The World Splits Into Pro-China and Anti-China Parts: IBM, Google Aid Quantum Push --- Companies to give combined $150 million for university research in supercomputer race.

"TOKYO -- International Business Machines and Google are giving $150 million for quantum-computing research at the University of Chicago and the University of Tokyo as the U.S. and Japan try to stay ahead of a fast-rising China.

Quantum computers are a hot area of research because they could help solve problems that classical computers alone can't, such as modeling how a drug molecule interacts with the body's proteins or how batteries work at an atomic scale.

China has invested heavily in quantum computing, which also has possible military applications in cryptology and materials for weapons. U.S. researchers said Chinese laboratories have shown progress recently -- often touted in state media -- and are competitive in some areas. 

However, quantum-computing specialists say more basic study is needed before anyone can be sure the technology delivers real-world benefits.

The U.S.-Japan partnership is an example of how scientific research with implications for security and economic growth is increasingly split between China and a U.S.-led camp that includes allies such as Japan and Western European nations.

"We have to count on our allies more for primary research," said Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan.

Until recently, he said, the U.S. was too lax in allowing Chinese students to work at American universities in advanced scientific fields. "We were funding them. We were not only funding them, we were training them, educating them to come back and compete against us," he said.

The University of Tokyo's executive vice president, Hiroaki Aihara, said many Chinese quantum-computing advances were shrouded in secrecy. "They are a very formidable competitor," he said.

Emanuel said the partnership was hatched when the University of Tokyo's president came over for lunch last July and mentioned the university's quantum-computing program. As mayor of Chicago, Emanuel had promoted the University of Chicago's ambitions in the field, so he pitched a joint research program with funds from U.S. companies.

IBM said it would give $100 million to the two universities with the aim of building a quantum-centric supercomputer in a decade that contains 100,000 qubits, the quantum equivalent of bits in a conventional digital computer. The company showed off a 433-qubit processor last November.

Unlike digital bits that are either zero or one, qubits store information in a quantum state that is a mix of zero and one. Quantum computers draw on the often-counterintuitive principles of quantum mechanics, such as the notion that an object's position may be defined only after someone looks at it.

In an interview, IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said quantum computers could model problems that are unsolvable on today's classical computers.

"If you can work on climate change and you can come up with alternate ways to sequester carbon, suddenly all the negativism on fossil fuels goes away," Krishna said.

Or, he said, the new computers might be able to simulate at an atomic level what happens inside an electric-vehicle battery. "You could do something in an evening that would have taken six months in a lab," he said.

The technology is still in the early stages. Charina Chou, the chief operating officer at Google Quantum AI, said Google estimated that ultimately a useful quantum computer would need a million qubits, up from something on the order of hundreds today.

She said it would need to make an error only about one in every million steps instead of one in 100 -- a rate that itself is the result of breakthroughs in error correction Alphabet's Google recently reported in the journal Nature.

"We have four orders of magnitude to go on the quantity, we have four orders of magnitude to go roughly on the quality, so it's going to be a hard problem," Chou said.

Google is contributing $50 million to the two universities in what Chou said was the first time the Silicon Valley company was sharing its quantum computer with university scientists as part of a long-term research partnership.

A signing ceremony is set for this weekend in Hiroshima, Japan, where President Biden and other leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized nations are holding their annual summit.

Participants said the partnership aimed to educate a generation of quantum specialists, not only physicists to design the computers but also scientists in adjacent fields who can use them to solve problems.

"There's going to be a real need for people who understand the technology behind this and can help to implement it," said University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos." [1]

1. Business News: IBM, Google Aid Quantum Push --- Companies to give combined $150 million for university research in supercomputer race. Landers, Peter. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 18 May 2023: B.3.

Switch Off Brainstorming If You Want Brighter Ideas --- Giving workers time to think for themselves could yield more innovation.

 

"OK, people, let's spitball some topics for this column. Annoying co-workers you would like to replace with artificial intelligence? Office wardrobe malfunctions? Bosses' secret TikTok accounts? Go ahead, shout 'em out. There are no bad ideas.

This brainstorming exercise is, in fact, a terrible idea -- not only because I can't hear you. The value of gathering to swap loosely formed thoughts is highly suspect, despite being a major reason many companies want workers back in offices.

"You do not get your best ideas out of these freewheeling brainstorming sessions," says Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School. "You will do your best creative work by yourself."

Iyengar has compiled academic research on idea generation, including a decade of her own interviews with more than a thousand people, into a book called "Think Bigger." 

It concludes that group brainstorming is usually a waste of time.

Pitfalls include blabbermouths with mediocre suggestions and introverts with brilliant ones that they keep to themselves. 

