I don’t think the attack was really an act of hostility, not when you look at the way it changed the world. I get to see stars every night now, in the sky above my head. For real stars. I don’t have to navigate to a satellite telescope web address or anything. I just go outside and look up. Who would have imagined that in my lifetime? Who can look up at that beautiful splash of light across the night sky, the Milky Way, and think it a bad thing?

The half million dead. Sure. They and their families wouldn’t appreciate my joy at the night sky. In fact, most of the world’s 10 billion people tend to remember the brown blanket of smog covering the planet, glowing in the city lights, quite fondly. These clear night skies make them feel exposed, and those twinkling pinpoints of light overhead seem ominous.

From which of those billions of points did the invaders come? Will they come back? Are they watching us now? Why did they attack in the first place? It’s the not knowing that unnerves people the most.

So they turned off the lights. If the aliens can’t see us, then they can’t hit us. But people got scared of the dark. So they huddled together in the cities. Safety in numbers, and all that stuff.

All those people, pushed together like that, it made them smarter. Cities present a smaller surface area, but all those buildings are awfully conspicuous. So they “greened” the buildings, planted gardens on the rooftops and encouraged vines to grow down the sides. They still look conspicuous to me from my window, but the satellite photos make New Hong Kong look like a mountain range.

Then some other smarties pointed out that the city was no longer a heat well, absorbing all the Sun’s light and radiating it back as thermal energy, but we were emitting a suspicious amount of heat in the wintertime. That thermal heat was visible in the infrared, so we had to insulate. The city government flies overhead regularly now, filming in infrared to spot the buildings that are leaking heat the invaders might see.

Then there’s all the interest in space again. New satellites are going up every week, but they aren’t watching the weather or broadcasting television, they’re looking outward. We’re back to the Moon, and we’re really really gonna put a person on Mars this time. We have to; we’re just sitting ducks here.

Environmental stability, reaching out to the stars again, world peace… All for the price of 0.00005 percent of the human population. I know it’s controversial to say so, practically blasphemy, but I can’t help but wonder if the invaders weren’t just trying to shake us out of our apathy. Doing what they did for our own good.

Download a PDF of this Paper here.

Abstract

Established in 1952, the Broadway Café starts out with a competitive advantage from an established menu and loyal customer base; however, in a business landscape where new competitors are arriving on the scene rapidly, the café also has much to benefit from upgrading its business practices with information systems. Knowledge management, customer relationship management, and business intelligence systems will help preserve the knowledge of older employees for future business operations, bring in a new generation of customers, and guide management in making the best strategic decisions in future operations. By merging the café’s unique, classical offerings with Information Age innovations, the business will not only benefit from information technology, but also actively contribute to the World Wide Web’s online community.

Part 1: Porter’s Five-Force Analysis

One hurdle for the Broadway café is the high Buyer Power force it must overcome. Cafes are a dime a dozen. In the small town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina there are 97 restaurants serving a population of 40,000 people, offering potential customers a wide variety of restaurants to choose from with a wide variety of dining options (Yahoo, 2008). A customer loyalty program is one way to lower this force; however, such a solution requires a “large-scale IT system (Baltzan, 2008),” which could be cost-prohibitive for a small business like the café. Another way to lower this force is to have the café specialize in meals that other cafes do not offer, thus creating a niche dinning experience that may only be purchased at the café.

The café has a low Supplier Power force to contend with, as there are a wide variety of suppliers from which to purchase. A Google search for “restaurant supplies” turned up 5.3 million results (Google, 2008), with almost every single site listed in the first ten pages of results offering online ordering or 1-800 numbers to call in orders. With such a wide range of suppliers offering convenient delivery and variety, any supply issues experienced may be quickly remedied with a simple mouse-click to the next web site on the list.

The threat of substitute products or services is high for the same reasons buyer power is high, there are many restaurants and cafes offering the same services and products; however, this threat is different from buyer power in that it must be considered in the context of what specific products the café offers. If the café offers a particularly popular dish, produced with a unique recipe that no other café has access to, then the café has effectively lowered this force. As the only switching costs the café has over its customers are the distance they must travel to the café and the price of a meal versus the prices offered by the café’s competitors, maintaining a unique selection of popular meals based on recipes that other restaurants do not have access to is the best strategy for keeping this threat to a minimum.

