wife was away. And have you noticed that we are back to the French and food?

Of course, in the Twenty-first century we’ve moved past simple Teflon-coated pans into the age of stoneware and Orgreenic pans. If the television and Internet commercials are to be believed, you don’t even need to spray them with PAM! Shucks! I like my daily dose of synthetic grease, reputed to be olive oil. What better way to tantalize my taste buds while clogging my arteries.

And for the mountaineers and extreme sports enthusiasts among us, who can forget the flowdown technology from Teflon known as Gore-Tex. Even better, the concept of “non-stick” or low-friction material has entered the world of competitive swimming. Led in many ways by Lance Armstrong and his desire to achieve every ounce of competitive advantage from both low technology – shaving the hair off his body - and high technology – cycling in a wind tunnel, the effects of friction on swimmers has led the swimsuit maker Speedo to invent flex skin and FASTSKIN3 based on the nano-level structure of shark or fish skins. Sadly, the jock-strap version of a Speedo swimsuit really should be outlawed for wear by some men. Where are the sharks when you need them? And, as always, rock and roll lyrics were there first as The Cadillacs crooned:

Well now, they often call me Speedo

‘Cause I don’t believe in wastin’ time.

And for the less fortunate husbands among us whose wives have bionic hearing, able to hear every squeaky wheel and door hinge within a radius of one mile, we have WD-40, yet another innovative product that ranks right there with squeeze-tube graphite.

Humor aside, friction and wear is a major and costly issue for our modern society, whether to get the ketchup out of the bottle, reduce the wear and tear on all forms of machinery, or permit gas-guzzling automobiles to use less fuel as they push through the air and roll on the pavement. It has been reported that “The annual cost of friction and wear-related energy and material losses is estimated to be over $700 billion - - 5% to 7% of the United States’ $14 trillion gross national product.” Banning friction and wear would be a great GOP issue for the coming election … if only Mother Nature would cooperate!

Even the business world has taken note of “Saving Energy by Fighting Friction”. Of course, they were mostly concerned with “cheeks burning for a piddling payoff” after sucking on a straw to drink one’s favorite milkshake. Hmm, wait a minute! What happens if we marry LiquiGlide to straws? Folks, you heard this idea here first from me, but don’t blame the messenger for the ease with which you consume those extra – but tasty – calories.

Yikes! Now I’m hungry. It’s time to finish off those hot dog buns for lunch before they grow stale. Darn, I’ll have to get that !&%#@ ketchup out of the bottle!

Another Day, Another Time

By Keith McDowell

Private Miles P. Morgan of Company G of the Fifth North Carolina Infantry turned right from the Mummasburg Road and entered Forney’s field of fresh Timothy grass in perfect step with his fellow soldiers. From the neighboring hillside, the oblique movement of Iverson’s Brigade presented quite a spectacle to the Southern sharpshooters as nearly 1,400 men from the brigade’s four regiments marched in perfect alignment in sixteen columns, four columns to each regiment with each regiment led by its color bearers. On any other day, the precision of their movement would have brought forth cheers from the onlookers. But it wasn’t just any other day. It was July 1, 1863, and Iverson’s Brigade was marching south toward Gettysburg and battle.

As Private Morgan entered the field, he felt fit as a fiddle after spending several days encamped at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, enjoying plenty of rest and a variety of nourishing meals. The previous day’s march to Heidlersberg had been merely a warm-up for his muscular, but wiry frame. That morning in the pre-dawn hours, a brief rain shower had cooled the air and made for a pleasant morning march toward Gettysburg.

Arriving at Oak Hill approximately a mile north of Gettysburg at noon, the regiment had waited for several hours, as was the fate of soldiers, while the temperature rose into the high eighties and the air turned sultry. The orders to march south were a welcome relief to Miles and his companions as they had grown tied of doing nothing and were happy to be on the move again, even into battle.

