The Persuasive Wizard

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers.

Last night, I was preparing a physics lesson for High School Juniors.

The topic will be series and parallel electric circuits; today I am the guest speaker.  Now, if you recall your high school years, that particular physics class probably never made it to the yearbook, probably never nudged a neuron.  Why?

It lacked two things – pertinence and impact.

If you want to persuade others, you must convince them that what you have to say is pertinent to them.  Otherwise, they will cast it aside and soon have no recollection at all.  No matter the size of the audience, every person must know that the information is gold for the taking.

And, if you really want them to receive gold, then you must deliver gold.  Spend your time and your words promoting things of value.  Make your words count.  Persuasive people work on their delivery, what they say and how they say it.  This is not “spin.”  It is choosing topics of value that will make a real difference in the lives of individuals.

The second component is impact.  You must do something that makes an impact.  This usually means visual and personal.  Photographs, PowerPoint, and videos are the mainstay of most teachers.  Zzzzzzz.  If you want to make an impact, it must be visual and personal.

For example, I was giving a safety class to beginning chemistry students.  Would this not classify as booorrrrringggg?  Other teachers showed a picture of the fire extinguisher or pointed it out in the back of the room.  I took the extinguisher and the class out into the parking lot.

Did I demonstrate for them?

You must be kidding.

Have you ever squeezed the lever of a fire extinguisher?

Ours was almost as large as the girl I handed it to.  That little daredevil (know your audience!) hammered down on the silver valve and yellow retardant spewed out like a fire hose, belching fine powder everywhere.  Screams and giggles erupted.  Those herding-cat students queued like flies on sugar.  A boy tried it next.  And so on until they all got a shot.  The wind picked up the retardant, a mushroom cloud. and it powdered all their cars, like yellow pollen on great big flowers.  (Sometimes, life can be oh, so sweet!)

(Of course, it was their cars.)

After school, they packed up and headed for the car wash.

I scheduled a refill on our extinguisher.

To this day, the only safety lesson they can remember from school was that one.  They think of it every time they pass an extinguisher.  They tell the story to their kids.  It had impact and you can bet they know how to use a fire extinguisher.  One day, it may save a life.

The lesson had pertinence and impact.

If you want to persuade, yours must possess both.

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers.

Albert Einstein, arguably the greatest scientist ever to walk the planet earth, died in 1955 at the age of 76 years.

Only a few weeks ago, I was surprised to learn that Einstein had written an article for Scientific American in April, 1950.  (Scientific American is targeted at the layman interested in science.)  Since this was in the twilight of Einstein’s epochal career, with all his achievements in hindsight, I wanted to read what he had to offer, and learn.  A little researching resurrected the article.  In part, Einstein philosophized about how he developed his insights.

Einstein said that the creative person “possesses a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music [in others].”

He went on to discuss how Leucippus, the Greek who in 500 B.C. developed the theory of atoms and passed it on to his student, Democritus.  Leucippus did this purely by thinking.  Leucippus observed water freezing, something everyone else had seen.  Leucippus saw the same as others, but thought differently.  He had a passion for comprehension.  Leucippus “was driven to the conclusion that in the [water-to-ice] transition, the essence of the thing had not changed at all.  Maybe the thing consists of immutable particles and the change is only a change in their spatial arrangement.  Could it not be the same .. with all material objects?”

Those were the creative insights of Leucippus.  Leucippus created the idea of atoms because he thought about water and ice in a different way.  He had a “passion for comprehension.”

Einstein elaborates further by describing Daniel Bernoulli, how 2,000 years after Leucippus, “Bernoulli wonders why gas exerts pressure on the walls of a container.  Should this be explained by mutual repulsion of the parts of the gas … atoms (or molecules) colliding with the walls of the container and in doing so exerting pressure?”

How many people do you know that have blown up a toy balloon for a party?  Yet, how many of them have thought about how pressure is exerted on the walls of the rubber balloon?  Or cared?  How many think and consider that it is the tiny atoms of air, moving about and being forced together that continually bounce against the walls of the rubber?  You don’t see the bouncing atoms because there are billions upon billions of them, each making a tiny contribution.  Why did Bernoulli have this thought when others did not?  He had a passion for comprehension that brought about our whole modern understanding of hydraulics.