The café having such a low supplier power to contend with means that new entrants also have a low hurdle to overcome in acquiring what they need to open up shop; in this respect, the threat of new entrants is high. However, there are some aspects to opening a café that cannot be purchased, and those are customer loyalty and a library of unique and established recipes. It may be easy for another café to find what they need to start up their business, but it will not be as easy to get customers to give up their regular dining habits and try out untested recipes that new chefs have yet to perfect.

In addition to high buyer power, the large number of restaurants also means a high rivalry among existing competitors (Rice, 2008). Prices must be competitive so customers will view the café as affordable in comparison to other restaurants. Service must excel to keep customers happy, and the menu must offer a novel selection of items customers cannot get anywhere else.

As we have noted, the café faces high competition, new entrants, and buyer power when we take a broad look at the food industry, but these forces are much lower when looked at in the narrower scope of food service specialization; therefore, a focused differentiation strategy will best tackle the forces presenting the biggest obstacles to the café. The Broadway café cannot be “all things to all people (Baltzan, 2008),” but it can offer a selection of high-quality recipes that have been established in over 50 years of business that no other restaurant can offer.

Part 2: Developing an E-Business Strategy

The Broadway Café needs a variety of e-business solutions to keep the business functioning in the Information Age just as IHOP has done (Kontzer, 2004). A Knowledge Management System is necessary to prevent the irretrievable lose of all the recipes stowed away in the minds of the employees. In addition to the list of ingredients and the algorithms for producing the meals, additional data could be gathered about the recipes, including customer reviews, variations, and how today’s leftovers can be turned into tomorrow’s special.

A Customer Relationship Management system is necessary to keep current customers and attract new ones. A customer rewards program that tracks customer spending at the café, offering freebies to customers who spend a lot of money and provides incentives to new customers, would be a proactive strategy for improving customer relations. A customer loyalty card that ties into a CRM system to track individual spending habits is an opt-in method for providing employees with the data they need to identify loyal and new customers.

This system would also be gathering Business Intelligence information. By tracking customer-spending habits, the system will be able to profile customers into different types. The system could also put date-time stamps at point-of-purchase entries and provide metrics on peak sales times by time of day, day of week, and time of year.

A website with the current menu, specials, and events taking place at the café is another very important piece of the puzzle (Australian Government, 2006), allowing customers to review meals and specials. An online suggestion box would allow customers to suggest meals, request that discontinued dishes be brought back, or rate and critique current meals. The café could also offer the ability to place orders online, accepting credit card payments for customer convenience and allowing customers to have their meal ready for them when they come into the café just as Papa John’s Pizza has done (Papa John’s Pizza, 2008). This is perfect for people hitting the café on their lunch break.

A high priority for the café is setting up an unsecured wifi connection for customers to surf the Internet with their laptops. Café’s aren’t just about sandwiches and coffee, they are about providing a place for social and intellectual gatherings, live music, and poetry readings. Providing free Wi-Fi is a fantastic incentive for bringing customers into the café (BBC News, 2008).

The free Internet access will also get the café listed in online directories such as Wi-Fi Free Spot (Wi-Fi Free Spot, 2008), and, while the connection is free, the café can offer the service in a way that a small, collapsible portion of the browser has advertising displayed on it, providing some additional revenue to the café (Fleishman, 2006).

Kiosks are definitely a nice touch, and would provide a competitive advantage over other coffee shops and cafes, which do not offer them. Wi-Fi is good for customers with laptops, kiosks are great for customers on their lunch break who don’t have a laptop with them. To keep the kiosks accessible, software will need to limit customers to 20-minute sessions during peak hours.

Part 3: Telecommunications Considerations for M-Coupons

According to NetInformer, a provider of mobile coupons:

[Mobile Coupons] have higher redemption rates than paper or e-coupons because they are not forgotten, or left at home. M-coupons can drastically reduce delivery and redemption costs, and trigger impulse buys (Netformer, 2008).

Additionally, the site notes that m-coupons allow a business to offer real-time discounts by region, track results by customer, and offer rewards for customer loyalty.