As the clock ticked past 3 P.M., Miles Morgan reveled in the smell of the Timothy grass, admired the quality of the farmland under his feet, slightly shifted the musket on his right shoulder, and marched forward with an inborn feeling of pride in his regiment and his fellow soldiers. Suddenly, an entire brigade of Yankees rose in unison from behind a stone wall on the eastern and southern boundaries of Forney’s field and poured a thunderous fusillade into Iverson’s Brigade. It took less than a second for over a thousand Minié balls to strike the marching columns. Private Miles P. Morgan died instantly. In the ensuing hour of combat on the killing field, over 800 Confederates were either killed, wounded, or listed as missing in action. Following the battle, a soldier from an artillery unit reported seeing nearly seventy North Carolinians lying dead and dressed in a perfect row where they had fallen.

Private Miles P. Morgan was my great-great grandfather.

A yeoman farmer from Rowan County, North Carolina, Miles P. Morgan was the grandson of Nathan Morgan, a Revolutionary War soldier who twice fought against Lord Cornwallis as a member of the North Carolina militia. In 1858, Miles married Camilla Stoner, a granddaughter of Michael Stoner and a soldier who fought for three years in the German Regiment of the Continental Army before moving to Rowan County. By any measure, Miles and his extended family were American patriots who helped to create the United States of America. So what forces caused him to march to his death on that July day in a futile attempt to sustain the Confederate States of America and to leave behind a widow and a two-year old son, my great grandfather?

The story of Private Miles P. Morgan and his death was repeated over 600,000 times in families from both the old South and the old North as the American Civil War consumed the male population with brutal savagery and cold efficiency. And forgotten by many, it was a war in which technology and innovations outpaced tactics and the strategies employed for centuries in the wars of Europe. With a range of several hundred yards, the newly invented rifled musket in combination with the Minié ball provided defenders an ability to kill and maim long before an attacking formation of massed soldiers could overrun fortifications, even given the time it took to reload the musket with a ramrod. And a Minié ball could penetrate as many as three bodies before being spent. Bones were shattered and split when hit by a Minié ball leading to amputation as the only viable treatment that could save a life from the ravages of infection.

But it wasn’t just weaponry that affected the outcome of the Civil War. It was the rapid growth of the network of railroad lines, especially in the North, to move and supply troops. It was the invention of the telegraph and the ability to sent messages over long distances quickly. And it was the leading edge of the industrial revolution, manufacturing, and the modern factory worker – all centered and located in the North.

The Civil War was the apotheosis of a polarized America with slavery, states rights, and the plantation aristocracy on one side and abolitionists, unionists, and tariffs on the other, just to name a few of the contributing factors and not forgetting the movement toward women’s rights and the rights of factory workers. Of course, slavery was the dominant issue and was the underlying driving force for many of the other putative issues.

And we must also not forget that the Civil War followed on the heels of the recession or panic of 1857, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 from the Supreme Court, and what many would describe as the dysfunctional Congress of the 1850s where Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina nearly clubbed Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts to death in 1856 with his cane for taking offense at something he said. Does all this sound vaguely familiar?

In the second decade of the Twenty-first century, many would argue that we have abortion as the polarizing issue with a seasoning of gay rights to complicate the story. It’s the left versus the right or the liberal versus the conservative, depending on your perspective. And we’ve just experienced a major recession in the midst of a totally dysfunctional Congress – not to mention that we have our first black president. No one has been caned yet, but we’ve certainly been “hermanated” and we’re currently enduring the aftereffects of the decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United on our electoral process.

Have we as a country learned nothing? Are we doomed to repeat history? Are we headed for another catharsis equivalent to the Civil war?

As we celebrate Memorial Day this weekend, I encourage everyone to remember that its original purpose was to honor Union soldiers who died in the Civil War, although Southerners quickly extended it to their own dead. And let us also remember the lessons learned from that tumultuous period as we deal with polarization in our own day and time.

While sadly it has become politically incorrect these days to speak of Confederate soldiers, ancestor or not, I salute my great-great grandfather for his courage as a soldier and honor him on this Memorial Day. But I also repudiate the abomination of slavery and racism that were at the core of the Southern “lost cause.” We only diminish ourselves when we seek to withhold equal rights under law from others or seek to belittle or “cane” those who would disagree with us, or hold a different worldview, or haven’t fared as well as other citizens of our great country. That is the ultimate lesson to be remembered on this Memorial Day.