Some individuals believe that they possess this passion merely because they are curious, they are interested, because they have a variety of pursuits and like to be different.  They like to read.  This is not what Einstein meant.  Many people are interested and curious and like to read.   I am interested in archaeology.  I am curious about archaeology.  I have read about archeology.  But, I do not stay up until midnight studying archaeology. I do not buy tools and sign up for excavations.  I do not attend lectures.  I do not think about archaeology every waking moment.  I do not bore my friends with the latest discoveries, the problems, the difficulties, the political ramifications.  I do not save for an archaeology dig instead of buying a new car.  I do not live in a cheaper house so that I can travel to the desert, spray for fleas, and sleep in a tent all summer.  I have an interest, not a passion, for archaeology.  I have a passion for physics.

The person with the passion goes beyond “interest” and “fascination” and “curiosity.”  It is never a “job,”, never a “vocation,” never a “hobby,” never a pursuit.

The passionate person has an unction.

I was intrigued considerably by the next part of Einstein’s essay.  But before I get into it, I have to introduce you to Michael Faraday.  Michael Faraday was born in 1791 in south London to a rather poor family.  He received only the basics of a beginning education.  When he was 14, he apprenticed himself to a local bookbinder and during the next seven years, read books and educated himself on a wide range of scientific subjects.  At the age of 21, Faraday attended a series of lectures given by a well-known chemist of that day, Humphry Davy.  Faraday sought a job as a chemical assistant for Davy.  He was turned down.  But, a year later he was given the chance to set up experiments and mix chemicals for “real scientists.”  That was the beginning of an absolutely profound discovery.

When Faraday was 30 years old, he published a paper on electromagnetic induction, the principle behind every electric motor and generator since then.  He developed the idea of electric and magnetic “fields” and that principle has guided electrical engineers ever since.  No one else had even considered the field approach to understanding electricity.  It was profound.

Now, here’s what Einstein had to say.

“Would Faraday have discovered the law of electromagnetic induction if he had received a regular college education?  Unencumbered by the traditional way of thinking ….”

So there you have the essence of creativity, “unencumbered by the traditional way of thinking.”  Not, unencumbered by education; Faraday was quite educated and knowledgeable, never think otherwise.  He worked for years studying and learning.  He stayed up nights.  He missed meals.  But it was not traditional education, Einstein remarked.

You need to arm yourself with an education of facts.

Then, armed with those facts, If you want to be creative, begin to think of things in a different way.  You must be known as the person who asks “stupid questions.”  You must harden your shell to opinions and think about things in a different way.  Ask dumb questions.  Try ridiculous things.  Most of your ideas will sputter and come to nothing.  Some of them will, indeed, be absolutely stupid.  Get over it.

Maybe you don’t understand passion.

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers.

The modern geek, like the modern soldier, always needs more power, power for one more device, power for a longer flight, power for those situations where electrical plugs are nonexistent.  I have leaned against many walls waiting for the janitors to finish vacuuming and free up the plug.

While the technology has been around for some time, GoalZero makes convenient solar panels that fit onto a backpack or strap to your body.   These are designed to charge up a battery pack.  By unfolding and exposing a 7” x 14” panel (not exactly a postage stamp), 6-8 hours of sunlight will give you 2-3 hours of cell phone or MP3 usage.  Other size panels  scale  accordingly in performance.

nPower PEG makes a charger that looks like a flashlight tube.  It holsters onto your belt and turns foot power into electrical power.  PEG converts the kinetic energy of your body into electrical energy.  Two springs suspend a magnetic mass that bounces back and forth between a coiled loop.  A brisk 15-minute walk can provide a minute or so of cell phone usage.  It’s also large enough to be used as a mini-nightstick against those who covet your geek toys.

BionicPower makes a harness that looks like a knee brace.  Movement of the knee turns on a little generator.  Put one on each knee and you can produce about 12 watts of electricity climbing stairs.  An hour’s worth of walking could charge about four mobile phones.  Of course, you look like you just came out of of a sports rehabilitation facility, but sacrifices must be made.

Integrating piezoelectric materials into garments has been around for awhile. The concept is getting renewed attention.  The movement of the body ekes out electrons.  It does have the advantage of potentially capturing more movement.

Universities are replete with students working on nanotechnology for producing electricity.  Come to think of it, I have yet to find any no subject that escapes the purported and proposed use of nanotechnology.  Fulfillment?  Well, we shall see.