One concern with an m-coupon marketing campaign has to do with the relative newness of the strategy. A unique id could allow a coupon to be verified; however, there is the concern of people fabricating new coupons. If the coupon is a text-message, then this is relatively easy to accomplish. If the coupon is an MMS, then we are burdening the customer with having to download it.

Another issue is the potential perceptions of the customers receiving the texts. Will they consider receiving m-coupons just another form of spam, which gives customers a negative perception of the business (BizCommunity, 2008)? Tempering the number of coupons sent out, keeping them infrequent enough to avoid this perception is important to preventing the campaign from backfiring.

There is a problem with this particular marketing idea that is a showstopper. For the wireless network or whatever system that is being used to know that someone is within a 15 foot radius of the store, it would have to have a means of detecting their cell phone, acquiring the number, and then text-message the coupon. To text-message someone’s cell phone unsolicited is an invasion of privacy. People have the right to remain anonymous. It is unethical for a business gather this kind of information from people simply because they happen to be within the vicinity of the store; therefore, the strategy for deploying this marketing campaign is completely unacceptable.

In the future, such broadcasting technology will be possible without such an invasion (Dominikus, 2007), until then the campaign must be modified to a system like the one McDonald’s has implemented, where potential customers may opt-in to receive a coupon, texting the service and having the service reply. This way, they are voluntarily giving away their contact details rather than having them mined by a wireless network.

Coupons will have ID numbers printed in the text message. Customers who voluntarily text the system to receive a coupon are connecting his or her phone number to that identification number. This offers a magnificent opportunity for gather metrics about customer behaviors. If the same number appears attached to multiple coupon ids, then we know a customer is using the system to its full advantage. If a new phone number enters the system, then we know we most likely have a new customer or, less likely, an old customer has a new phone. An m-coupon campaign that has an established history can identify customers who have not been in the café for a long time (Knight, 2008).

Customers who forward their coupon to another phone allows us to establish networks of customers, a “who knows who” database. This can inform us of communities of people who frequent the café, have the system flag individuals in these groups and have an employee ask them for input about what they like about the café. The café’s success hinges on community buy-in; therefore, surveys of the individuals who make up the communities will help to foster them and make them grow. Additionally, being able to recognize a customer who has forwarded on their coupon, allows the business to reward that customer for the referral, providing an incentive for that customer to refer others to the café.

If coupon ids are connected with a point of sale record, then we also have data about what else they purchased. How effective was the 15 percent off as an incentive to having a customer purchase more than his or her average purchase? What products do customers like to purchase along with their latte? Data on customer buying patterns will be transformed into information that will serve business decisions.

Part 4: Second Life for Customer Relationship Management

It may seem a waste of time and effort to purchase real estate in Second Life for the café; after all, the café deals in tangible, perishable products that cannot be sold online. But good coffee shops are all about selling culture as well as caffeine. They are a place for people to hang out, relax, and bond with others. We cannot sell coffee and dinner in Second Life, but we can sell community.

The café has to close for the night, but a Second Life location does not. A group of customers, engaged in deep conversation don’t need to pack it up for the night or continue their discussion outside in the cold; instead they can meet at the Second Life location and chat as late as they like.

Similarly, Second Life is accessible to people all over the world. The café could hold small concerts, poetry slams, and other events that would appeal to all Second Life residents and not just locals. At the same time, the Second Life venue provides a way for locals to meet and connect with people from all around the world.

Staffing the Second Life café is problematic. Employing a fulltime representative of the shop at the Second Life location would not have a good return on investment; therefore, the online location would only have someone from the shop present for events, a volunteer if possible, preferably someone hosting the event or a temp from a Second Life staffing firm like Semper International (Semper, 2008). The Second Life location should offer free virtual coffee, music, and chairs for customers to hang out and make the location their own for when it is not staffed. Upcoming events, local artwork, and music should be available for customers visiting by themselves to find a reason to explore the site.