Shown in the picture is Private Charles Washington Stoner of Company D of the Twenty-third Regiment of NC Infantry, another great-great grandfather, who survived the massacre of Iverson’s Brigade. My step great-great grandfather and second husband of Camilla Stoner Morgan, First Sergeant Daniel Cress Basinger, was wounded in the stomach at Forney’s field, but survived to fight until his capture at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. Nathan Morgan, great grandson of the Revolutionary War soldier, was seriously wounded in the hip on Forney’s field, but survived to fight another day and surrender with General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House.

Tip the Innovators!

By Keith McDowell

You know it’s a slow news day when credit default swaps, leveraging, and the loss of $2 billion by JP Morgan are replaced by the headline: “delayed-choice entanglement swapping (DCES) will determine our past based on our future.” No, DCES is not the latest gimmick on Wall Street to take our money and destroy wealth or a new fad to confuse the already complicated dating-marriage rituals, the prominent issue of gay marriage notwithstanding. DCES is a new phenomenon discovered by physicists as part of the older story of quantum mechanical measurement theory.

The simplified storyline goes something like this: Party Boy sends out invitations to a party to three unconnected people: Alice, Bob, and Victor. Alice and Bob open their invitations at the same time and decide whether or not to go to the party independent of each other. Victor the procrastinator waits until the final moment before picking up the envelope. Will he open it or not and, if so, what will be his decision about going to the party or not? Believe it or not – I hope you are following all these “knotty” choices, in the quantum mechanical world of entangled photons, his delayed choices affect the earlier decisions of Alice and Bob and exactly who shows up at the party … or not. In other words, future events influence the past and affect one’s perception of what is reality. Or as George Strait famously warbled: “The who I was before I was your used to be.”

Confused? You should be! It’s rather like being given the homework assignment in your high school English class to diagram or parse the following Rick Perry quote:

Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of — against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it — was before — he was before the social programs from the standpoint of — he was for standing up for Roe v. Wade before he was against first …

Flip flopping aside, waitors – garçons for the rich effete among us – have long understood the DCES phenomena. It has to do with “reading” the patron at first glance and entangling one’s level of service and customer satisfaction in anticipation of the size of the gratuity. And just like quantum mechanics, it’s a game of probabilities played by some with exquisite skill. Yikes! Is DCES really just another manifestation of the self-fulfilling prophecy?

And, of course, psychologists have also entered the fray. Leonard Mlodinow in his new book, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior would have us believe that if we change our perception, we change our reality. It’s amusing to see psychology and physics coming together in common cause, but then Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist by profession. Nonetheless, the concept of “perception becomes reality” is yet another slippery conundrum made whole by modern research. But then one must not discount the U.S. Army jumping the gun with their former slogan: “Be all you can be.”

And what does any of this have to do with innovation or commercializing university research? Who knows, but it’s safe to say that our unconscious mind, entangled or not, will not produce the next Facebook – is it’s stock really worth the IPO-expected asking price or is that just a figment of my imagination soon to become reality?

So what conclusion should we draw from the world of DCES and entangled minds and  the effect of delayed choices on our reality? I say, tip the innovators! They will make the future become what it was before it used to be.

The Misadventures of the Mad Scientist

By Keith McDowell

It was a different time, a different age. It was the 1950s and the birth of rock and roll, “ducktail” haircuts, rebels without a cause, beatniks, mutually assured destruction, fallout shelters, ICBMs, Eisenhower, “Atoms for Peace,” the International Geophysical Year, the launch of Sputnik, and most important of all, the introduction of the beach bikini as immortalized by the song: Itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini. It was a time of great change and the explosion of the American middle-class culture, steeped in images of cowboy swagger and puerile rebellion, but immersed in a protestant work-ethic and helmed in by religious dogma.

