zoiaorg

by Roberto Zoia

Huawei. Modern Warfare

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Wars are often fought to win over strategic resources.

Huawei is the #1 telecom supplier in the world1, and the #2 smartphone maker2 after Samsung. It’s also a major player in next generation 5G network technology. “As of April 2019, Huawei tops the global rankings in nearly every category of 5G development, from its ‘contributions’—a technical term meaning standards proposals—to the number of standards meetings around the world that company representatives attend3“, writes The Wall Street Journal.

On May 15, U.S. President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, signing an executive order that expanded the government’s powers to protect communications networks4. Shortly after, the Commerce Department banned U.S. companies and any company using U.S. technology from doing business with Huawei, alleging “that there is reasonable cause to believe that Huawei has been involved in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States 5”.

There has been a “long-held belief from lawmakers and the U.S. intelligence community that Huawei acts on behalf of the Chinese government6”. While Huawei says it respects intellectual property rights, “competitors and some of its own former employees allege company goes to great lengths to steal trade secrets7”. On January 2019, the “U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) (…) charged Huawei with bank fraud and stealing trade secrets. In a 13-count indictment DOJ charged Huawei, its chief financial officer, and two affiliated firms with a laundry list of crimes including conspiracy, money laundering, bank and wire fraud, flouting U.S. sanctions on Iran, and obstruction of justice8.”

The ban will certainly impact Huawei’s cellphone business, and the damage to their telecom business can be even greater. For example, the World’s leading chip designers and suppliers, Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and ARM among them, have announced that because of the ban they will no longer be able to supply Huawei9.

Weapons of War and Perfect Timing

The timing of the ban is perfect, just in the middle of the U.S. trade negotiations with China. According to the Washington Post, “Trump has signaled in the past that these sorts of decisions can be used as bargaining chips in broader negotiations10”. In fact, some days after the ban, “Trump raised the possibility of easing restrictions on Huawei as part of a broader trade deal with Beijing11“. How can a national security issue be eased on “a broader trade deal”?

The ban on Huawei is not based on technical arguments, nor mentions Huawei’s rampant intellectual property theft. The alleged cause, national security, is very convenient because it prevents China from presenting a formal WTO challenge to the U.S..

It’s worth noting that none of the U.S. major telecom players use Huawei technology, and neither does the U.S. Government. (However, thanks the lower cost of its equipment, Huawei plays an important role for wireless carriers in rural America12.) Also, Huawei doesn’t sell phones within the U.S..

Some people raise the flag that the U.S. administration is doing “what’s right”, alluding Huawei’s rampant piracy practices and the fact that it works hand in hand with a government that restricts some very basic freedoms. However, the U.S. government doesn’t seem too much concerned when U.S. companies help oppressing regimes with implementation of censorship and information control infrastructure. Consider, for example, the Great Firewall of China13, one of the Chinese government’s favorite repression tool, which was build thanks to huge contracts with U.S. companies, using hardware provided by U.S. companies like Cisco14. A more recent examples is the funding by US Universities and Retirees funds of censorship technology like SenseTime and Megvil.

The Race for 5G Supremacy

The U.S. government has been trying to persuade Europe and other commercial partners to stay away from Huawei for their next generation 5G networks. But 5G networks are extraordinary expensive. China is heavily invested in 5G and Huawei is one of the leading companies in 5G technology in the world15, with very competitive prices. Nick Read, CEO of Vodafone —the world’s second-largest mobile operator— said that barring Huawei could delay 5G in Europe for at least two years, and structurally disadvantage Europe16.

EU nations don’t like to be bossed around by foreign governments. On March 11, 2019, the Trump administration told the German government that it would limit intelligence sharing with Berlin if Huawei was allowed to build Germany’s next-generation mobile-internet infrastructure. The same day, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Germany would define its own security standards for their new 5G networks, and that they have no plans to stop Huawei from participating if the company complies with the security requirements17.

Other European countries have followed suit. “If nations as wealthy as Switzerland and Saudi Arabia are picking Huawei (and their bank accounts) in the face of U.S. displeasure, we cannot realistically expect developing countries without such deep pockets to choose differently.18”

Technological Gaps

While the U.S. is leading when it comes to design and the technology behind electronic components, manufacturing is lead by a companies in Asian countries like Taiwan’s TSMC (the world’s largest semiconductor foundry) and others. U.S. semiconductor companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, MediaTek, etc., are “fabless”. That is, they outsource the fabrication of their designs to specialized semiconductor foundries.