Along with this issue of cost, is the cost of owning real estate in Second Life. Because of a recent crash in virtual real estate values, Linden Lab has increased the prices on virtual land hosting by two-thirds to $125 a month (Krangel, 2008). Collaborating with neighboring businesses to set up a line of locations in the same tract online could offset this cost. This way the Second Life presence becomes a community effort, giving other shop owners in the area a stake in the location and a reason to encourage customers to visit online as well. The Second Life real estate, therefore, becomes a virtual representation of not just the café, but the area surrounding it as well.

It is important that the Second Life location not render the real life location obsolete (Revkin, 2008). If all of the customers looking for a place to socialize end up hanging out in the Second Life location all the time, they are not at the café spending real life dollars. It is essential then that the café advertise incentives at the Second Life location to promote customers coming into the real life location on a regular basis. Because anyone in the world can visit the café in Second Life, promoting the real world café there holds the promise of enticing people who visit the café’s real world region to visit it in real life.

Part 5: Aspects of Outsourcing Systems Development

While we appreciate Nick Zele’s offer to build the timesheet component of the Supply Chain Management system for our organization, there are some fairly big concerns to take in consideration. What are Mr. Zele’s qualifications? The profit margins for a café are very slim, and the costs of building an in-house application could be very high. It’s very important to get the system right at minimal cost; therefore, we must also consider what other projects Mr. Zele has worked on. Are there systems he has designed of similar scope and function?

Another other concern with having Mr. Zele design the system is accountability. If Mr. Zeke designs a payroll system that has a bug that deletes important information, or is improperly backed-up against the possibility of a hard drive crash, then what recourse do we have? The system loosing a month’s worth of employee hours and payroll information could be fatal to the café staying in business.

What is Mr. Zele going to offer by way of supporting the system he designs? Will he be available at all hours of the night, ready to offer help desk support the night before paychecks are printed if the system is having problems? What if Mr. Zele takes a job somewhere else and no longer has the time to support the system?

In contrast, a carefully selected COTS product with lots of great reviews offered from an established vendor will also come with guaranteed support. Documentation and help files are crucial features that an individual working solo might tend to gloss over, believing they will provide personal support. Plus a software vendor will have staff on call 24 hours a day to support their product.

The key letter in to be concerned with in the COTS acronym is “C.” How customizable is the product? Will the software support the business, or will the business need to conform to the software? With the increase in software customization, follows the increase in the complexity of customizing it.

There is the possibility of finding a middle ground. Setting up a system in Microsoft Access isn’t too highly technical a solution. Access offers a numerous wizards for setting up a database and a front-end for managing it (Munk, 2006). Letting Mr. Zele design a system in Access would be a solution halfway between producing something in-house and a COTS system and create a system that is simple enough for a non-technical manager to make adjustments to.

 

For a time-keeping system, it’s hard to imagine employees having too much of a problem adapting to it. Admittedly, older employees, who lack experience with computers, will experience stress dealing with the new system. When you don’t know how to tab from field to field or use keyboard shortcuts, it’s difficult to see how an electronic system is more efficient than entering the data on paper.

Demonstrating the benefits of entering data into a database could go a long way to persuading these employees to use the system (Finkle, 2008). Showing them the reports and cost savings the system will provide will encourage these older employees, who presumably have more interesting in the café’s success, to contribute and a adapt to the new method of doing business. This persuasive tactic might also prompt them to contribute their own suggestions to improving the system.

Conclusions

The Broadway Café has the potential to not only stay in business, but also improve business success by leveraging information systems into its daily business practices. By pursuing a focused differentiation strategy, promoting the unique, established menu items that only the Broadway cafe has to offer, the business will mitigate the obstacles presented by the restaurant businesses’ high competition, new entrants, and buyer power. Knowledge, Customer Relationship, and Business Intelligence management systems will contribute to all aspects of the business, with a website and free wi-fi enhancing the business’ services and increase its visibility.

Mobile coupons will give customers incentives to come into the cafe as well as identify and reward loyal customers; however, broadcasting coupons to customer cell phones that are within range of the cafe would be unethical, so an opt-in system for receiving coupons would be the proper alternative strategy for distribution. Second Life offers a method for building a community around the cafe, encouraging visitors to hang out, and, by collaborating with neighboring businesses on developing Second Life real estate, build a local community online.