She argues that the ethos of brainstorming -- reserve judgment and build on what others say -- is better applied to polite conversation at a dinner party than to key decisions in a conference room.

Business teams ought to collaborate, of course, but she interprets the evidence to mean that colleagues should compare notes after extensive, independent thinking.

Plenty of people have always bemoaned brainstorming. Longtime Wall Street Journal readers may recall a 2006 "Cubicle Culture" column that skewered the popular practice, and Harvard Business Review published a research-based case against the usefulness of brainstorming in 2015. Mostly, though, grumblers have accepted such meetings as an inescapable office reality.

Enough, some companies and workers say.

"I've gone from being the biggest brainstorming proponent to feeling anxiety if a meeting doesn't have a clear agenda," says Drew Himel, chief executive of Fireside, an e-commerce strategy firm.

Himel says bantering around a table fits his outgoing personality, but the pandemic and an executive coach led him to a humbling realization: He talks too much. 

He discovered that his 16-person team, now fully remote, thrives when people develop ideas on their own and can share them in writing.

They still get together virtually to discuss and refine what they've come up with, but these revamped meetings are tightly organized and tangent-free.

Elsewhere, companies like Alphabet's Google try to encourage innovation by letting workers spend part of their work time building on their own ideas for what could benefit the business. Some such as Shopify and Wayfair have slashed meeting times, part of the working world's re-examination of checking in, touching base and catching up in the hybrid era. Microsoft research shows that many people spend the equivalent of an entire workday in meetings every week (and another day's worth of time reading and sending emails).

Other firms maintain that our screens are the real problem, and creative sparks will fly if we convene in person. The longer offices remain half-empty, the more some executives glorify face-to-face get-togethers as fountains of innovation.

"In the more productive brainstorm sessions I've been a part of over the years, people get excited and blurt out new ideas or improvements to prior proposals, quickly advancing the seed of an idea, and leading to the broader group getting energized and feeling that it's onto something," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a recent memo to explain why most employees must report to an office at least three days a week, starting this month.

An Amazon spokesman adds that the company's brainstorming sessions are sometimes unstructured but often begin with colleagues sharing well-researched memos, reducing time spent on ill-conceived ideas.

Devoted brainstormers do exist outside the C-suite. They don't dispute research showing that free-form confabs are often fruitless. They maintain that breakthrough moments are possible and make the process worthwhile. Critics have unreasonable expectations, they say.

Lukas Kaiser, senior vice president of content at Westbrook Media in Los Angeles, subscribes to a 70-30 theory: 70% of ideas in a brainstorming session are idiotic (his word), and that's a fair price to pay for the 30% of ideas that have merit.

Oh, he's also noticed that the duds tend to come first, so to leave time for the good stuff, he prescribes two-hour meetings.

Meg Amis, a marketing director in Philadelphia, says she loves the energy of huddling in a room to slap sticky notes on a wall or scribble on a whiteboard. The process can set an inclusive tone and rally support for a project, she contends.

"With anything that requires multiple people's buy-in, it's better to start with a brainstorming session because then everybody feels like they're part of it," she says.

Sometimes leaders bring employees together to create the illusion of wide-open input, says Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design Studio, a management consulting firm in San Francisco. In-person brainstorming is part of the back-to-office rationale for many of her clients, and she generally advises the ones that truly want to improve collaboration to first carve out some alone time for their workers.

When Hall needs inspiration, she goes for a run.

"It's freaky," she says. "I will go run on a problem, and things will happen in my head that do not happen under any other circumstance."

Others might find "Aha!" moments in the shower or while listening to music. Leaving breakthroughs to private serendipity can feel, to bosses, like losing control, she acknowledges, but it might be more effective than trying to schedule magic in a conference room." [1]

This research kills the idea that work in the office is a good application of our resources. 

1. On the Clock: Switch Off Brainstorming If You Want Brighter Ideas --- Giving workers time to think for themselves could yield more innovation. Borchers, Callum. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 18 May 2023: A.12.

Išjunkite „Smegenų šturmą“, jei norite ryškesnių idėjų --- Jei darbuotojams suteiksite laiko pagalvoti patiems, tai gali duoti daugiau naujovių

     „Gerai, žmonės, išspjaukime keletą temų šiai rubrikai. Erzinantys bendradarbiai, kuriuos norėtumėte pakeisti dirbtiniu intelektu? Biuro drabužių problemos? Slaptos „viršininkų“ „TikTok“ paskyros? Pirmyn. Blogų idėjų nėra.