Big players like Apple manufacture products like the iPhone in China because it allows them to lower assembly costs significantly. But most of the iPhone technology and parts are not desiged nor produced in China. It’s estimated that China makes only $10 of the cost of an iPhone, and only $2 of the amount are labor costs. Touch screen display, memory chips, microprocessors and other components are manufactured by Japanese, Korean, and U.S. companies, among others19, and are imported to China for assembly and later exported back as a finished product.

This is one of the reasons why, aside from the huge capital expenditure involved, moving factories to the U.S. for Apple would certainly increase assembly costs and lower Apple’s margins. (Even if the Trump administration has granted companies like Apple exception from import taxes over components.)

China is taking giant steps innovating in fields like AI and genetics. But when it comes to hardware and design of basic components like microprocessors, it continues to depend on the U.S.. The Huawei ban exposes this vulnerability. “China now has no choice but to pursue technological independence, and will burn the cash to achieve it20“. It will take time, but China will certainly take the necessary steps to close this dependency on foreign technology.


Photo by Thomas Jensen on Unsplash

  1. cfr Huawei Now World’s Largest Telecom Equipment-Maker. ↩
  2. cfr Smartphone Rankings Shaken Up Once Again as Huawei Surpasses Apple ↩
  3. cfr WSJ, Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered With Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics. ↩
  4. cfr Executive Order on Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain. ↩
  5. Technically speaking, Huawei was added to the Entity List. The Entity List is a “list of names of certain foreign persons – including businesses, research institutions, government and private organizations, individuals, and other types of legal persons – that are subject to specific license requirements for the export, reexport and/or transfer (in-country) of specified items.“ (cfr Bureau of Industry and Security/Entity List. ↩
  6. The Verge, Huawei vs. Trump: all the news about the Chinese phone maker’s messy relationship with the U.S.. ↩
  7. cfr WSJ, Huawei’s Yearslong Rise Is Littered With Accusations of Theft and Dubious Ethics. ↩
  8. cfr Huawei: Banned and Permitted in Which Countries?. ↩
  9. It’s worth noting that these and other companie’s revenues will also get hurt by the lost of such a big client. Cfr Intel, Qualcomm, and other chipmakers reportedly join Google in Huawei ban. ↩
  10. cfr The Washington Post, Trump administration cracks down on giant Chinese tech firm, escalating clash with Beijing. ↩
  11. cfr CNN Business, Trump suggests using Huawei as a bargaining chip in U.S.-China trade deal and The Verge, Trump’s latest explanation for the Huawei ban is unacceptably bad. ↩
  12. cfr The New York Times, Huawei Ban Threatens Wireless Service in Rural Areas. ↩
  13. cfr Wikipedia, Great Firewall: “The Great Firewall of China (GFW) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People’s Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in the Internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic. The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools (e.g. Google search, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia etc.) and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations. Besides censorship, the GFW has also influenced the development of China’s internal internet economy by nurturing domestic companies and reducing the effectiveness of products from foreign internet companies.” ↩
  14. cfr. Wired, Cisco Leak: Great Firewall of China was a chance to sell more routers. ↩
  15. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Intel recently announced that it was exiting the 5G modem market. cfr The Verge, https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18411332/intel-exiting-5g-smartphone-modem-market-apple-qualcomm-settle-dispute. Also, cfr MIT Technology Review, China is racing ahead in 5G. Here’s what that means. ↩
  16. cfr Huawei expects to secure 5G contracts in Germany. ↩
  17. cfr Huawei: Banned and Permitted in Which Countries?. ↩
  18. cfr Australian Strategic Policy Institute,
    Huawei and 5G: what are the alternatives?. ↩
  19. cfr The Conversation, We estimate China only makes $8.46 from an iPhone – and that’s why Trump’s trade war is futile. ↩
  20. cfr The Tech Cold War Has Begun. ↩

Teach it to a Child

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If you have experience in something, it can be difficult to explain it succinctly to other people.

This may seem counterintuitive. Doesn’t experience give you the advantage of understanding how something works? When you’ve been doing things for a long time, your brain makes part of the process transparent to you. You unconsciously make leaps.

