ET phone home

A month and a half ago I wrote a blog post about the growing number of Internet users in China. Now, every evening somebody comments on it in Chinese. Since I don't read Chinese, I can't figure out whether it is spam, or an attempt to start a conversation, or a real conversation between Chinese readers. Most likely, it's spam. But, who knows. Maybe it's a lonely AI computer stuck somewhere in the universe keeps searching human blogs for the code word "Beijing", hoping one day to find a perfect conversation partner. No such luck. And I think it's fair. We, humans should stay away from these conversations. Let spam computers talk to other computers. In private.

The ultimate learning machine

An article on brain implants in animals:

The idea is to implant electronic chips in the relevant regions of the brain to record neural activity. Then a decoder deciphers the neural chatter, often from thousands of neurons, to figure out what the brain wants the body to do. These messages must then be relayed - ideally wirelessly - to electrodes that deliver a pulse of electricity to stimulate the muscles into action. Such "brain chips" are already restoring hearing to the deaf and vision to the blind, and helping to stave off epileptic fits, so the idea isn't as far-fetched as it might sound (see "Bionic medicine").

It appears that brain treats embedded chips as just another set of neurons that need to be controlled.

When in doubt wear red.

New Scientist reports that "referees are more likely to award points to a competitor dressed in red". Also, a couple of related studies:

1. Elliot's team told 67 students that they would be taking either a vocabulary test or an analogies test, and asked them to look inside a folder to find out which one. The students saw either the word "analogies" or the word "vocabulary" on a red or green background - and the colour had a profound effect on their subsequent behaviour. When the students were instructed to walk to an adjacent laboratory to take the test, they found a sign on the door saying "Please knock". Those who had seen a red background knocked fewer times, and more quietly, than those given green.(Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol 136, p 154).

2. Ravi Mehta and Juliet Zhu of the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that red enhances performance on detail-orientated tasks, whereas blue improves the results of creative tasks. (Science, vol 323, p 1226).

3. It is this context-specificity that Elliot and colleagues are now exploring. Their latest work has investigated innate preference in infants. The team have found that one-year-olds shown red and green Lego bricks tend to reach out for red bricks. Yet when the infants are shown an angry face before being exposed to the blocks, they go for green.

Studies confirm that healthcare to a large degree is a lifestyle issue:

Two teams, one led by Pierre-Carl Michaud of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, the other by Samuel Preston of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, have dug into international health statistics to ask why US citizens can expect to die earlier than their counterparts in the richest European nations.
...
eliminating profligate spending on ineffective medical interventions by US doctors is only part of the solution to US health woes. Changing citizens' behaviour so that they eat less and exercise more will be vital, both to improve health and reduce costs. "One of the main reasons that US healthcare is so expensive is that we are sicker than other people," says Preston.

Jeroen Brouwer, who lives in the Bay Area and works for Philips directlife program in the US, recently told me that during a regular work day his Netherlands-based colleagues spend 40% more calories in physical activities than he does. Jeroen goes to the gym, they don't; Jeroen runs for exercise, they don't. Why the difference? It seems to be in lifestyle choices. The Dutch bike to work, we drive; the Dutch walk around the town, we drive; the Dutch drink beer, we drive.
To improve the US health care system, the government should impose heavy taxes on driving! (smile).

Dilemma of the Day: predicting the future.

I am reading Blue Ocean Strategy, by W.C. Kim and Renee Mauborgne. It's a good book, full of interesting business intuitions and anecdotes, but contradictory statements, like the two below, leave me sometimes puzzled:

We're not talking about predicting the future, something that is inherently impossible. p.76.

Visualizing strategy can also help managers responsible for corporate strategy predict and plan the company's future growth and profit. p.96.

On one hand, the future is inherently unpredictable; on the other, here's a visualization tool that helps you do exactly that. Huh?

I guess they mean that future is probabilistic. Some predictions can be made with a greater degree of confidence than others. For example, I can rather confidently predict that 50 years from now, unless humanity perishes in a cataclysmic event, we will use electricity to satisfy our basic energy needs. We will use money in commercial transactions. We will have developed genetic techniques to treat diseases that seem to be untreatable today. Etc, etc.

On the other hand, I can't predict with sufficient accuracy whether Apple as a company will survive these 50 years; who who will be its new CEO, and what the change in leadership is going bring. My hunch, though, is that he or she will still be human and make contradictory statements like the ones in the Blue Ocean book.

2 + 2 = 4

2 wolves + 2 rabbits = 2 wolves

1 dog + 1 dog + 1 dog = 1 Cerberus

for more creature arithmetic see http://www.flickr.com/photos/preshaa/3847027500/

CNET has a story and a picture gallery about the Wright brothers' contract with the War Dept:

On September 9 of that year, Orville Wright kept the plane in the air for more than an hour, which was one of the War Department's requirements. The other requirements included carrying a passenger for at least 125 miles at a speed of 40 miles per hour, being steerable in all directions at all times, and landing without damage.