While an in-house employee could build some of the less-intensive information systems, using a COTS product or Microsoft Access as a rapid application development environment, issues of maintaining and supporting any system developed must be addressed. Any new system will need to be “sold” to older employees by demonstrating the value added to the business through its use.

Overall, this project, the exercise of evaluating a wide variety of technical and informational possibilities, is a success. A wide variety of aspects of the business have been explored, a wide variety of information solution options have been discovered, which, in turn, offer a wide variety of strategies for business improvements.

Bibliography: Part I

Baltzan, Paige and Phillips, Amy (2008). CIS 500 Information Systems for Decision Making. McGraw-Hill.

Google (2008, Jul 30). Search for “Restaurant Supplies.” Retrieved December 5, 2008.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=restaurant+supplies&btnG=Search

Rice, Dale (2008, Jul 30). Local Restaurant owners wary of competition, price increases. Austin 360. Retrieved December 5, 2008.
http://www.austin360.com/food_drink/content/food_drink/stories/2008/07/0730dalesdish.html

Yahoo (2008). Yellow Pages Results for Restaurants in the 27909 Zip Code. Retrieved December 5, 2008.
http://yp.yahoo.com/ypResults.py?stx=8903827&stp=y&desc=All+Restaurants&city=Elizabeth+City&state=NC&zip=27909&uzip=27909&msa=0000&slt=36.2946&sln=-76.2501&cs=5

Bibliography: Part II

Australian Government, Department of Communication, Information Technology, and the Arts (May 2006). E-Business Guide, Getting Started: an Australian guide to doing business online. Retrieved December 10, 2008.
http://www.restaurantcater.asn.au/rc/admin/publishing/uploadfiles/webcontent/File/New%20Business/E%20Business%20Guide%202006%20Version.pdf

BBC News (2008, June 26). Coffee ‘wi-fi’ break for shoppers. Retrieved December 10, 2008.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3022638.stm

Fleishman, Glenn (2008, Aug 10). Another Free Wi-Fi through Advertising Model from Hypewifi. Wi-Fi Net News. Retrieved December 19, 2008.
http://wifinetnews.com/archives/006854.html

Kontzer, Tony (May 24, 2004). Pancake Chain Adopts E-Business. InformationWeek. Retrieved December 10, 2008.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterpriseapps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=20900150

Papa John’s Pizza (2008). Order Online. Retrieved December 10, 2008.
http://www.papajohns.com/

Wi-Fi Free Spot (2008). Retrieved December 10, 2008.
http://www.wififreespot.com/

Bibliography: Part III

BizCommunity (2008, Jun 17). PR spam negatively affects PR industry’s reputation. Retrieved December 12, 2008.
http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/18/25503.html

Dominikus, Sandra and Aigner, Manfred (2008, May 21). mCoupons: An Application for Near Field Communication (NFC). IEEE Xplore. Retrieved December 12, 2008.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/4221005/4224052/04224141.pdf?arnumber=4224141

Knight, Kristina (2008, Nov 18). Timing is Everything With mCoupons. BizReport. Retrieved December 12, 2008.
http://www.bizreport.com/2008/11/timing_is_everything_with_mcoupons.html

NetInformer (2008). Mobil Coupons. Retrieved December 12, 2008.
http://www.netinformer.com/advertising/coupons.html

Xu, Heng and Teo, Hock-Hai (2006, Feb 9). Consumer’s Privacy Concerns Toward Using Location-Based Services: An Exploratory Framework and Research Proposal. SpringerLink. Retrieved December 12, 2008.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l3370490661176u3/

Bibliography: Part IV

Krangel, Eric (2008, Oct 28). Real Estate Crashes in Second Life, Too: Linden Lab’s Bailout Plan. Silicon Alley Insider. Retrieved December 12, 2008.
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/linden-lab-s-survival-plan-spike-second-life-user-fees

Revkin, Andrew (2008, Mar 13). Second Life and Real Life. New York Times. Retrieved December 12, 2008.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/second-life-and-real-life/

Semper International LLC (2008). Second Life Staffing Firm – Semper International Virtual World Staffing Services. Retrieved December 12, 2008.
http://www.semperllc.com/metaverse/

Bibliography: Part V

Finkle, Linda (2008). Motivating Change-Resistant Employees. EmploymentCrossing. Retrieved December 19, 2008.
http://www.managercrossing.com/article/index.php?id=330115

