Thibaut Scholasch and Sébastien Payen for the Al

October 16, 2014

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

So Scholasch and Payen are Frenchmen who are well on their way to revolutionizing the art of making wine, and perhaps agriculture more broadly. They however have faced years of reactionary opposition and general inertia in the wine making community. No good deed goes unpunished in this wicked world, but I for one hope that these two guys become incredibly wealthy and give their skeptics something to cry about through the best sort of revenge- living well.

Wired profiled Scholasch and Payen in 2012 in an article titled the Vine Nerds. Scholasch and Payen are French ex-pats who met in California. Scholasch had worked in vineyards in Napa, France and Chile and came to feel like a scientist trapped in a profession of artists. Scholasch had an unusual desire to improve the process of making wine, which apparently verges on the blasphemous in some circles. Techniques developed in 12th Century France represent the apex of agricultural technology you see, and anyone trying to update them is something of a public menace. A mutual friend introduced Scholasch to Payen, another French ex-pat. Payen holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley. As a graduate student Payen designed a novel micro-biosensor. They teamed up to form the Fruition Sciences company, which installs sap sensors to provide real-time data on crops, in this case grapes. The technology allows wine makers to give their vines just the right amount of water precisely when needed- a substantial improvement over tasting dirt, spitting it out, and irrigating fields early and (too) often.

You can read their bios here and how the process works here. Basically their process allows wine makers to make better wine while using only a fraction of the water typically employed.

Some wine makers gave Scholasch and Payen a shot, and became believers. From the Vine Nerds:

Austin Peterson, is one of Fruition’s most vocal supporters and attests to changes the sensor arrays can produce. ‘Before, irrigation management was basically done by our vineyard foreman looking at next week’s weather forecast and at leaves that were starting to fold or tendrils that were drying,’ Peterson says. ‘But visual cues can be misleading. As we started to see the data, it started to explain some things.’

Before becoming a convert, Peterson needed to see proof. In 2007 he divided Ovid’s 15-acre property in half, using the visual method on one side, sensors on the other. Following traditional visual cues led to a regimen of shallow irrigations, which required more water and resulted in unintended side effects, like shriveled grapes and elevated alcohol levels. It also may have helped slow the ripening process and delay the harvest, which is always risky in Northern California, where early autumn rains can destroy a crop in a matter of days. Meanwhile, data gathered from the sensors dictated a near-opposite approach: fewer, deeper irrigations, primarily later in the season. After two years, the result was substantial water savings and earlier harvests. For Peterson, the experiment shed light on how profoundly irrigation affects fruit quality as well as a wine’s flavors and bouquet. ‘It was like going from having an undergraduate degree in something to a PhD, where you have a deep understanding of why vines behave the way they do’ Peterson says. ‘As a winemaker, you understand different flavors. But now you start to understand why the differences exist.’

So it turns out that wine makers have been over-irrigating their vineyards in Napa for decades and producing lower rated wine as a result. One client interviewed by Wired stated that they had dropped their water use from 36-64 gallons per vine to 0-10 gallons. They reckoned this would save them 5.8 million gallons of water and produce better wine in the process. Project that out across California, and it gets to something like a potential savings of 9.1 billion gallons of water per growing season.

Did I mention that the Southwest United States is experiencing a huge drought? It looks something like this (color = bad, dark = worse):

Agricultural technologies that help you get by with less water might come in handy about now, especially in California. So you make much better use of an increasingly scarce resource to produce a better product. Better still, this technology is branching out beyond wine to increase the productivity of other sectors of agriculture. Scholasch and Payen are just two of the most recent entrepreneurs in a long line that have repeatedly thwarted Malthusians and neo-Malthusians through the driving force of voluntary exchange.

The process of updating agriculture sounds almost as frustrating as education reform. After an enthusiastic embrace of the technology by an expert in rice cultivation, Wired noted Scholasch’s reaction:

Scholasch lowers his eyes and shakes his head. ‘The first sap-flow sensors were tested in the ’80s. What we have in place was usable in the early ’90s—and look, it’s taken 20 years to start using it,’ he says, then gives a quick smile, betraying a glimmer of hope. ‘But it’s very rewarding to get recognition from peers you respect. It’s an accreditation.’

Hang in there guys- and remember the motto of the Economist “to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” No one ever said it would be easy, but the difficulty of your struggle will only make your eventual triumph all the more flavorful- like your wine, it will get better with age.

 

 

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Posted by matthewladner

Pascal Monnet for the Higgy

April 14, 2013

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

A fascinating 2012 article in Wired introduced readers to the exploits of Urban eXperiment (UX for short). UX is a clandestine group of Parisians who make use of the underground tunnels break into museums in order to restore neglected pieces of art. Pascal Monnet is a museum administrator who did everything in his power to shut them down.

If this sounds too much like Robert DeNiro’s rebel-commando air conditioner repair man character from Brazil for comfort, well, yeah-me too.  A friend of mine from graduate school, Dan Twiggs, sagely noted that Brazil was actually a documentary rather than a bizarre dark comedy.