Sounds like an automobile; one that doesn't have to have a road.

Update: the latest DARPA drone that will fly for years at 60,000 feet and higher.
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64418

The imminent death of printing is a really good news for trees.

I think Google Wave will be the killer app of the Web 3.0. It has very high niche construction potential.

In the early 2000-s, the audio recording industry lost its Internet battle to Napster and other P2P services. At the time, a lot of folks in Hollywood were really concerned that video will follow the same path. They were scared stiff of the new media. But judging from this Bloomberg report, Hollywood seems to have figured out a way to make money on digital content distribution:

Digital movie revenue for online stores in the U.S., including computer downloads that can be transferred to handsets, may grow to more than $1 billion in 2013 from about $215 million last year, said Dan Cryan at London-based video analysts Screen Digest.

Studios get paid when a movie is downloaded and their cut varies according to how new and popular the film is, said Leslie Golding, a founding partner at Acetrax AG, the content aggregator that built Samsung’s store.

Most revenue from films sold by phone makers ends up with studios, as handset makers are willing to sell movies for less than they pay to studios, according to Screen Digest.

Need larger brain cache for extra connections

It has been my presumption that multitaskers are generally more productive than people who prefer to do one thing at a time.

According to a new study released by a group of Stanford University researchers Tuesday, people who regularly deal with several streams of electronic information simultaneously do not pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one job to another any better than those who prefer to complete one task at a time. Actually, they fare worse.

Multitasking is a brain killer for me. When I write I set my phone in airplane mode and turn off wireless on my PC. But the connectivity habit is tough to break. I must admit that I can't stay unplugged for more than two hours. Yet.

...and the pursuit of happiness

Megan McArdle in the Atlantic traces back the origins of American home entertainment:

The emergence of leisure activity as what economists call “market production”—something that is bought and sold—is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until well into the 20th century, most leisure was “home production,” created and consumed without much cash changing hands. Our ancestors made parties out of things they needed to do anyway—quilting, raising a barn, eating—or they entertained one another, singing, reciting, dancing. Either way, any trading was strictly on a barter basis.
The Great Depression left us with a legacy of devices that transformed the home, saving our labor and helping us waste the extra time they gave us.

Fun has become America's most important businesses. Maybe that's why people now ask their kids when they come back home, "Did you have fun at school?"

The long-lasting effects of infrastructure build-up

Contemporary vine had acquired its taste 2,000 years ago:

The use of barrels was a technical innovation that had specific repercussions. Its adoption was rapid, with the number and volume of amphorae in Rome declining rapidly after the first century. Use of the new containers enabled the cost of carrying freight t obe reduced, tended to favour vineyards that had easy access to oak forests rather than those closest to deposits of clay, and modified the tastes of wine consumers. The vineyards of northern Italy, Bordeaux, and the fringes of the Massif Central benefited greatly from this innovation to the detriment of vine-growing areas in central and southern Italy. A historical geography of Europe. p. 42.

Roads played a major role in military, adminstrateive, and also conceptual domination of the Roman Empire. They were created and equipped when the conquest took place, and were abandoned when Roman ocupation collapsed.
Roads played a determining role in the creation of a centralized administrative system. [imperial postal service] was improved many times and performed the dual function of allowing imperial functionaries to travel around, and dispatches to be delivered with the minimum of delay. The staging posts also played an essential part in allowing ordinary travelers to move around the empire, in which personal mobility was becoming more commonplace. pp. 44-45.

The great majority of cargo was moved by water which was faster and cheaper than transporting goods by road. ... at the end of AD 301 we may calculate that to transport a cargo of corn over 100 miles cost 1 per cent of its overall value if carried by sea, 4.9 per cent if shipped by river, and 28 per cent (or even 56 percent depending on how the document is interpreted). These proportions were very close to those noted for eighteen-century England. p. 45.

Business Art: Health Care #2

My boss at HP used to call me a business artist because I always explained to him my strategy ideas in pictures and drawings. Today's piece is called "Evolution of Health Care #2"

A 10X change in blood tests?

Scientific American:

a new patch lined with short needles, each the width of just a few strands of hair, may soon grant squeamish patients a reprieve as well as a relatively simple opportunity to take matters into their own hands. The innovation could eliminate the pain and fear of getting shots, researchers say, and it could also make future vaccines and medical treatments safer, more effective and easier to self-administer.

It can probably be used for various tests, which is a much more common medical procedure than vaccine shots. Simple cholesterol, sugar, and other tests could help people, among other things, maintain a better diet and exercise regime.

A neat graph from Mark J. Perry's blog:

Plasmons and trains - what's the difference?