 

     Šis smegenų šturmo pratimas iš tikrųjų yra siaubinga idėja – ne tik todėl, kad aš jūsų negirdžiu. Labai abejotina, ar verta susiburti apsikeisti laisvai suformuotomis mintimis, nors tai yra pagrindinė priežastis, dėl kurios daugelis įmonių nori, kad darbuotojai grįžtų į biurus.

 

     „Jūs nepasisemsite geriausių idėjų iš šių laisvo minčių šturmo seansų“, - sako Sheena Iyengar, Kolumbijos verslo mokyklos profesorė. „Geriausią kūrybinį darbą atliksi pats vienas“.

 

     Iyengar apibendrino akademinius idėjų generavimo tyrimus, įskaitant dešimtmetį jos pačios interviu su daugiau, nei tūkstančiu, žmonių, į knygą „Galvok daugiau“.

 

     Joje daroma išvada, kad grupinis smegenų šturmas paprastai yra laiko švaistymas.

 

     Spąstai apima blevyzgus su vidutiniais pasiūlymais ir intravertus su nuostabiais, kuriuos jie laiko sau.

 

     Ji teigia, kad smegenų šturmo etosą – apsisaugoti nuo ankstyvo sprendimo ir remtis tuo, ką sako kiti – geriau pritaikyti mandagiems pokalbiams vakarienės metu, o ne pagrindiniams sprendimams konferencijų salėje.

 

     Žinoma, verslo komandos turėtų bendradarbiauti, tačiau ji interpretuoja įrodymus taip, kad kolegos turėtų palyginti pastabas po išsamaus ir nepriklausomo mąstymo.

 

     Daugybė žmonių visada apgailestavo dėl smegenų šturmo. Ilgamečiai „Wall Street Journal“ skaitytojai gali prisiminti 2006 m. stulpelį „Kabinų kultūra“, kuriame buvo sukritikuotata populiari praktika, o „Harvard Business Review“ 2015 m. paskelbė moksliniais tyrimais pagrįstą bylą prieš protų šturmo naudingumą. Tačiau dažniausiai niurzgėjai tokius susitikimus priėmė, kaip neišvengiamą dalyką, kaip biuro realybę.

 

     Pakanka, sako kai kurios įmonės ir darbuotojai.

 

     „Iš didžiausio protų šturmo šalininko tapau apimtas nerimo jausmo, jei susitikime nėra aiškios darbotvarkės“, – sako Drew Himel, elektroninės prekybos strategijos įmonės „Fireside“ vadovas.

 

     Himelis sako, kad pokštavimas prie stalo atitinka jo atvirą asmenybę, tačiau pandemija ir vadovaujantis treneris paskatino jį suprasti, kad jis per daug kalba.

 

     Jis atrado, kad jo 16 žmonių komanda, kuri dabar yra visiškai nutolusi, klesti, kai žmonės patys kuria idėjas ir gali jomis pasidalinti raštu.

 

     Jie vis dar susitinka virtualiai, kad aptartų ir patobulintų tai, ką sugalvojo, tačiau šie atnaujinti susitikimai yra griežtai organizuoti ir be nukrypimų.

 

     Kitur tokios įmonės, kaip „Alphabet“ „Google“, bando skatinti naujoves, leisdamos darbuotojams dalį savo darbo laiko skirti savo idėjoms, kurios galėtų būti naudingos verslui. Kai kurie, pavyzdžiui, „Shopify“ ir „Wayfair“, sutrumpino susitikimų laiką, o tai yra dalis darbo pasaulio pakartotinio patikrinimo, susijusio su registracija, paliečiama baze ir pasivijo hibridinę erą. „Microsoft“ tyrimai rodo, kad daugelis žmonių kiekvieną savaitę susitikimuose praleidžia visą darbo dieną (ir dar vieną dieną laiko, skaitydami ir siųsdami el. laiškus).

 

     Kitos firmos teigia, kad mūsų ekranai yra tikroji problema, o kūrybinės kibirkštys kils, jei susirinksime asmeniškai. Kuo ilgiau biurai lieka pustušti, tuo labiau kai kurie vadovai šlovina akis į akį susitikimus, kaip naujovių šaltinį.

 

     „Per daugelį metų dalyvavę produktyvesnėse minčių šturmo sesijose, žmonės susijaudina ir išskleidžia naujas idėjas ar ankstesnių pasiūlymų patobulinimus, greitai paspartindami idėjos pradžią ir paskatindami platesnę grupę įgauti energijos ir jausmų, kad tai susiję su kažkuo“, – rašė „Amazon“ generalinis direktorius Andy Jassy, paaiškindamas, kodėl dauguma darbuotojų nuo šio mėnesio turi atsiskaityti biure bent tris dienas per savaitę.