Even better from my perspective, young children received for Christmas their Chemcraft chemistry set made by the Porter Chemical Co. in Hagerstown, Maryland, and began their personal journey into the world of science through chemistry. I still possess the manual “Chemcraft Magic” that gives detailed descriptions on how to conduct a magic show while turning water into wine. And one of my prized possessions is the Bryan Valence Blocks box with all its contents that helped me learn about valency long before my high school chemistry course. What can I say? Some of us are easily entertained.

In addition to my chemistry set, I quickly discovered that local drugstores would sell me large bottles of potassium nitrate (Saltpeter), sulfur, and powdered charcoal having no idea that these are the primary ingredients for gunpowder. It was the heyday of unfettered exploration and the mad young scientist.

And as might be expected, my basement laboratory soon became a scene for many adventures and misadventures as the neighborhood boys, my brother, and I worked hard to create the perfect solid fuel for our homemade rockets, many of which blew up, causing consternation and worries about setting the local field on fire. Somehow, we could never get the right tubing to encase the fuel and our rockets were hopelessly unbalanced aerodynamically - not to mention the time we spent days filing on an aluminum rod to get aluminum powder, only to have a friend ignite it, singe his eyebrows, and nearly blind himself from the flash. We laughed for days about that adventure and the image of him running from the basement.

Of course, producing high quality ethanol from blackberry mash was trivial when one has a nice glass condenser to build a distillation apparatus. I'll never forget the long hike back and forth to the blackberry briar patch on the far side of what is now business 85 in High Point, North Carolina, and the tortuous exercise of extracting the wild berries from the briars without getting too badly scratched. And then there was the endless debate about how to make the mash. We were the children of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road (movie - book) fully versed in the use of moonshine whiskey doped with honey to “clear the pipes” and cure coughs and congestion. But must we add a dead mouse to the mash? The Encyclopedia Britannica was our only source of information which, of course, none of our gang possessed.

I’ve always wondered what the neighborhood thought about our intrepid gang of explorers, especially during that summer when we made a number of “dry ice” bombs. The trick was to put dry ice – not easy to find or purchase – into a canning jar, add water, and close the lid. After a bit, the pressure from the carbon dioxide gas would make the jar into a lethal bomb, ready to blow. We drew straws to see who got to fire the BB gun at the jar from a distance. When hit, the jar would explode with a very loud bang, sending glass shards all over the place.

Such foolish misadventures are now enshrined by the annual Darwin Award for stupidity.

My own contributions to winning the award - not including exploding rockets, dry-ice bombs, and the time I stunk up the house with the smell of rotten eggs during a visit from my father's boss - started as a teenager when I was curious about flash bulbs for cameras and how they worked. Why let’s just hold the bulb and attach it to a battery and see what happens! I’m lucky my fingers did not become permanently attached to the bulb as it flashed, although the burns and the pain were felt for some time.

Not learning my lesson about electricity, I fondly recall an evening in my dorm room with my roommate sitting across from me with his feet propped up on the desk and leaning back in his chair. I was happily engaged in trying to make a home-built radio work and decided I needed to stick the screwdriver into the inner workings without turning off or unplugging the radio. Ah, I will never forget the look of horror on my roommate’s face as the sparks flew and he tumbled over backwards while a major section of the dormitory went dark. I’m sure Wake Forest University to this day is still trying to explain the 1963 blackout of the dorm. And people wonder why I became a theoretical chemist!

Notwithstanding my own peccadilloes and youthful misadventures or those of my many friends and colleagues who grew up in the same era and have their own stories to tell, whatever happened to youthful experimentation and the real discovery process? By contrast with my era, today's children buy their rockets as a kit, join a local rocket club, and launch under very controlled conditions. Modern chemistry sets for children advertise safety as their principal goal. And good luck on buying any chemicals from the local pharmacy! Somehow, it doesn't seem the same. Children seem to know that it is somehow rigged to work and is no longer play. It's too antiseptic! Where is the adventure or the exploration? Gads, in today's world, my teenage misadventures would land me in jail!