Ignoring price, all these devices and others like them have two major shortcomings

1.)     They are highly inefficient.  What comes out as electrical power is a small fraction of what goes in as kinetic, solar, or other power.

2.)     They all require that the energy be stored in a battery.  We discussed that problem in the last article.  Very few practical devices use so little power that they could be run directly from these chargers.

What we need is an electrical generating capability that has the following properties:

a.) Readily available

b.) Efficient

c.) Continuous

d.) Does not require a battery for storage.

This need is begging for an engineer, physicist, or chemist to solve it.  How about you?

Contact: lgivens@thepersuasivewizard.com

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers.

Without batteries, we would be lost.  I worked in the intelligence community creating listening devices, geopositioning, stand-off detectors – inventions for the modern soldier.  One problem persisted – how to power those clever innovations without adding more pounds to the already weighted warrior.

A battery is essentially an electric cell, that is, a negative electrode, a positive electrode, an electrolyte that conducts ions, and a separator (ion conductor).

Fundamentally, the battery has changed little since its invention in the 18^th century.  If you want to win the next Nobel prize, come up with a battery idea that, by several orders of magnitude, reduces the weight, increases the power, or expands the storage of existing chemical-cell technology.

In 1748, Benjamin Franklin coined the term “battery” to describe a set of charged glass plates.  In 1800, Alessandro Volta of Italy invented what we now call a “wet cell,” zinc and copper plates with an electrolyte between them.  Sixty years later, a practical design by the Frenchman Gaston Plante led to the lead-acid batteries still used today in modern automobiles and most transportable equipment.

In 1881, the German Carl Gassner invented the commercial “dry cell” battery, a zinc-carbon cell.  In 1901, Thomas Edison invented the alkaline (iron and nickel oxide) storage battery and 50 years later, Canadian Lew Urry found better performance with alkaline-manganese batteries.  In 1899, the rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery was invented by the Swede Walkmar Jungner.  Ninety-one years later (1990), the Japanese company, Sony, invented the lithium-ion battery.

Get my point?

The battery design is virtually unchanged.  Battery innovations have come about from inventors all over the planet, but these advances have all been variations on a theme.  The differences in performance have come through the use of different metals for the electrodes and different electrolytes inside.

It is likely that improvements will continue to be made, but without some major new concept for a portable battery, the advances will be incremental.

What this has done is force computers, phones, and hand-held devices to be power misers.  That part is good, but it will only take us so far.

Got a break-through idea for battery power?

Contact: lgivens@thepersuasivewizard.com

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers.

In my book, I talk a great deal about the chasm between the technology wizard and the decision maker.  The wizard likes to stay in the laboratory, stare at the computer, and massage the controls of a favorite machine.  The decision maker is not so.  If you plan to persuade decision makers, you must enter their world.  When in Rome …

The Harvard Law School and the London School of Economics analyzed the daily schedules of 65 Chief Executive Officers (CEO) to measure how they spent their work week.  The study found that, on the average, CEO’s work about 55 hours a week.  There is an equivalent set of technologists who also work 55 hours a week.  So, in that respect, the two might not be so different.

Once we categorize what the two sets do with those 55 hours, we quickly spot the differences.  In the study, the CEO’s exhausted over 33% of their entire work week in meetings.  Since CEO’s are in control of their own time and actually schedule those meetings, one must conclude they consider them a primary engine of their enterprise.  In contrast, technologists generally feel that every minute spent in a meeting is a minute wasted.

CEO’s conduct much of their business over informal lunches and meals, about 10% of their work week.  At these meals, they make decisions, exchange information, and network.  By comparison, technologists also work during lunch, generally attacking a burger or quietly reducing the contents of a brown bag.  Their work is staring at a machine or clicking the keys of a computer.  Both sets are working during the meal, the decision makers and technologists, but their tasks are different.

CEO’s spend about 10% of each week on the phone.  My experience is that technologists do similarly, networking with someone, connecting to get information, but generally do this with digits rather than by voice.  I would estimate that technologists spend closer to 30% networking with counterparts.

About 4% of the CEO’s time is spent making public appearances.  This is no counterpart to this for the technologist.

Some 36% of the CEO work week is spent in travel, personal appointments, and other short segments that add up to a large number of hours, but are not calendar-scheduled.  Technologist may not travel as much, but their time also is eaten up by unproductive segments that accumulate.

Only 11% of the CEO work week was spent working alone.  Contrast this to many technologist who spend almost all their hours working with their closest friend, that is, a computer or a machine of some sorts, maybe pencil and paper.