Other times, it’s not that you are taking things for granted that may look like magic to other people. We think that we’ve got a solid understanding of something, when there may be important gaps in our knowledge.

Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman used a method for learning that relied on teaching. He found that explaining things to others is a great way to learn. His method is now known as the Feynman Technique: Choose a concept. Teach it to a child. Identify the gaps and go back to the source material. Review and simplify.

Give it a try. You’ll find that children are curious and acute. Finding solid explanations for things you thought you knew will help you consolidate that knowledge.

Accessing Trumps Owning

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Several companies have recently announced new subscription-based services: gaming (Google, Apple), video streaming (Apple, Disney), and news (Apple News). On a different plane, software is definitely trending towards a subscription model, which makes sense from a business model point of view.

In his book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future , Kevin Kelly explains that “access is so superior to ownership in many ways that it is driving the frontiers of the economy. (…) In the coming 30 years the tendency toward the dematerialized, the decentralized, the simultaneous, the platform enabled, and the cloud will continue unabated. (…) For most things in daily life, accessing will trump owning.1”

  1. Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, p. 131. ↩

Building a Better Business Using the Lego Serious Play Method, by Per Kristiansen and Robert Rasmussen

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Kristiansen and Rasmussen have been deeply involved in the Lego Serious Play method since its inception. Lego Serious Play is a facilitation methodology created by the Lego Group, available since 2010 under an open source, community-based model. Its goal is fostering creative thinking through team building metaphors of their organizational identities and experiences using Lego bricks. Participants work through imaginary scenarios using visual three-dimensional Lego constructions, hence the name “serious play”.

Some ways that Lego Serious Play can help an organization are:

Going beyond 20/80 meetings and creating lean in. 20/80 Meetings are, as defined by the authors, meetings where 20 percent of the attendants take 80 percent of the meeting time. The attention density —how long we pay attention to something— is low.

Lego Serious Play can also help leaders unlock other people’s potential. Often, people are not aware of their knowledge on a given topic. A group of smart people eager to contribute don’t necessarily know how to form a solution. Leaders should help unlock the knowledge in the room.

Unlocking also means deepening the participant’s understanding of the system, and “creating a culture and process where there is an understanding that the organization needs to probe, sense, and then respond. (…).”, and helping them realize the connection (or disconnection) between each individual’s purpose and the purpose of the organization.

Breaking Habitual Thinking. Expertise in a domain can lead to using tested and proven patterns of thinking over and over again. While in most cases this can be seen as an advantage, in can hinder creative thinking and problem solving.

The focus in Lego Serious Play is not on the brick; it is on the story they create. Yet there is no story without the brick. The bricks and the models become metaphors, and the landscapes of the models become stories. (p. 31)

What is Serious Play?

lego_serious_play

The authors define Serious Play as play with an explicit purpose. A session of serious play is an intentional gathering to apply the imagination, where participants seek not to implement but to explore and prepare, by following a specific set of rules and language.

“The purpose of the systematic use of the LEGO brick is to make the models —not any individual present— the center of attention in the meeting.” Lego bricks are not used to convey answers but to unlock and construct new knowledge. There is no “right way”, every participant has the obligation to build a model and a right to tell the story of the model. The method encourages questioning the model and its story, not the person.

The Science Underlying Lego Serious Play

The Lego Serious Play methodology rests upon Seymour Papert’s constructivism.

Papert, who is considered the “world’s foremost expert on how technology can provide new ways to learn and teach mathematics, thinking in general, and other subjects”, saw conventional school environments as too sterile, too passive, too dominated by instruction. They didn’t provide or promote an atmosphere that allowed children to be the active builders that he knew they were1.

Constructionism involves two types of construct: when you construct things out in the world, you simultaneously construct knowledge in your head. “If we believe that we hold knowledge as structures based on our interaction with the world, then we can create knowledge faster and better (learning) when we are engaged in constructing a product or something external to themselves—a sand castle, a machine, a computer program, or a book. In short, ‘When you build in the world, you build in your mind.’” (p. 82)

The Builder’s Mind

Understanding the builder’s mind and in particular short-term and long-term memory plays an important role in Lego Serious Play’s foundations.

