As “first generation” bias — discrimination based on overt factors like gender or ethnicity — is becoming unacceptable, we need to dig deeper into cultural processes that reproduce inequality. That’s what Erin Cech has done in a new study. After all, inequality is still apparent, with women and minorities continuing to be underpaid and underrepresented in many job sectors. Cech thinks an implicit dualism in engineering — the notion of “hard” technical work versus “soft” social or people-focused activities — contributes to women’s lower pay.

To test her theory, Cech used data gathered by the National Science Foundation from nearly 10,000 recent college graduates who identified as being employed as engineers. Women made up only 11 percent of the sample. There was a clear pay gap between men and women — $13,000 annually or about a 16 percent difference — across all engineering subfields. Cech found that women more likely worked in “softer” fields like industrial engineering, or chemical and bioengineering, than in electrical, computer, or mechanical engineering. Women were also underrepresented in technical work activities, like research and development, and overrepresented among management, administration, or teaching activities.

When she drilled down further into the numbers, though, she found that women actually experience a pay penalty for engaging in technical work, and also a slight penalty when their work is related to their highest academic degree. As Cech wrote in the paper, “women are devalued for engaging in technical primary work activities but not social ones.” Apparently culturally benign beliefs that are persistent in engineering, like the separation of the technical and social aspects of engineering, thus seem to contribute to the wage gap.

In engineering especially, the “purest” forms of the profession, like design, research, or computational activities, are valued more highly than management, sales, or teaching, according to Cech. She compared the data from the engineers to other scientists, but found that the same wage inequality patterns were not apparent in biology or physical sciences. The technical/social dualism doesn’t appear to drive segregation in those fields.

Cech thinks this is because the ideology is especially strong in engineering, where judgments of professional competence or fit are associated with the parts of the profession that are most valued. Thus, what’s driving the devaluation of women isn’t their gender, but their engagement in undervalued parts of the profession, like management, or perceived unsuitability for its more valued technical aspects.

Cech thinks the cultural ideologies that contribute to the wage gap in engineering could be changed through training and by refuting the technical/social dualism in college engineering education, where the professional culture for tech gets ingrained. The simple realization that both men and women engage in heterogeneous work activities in engineering could be a start. Because the cultural contributions to pay inequality appear to be strongly specific to engineering, Cech believes training may be more effective than attempts to create broad “inclusive climates.”

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But at Pinterest, the social media darling that has seen incredible user growth over the past few year and whose design has copied widely, the designers and engineers have one seemingly-improbable message: We can do both. At least for now, anyway: one of Pinterest’s greatest challenges in turning from web sensation into a viable business will be its ability to adhere to these principles as revenue and profit pressures sink in.

I talked with Pinterest software engineer Joshua Inkenbrandt and lead product designer Jason Wilson this week, and we discussed the recent Pinterest re-design: specifically, how both visual and engineering elements played into the overhaul, and how those tensions play out at Pinterest. The two were obviously passionate about the issue, re-iterating the unique qualities of Pinterest’s internal culture and the crossover between their roles. At one point, Inkenbrandt referred to a feature that Wilson had designed, and Wilson automatically jumped in to correct him:

“It’s the designs that I visualize. We’re all designers.”

But at an awful lot of companies, designers and engineers aren’t finishing each other’s sentences. Kleiner Perkins partner and former Twitter VP of engineering Michael Abbott explained the tensions best at our Structure:Data conference this week: “The tension on the design side is that it’s never good enough,” he said, “and on the engineering side he or she wants to ship… How do you get that balance? Because you still need to ship.”

Building a culture of mutual respect

It’s not that Pinterest is somehow immune from the tensions that other companies face. In fact, Wilson and Inkenbrandt noted that they think the media has probably underplayed just how much the site has changed over the years and the compromises that are inherent in every tweak:

“With every feature, there’s that tension between it being beautiful and then figuring out how hard it is to actually implement it. So everything you see on the new site has actually gone through that balance,” Inkenbrandt said. For instance, just looking at the main Pinterest grid — which doesn’t feel like it’s changed all that much since the site launched in limited beta in March 2010 — you would never know the number of iterations it has gone through.

Ben Silbermann, CEO, Pinterest RoadMap 2012 (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

“We’ve iterated on that 70+ times,” said Inkenbrandt, who just joined the company slightly more than a year ago. Of course, rapid iteration on the web wasn’t invented at Pinterest: Google’s web development strategy in its early years, overseen in large part by current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, blazed this trail for a generation of Silicon Valley engineers and designers.