This data was collected for CEO’s, but it applies to almost all managers, regardless of level. In spite of that, most technologists will read the above and say, “So, what?”

Here’s what.  If you want to persuade decision makers, enact the following:

1.  Decision makers consider meetings their prime method of information gathering and decision making.  Your occasional meeting with one must gain in priority with you.  You must elevate those opportunities to the top tier of your thinking.

a.)  So, stop commenting to your fellow wizards about how meetings waste time, get nothing done, etc, etc.  This only sets you up as someone who does not understand the real world (and you do not).  Understand that the walls have ears.  Your attitude will be broadcast to every decision maker in your chain of command.  They will label you naive, immature, and not a team player.  All of which dissolves your powers of persuasion.

b.) Make the most of the meetings you hate.  Observe people.  Learn something that will help you in your business.  Contribute.  Learn to add, not subtract, multiply, not divide.

2.  Executives spend little time in private contemplation.  If you want to get their attention and persuade them, do NOT send an email or other written correspondence, which is easily misconstrued, and more often than not, misinterpreted.

a.)  Technologists are particularly inept at wording effective emails and memoranda.  Their attempts are usually missiles of self-destruction.  Schedule face time with a decision maker and put time and effort into properly making your case.  Executives and managers do not like their own words in print so they are loathe to respond with text.  You consider texting essential – see the mismatch?

b.)  I had one technology director whom I forbade to write ANY emails after 6:00 PM.  She was a wonderful, aggressive director, but by the end of the day her emails were nuclear bombs; it would require half the next day to repair the damage.

c.)  Learn to be personable and do things, in person.  Yes, it takes longer and is more difficult.  HOWEVER, it gets you the positive results you seek.

Persuasion is a skill you acquire with much effort, but your effort needs to be directed.

Contact: lgivens@thepersuasivewizard.com

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone wanting a better job, desiring a raise in the current one, seeking investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.  College and High School students find it invaluable as they begin their careers.

In the last article, we talked about The Persuasive Word, knowing how to proffer your ideas to achieve favorable action by decision makers.  Sculpting your concepts with incisive language will ensure their effectiveness.  In this article, we discuss an even more formidable weapon, the persuasive silence.

Once you begin your presentation, or even a business discussion over a meal, your adrenalin increases and all your facilities turbocharge.  This is helpful in that it hones your thinking, amplifies your logic, and expands your bandwidth.  It is detrimental in that, if unrestrained, makes you overly aggressive and monotonously garrulous.  You need to check your your verbiage with silence.

One manifestation of silence might be interpreted as the “pause.”  Every 60 seconds or so, stop for 4-5 seconds.  Just stop and look at the audience with unemotional confidence.  This does three things.  One, it lets you catch your breath.  Two, it gives your audience a moment to think about what you have just said.  Three, the silence will remind you to look at your audience and see what they are doing.

Are they alive?

Luke tells us that the apostle Paul once preached into the night, causing a man, Eutychus, to fall asleep, topple out the third story window, and tumble to his death.  Fortunately for everyone, Paul prayed and God raised the young Eutychus back to life.

I doubt you have that ability.

Do not keep talking until they all jump out the windows to freedom.  Stop.  Examine the situation and be circumspect about your next move.

Use silence for effect, respect, and aspect.

Another place  where you must inject silence is when you are being queried.  Most technologists will, in their minds and on their lips, begin to formulate an answer before the interrogator is half-finished with the question.  I cannot tell you how many technologists I have heard answer a question, meticulously, slowly, carefully, exactly, precisely, taking time they did not have to answer a question that was not asked.

Listen to the question completely and do not speak.  Do not begin to form words with your lips as if to silently interrupt.  Remain silent and listen.  Let the decision maker ask the question.  Listen and do not, yourself, speak.  Look the person in the eye, without emotion.  Listen.  Let the silence continue 2-3 seconds after the interrogator stops.  Ensure the question is complete.  Then, and only then, begin your response.  If you do this, everyone in the room will be on the edge of their seats awaiting your response.

Silence is persuasive.  Use it.  I am reminded of the Swiss poet, Johann Caspar Lavater, who said,

“He knows not how to speak who cannot be silent.”

I am certain Lavater intended a different nuance, but it rings ever so true that silence and articulation are joined at the hip.