One could say that learning includes easily retrieving memory of new knowledge. But first you need to have something to retrieve; hence, encoding/formation stands out as an obvious first key stage in creating results with Lego Serious Play” (p. 100)

Long-term memory depends strongly on attention density2. Focused attention increases memory formation. According to the authors, there are four factors that affect memory formation:

  1. Levels of processing. The more deeply we process information, the stronger memory formation is. If we can transform information into something personally meaningful, then stronger memories will form.
  2. The importance of context. Context can serve as a good cue to retrieve memory, which is essentially an interaction between encoding and retrieval.
  3. Generation, when the learner is involved in making new knowledge. Ownership optimizes learning and creates long-term memory. Generation and levels of processing are very closely related: producing your own learning means you are processing more deeply.
  4. Emotions. Current thinking is that strong emotions help to focus attention and activate the amygdala (which plays a key role in mediating the effects of emotional arousal on the strength of the memory for the event).

Focused attention is essential: when attention is divided, research shows, the hippocampus shuts down and no memory is formed. Techniques like distributing learning over time and chunking —simplifying knowledge in a way that it forms clusters of similar meaning and a pattern of understanding— can lead to significant improvements in learning.

Insights are fresh knowledge that comes in the form of surprising solutions to an often known problem. What does the brain need for insights to emerge?

Research shows, explain the authors, that before an insight occurs, the brain quites down. Fewer signals come in and there are fewer signals between different brain waves. Also, good mood makes it more likely to solve a problem with an insight, and therefore to form a strong memory. “It puts the brain in preparatory state.”

The Joy of Effective Learning

Nature gives us a special type of biological feedback that rewards appropriate learning activities. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi refers to this feeling as flow. “Flow is a condition in which we are completely engrossed in a game or task, lose our sense of time and place, and utilize our learning potential to the fullest.”

We arrive at the flow condition when our competencies and the challenge we face are in balance with each other. Lack of challenge leads to boredom, facing a too difficult challenge creates anxiety. We develop and become more competent as a result of experiencing flow: we have a high point experience, that is, we succeed mastering a challenge that initially felt too hard and out of reach. (p. 114)

Strategic Imagination

“Imagination is the ability to conceive of what is not. Creativity is imagination applied.” Different types of imagination serve different purposes.

Making sense of things, or descriptive imagination, is used “to evoke images that describe the complex and confusing world out there.” It not only reveals what’s happening, but enables us to make sense of it and identify new possibilities and opportunities.

Creative imagination allows us to see what isn’t there (yet). It’s used to create something new and different. While fanstasy is the domain of the imposible, creative imagination focuses on possible realities and the making of reality.

With Challenging imagination we negate, contradict, and destroy the sense of progress that comes from descriptive and creative imagination. It starts from start and assumes nothing.

The Role of Play

Play is about process, work is about results. The purpose of Lego Serious Play is to use play to produce faster results.

The authors quote Johan Huizinga’s four-part definition of play: Play is fully absorbing, is intrinsically motivated, includes elements of uncertainty and surprise, and involves a sense of illusion and imagination.

Biologically, play influences positively brain development. “As play activities become more complex, new neural networks are added to handle this complexity.” (p. 131). Socially, play helps develop the calibration of one’s emotional responses to the world’s many unexpected and ambiguous events. It helps us prepare for unanticipated interactions by fine-tuning copying skills and refining social competences. Play also helps us “test our capabilities, rehires, and hone our skills.” Learning memory last longer when we learn by playing.

Play is culturally, temporally, and spatially marked. Where, when, and how are clearly defined, for example, by freedom (you don’t have to play), separation (marking of time), non-productive orientation (no need to produce goods), rules (that help suspend reality, or normal real life), and factiousness (awareness that play is different from real life).

play is a transformative power—something that we all intuitively use while in childhood, and ought to use in adulthood as well. (…) This extension of play into adulthood is believed to be the basis of what Whitebread and Basilio called the ‘flexibility of thought which underpins the astonishing problem-solving abilities and creativity of humans.’ (p. 133)

I enjoyed reading this book very much, specially the sections explaining the method’s foundations. This book will provide a good insight into the Lego Serious Play methodology, although you’ll need a trained facilitator to apply it effectively.