In the relatively short time Inkenbrandt has been with Pinterest, the company has grown from about 17 employees to more than 100. Pinterest does not release official user stats, but recent ComScore numbers put users of the popular social content pinning site at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is about the same as the number who use Twitter. The company recently raised $200 million in a new round of financing, putting its valuation at $2.5 billion.

So the fact that the company has managed to weather this type of rapid growth without any notable or constant outages (just compare to the number of fail whales in Twitter’s early years), while also remaining one of the most-copied designs on the web at the moment, certainly speaks to Pinterest’s ability to balance both priorities.

It comes down to the company’s culture, the two said, in that the company values open communication among employees and prioritizes the goals of both designers and engineers. Of course, whether this can scale along with the company is always in question — it’s easier to support both when you’re just a 20 person operation. But the two said that heavy involvement from co-founder Evan Sharp plays a key role in fostering that balance.

“Evan himself designed and coded the original site,” Wilson said. “So we know that at the end of the day he understands what it takes to get it done.”

Wilson, who’s designed for companies like Apple, Lytro, and Adobe, said he thinks the company’s efforts to make sure new hires understand the importance of collaborative culture has helped keep the company on that track:

“I’m basically a vagabond in the industry. I’ve worked at a hell of a lot of places. And every place has its way of doing things. When I worked at Apple, it was very design-centric, and things came from the direction of the executive and it’s thrown over the wall at the engineers. And I’ve worked at places like Adobe, where they develop the features and then say, make it look good. And I don’t believe personally — and this is just a personal opinion — that either of those really are ideal. It’s not bullshit to say that here, it’s a total team effort. I can point to a design element, like actual pixel-level design elements, that Josh gave me creative direction on.”

Design and engineering building the new look

Pinterest rolled out its new design to the general public earlier this week, and to the un-trained (or un-Pinterested) eye, the new look wouldn’t seem too different. But two key changes to the look — larger pins, or photos, that come with the content suggestions along the side, and a new way to remain in-stream while scrolling — actually started at engineering problems that were solved by the design team.

The engineering team had long wanted to fix some of the structural issues that had come with the site’s rapid growth, Inkenbrandt said, and one of them was how to suggest more content for users in a way that was both natural and useful. But in the end, it was Wilson’s design team that found an answer to the recommendation engine quest, by surfacing similar pins from boards users had created:

“One of our challenges was how to recommend content,” Inkenbrandt said. “So we’re coming up with like, secret sauce algorithms, where we’re trying to figure out based on content what people might like. And then it turns out that based off the design, just having the actual board where the pin was from, well, that content is obviously highly relevant, usually in the same theme, and can help people find great stuff.”

By showing related content next to individual pins, and then allowing users to navigate to that content without leaving their spot in the stream, also solved another engineering issue with navigation. Wilson said Sharp gave him and the designer some high-level goals for the re-design, and one was to make the overall feel much more lightweight.

“Before, you would look at one close-up and then go back to the grid and then back to the close-up. So we wanted to figure out a way so you wouldn’t have to do that jump. It seems like a simple thing, but if you’re on there for an hour let’s say, and you do that repeatedly, you might do that a few hundred times.” he said. “To me anyway the holy grail to navigation is to get to the user to navigate via content.”

But while Pinterest has been able to balance the priorities of design and functionality fairly remarkably so far, the rubber might be about to hit the road. The company has been nudging its way toward a business model recently, adding features like analytics for businesses and encouraging marketers to the site, which makes sense if the company is going to live up to that $2.5 billion valuation.

But just ask Twitter and Facebook: it’s a lot easier balancing design and engineering when salespeople aren’t breathing down your neck every day.

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“It’s been a pretty serious engineering effort on our end to build an infrastructure to run a lot of server-side languages, like Python,” said co-founder Zach Sims.

Until now, he said, the startup focused on langages that can run in-browser, such as JavaScript and HTML, not Python and other languages that run on remote servers.

In January, the company started offering courses in Python and Ruby through Codecademy Labs, but it was more of an experimental, lightweight offering. Sims said they’ve rebuilt the way they offer Python from the ground up and plan to launch other new server-side languages in the near future.

Starting today, the startup will offfer six new user-generated Python classes and will allow the community to contribute more. Python was by far the most requested language by users, Sims said, and given mounting interest from high school teachers, they wanted to be able to roll out the new courses in time for the new school year.

Last week, author of “Program or Be Programmed” and CNN tech commentator Dougless Rushkoff said on his blog that he would be joining Codecademy as an evangelist for Codecademy and its wider goal of code literacy.