 

     „Amazon“ atstovas priduria, kad įmonės „smegenų šturmo“ sesijos kartais būna nestruktūruotos, tačiau dažnai prasideda, kolegoms dalijantis gerai ištirtomis žinutėmis, taip sumažinant laiką, praleistą netinkamai apgalvotoms idėjoms.

 

     Atsidavusių protų audroms tikrai yra už viršininkų patalpų ribų. Jie neginčija tyrimų, rodančių, kad laisvos formos konfabai dažnai būna nevaisingi. Jie teigia, kad proveržio akimirkos yra įmanomos ir kad procesas yra vertas. Kritikai turi nepagrįstų lūkesčių, sako jie.

 

     Lukas Kaiseris, Los Andželo „Westbrook Media“ vyresnysis viceprezidentas, pritaria 70–30 teorijai: 70 % minčių šturmo sesijos idėjų yra idiotiškos (jo žodis), ir tai yra teisinga kaina už 30 % idėjų, kurios turi nuopelnų.

 

     Oi, jis taip pat pastebėjo, kad keblumai dažniausiai būna pirmoje vietoje, todėl, kad liktų laiko geriems dalykams, jis paskiria dviejų valandų susitikimus.

 

     Meg Amis, rinkodaros direktorė iš Filadelfijos, sako, kad jai patinka glaustis kambaryje, plakant lipnius lapelius ant sienos ar rašyti ant lentos. Ji tvirtina, kad procesas gali suteikti visa apimantį toną ir paskatinti projektą.

 

     "Su bet kuo, kam  reikalingas kelių žmonių dalyvavimas, geriau pradėti nuo minčių šturmo, nes tada visi jaučiasi esantys jos dalimi“, – sako ji.

 

     Kartais lyderiai suburia darbuotojus, kad sukurtų plataus indėlio iliuziją, sako Erika Hall, viena iš San Francisko vadybos konsultacijų įmonės „Mule Design Studio“ įkūrėjų. Asmeninis minčių šturmas yra daugelio jos klientų sugrįžimo į biurą loginio pagrindo dalis, ir ji paprastai pataria tiems, kurie tikrai nori pagerinti bendradarbiavimą, pirmiausia skirti šiek tiek laiko savo darbuotojams.

 

     Kai Hall reikia įkvėpimo, ji eina pabėgioti.

 

     „Tai keista“, - sako ji. „Aš spręsiu problemą ir mano galvoje atsitiks dalykų, kurie neįvyksta jokiomis kitomis aplinkybėmis“.

 

     Kiti gali rasti "Aha!" akimirkas duše ar klausantis muzikos. Ji pripažįsta, kad proveržio palikimas asmeniniam polėkiui, viršininkams, gali jaustis, kaip kontrolės praradimas, tačiau tai gali būti veiksmingiau, nei bandymas suplanuoti magiją konferencijų salėje." [1]

 

Šis tyrimas užmuša idėją, kad darbas biure yra geras mūsų išteklių panaudojimas.

 

1. On the Clock: Switch Off Brainstorming If You Want Brighter Ideas --- Giving workers time to think for themselves could yield more innovation. Borchers, Callum. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 18 May 2023: A.12.

Lietuva – nauja gamtos jėga

  "Daugeliu atžvilgių Didžioji Britanija yra nedaug geresnė už mus. Tačiau šalies, turinčios antrą pagal dydį gynybos biudžetą NATO (apie 50 mlrd. svarų sterlingų per metus), ginkluotųjų pajėgų problemos yra gilesnės, nei mūsų. Dešimtmečius mažinamos, kariuomenės išlaidos sumažino jos gebėjimus dalyvauti konflikte, kuriame dalyvauja NATO, neįmanoma tokio konflikto metu iškelti net vieną sunkią diviziją: apie 30 000 karių su tankais, artilerija ir sraigtasparniais." [1]

Labai įdomu. 50 milijardų svarų sterlingų per metus negali suteikti jums divizijos. Lietuva tam turi 1 milijardą eurų per metus. Kaip kovos mūsų, Lietuvos, divizija? Nebijokite. Visi nusivilksime apatinius ir pradėsime su jais mosuoti. Uraganas pasieks kosminę erdvę ir sunaikins visus palydovus, kurie nėra pakankamai draugiški išdidžiai Lietuvai. Landsbergių šeima turi tiek gero, brangaus, maisto, kad gali išnaudoti progą pasigaminti visai kitokio pobūdžio vėją.

1. "Europe is struggling to rebuild its military clout." The Economist, 13 May 2023, p. NA.