MITPressLog

Calling All Coffee Addicts

Today is National Coffee Day--here's an excerpt from Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America, edited by Christopher Bacon et. al, to go along with your cup of afternoon joe.

Brazil and Vietnam have reshaped the world's coffee supply. Before 1990, Vietnam was barely a statistical blip in the coffee world, producing just 1.5 million bags. Its agricultural economy was opened to the world market during the 1990s, with the government providing irrigated land and subsidies to encourage resettlement by farmers into coffee production. By 2000, it had become the second-largest producer in the world, with 15 million bags to its name, largely produced on small farm holdings. Brazil, on the other hand, is not a newcomer: it has long been the world's largest producer, but production has recently been boosted by changes in how and where coffee is grown. Increased mechanization, intense production methods, and a geographical shift away from the traditional, frost-prone growing areas have all increased yields.

Though production levels in Brazil will rise and fall over time, the country's ability to produce profitably even at low world prices renders growers in many other regions powerless in the market. As a result of Brazil's unprecendented capacity and efficiency, the impact for traditional coffee-producing countries is serious. Patrick Installe, the Managing Director of Efico, a green coffee trader, elaborates: "To give you an idea of the difference, in some areas of Guatemala, it could take over 1.000 people working one day each to fill the equivalent of one container of 275 bags, each bag weighing 69 [kilograms]. In the Brazilian cerrado, you need five people and a mechanical harvester for two or three days to fill a container. One drives, and the others pick. How can Central American family farms compete against that?" (Installe 2002)

Julius Blank (1925-2011): History and Humor

David C. Brock, co-author of Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor, reflects on Julius Blank's sense of humor.

 

 

 

 

Julius Blank

Photo courtesy of qtschlepper/Mitchell Weinstock

http://www.flickr.com/photos/schlepper/4390485432/

Creative Commons License Terms

I was surprised and saddened on Tuesday to learn that Julius Blank, one of the eight co-founders of the seminal Silicon Valley electronics firm Fairchild Semiconductor, had died. I first met Mr. Blank five years ago when he sat for a three and a half hour oral history interview with me as part of a Chemical Heritage Foundation project supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The project sought to use oral history to document the stories of the first silicon startups in Silicon Valley – the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation – and Mr. Blank had been deeply involved with both. I learned a lot from that oral history with Julius, as he often reminded me to address him. It, along with many other oral histories and interviews conducted by me and Christophe Lécuyer, proved to be an invaluable and enriching resource for the history of Fairchild Semiconductor that he and I co-authored recently. (Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor, MIT Press, 2010, www.makersofthemicrochip.com) Fairchild earned its place in the history of technology by pioneering silicon electronics technology, including the planar integrated circuit (the direct ancestor of today’s microchips), and the Silicon Valley dynamic of the venture funding of new technology startups and spinoffs (of which there were many from Fairchild, including Intel).

Julius had a long career in Silicon Valley that was captured well by his obituaries in the San Jose Mercury News and New York Times. What does not come through in these accounts though was Mr. Blank’s wonderful, even disarming, sense of humor. After our oral history, Mr. Blank was kind enough to talk to me with some regularity when I didn’t understand some aspect of history. Why were four-layer diodes hard to make? What were the relative advantages of resistance versus RF crystal pullers? How did the automated wire wrapping effort at Western Electric develop in the early 1950s? He was always ready to take my call, and his droll, plainspoken answers to these questions invariably had me – and often him – chuckling. His clipped language typical of many engineers combined with a Lower East Side accent certainly aided my laughter. I’m certain that it did as well for many of his associates in the semiconductor industry and the Valley. Part of my shock at the news of his death was that less than a month ago I was on the phone with him, listening to his answers about the Western Electric question above. He was his usual self: insightful, patient, and funny. We shared a laugh at one of his characteristically unvarnished assessments of one of the characters involved. With Julius, I’d imagine it was an assessment he would have happily shared – and probably did – with them.

 

For more about Julius Blank and to experience something of his voice, consult one of his oral histories:

http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/collections/oral-histories/details/blank-julius.aspx

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102658264

 

 

9/11: Architectural Criticism?

Jarett Kobek's novel ATTA (semiotext(e)) offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism?  Here's an excerpt that addresses this question.

He gathers his luggage, makes his way through customs, presents his passport. His visa is in a new name. MOHAMED ATTA. He walks out of the terminal and finds a commuter bus. He travels on a highway towards the city. New York’s skyline rises in the distance. A unique horror. Direct in line of sight is the Empire State Building, an Art Deco stab at the sky. To the right, smaller buildings surround the Towers like acolytes encircle a false messiah.

The bus dives into a tunnel and leaves him on the street beside Grand Central Terminal. He enters the building, walks to its main course. The rush of people amuses him, reminds him of home. He stares at the ceiling, yellow astrological idols of Greek origin against teal background. So many false gods in America.

Atta leaves Grand Central, walks south on Park Avenue. On 40th Street, he realizes that he moves in the wrong direction. He turns right, navigates west. Each and every building is enormous, of unthinkable size. Skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper.

He reaches 6th Avenue, Avenue of the Americas. He looks south. The Towers dwarf the city. New York is a land of giants until you encounter its titans. Solid rectangle erections of architectural arrogance, total modernist faith in the ability of buildings to shape lives, of the architect’s belief that he can control his vision and utilize it towards good.

 

"Star Trek" and Cybersyn

Eden Medina, author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, celebrates the 45th anniversary of "Star Trek" by relating it to a different vision of the future--Project Cybersyn. 

 

On September 8, 1966, the first episode of “Star Trek” aired on U.S. television and presented viewers with a utopian vision of a future grounded in the use of advanced technology. On the show, a diverse crew of people (and other life forms) traveled across the universe at warp speed to promote peace, order, prosperity, and greater equality. From the high-tech bridge of the Starship Enterprise, Captain Kirk transmitted messages across vast distances, made decisions quickly and decisively, and monitored the health of both ship and crew.

To celebrate the 45th anniversary of “Star Trek,” this blog post commemorates a different, but related, vision of the future: “Project Cybersyn.”  The history of Project Cybersyn is detailed in the forthcoming MIT Press book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, which will be published in November 2011.

Project Cybersyn was a computer system built in Chile by the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970–73). Chilean and British engineers, working under the direction of the British cybernetician Stafford Beer, viewed the system as a way to advance the economic nationalization program that was central to Allende’s economic platform and Chilean socialist change. The system enabled the rapid transmission of information between the nationalized factories and the government agency charged with their management (CORFO) and used statistical software to predict crises before they happened. The team called the system Cybersyn, a synthesis of the words cybernetics and synergy. The name reflected the cybernetic principles present in the system’s design and the team’s belief that the whole system exceeded the sum of its parts.

Like “Star Trek,” Project Cybersyn brought together technology and politics to advance a utopian vision of a just society. It was created to transmit information quickly across great distances (Chile is approximately 3,200 miles long), monitor the health of the national economy, improve governance, and facilitate decision-making. Moreover, its design included mechanisms to promote worker participation in industrial management, and thus increase equality on the shop floor, as well as a control space that rivaled science fiction.