“He’ll do more writing about the theoretical underpinnings of why people should learn to program, he’ll be giving speeches about it… and talking with people in government and elsewhere,” said Sims.

Since launching last year, the startup said millions of students on the platform have taken more than 100 million exercises and that more than 25,000 people have created courses.

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The headrest mount, which works with Wallee’s existing iPad case mounting system, attaches to the headrest rail of any vehicle, and rotates in and out to provide viewing to one or more unruly kids who need entertaining in the back seat on long trips. It’s a simple, sturdy design in and of itself, but it’s really more impressive as the latest proof that Wallee’s creators at Studio Proper are into delivering long-term value rather than chasing short-term gain.

A lot of my favorite cases for the original iPad, including the ZAGGmate iPad keyboard case, required me to buy a new version in order to play nice with the iPad 2. The Wallee also required a new case, but it stung much less since all the accessories the case is designed to work with remained useful. Wall mounting disks, stands and a VESA mount still work with the new iPad 2 version of the Wallee case, and recent additions to the line, including a hand strap for easy one-handed use, and the upcoming Wallee Lock for secure, interactive iPad-based displays mean investment in the system continues to feel fresh, two years after the original Wallee’s introduction.

Most mobile device users will likely go through piles of device accessories that quickly become as outdated as the gadgets they’re designed for, so it’s nice to see a system that embraces and builds on its past, rather than simply starting fresh with each new whim of Apple’s design department.

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From the article:

And building new capacity isn’t cheap. Everyone — not just the first-class passengers — ends up paying for it. So prepare for higher cellphone bills. And in the meantime? Prepare to sit and wait. That call to Grandma might not get through until the congestion clears.

Other alternatives might be less palatable, especially to anyone who wants immediate downloading gratification. We could stay off the grid or utilize fewer data-intensive functions. Or we could put some traffic cops on the beat to regulate our data demands and limit the traffic snarls and bottlenecks.

But if you think Siri is somehow responsible for the data overload, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Siri is the first generation of interfaces that will make it seamless and easy for us to surf the web from anywhere, and on any device or vehicle. So the author’s problem is one that’s only going to get bigger. Thankfully, it has a solution — one which he seems to ignore.

Paul Farhi, the author of the piece, makes a couple of errors (or maybe omissions is kinder) that are worth pointing out to the policy wonks in D.C., especially as they contemplate bills that would gut the FCC’s ability to make spectrum policy in the U.S. for the sake politics. Onto the problems:

Siri as data hog

Siri, the natural language processing service Apple introduced on the iPhone 4S, doesn’t consume the data Farhi says it does in his article when he says, “Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.” Siri consumes very little data in sending your voice back to the servers to figure out what you want the phone to do, but what it does is make it that much easier to surf the web. Farhi seems to understand this, but his first characterization is blatantly false. Siri isn’t guzzling data; she’s making it easier for us to do so. We’re the guzzlers.

The airwaves as highways

The second problem with the article is more complicated. Farhi uses the popular highways analogy for how we send cellular traffic and explains that building out more infrastructure takes time. (One reason is because it takes about 10 years on average to get spectrum into the hands of carriers thanks to the politics associated with spectrum auctions.) But what he misses, and what is crucial to his point, is that there is more than one set of wireless highways. There are multiple types of licensed airwaves that are used for everything from satellite radio to cellular, and there are unlicensed airwaves where data is currently sent using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and soon, WiGig.

When we’re talking over the air, there’s not one single highway to get us from Point A to Point B; there are multiple spectrum bands, technologies and costs associated with them. In this age, using wireless is like engaging in multimodal commuting. You use cellular to drive to the train station and the high-speed rails of Wi-Fi fly downtown. Meanwhile, you’re sharing those rails and highways with thousands of other commuters in neighboring airwaves that are the equivalent of bikers, skateboarders etc.

We can keep Siri and still call grandma. Here’s how:

That’s where Farhi missed a big opportunity to tell D.C. that instead of focusing on cars and the single highway, it should look around at all the other technologies out there. Stop listening to the carriers, who actually do have spectrum they can deploy if they want to work a little harder and spend a little more, and start thinking about how Wi-Fi or white spaces broadband (Super Wi-Fi) can play a role in taking congestion off over the air data networks.