And what about our next crop of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, inventors, and innovators? Is the entrepreneurial spirit produced by global competition enough to motivate or produce such people from the unwashed masses? And do we really want "tiger moms” turning children into programmed automatons whose lives are driven by a ruthless schedule or the need to win the local science fair? Or is social networking the newest trick? Wow! Maybe it’s time to once again dust off Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and replay their message to teach your children well.

No one from my generation would suggest that parents put their children at significant risk of winning the Darwin award or that society return to the 1950s. Instead, we need to draw from the lessons learned during that era and the banner crop of creative minds that emerged to produce a new era of experimentation and discovery by our children unfettered by rigid parental control and societal dogma. We must find a way to strike the proper balance that such creative minds require. Hmmm, I wonder what happens if I push this button on my laptop … .

For those who walk to a different drum beat, check out the book by Theodore Gray: Theo Gray’s Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do at Home – But Probably Shouldn’t, Black Dog & Levanthal, New York, 2009.

Watching Paint Dry

By Keith McDowell

The innovation “bucket list” is replete with stories of excitement and adventure as swashbuckling entrepreneurs with hair on fire swing sparkling swords at the regulatory dragon and rescue the failing startup company from the clutches of evil bankruptcy. Innovators and inventors alike dazzle the timid with leaps of intuition and blazing glimpses into the not-so obvious as open innovation springs forth as the latest and greatest weapon for winning over the commercial marketplace.

It’s the twenty-first century innovation race to the top of the global competitive pyramid with all hands called to the deck to fight the good fight. But left in the galley below is a lowly steward toiling away with a brush and bucket of paint hoping against hope to protect the rotting hull of the ship against the ravages of time and knowing full well that the knights of innovation no longer attend to the mundane. Watching paint dry has no appeal to an active creative mind. Or does it? My good friend James Madison Bohannon would take exception to those who would neglect the obvious.

Bo, as he is known to his childhood friends, has spent a lifetime watching paint dry – or better said, observing, collecting data, and testing the viability and efficacy of various paint and finish formulations on every conceivable surface as part of his contribution to the coatings industry. Now retired, Bo is one of the many unsung heroes of innovation who toil away below the decks, out of sight and out of mind, on problems of seemingly little interest to the innovation race.

Sadly, the exploits of such men and women have often been deemed by the intellectual elite as of secondary importance, part of a caste system where the presumptive best and brightest assume positions of prominence in the world’s leading research universities and define what is to be while supposed lesser minds are channeled into positions at industrial R&D laboratories and, yes, community colleges. In some measure, much of the current debate on how to bring the university and industry cultures together to foster innovation hinges on removing such stereotyping. And stereotyping is just what it is – an activity of one-dimensional, lesser minds.

But the times are changing as the putative caste system undergoes stress from the forces of global competition and both the university and industry cultures adapt to the need for community engagement to attack grand challenges in a connected social network. Indeed, we need the full spectrum of all such people with their differing skills and their different agendas if continuing success is to be maintained.

And what about the paint and coatings industry? Have we truly forgotten that some of our most clever inventors and innovators over the centuries were artists searching for a new pigment to bring forth a new vision and representation of reality on their canvass?

I recall well a visit to the Burlington-Northern-Santa-Fe Railroad headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, over a decade ago and participating in a discussion about using nano-paint on railroad car wheels to search for stress fractures in the wheels before they blew apart and caused a train accident. And later, scientists at the Pawtucket Naval Air Station were engaged in a similar effort with nano-paints hoping to find micro-fractures in the skin of naval aircraft subjected to the salty ocean air and the stress of carrier landings. Who says watching paint dry can’t be fun?

Not to be outdone, the automobile industry touts nanopaint as a new way to add luster, depth, and the shifting of color to the appearance of new cars. Warplanes become invisible to radar and new nano-coatings paint a green future. Even the wall paint of old gets a new look. Who would have thought that so much could emerge from watching paint dry! Hmmm, maybe we should all take a few moments to watch the grass grow. Who knows what we might learn and what new inventions await us!