Munk, Skip (2006, Jul 6). A Word About Rapid Application Development Tools. Toolbox for It. Retrieved December 19, 2008.
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/smunk/a-word-about-rapid-application-development-tools-10351

---

Other Assignments from CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making:

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Week 01 Assignment

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Week 01 Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Gardening AI

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Walk or Drive

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Week 02 Assignment

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Startup to Watch

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Viral Marketing

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Pizza Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Ranking Utilities Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Week 04 Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Week 04 Discussion II

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: CitiSense Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: RFID Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: SL Customer Service Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: StrayerVention

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Ugly Side of CRM Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Great Wiki Debate Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Wild About Wikis Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Week 08 Assignment

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: IT Dilemma Discussion

CIS500 Information Systems for Decision Making: Saving Systems Discussion

The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics states:

If two thermodynamic systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.

Liquid-Liquid barrier in Coffee with Creamer Credit: R.B. Boyer

It’s called the “Zeroth Law” because it was discovered after the other laws, but is more fundamental than them. It’s an algebraic concept, if a=b and b=c, then a=c. A thermometer in a pot of boiling water is a system, and it reaches thermal equilibrium with the boiling water when its temperature reaches 100 degrees celsius.

Our refrigerators are systems, releasing cold into our homes when we open the door. Our homes are systems, releasing heat into the winter air through our windows and walls. The Sun is a system, radiating heat and light energy out into the Universe. We are systems, dispersing heat, work, and electrical energy through our bodies all over the place.

The First Law of Thermodynamics states:

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.

Blue Ball Aggregator Credit: ytmnd

Hydrogen atoms fuse into helium atoms in our Sun, releasing a difference in mass as energy according to E=mc² in the form of light and heat. Phytoplankton convert that light into chemical energy via photosynthesis. The phytoplankton die, fall to the bottom of the ocean, where they are buried and are stored as crude oil, another form of chemical energy. When we burn the oil, that energy is converted into light and heat.

At no point in the process is additional energy added to the system. The energy in the oil is the energy that came from the Sun. With the exception of the tides, which are driven by the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon, all of the energy on Earth comes from the Sun’s light and heat.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states:

The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

Irreversibilità Credit: marcofantoni84

Drop an egg and you get a broken egg, but drop a broken egg and you will never get an egg made whole. This is not to say that you cannot turn a scrambled egg back into an egg, as is often asserted, but rather that it would take a great deal of energy to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Energy is like this egg. A hot cup of coffee will cool to room temperature because the heat the coffee disperses to equalize with the rest of the room. If you want to make the coffee hot again, you will need to zap it with energy in a microwave oven. The energy used to run the microwave oven is energy dispersed into the coffee, and you can’t put it back together again either.

The Second Law is why you can’t build a perpetual motion machine or a 100-percent efficient engine. Some energy is always dispersed as part of an exchange.

The Third Law of Thermodynamics states:

As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant minimum.

Snow By Night Credit: tricky TM

As the heat disperses into an unusable form within a system, that system approaches a temperature of absolute zero, -273.15° Celsius, or -459.7 Fahrenheit. The key word here being “approaches.” Absolute Zero is unattainable; therefore, it is impossible to remove all the energy from a system.

We are doomed. Eventually the Universe will all wind down and a uniform freeze will pervade everything thanks to the Second Law. But, thanks to the Third Law, the energy won’t be gone, it will have spread so thin as to be unusable.

C.P. Snow best summarized the three laws of Thermodynamics (fourth added posthumously):

• 0. This is the Game: you’re here, you are part of the system
• 1. You Can’t Win: you can’t get more energy out of the system than you put into it.
• 2. You Can’t Break Even: any transfer of energy will result in some waste of energy unless a temperature of absolute zero can be achieved.
• 3. You Can’t Get Out of the Game: you cannot achieve absolute zero.

Stated simply: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

---

Note: Creationists argue that the Second Law invalidates the possibility of evolution. Things cannot go from a state of disorder to increasing order, as evolution appears to do. The problem with their arguement is that the Second Law applies to a closed system. The Earth isn’t a closed system, it’s powered by the Sun. Evolution is powered by the Sun, and it’s an extremely wasteful proccess.