Passing a spectrum bill that allows for more unlicensed airwaves would be a start, as would leaving the FCC to deal with the highly technical issues surrounding spectrum auctions. Pushing the FCC to investigate special access fees would also help, as it might lower the rate of bringing a fiber pipe out to areas so ISPs can support large-scale Wi-Fi or white spaces networks. But first, we have to understand how the wireless and cellular networks work, so we can propose viable solutions instead of blaming applications that make our lives better for congesting our network.

Since many of those solutions will require action (or inaction) from Congress and the FCC, the Washington Post missed a golden opportunity to educate its readers about possible solutions and push the debate forward with mobile operators about using Wi-Fi more strategically, making it possible for rural areas to use unlicensed airwaves to create broad coverage areas without paying an arm and leg for a gigabyte and helping Congress understand how the industry actually works.

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It was also the year that direct current (DC) took a back seat to alternating current (AC) after Niagara Falls Power Company chose AC transmission for its power plant.

Although we live in an AC-dominated world, DC seems poised for a comeback, particularly in data centers. Facebook adopted a DC architecture in its Prineville, Ore., data center. SAP spent $128,000 retrofitting a data center at its offices in Palo Alto, Calif., to rely on DC power. In 2010 it cut SAP’s energy bills by $24,000 per year.

ABB, the Swiss-Swedish conglomerate, bought a controlling interest last year in Validus DC Systems, which specializes in DC data center equipment. ABB also opened a factory in North Carolina to produce HVDC (high voltage DC) equipment for delivering power from solar and offshore wind farms to the grid. The Tres Amigas “superstation” will rely heavily on HVDC.

General Electric, meanwhile, bought Lineage Power, which produces DC equipment, and it has talked about using DC to power mining shovels and other heavy-duty equipment.

Nextek Power Systems and the EMmerge Alliance are also promoting DC as a way to cut power in buildings.

Behind the DC drive

What’s driving it? Although AC became the standard for electronic transmission, DC didn’t disappear. It just hid. Servers, large numbers of electric motors, batteries, even ships and airplanes run on DC. Solar panels produce DC power. Wind turbines can produce AC or DC power, but the extreme variability of wind power means that electricity generated by turbines has to pass through battery banks before it gets to the grid. As a result, wind farms are effectively DC.

The landline telephone system runs on DC too, notes Brian Fortenberry, a program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute.

To solve the mismatch, a whole industry of AC-DC converters has been developed. National Semiconductor sells billions of dollars’ worth of chips to convert power. Inverters in the solar industry exist to convert DC from solar panels to AC that can run on the wires in your home.

In data centers, the AC-DC gymnastics top the charts. Typically, AC from the grid has to be stepped down in voltage so it can be routed safely in building equipment. Lower-voltage AC then gets converted to DC so it can go to an uninterruptable power supply (UPS). DC power from the UPS then gets converted to AC so it can go over the wires in the building. Then it gets converted back to DC. Usually five conversions, or steps, downward take place.

By converting grid AC at the door of a data center to medium-voltage DC or converting stepped-down AC to DC at the last possible moment, a data center can cut utility bills by 10 to 20 percent or more, according to Trent Waterhouse, the VP of marketing for power electronics at General Electric.

Validus and others have also eliminated some of the technological hurdles involved in transmitting via DC, namely the monster-sized copper cables.

The same dynamics work in buildings. In a retail establishment, DC power from solar panels could go directly to DC-powered LED lights with not-intermediate conversions that sap energy, according to Nextek. Perhaps not coincidentally, Redwood Systems, the lighting networking company, touts that its technology is actually an example of DC networking.

More savings comes in real estate. DC data centers require 25 percent to 40 percent less square footage than their AC counterparts, largely because computer equipment can connect directly to backup batteries.

In a hypothetical example, a 2.5-megawatt data center power module in the AC world might need 7,295 square feet, Ronald Ranaldi, the VP of sales at Validus, told me last year. An equivalent DC power module might occupy only 5,102 square feet, a savings of 2,193 square feet. What’s more, a single data center might consist of several 2.5-megawatt modules.

“Real estate is often greater than the energy savings,” says Ranaldi. “In large, green field data centers, you are literally eliminating buildings.”

DC won’t take over the world. And not everyone is sold. Google is not taking DC for its data centers in part because of the cost that would be involved in retrofitting their existing architecture. But it seems that an idea that was current when Grover Cleveland was in the White House and Japan was just adopting the Gregorian calendar could make a comeback.

Image courtesy of The Planet

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Mooly Eden, the Intel VP and general manager of the PC Client Group, was a one-man show, not only touting the many successes of Intel’s Sandy Bridge computing platform — 150 million such chips sold — but also demonstrating the latest Ultrabook technology. These small notebooks, around 18 millimeters thin (or less) offer what people want, according to Intel: great experiences in a small package.

