Also - does he really have so much experience with that tech? There seems to be some controversy around how much self-promotion he's doing via Wikipedia.
He's both self-promotional and has legitimately done all of the stuff he's promoting.
Incidentally, for those who haven't read it, pg's analysis of the incredible technology of the Segway being completely trumped by human fashion is great: http://www.paulgraham.com/segway.html
Surprisingly many professors I know seem to be genuinely motivated by what they see as a service to society. Typically, more through teaching than research.
Yes, there are a few big jerks who are clearly driven by wanting to show off.
Implying an educated person.
> ... I can tell you, what your [sic] saying is just plain untrue.
Did that education include English literacy? s/your/you're/
I'm actually far more literate than most of my colleagues. Making this mistake honestly makes me want to harm myself.
I do know of one or two in my area who seem this way, and I think they're very shallow people. And I know of some profs who are just kind of slackers. Maybe they though academia was something different than what it turned out to be.
But most profs are smart enough to know what kind of life it is going in. (A modicum of intelligence and societal savvy are required to get the job.)
then what the heck do you think think they're in it for?
It's not always easy to distinguish between status motivations and the more socially desirable motivations. In fact, one measure of how well our institutions are constructed is how well aligned these motivations are; ideally, they would be indistinguishable. But there are ways to tease this out.
For example, when some exogenous input (e.g. federal funding cut) knock these people out of a high-status career, do they still work long hours in their spare time on the subject? Very rarely, especially as it becomes clear they won't regain former respect.
The incredible power of fads in academics, even among those with tenure, is more evidence. The best group strategies for maximizing impact call for diversifying research routes, but academic researchers clump very strongly because this is often in the best interest of an individual's status.
Human motivations are complicated and this makes it very difficult to compile indisputable evidence of anything. This is compounded by the fact that we want to appear to have other motivations than our actual ones. However, I think if you take a careful look and try to model academics as robots you'll find the "tries to maximize status" is a better first order approximation than "tries to maximize academic contribution".
For the record, I've been strongly influenced by the views of economist Robin Hanson on this subject.
Well, I, for one, was fascinated with wearable computers for a time after reading an article about Steve Mann (in MIT Technology Review, IIRC). That was about fifteen years ago. Based on my memory of that article, I'd say that 20 years is a bit of an understatement.