Coffee Cup Sterling Engine:

Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, writes a convincing argument for why Ray Kurzweil needs to just relax and accept his mortality, explaining that, even if a super-AI emerged from the Google-Interwebs in 2045, simply being a supermind isn’t enough to solve all the world’s problems:

No super AI can simply think about all the current and past nuclear fission experiments and then come up with working nuclear fusion in a day. Between not knowing how things work and knowing how they work is a lot more than thinkism. There are tons of experiments in the real world which yields tons and tons of data that will be required to form the correct working hypothesis. Thinking about the potential data will not yield the correct data. Thinking is only part of science; maybe even a small part. We don’t have enough proper data to come close to solving the death problem. And in the case of living organisms, most of these experiments take calendar time. They take years, or months, or at least days, to get results. Thinkism may be instant for a super AI, but experimental results are not instant.

I find this line of reasoning extremely persuasive, especially when considered in the context of the historical debate on the subject. Essentially, we are revisiting the Cartesian versus Newtonian methodologies for understanding the world. The Cartesian method, embodied in the philosophies of Plato and Descartes, hypothesizes that all empirical things may be discovered through logical inference. The Newtonian methodology, found in Newton and Locke, argues that reality may only be discovered through experimentation and experience.

In other words, is reality best known through experience or meditation? With perhaps the exception of mathematics, history has hammered into our heads that, if you want to know the laws of the Universe, you must test them. If you think the Moon is made of cheese, better go there and find out. If you think the world is flat, better sail to the edge and make sure.

In order for a super-AI to solve the entire world’s problems, it would have to either simulate the Universe or have us humans do the legwork of conducting experiments to figure out how it works. There is neither the computing power, personnel, nor money available to generate a singularity in the next century. Our best hope is to contribute as much as we can to human progress in our lifetimes, in hopes of the species eventually advancing enough to resurrect us out of the space-time continuum.

I’m not taking any bets on the probabilities of that happening.

Shouldn’t the primates exhibit be merged with the Hall of Human Origins? Wouldn’t the recently discovered hobbit, the Alien from Earth, as PBS NOVA calls it, also properly go in both exhibits? Maybe some of the confusion and lack of appreciation for primates comes from people who forget that humans are primates.

Orang-utan

See the complete flickr set here.

2008 marks the 50th anniversary of the National Defense Education act, a direct response to the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite into Earth orbit. The act employed one of the most brilliant strategic responses to an outside military threat ever devised: dramatically improve education for all Americans.

The act’s goal was to bring “American education to levels consistent with the needs of our society,” and contained ten titles designed to improve the nation’s schools. These included prohibiting federal control over curriculum, administration, or personnel; provide $295 million in low-interest loans to college students; $300 million in assistance for science, mathematics, and foreign-language instruction; and $18 million in research into how to use television and radio for educational purposes.

On January 12, 1961 Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his State of the Union address, called the act “a milestone in the history of American education.” Today, President-Elect Barack Obama’s website notes the importance of the act in improving national security, space programs, economic growth, and innovation for the second half of the 20^th century.

The 109^th Congress in February 2006 introduced the 21^st Century National Defense Education Act, but never made it to committee, possibly due to the beuracratic burden some argued it would place on public schools. The 1958 act was also not without controversy, as when 20 colleges and universities refused to accept funds from it in protest of the act’s requirement for loan recipients to take a loyalty oath to the United States, which contradicted the first title.

Despite these controversies, it is the spirit of the act that deserves reflection as we face the threats of terrorism and economic hardship, the idea that all our problems are best fought with a well-informed, highly educated public:

The National Defense Education Act recognizes that education is a national unifying force, and it regards an educated citizenry as the country’s most precious resource. Its ten Titles are designed to motivate the discovery of intelligent and talented young men and women and stimulate them to devote themselves to the sciences, foreign languages, technology, and in general to those intellectual pursuits that will enrich personal life, strengthen resistance to totalitarianism, and enhance the quality of American leadership on the international scene. – Arthur S. Flemming

---

Google has a timeline of news stories about the act in books, newspapers, and academic journals.