Eden took a small jab at the tablet market where Apple’s iPad has the lion’s share of the market, and Intel is barely in the game. He mentioned that content consumption isn’t enough for these devices. “Consumption is good for cows. We are humans,” Eden said as he launched a demonstration of ArcSoft software for photo album creation. On the surface, the demo was about the Ultrabook experience, but you didn’t have to look deep for the traditional Intel message of speed and power.

Ultimately, the problem that keeps coming back to me is that Intel’s focus is on experiences already met by non-Intel devices. For example, the six main “experiences” Intel says Ultrabooks deliver are: Creation to Express; Not Needing to Wait; Unwired; Peace of Mind; Reflection of Me; and At a Price That Works.

I’d argue smartphones and tablets currently meet most, if not all of those needs; therein lies the problem for Ultrabooks. It’s not a consumer problem; it’s an Intel problem, as sales of traditional computers are declining, while sales of tablets and smartphones are rising.

Short of being powerful, portable laptops, there’s no new “experience” to be had here. Intel is even challenged on the final of its six target experiences, because it knows these devices need to come down in price. Eden suggested that when the partner ecosystem reaches economies of scale, Ultrabook prices would come down to mainstream price points. With 75 expected Ultrabook models due out this year, I hope those prices drop quickly.

Even as the current crop of Ultrabooks arrives though, Intel is looking ahead. So what’s the future for Ultrabooks? Thanks to the Ivy Bridge chip power, look for gesture-based computing, interaction between devices, and better voice recognition with help from Nuance. Impressive as these were, they aren’t new ideas, and for now, they’re concepts for Intel.

Speaking of old ideas, Eden was excited about Ultrabooks with touch displays. Haven’t we seen these for several years? They haven’t sold before in mass numbers, and they’re unlikely to sell again for two reasons. The ergonomics of such “reach out and touch” activities makes no sense for most standard computing activities, and this technology will add a price premium that will reduce demand.

Still, one concept really captured my attention. Intel showed off an Ultrabook that has a transparent area where the trackpad would normally reside on a laptop. It’s touch sensitive, so it can be used as a giant trackpad, but it has palm-rejection so as not to interfere with typing. Most impressive, however, was that the see-through area can show information when the laptop is closed.

Aside from displaying appointments, emails and such, a user could interact with this data without opening the laptop. I think this is clever, but it also says something about Intel’s lack of ability to enter the smartphone market. Why? Because the company is trying to move traditional smartphone activities — email, notifications, calendar events — to the laptop. Eden even said this was “so you don’t have to pull a smartphone out of your pocket.”

Even with that unique, forward-thinking demonstration, however, it still seems to me like Intel is trying too hard to invent something that’s just the natural evolution of laptops. In turn, its branding of Ultrabooks is more about solving Intel’s problem — less reliance on it as devices embrace ARM chips — than solving a consumer problem.

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Next Jump and NYSE are hosting the SA 500, or Silicon Alley 500, a bid to bring 500 top engineering students from Washington, D.C., to Boston to meet 50 of the best East Coast technology companies. The event, scheduled for Oct. 15, will attract students from MIT, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, Brown and Georgia Tech. Applications are being accepted for both companies and students here.

Now, there’s no guarantee that SA 500 will meet its goals for students and companies. But it’s a major effort to strengthen the New York and East Coast tech ecosystem and help companies to grow and thrive without losing talent to Silicon Valley. It also shows that New York is rising to the challenge of being a major tech destination.

“There are great tech opportunities on the East Coast, but the infrastructure for bringing tomorrow’s talents together with today’s entrepreneurs needs strengthening,” said Charlie Kim, the CEO of Next Jump. “By taking it to the next level with events like SA 500, we are bolstering the engineering community as a whole.”

Kim said the event is unique for its venue, a place few ever get to see, as well as its focus on engineers only, together with tech companies. He said Next Jump has taken the lead on this because it has made significant inroads in on-campus recruiting, and earlier this year it piloted a recruiting event in conjunction with the New York Economic Development Corporation in Boston that attracted 18 tech firms and nearly 200 students.

The SA 500 is just one of many endeavors intent on elevating New York as a tech hub. Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced plans for Applied Sciences NYC, a bid to build or expand a state-of-the-art engineering and applied sciences campus in New York City, a project for which Kim is a key advisor. Kayweb Angels, a new angel investment group, launched in April to solve New York’s engineering talent crisis by offering development resources to startups in exchange for equity. Hackcruiter, a New York–based startup, is helping startups find good engineers in New York and San Francisco.