Contact: lgivens@thepersuasivewizard.com.

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas.  Now available in Kindle e-book..  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.

If you want to be persuasive, learn to choose, manage, and assemble your words.  Your goal is to be as precise as an atomic clock.

The power of words was known from antiquity.  Around 950 B.C., the Biblical Solomon wrote, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold on displays of silver.” Homer spoke of an even earlier time, “… when he let the great voice go from his chest, and the words came drifting down like the winter snows, then no other mortal man beside could stand up against Odysseus.”

Words matter.  If you want to be persuasive, spend time developing a good, solid vocabulary.  Not necessarily a knowledge of technical jargon or a knowledge of esoteric words, but develop a knowledge that can choose between “affect” and “effect,” between “hypothesis,” “theory,” and “conjecture.”   Few things are more pleasing to the intellect than the choice of the right word.  The master of words, the late William F. Buckley Jr., was accused in a debate forum of using a longer, more arcane word when a simpler word would have meant the same thing.  The wry Buckley countered by alleging his five-syllable word maintained a rhythm that would have been lost with the shorter, three-syllable word.  You do not need to achieve that level, but work at it.

It is powerful to have the ability to “turn a phrase,” so to speak.  This ability to say meaningful things in memorable ways is a valuable asset to persuasion.  Whether speaking or putting the presentation into text form, work ever so diligently to select the word or phrase that precisely connotes your meaning.

Avoid being trite or cute.

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine describes a renowned and brilliant orator, Faustus, with whom Augustine has waited years to discourse.  He is delighted to learn that the venerated Faustus will finally travel to Carthage and converse with Augustine and other scholars.  The famed speaker arrives, the students are set, and Faustus begins his discourse.  Augustine is bitterly disappointed, writing,

“[The ideas Faustus presented] seemed to me none the better for being better expressed, nor true simply because they were eloquently told.  Neither did I think that a pleasant face and a gifted tongue were proof of a wise mind.  A statement is not necessarily true because it is wrapped in fine language or false because it is awkwardly expressed.”

Note that Augustine talks to both sides of the issue.  Expressing a concept with pith and wit does not make the concept true.  Contrariwise, expressing a concept poorly, with poor grammar does not make the concept false, but neither does it make it understood.  The former leans toward something that is labeled “spin,” trying to convince an audience using élan, wit, or intimidation instead of content.  This is the stereotypical “salesman” approach.  This error is not often encountered in technology wizards, as they are prone to be brutally honest.  The problem-child for the technology wizard is the latter error, the inability to express true, but complex, technology issues in a way that decision makers can understand and appreciate.

Recall the moving speech by Patrick Henry at the Second Virginia Convention and his final, stirring phrase we all can recite, “Give me liberty or give me death.” It was a moving exhortation and an example of choosing the right words.  However, in general, as a speaker, Henry had a fatal flaw.  Here is how Thomas Jefferson described his speeches.  “His eloquence was peculiar, if indeed it should be called eloquence; for it was impressive ad sublime, beyond what can be imagined.  Although it was difficult when he had spoken to tell what he had said, yet, while he was speaking, it always seemed directly to the point.  When he had spoken in opposition to my opinion, had produced a great effect, and I myself had been highly delighted and moved, I have asked myself when he ceased: ‘What the devil has he said?’  I could never answer the inquiry.”

I have heard technologists who were in the same club.  They were awe-inspiring when speaking and everyone loved to advertise them as keynote speakers at a conference.  Yet, afterwards, one remembered only the impression, not the endowment, of greatness.  The output of persuasion it to have the decision maker take some action in your behalf.  In order to do this, the thoughts and actions must be transplanted from the speaker into the decision maker.  It is not sufficient to be eloquent, the verbal framework must enclose content of value.

Content is paramount.  It is imperative that the wizard technologist makes transparent, understandable presentations that are rooted in sound content.  All the style, techniques, and methodology are wasted if the content is weak.  Ensure that the content, the facts and data, are true, validated, and solid.  Then, and only then, work on delivery.  Never purvey unsound technology.

Choose your words for impact and imprint.  Make no mistake.  Words count.  Do not let the Grail-Knight-decision-maker end your presentation by saying, “He chose poorly.”

Contact: lgivens@thepersuasivewizard.com.

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.

Ever since I was a boy reading Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, I have been hooked on crime mysteries.  Ah,  the ratiocinations of C. Auguste Dupin.

