Creationism and Evolution Convergence

I rarely read the newspapers in Israel but on the plane Tuesday on the way back to Israel, I figured it was a decent way to catch up. What caught my eye was an article on the front page of Haaretz that humans are evolving 100 times faster. The article is based on research at the university of Wisconsin.

The hebrew article is more complete than the English one and includes a comment like this one from eFlux.

"In his study published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Hawks estimated that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone — around the period of the Stone Age — has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution.

“In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,” says Hawks. “And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time.”

Hmmmm. 5000 years. That is awfully close the the 5700+ years creationists (Jews) believe marked the creation of the world. Could that be a coincidence? Now, I think even creationists like myself believe that humans adapt and evolve themselves, their immune system and digestive system etc as the article suggests. Certainly, it would be a lot easier for me to explain why "all of the sudden" evolution "sped up" over the last 5000 years than it is for someone who believes we came from an amoeba millions of years ago. Could that 5000 year scientific dating be a coincidence or just some funny time vortex in history?

Why The Internet Needs to Become a National Priority for Israel

Some 2.5 years ago, I prepared a Powerpoint and pitched numerous times to a couple of senior politicians and bureaucrats on the need to invest in Israel's internet infrastructure. I figured if Shimon Peres hyped and promoted the wonders of nano-technology in Israel --which produced nano returns-- and raised lots of money around that, the politicos and incentive givers should invest in the internet which has delivered hits such as Shopping.com, PictureVision (full disclosure: I was an investor and board member in both) and ICQ. I made the case that we needed to invest in bandwidth, both transatlantic and the last mile. We needed to invest in education, training scores of programmers in the arts of internet programming. Israel needed to build programs to attract the big internet companies to expand development centers here, in the same way that Intel, Microsoft, IBM and National Semiconductor did in the last wave of computing which was an early step in launching Israel's high tech economy. Needless to say, my plan fell on deaf ears.

The good news is that Google and eBay are here, one because it was strategic and bought a small company (irows) and is opening development centers everywhere and has a robust one in Israel. The other, eBay, is here because it bought Shopping.com. The bad news is that Israel is woefully under-resourced in many areas and it is hurting business and investment in this new economy tht could otherwise spawn a tremendous cottage of businesses in outlying areas much as it is doing in Eastern Europe and parts of rural America.

The bad news though is a much longer list:
1. Israel's bandwidth is woeful: I pay for 5 MB in to my home. In reality, I get 500Kb. I spoke to a couple of my entrepreneurs a couple of weeks ago who confirmed the same experience. This is actually a common complaint of entrepreneurs and work-at-home employees in Israel. Underwater bandwidth is worse which further compounds the problem. This means that in early stages in a company's life, you cannot put your hosting facility in Israel near your R&D because you cannot reliably service customers due to the bandwidth constraints. It also stifles innovation into new applications needed in a high bandwidth world because we do not have high bandwidth service!

2. Speaking of hosting providers, the carriers and hosting companies here provide substandard service. One of my companies monetizes using Google's adnsense. Google inquired as to why once a week the ad revenue seemed to go down. Oh that, said my company is our hosting provider in Israel shutting down for maintenance. Last week, they discovered a technical problem in the data center that the hosting provder denied for months. Hosting in Israel is substandard in terms of both service and bandwidth.

3. We have a shortage of internet programmers
Israel is amazing at mobilizing resources when it makes something a national priority. When it doesn't, our very small country ends up under-resourced. We have way too many lawyers and way to few internet programmers. Ironically, even in our programmer class we have too many of the wrong programmers. This is partly due to Microsoft's amazing work in the developer community here. We have a high percentage of .NET programmers and hence a lot of websites built in .NET which is certainly not the worldwide flavor of choice for scalable internet apps. Ruby on Rails programmers and experts in LAMP and Java are harder to come by. Bringing in more of the bigger internet companies like Google and Yahoo with incentives would help solve this as would public/private partnerships that would invest in educating and retraining people in computer engineering and programming.

Israel is perfectly positioned to be a global internet leader. Many groundbreaking technologies were developed and popularized here such as IM (ICQ), Chat (Ubique), VOIP (Vocaltec), Photo Sharing (PictureVision) and of course security. Israel is also timezone advantaged for a global business such as the internet since we are 7 hours from Beijing and 7 from New York and close to Europe and Russia's exploding internet markets. We have a multilingual population that can service many countries.

So what to do:
1. The government should reduce taxes on Israeli internet companies to zero and put incentives in place.
Internet companies are highly profitable and hence can employ and train lots of people. There should be one caveat to the zero tax rule: the companies should either have to contribute some small % profits to a worker training program to create more programmers or commit to grow its workforce at some minimum amount. The government should match the contributions to the worker training/retraining plan.

This is much better than providing grants for people to put iron and metal in the ground for semiconductor and hardware companies that is in line with Israel's current government incentive policy. This is about reinforcing successful companies and industries rather than propping up unprofitable ones and it is also a forward looking strategy.

2. Bandwidth should be a national infrastructure project.
The Government should commit to invest in increasing underwater bandwidth by 10X in the next 2 years. Additionally, we should have a national project to increase actual bandwidth to all homes and business by a minimum of 4X. Korea has done it so why can't Israel? They should enforce standards on carriers who promote their service by measuring effective bandwidth to homes and fining the carriers for not providing that bandwidth.

3. Building the next generation Internet should become a national priority at all levels.
This includes attracting international internet leaders with incentives, worker training, funds for research into next gen infrastructure and applications and wiring 100% of the homes and schools for high speed access. We can generate innovation this way and generate even more jobs and opportunities for earning an income.

Teachers Strike In Israel

Thankfully, my children have not been subjected to the Teacher's strike that has bored millions of Israel's students over the last two months and, even more thankfully, it looks like the strike may end this morning. However, this strike has claimed many casualties.

1. Israel's youth have been irreparably harmed. They are the big losers here. I know that sounds harsh but these kids were given a message that their education could be sacrificed and that is hard to swallow. This year already has been lost. In addition, they have been distracted by the ills of cable TV and movies for the last 2 months rather than works of poetry, judaism and math. That is a bad tradeoff and a bad educational lesson served up by the teachers. 2 months is just too long.

2. Yesterday, the teachers killed the rule of law. When the court issued a back to work order effective today and many teachers said they would defy the court order, they gave license to a series of law breakers that the courts and the law can be defied. They broadcast this to their students as well. Nobody should be surprised when so-called settlers break the law and lie down on road or put up outposts. Nobdody should be surprised when airport workers walk out and defy the courts. The teachers have taught their students and society that the law and the courts do not need to be obeyed.

3. The public WAS on the side of the teachers: I stress the word WAS because education is an important issue to us all and education in Israel is decaying for many of the reasons the teachers enumerate: classes are too large, teachers are paid poorly and are not respected in the way they deserve to be. However, through poor leadership and negotiation tactics of union head Ran Erez, they lost much of this support and that is a pity.

The teachers would also be wise to acknowledge the problems of tired teachers and incapable teachers infesting the system and that they are also partially responsible for the decaying education system. I think that would bring sanity to the debate.

The big winner in all of this, in my opinion, is Ehud Olmert. I think he played this strike masterfully. He refused to break the bank and refused to blame the Minister of Education (who i am no fan of) and correctly let this play out at a ministerial level and not a prime ministerial level. Now, if only get could get going on the education reform plan and really make education a priority, he will have truly won this war.

Been slow posting

It has been a slow posting month but now that I am back from vacation, a few are coming on a variety of topics. Just posting them at a reasonable pace.