As Chris Dixon, Hunch CEO and the co-founder of Founder Collective, pointed out in a blog this week, the problem isn’t so much about supply. It’s that New York has a problem marketing itself as a destination for engineering talent.

The problem is that NYC startups are basically unknown to students at MIT, CMU, Penn, and even (shockingly) to engineering students at NYU and Columbia (big props to HackNY for trying to fix this). East Coast CS students also view startups as a much riskier path than they actually are. I say this having been at dozens of events with East Coast students over the last year or so talking about startups. I’m constantly amazed that most of the students simply don’t realize startups are a viable option.

One event won’t change things for New York, but it may help in the overall marketing message for the city as it tries to convince engineers that it has plenty to offer.

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Apple finally launched the white iPhone 4

As mentioned yesterday, the white iPhone 4 did generate some lines, especially in Asia. In Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, lines were very long, reaching into the hundreds. Of the few reports of lines at North American locations, the longest seems to have reached around 10 people. It’s worth noting that the black iPhone 4 went on sale in China in September 2010, while in the U.S., it has been available since June. Conceivably, that could mean that U.S. buyers had more time to give in and buy the black iPhone rather than wait for the white model.

But it’s also a sign that Apple’s priorities may soon shift, as China and other emerging markets represent the largest potential growth markets for the company. Apple saw huge growth for the iPhone in China last quarter, and Strategy Analytics just released a report showing Apple has passed ZTE Corp. to become the world’s largest handset maker as measured by shipments, for the first calendar quarter of 2011. ZTE is a Chinese phone maker, and arguably Apple’s biggest competition in the Chinese market.

The white iPhone definitely appears to be selling well in at least a few markets other than China, too, since ship times for the device have slipped to five business days from three to five days in some international stores, such as those in Italy, the U.K., France and Spain. Apple typically prioritizes the U.S. when it comes to device shipments, so slipping ship times don’t necessarily indicate that those countries are the ones experiencing the strongest sales.

Finally, users who’ve had the chance to compare the white and black iPhones side-by-side have noted that the white version is just a hair thicker than the black one: 0.2 mm thicker, to be exact. It makes Apple’s marketing claim that the iPhone 4 is “the world’s thinnest smartphone” just a little less accurate than it had recently become. No word on what’s behind the extra girth, as Apple’s website still lists the official specs for both at the same at 0.37 inches. It could be that the extra UV protection the white paint requires accounts for some additional thickness. Reports so far suggest that the extra thickness isn’t significantly affecting the fit of most cases, but you should double-check before you buy one just to make sure.

The white iPhone 4 may be just a color change for a 10-month old device, but its reception provides a hint at the future of a possible shift in Apple’s primary buying public, and its production demonstrates Apple’s continued dedication to getting product design right prior to release. In the end, nobody can pull off new paint on an old barn quite like Apple.

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Throughout the cleantech business, we’ve heard reports that many startups are finding themselves in the following predicament: While armed with a good business plan, a good idea, and good technology, they don’t have enough staff to scale their science-based business. It’s a problem affecting companies across the board, from traditional infrastructure development to solar installation to the carbon market.

At a media briefing earlier this year, Luc Larmuseau, global director of climate change services for risk management firm DNV (Det Norske Veritas), said a lack of qualified engineering professionals at all stages, from project development to project verification, is a major hurdle to speeding greenhouse gas-reducing projects through the pipeline. Developing carbon offset projects is a complex maze of engineering, regulatory requirements, environmental science and business know-how. Verifying that the projects do what they claim is an equally taxing process, and the labor shortage is creating a logjam when it comes to getting more carbon projects online.

As students shift into technology fields from I-banking, it could be a boon for carbon markets — and other greentech startups. From the BusinessWeek article:

“Over the last few years, many students who have had innovative ideas ultimately chose to take a more risk-averse career in investment banking or consulting,” says Travis May, another Harvard undergrad who put off finishing school to relaunch StudentBusinesses.com, an online service designed to match student-founded companies with angel funding. “Now, there is less of a pull to go in a traditional route, and the upside of that is it makes startups more compelling as a career path,” May says.

An influx of smart, driven engineers could be just what the cleantech business needs. As President-elect Obama and others work to stimulate the economy with green collar jobs, it’s nice to know that the nation’s brainiacs are headed in the same direction.

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