But, here’s a problem in modern US crime.

In 2005, the FBI, along with the police force of the District of Columbia, focused their gaze on one, Antoine, Jones.  Mr. Jones was a local nightclub owner who lived south of the D.C. area.  In his photo, this African American man looks to be about 35 years of age, with finely cropped hair and a bisected planar mustache.  In a lineup, I would mistake him for Paul Pierce of the Celtics.

It seems that Mr. Jones’s nightclub needed a little financial shot in the arm, so to speak, so proprietor Jones started a lucrative narcotics business on the side.  The feds get onto this and set up the ol’ sting operation.

Like something out of Hollywood, they sneak up to Jones’s little Jeep Grand Cherokee and attach a GPS Tracker to it.  I can imagine it was one of those magnetic ones.  Maybe they hid in the sewer and slid open a manhole cover while he was stopped at a traffic light.  We need something that looks good on film.  I can see their heads bobbing out of the manhole, their arms reaching up to magnetically attach the GPS tracker, their quick leap back down into the sewer goo to avoid a semi tractor trailer decapitating and smashing their heads.  Surely, they did something clandestinely clever like that.  The masterminds of surveillance then sit back and collect data while Mr. Jones is none the wiser.  The time bomb of fate is ticking. Tick, … tick, … tick.

The case builds to a climax.  They are ready to spring the trap.  The feds surround his little bungalow in Ft. Washington, MD, pound down the doors and find the mother load – 220 pounds  of cocaine and a million dollars in cash.

But, that was in 2005.

Here we are, seven years later, and Mr. Jones has been on the appeals trail.  He made it to the Supreme Court with his defense and last month got a ruling.

The FBI prosecutor argued that putting a tracking device on a car was “too trivial a violation of property rights to matter and that no one who drove in public streets could expect his movements to go unmonitored.”   Whoa.  Can you believe that?  That was the best defense they could come up with?

It seems that while the feds had a warrant for the cell phone, they did not get legal permission to attach the GPS tracker.  (They obviously felt they did not need one.  The guy on sewer duty was probably out of work.)

The Supreme Court ruled that the government violated Mr. Jones’s Fourth Amendment’s protection of “persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect’s vehicle.  The court split over the specificities of the violation.

Does that mean he gets his cocaine and million dollars of drug money back?

Not to compete with the ratiocinations of C. Auguste Dupin, but that decision opens a whole new can of worms – will this affect the police routinely looking at the tolltag entrances and exists, for example?  At one time, they tried stand-off Infrared detectors to look at heat in a house and detect the marijuana growers.  What other  high tech surveillance do you think might be in jeopardy of needing a warrant?  Thoughts?

Order from Amazon.com, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas, for the low price of $12.95.  Now available in Kindle e-book for $7.45.  The Persuasive Wizard is a must for anyone seeking a better job, a raise in the current job, investment funding, or just needing to persuade others.

The American Physical Society (APS) is the national organization of professional physicists.  Until last September, Ivar Giaever was a “fellow,” an extremely prestigious position.  Giaever shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his work on quantum tunneling in solids.  Giaever was a supporter of President Obama in the last election.  In September, Giaever publicly resigned from the APS because of its policy statement on global warming, which is:

“The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.  If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur.  We must reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.”

In his resignation letter, Giaever stated: “In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”

Now, “incontrovertible” means “not able to be denied or disputed.”

Thus, Giaever makes the point that the APS and many scientific organizations are becoming gears in political machines, that sociopolitical agendas bias research and taint outcomes.

Freeman Dyson is a name all physicists know.  He has never won a Nobel Prize, but his work in quantum field theory, nuclear engineering and other areas have made him a formidable, although often contrarian, spokesman.  Dyson talks about the computer models used to analyze environmental data and predict climate change:

“The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans.  They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests.  They do not begin to describe the real world we live in.”

He addresses the science and politics of Global Warming:

“There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.

Dyson does not believe the conclusions regarding global warming and maintains that they are not supported by independent, unbiased research.

This week, sixteen leading global scientists issued a public letter, quoted here in part:

“In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the ‘pollutant’ carbon dioxide will destroy civilization , large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever.  And the number of scientific ‘heretics’ is growing with each passing year.  The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts…”

They go on to state several facts of which I note three:

1. In the last decade we have not been in a period of global warming, a fact agreed to by proponents of Global Warming, which is why they prefer to talk about “Climate Change” rather than “Global Warming.”
2. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.  In today’s greenhouses, operators currently increase the carbon dioxide concentration by factor of three or four to increase plant growth.
3. Historically, the carbon dioxide concentrations have been about 10 times greater than they are today.