UX is more than cool enough to force you to revise any stereotypes Americans hold about the French, but people like Monnet force you to reconsider your reconsideration. The group invests their time, effort and money into restoration projects neglected by the state, and even gives pointers to museum administrators regarding the flaws in their security. Armed with a map of the underground tunnel networks beneath Paris, UX members set up workshops in order to conduct late night restoration projects.  In 2006, they decided to fix a large clock within the Pantheon:

That September, Viot persuaded seven other UX members to join him in repairing  the clock. They’d been contemplating the project for years, but now it seemed  urgent: Oxidation had so crippled the works that they would soon become  impossible to fix without re-creating, rather than restoring, almost every part.  “That wouldn’t be a restored clock, but a facsimile,” Kunstmann says. As the  project began, it took on an almost mystical significance for the team. Paris,  as they saw it, was the center of France and was once the center of Western civilization; the Latin Quarter was Paris’ historic intellectual center; the Pantheon stands in the Latin Quarter and is dedicated to the great men of French history, many of whose remains are housed within; and in its interior lay a clock, beating like a heart, until it suddenly was silenced.

Untergunther wanted to restart the heart of the world. The eight shifted all their free time to the project.

After fixing the clock, UX notified the administration of the Pantheon, whereupon the story started to go wrong:

As soon as it was done, in late summer 2006, UX told the Pantheon about the successful operation. They figured the administration would happily take credit for the restoration itself and that the staff would take over the job of maintaining the clock. They notified the director, Bernard Jeannot, by phone, then offered to elaborate in person. Four of them came—two men and two women, including Kunstmann and the restoration group’s leader, a woman in her forties who works as a photographer—and were startled when Jeannot refused to believe their story. They were even more shocked when, after they showed him their workshop (“I think I need to sit down,” he murmured), the administration later decided to sue UX, at one point seeking up to a year of jail time and 48,300 euros in damages.

Jeannot’s even more clueless successor, Pascal Monnet, not only continued to file suit against known members of UX,  and he even hired someone to break the newly restored clock:

Jeannot’s then-deputy, Pascal Monnet, is now the Pantheon’s director, and he has gone so far as to hire a clockmaker to restore the clock to its previous condition by resabotaging it. But the clockmaker refused to do more than disengage a part—the escape wheel, the very part that had been sabotaged the first time. UX slipped in shortly thereafter to take the wheel into its own possession, for safekeeping, in the hope that someday a more enlightened administration will welcome its return.

Meanwhile, the government lost its lawsuit. It filed another, which it also lost. There is no law in France, it turns out, against the improvement of clocks. In court, one prosecutor characterized her own government’s charges against Untergunther as “stupid.” But the clock is still immobile today, its hands frozen at 10:51.

Well thank goodness for that- after all we wouldn’t want a clock actually displaying the correct time for more than two minutes a day- that would be like having a public school system that actually taught children how to read– quelle horreur! It strikes me that in a sense we are all waiting for that “more enlightened administration” in one form or another. I happily nominate Pascal Monnet for the Higgy, as he is a good candidate to be Patron Saint of Soulless Bureaucrats everywhere by displaying rigidity well past the point of absurdity.

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Posted by matthewladner

The Way of the Future: Creative Destruction in Higher Education

March 23, 2012

 (Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

You thought I was crazy back in 2009 when I predicted that we would see free, high quality university training made available online. I thought I might be crazy too, and for the record it hasn’t happened (quite) yet.

Inspired by Khan Academy, two Stanford professors however just put a graduate level Computer Science course online, complete with reading assignments, tests and a “Certificate of Completion.” Wired Magazine reports that a mere 200,000 students from around the world took the course.

The good professors decided to form a company, called Udasity, to pursue online higher education. Money quote from the article:

He’s thinking big now. He imagines that in 10 years, job applicants will tout their Udacity degrees. In 50 years, he says, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them. Thrun just has to plot the right course.

Personally I don’t believe there will only be 10 institutions delivering higher education in 2062. I think the demand for in-person instruction will be considerably stronger than that. Having just visited the Stanford campus a few weeks ago, I dare to wager that there will always be a Stanford.

I do however believe that by 2062 we will see far fewer universities than we have today. The technology exists to put high quality undergraduate and graduate level courses online and make them available for free or next to free. Stanford and MIT have been moving in this direction, and if they don’t close the deal eventually someone else will do so.

Universities have been increasing their costs at a rate exceeding health care inflation for decades. The pink cloud of academic euphoria is going to meet the cold howling wind of creative destruction, and that includes the current stock of for-profit online providers. Once Stanford or MIT or Oxford starts putting degree programs online for little to no cost to the student, many dominoes will begin to fall.

Far more important than the incumbent interests of the status-quo is the remarkable benefit that this trend with have for human progress. Making world-class graduate level training available to subsistence farmers in Bangladesh will change the world for the better, regardless of whether it forces changes in business models for online companies and/or puts painfully mediocre and expensive universities out of business.

The Amazon first mover advantage for a serious brand name to move into the free-for-user higher education space with a Google funding model is out there, waiting for someone to seize it and make history. Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war!

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Posted by matthewladner