  1. Papert was, among other things, co-director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, inventor of the Logo programming language, and the genius behind the Lego Mindstorms product line. ↩
  2. “the key definition of attention density is that it is the combination of how long we pay attention to something and how much we pay attention to it. The how much can further be divided into are we listening, or are we listening and looking, or are we even listening, looking, and touching. Meeting attendees are creating very little or even no new knowledge, and thus no new solutions. These meetings may even destroy value –partly because the participants are taken away from value-creating activities, partly because employees haven’t solved the complex issue the meeting was intended to address, and partly because the meeting itself destroys collaborative efforts between the individuals and may even create stress (which has a very negative impact on the brain).” (p. 17) ↩

Meaningful vs Expiring Information

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As time remains constant and information becomes abundant and ubiquitous, the question of how to read things that lead to meaningful knowledge becomes ever more relevant.

Some people are worried about how Facebook or Twitter maybe “manipulating” their timelines by deciding which news or tweets they see and which don’t. I don’t think that’s a problem per se.

Newspapers, for example, provide us with a series of news curated by an editorial staff, which certainly has its own view about what’s happening in the world. More important, some newspapers have a long-term vision about that worldview. Also, consider that most people read the newspaper that is more akin to his or her tastes, politically and socially speaking. But isn’t this falling into some kind of confirmation bias1? Some people read two newspapers to have a more “independent” view of the news, but I bet that they are few.

The problem is not Facebook’s or Twitter’s algorithm, but our decision to rely on Facebook and Twitter as a source of relevant information. For some years now —and the trend probably will go on forever— we rely on algorithms to find information. The information available is far too much for us to see without filtering. For example, Google optimizes search results for us. Which is a great convenience in a wide range of situations. Facebook customizes what is shown in our timeline according to its own criteria. We don’t know that criteria for sure, but I would bet that maximizing the time we spend on Facebook is a factor that carries a lot of weight in the algorithm. What’s Twitter’s criteria? How about LinkedIn?

Farman Street’s Shane Parrish concept of expiring information can help us make better use of our time. “Information has a predictable half-life: the time taken for half of it to be replaced or disproved. Over time, one group of facts replaces another.2” Expiring information is information that has a short half-life, and we should avoid it:

Here are a few telltale signs you’re dealing with expiring information. First, it’s marketed to you. Second, lacking details and nuance, it’s easily digestible. This is why it’s commonly telling you what happened, not why it happened or under what conditions it might happen again. Third, it won’t be relevant in a month or a year. Expiring information is one reason I stopped reading most news. It’s a false map.

Attention is the valuable asset we need to take care of:

Avoid the noise because it messes with the signal. Your attention is valuable, so why spend so much time on stuff that will be irrelevant in a few days? Read what stands the test of time. Read from publications that respect and value your time, the ones that add more value than they consume. Read what prompts you to think for yourself. Read fewer articles and more books. Read books that have stood the test of time, those that are still in print after 20 years or so.

What did you read today? Will it still be meaningful next week? What about next year?

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash.

  1. Confirmation bias is “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.” (cfr Wikipedia, Confirmation Bias.) ↩
  2. cfr Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It. ↩

Privacy Trade-Offs

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As Facebook continues to raise scandals about the way they record, store and sell their user’s data (and not only their user’s data), you may wonder why people continue to use Facebook at all.

I found one answer while reading Kill Process, a science-fiction novel by William Hertling. In the novel, most people in the world are connected by Tomo, the world’s larges social network company. Even if the book is fictional, the similarities between Tomo and Facebook are too many not to think ‘Facebook’ every time you read ‘Tomo’. Despite Tomo’s worst practices regarding user’s privacy, people continue to use the service because in a world where real, face-to-face connections are scarce, Tomo is how people remain connected to their friends. Even if it’s a feeble connection, they don’t dare drop out of Tomo because they fear loosing those conections.

Last year, I did a simple experiment: I deleted the Facebook app from my cel phone. I did not delete my Facebook account, but I only logged into Facebook on the laptop, ideally twice a day.

I’ve never considered myself a heavy user of Facebook. My posts are mostly quotes about things I’m reading. It also serves me as a reminder of my friend’s birthdays. Even so, I was surprised at how many times a day I tapped into my phone trying to open the now non-existent Facebook app. It took me more than a week to unlearn this ‘unconscious’ behavior.

Kevin Kelly, in his great book  The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, gives another explanation:

If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy. This has surprised the experts. So far, at every juncture that offers a choice, we’ve tilted, on average, toward more sharing, more disclosure, more transparency. I would sum it up like this: Vanity trumps privacy. (p. 262)

The important question you should ask yourself is: why am I on Facebook?

Photo by Eaters Collective on Unsplash.