The really interesting part is that the sixteen scientists who signed this letter are in prominent environmental and weather forecasting positions.  These are scientists of no small signifigance.

You might also want to read Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Lomborg was a strong environmentalist until he began to look at the data.  This is an excellent scientific book, not vague propaganda.  Lomborg originally analyzed the data with the intent of supporting the global warming position; the data changed his position, entirely.

You cannot imagine the vitreous outrage these actions have stirred among environmentalists.  Why?

Regardless of your beliefs supporting Global Warming or Climate Change, my position, as a physicist, is this: science should be about the search for scientific truth at a fundamental level; it should not be politically or socially catalyzed and, thereby, influenced to come to some “incontrovertible” conclusion that must agree with politics.  Science and politics are immiscible.

A major problem is that much of the funding for research comes from government, special interest groups, and businesses – all who have much to gain and vast amounts to lose by certain pre-specified outcomes.  Whether it is the pharmaceutical companies or the environmentalists, science must separate itself from influences that thrive on predefined conclusions.

The trend is troublesome in full measure.

Once you let sociopolitical agendas drive science, then “science” becomes the new religion, the new Torquemada torturing any belief counter to the current sociopolitical establishment.  By impregnating science with social doctrine, science becomes a scary mirror-image of the Spanish Inquisition. “Science” becomes the barrier to and the torturer of free speech and contrariwise thinking.  Galileo would rotate in his coffin.

A current ubiquitous example of this is atheism.  The atheist social agenda drives science education.  Why?  Can only atheists understand and appreciate science?  Does our IQ suddenly jump by 30 points the moment we deny an existence of God?  It seems that renown physicists like Steven Hawking feel compelled to demand that all competent scientists swear to a vow of atheism.  Nonsense.  This current trend in science and physics to create and control social, political, and religious issues is beyond their scope and capability.  It makes science a prey to every political interest group, dilutes the research, and contaminates the conclusion.  In extreme cases, I fear it may even go so far as to falsify the data.

I maintain that physics, biology, chemistry, and cosmology have enough unsolved problems in their present bailiwicks to keep them soundly occupied.  Let science search for the truth about science, without dilution, without infiltration, and without sociopolitical narcotics.

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One of the absolute coolest products I’ve seen of late is your own personal drone.  It costs less than $300 and is a quadricopter (4-motor) carbon fiber plastic helicopter made by Parrott, called the AR.Drone.  This little feloow does not have its own controls.  It has an application that permits WiFi navigation by an iPhone, iPad, or Linux PC.

Mounted on its 21”x21” frame is a 93^o wide-angle lens camera with a 640×480 resolution.  That is the resolution of standard (non-HD) television.

The quadricopter flies at about 11 miles per hour and can stay up 12 minutes on its 3-cell battery pack.  It utilizes its own gyroscopes and inertial guidance system.  If you take your hands off the controls it just hovers

Now, flying the copter is a little tricky if there is much of a wind outside.  My son, Harrison, is the lighting technician for a megachurch.  They have a gigantic auditorium and when they get bored setting up equipment and programming a service, they fly the drone around inside the auditorium and up to the lighting catwalk.  They have not figured a practical use for the AR.Drone except entertainment, which is not the worst thing in the world.

I recently did an article about a commercial drone for law enforcement.  I raised some questions there about privacy, but that one had the capacity to do real surveillance.  It also made more noise than a lawnmower.  The AR.Drone is much quieter and could be really sneaky if the company put some effort into decibel work.

It weighs about a pound so the possibility of carrying a payload of any size will have to wait for larger motors and more innovation.

My big question is what do you do with a drone of your own, other than play around?

Some ideas:  It could put a whole new meaning on being a Peeping Drone.  Maybe the military or law enforcement could use it to look around the corner before they put their lives at risk.  Perhaps deer hunters can use it to survey the area from overhead before they set up an ambush site.  What we could do is start drone clubs.  Maybe we could shift the USFirst robotics competitions to drones.  That would seem more exciting to me.

I’m scratching my head on what to do with little drones like these, so I’m open to creative ideas.  Clearly, they will be more capable and more prevalent in the near future.