Here's claim 1 of US Patent 7542633:

A method comprising: guiding a plasmon signal on a first plasmon guide; selectively controlling the guided plasmon signal with a plurality of control signals, wherein at least one of the plurality of control signals includes optical electromagnetic energy guided through a waveguide that is directly coupled to the first plasmon guide.

I have no idea what plasmon signal is, so I think about it as a train. Then, plasmon guide acts as rails, plurality of signals as a traffic light, and the waveguide as an electric wire that runs along the rails toward the traffic light. That's all.

The whole patent is a great illustration of how people keep reinventing the railway system even when they think they invent some fancy new technology.

On the system level, the key to understanding a patent is to figure out which element plays the role of Payload. In this case it's "plasmon signal".

Early evolution of coinage.

metal coinage - at least to start with - had only a subsidiary role as a means for allowing differential barter to take place. Its initial purpose was fiscal in character, with coinage being used as a means of controlling and simplifying expression of weight. ... The appearance at the end of the fifth century BC of bronze coinage created conditions for the development of an internal market and for trade based on profit, as well as for the development of a banking system. In the fourth century BC, for Aristotle money had become the leading expression of wealth, being followed by land and goods, such as slaves and livestock.

An historical geography of Europe. ed. R.A.Butlin and R.A. Dogson. p. 28.

From reflecting weight to expressing value to measuring wealth to enabling a banking system.

Welcome to Web 3.0

I confess that I now turn to the App Store in almost every situation. In unfamiliar places, I use apps to find the nearest gas station, cinema or even public toilet. I track the length and time of my commute. All my gym workouts are logged. Finding a nice place to eat while on the move is a cinch. Even this article is brought to you thanks to a voice recorder app (iDictaphone) that I used for recording interviews, and one that helped me "mind map" my thoughts when planning it out. Sometimes I daydream about becoming the most virtually enhanced human in the world.

Is there anybody out there who wants to work with me on iPhone apps for inventors?

Free Cheese!

An important step in Google Apps evolution:

Google officially rolled out its Apps Script functionality for enterprise users Wednesday, following a limited pilot release earlier this year.

Google Apps Script works mainly within the Spreadsheets app to automate various processes. For example, users can automate the sending of e-mails based on data held in a spreadsheet, or create scripts that communicate with other Web services.

Why is it important? Because scripting allows customers customize and connect their information, which makes Google Apps a lot more stickier within an enterprise. If Google Search disappears tomorrow, people will easily switch to Yahoo or Microsoft. Once Google Apps, with scripts and storage, take hold in the IT space, replacing them would be almost impossible.

Magic as a Service

The cloud computing is coming. It will be the next step in the evolution of technology and, most likely, will fuel the next stock market bubble. In the meantime, to prepare for the inevitable we need to learn the new terminology: IaaS, PaaS, Saas. Here's an excerpt from a post that untangles the acronyms:

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in a general sense, provides the ability to ’summon’ resources in specific configurations at will and delivers value similar to what one might find in a traditional datacenter. IaaS’ power lies in its massive on-the-fly flexibility and configurability. It can be equated to owning a magic wand that could conjure up a variety of network and server resources in zero time and occupying zero space.

This description is so close to the TRIZ definition of Ideality! The infrastructure does not exist, but its functionality is fulfilled.

A fascinating, yet simple approach to show that under certain circumstances time can flow in both directions, forward and backward:

I show that entropy in a system can both increase and decrease (as time reversal
dictates), but that all entropy-decreasing transformations cannot leave any trace of their having happened. Since no information on them exists, this is indistinguishable from the situation in which such transformations do not happen at all: ‘‘The past exists only insofar as it is recorded in the present’’ [11]. Then the second law is forcefully valid: the only physical evolutions we see in our past, and which can then be studied, are those where entropy has not decreased.

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.080401

Lorenzo Maccone, 2009. Quantum Solution to the Arrow-of-Time Dilemma. PRL 103, 080401 (2009).

A new demographic of smartphone users:

In fact, moms are finding smartphones so useful that they are one of the fastest growing demographics to own smartphones. In the first quarter of 2009, about 14 percent of all wireless users who identified themselves as mothers said they owned a smartphone, according to Neilsen. This figure was up from 8.3 percent of moms who owned a smartphone in the first quarter of 2008.

The No. 1 reason many moms say they have a smartphone is to keep track of their family's schedules. For Russell, with four kids aged 3 years old to 10 years old, the calendar is crucial for alerting her to doctor appointments, horseback riding lessons, football practices, and even reminders for when field trip money is due.

Phone, i.e. voice communication application, is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

web mail is so 1995

techcrunch:

Gmail...is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates.

One of the primary lures of Gmail has always been its seemingly endless and ever-expanding storage limits.

Gmail is a lot more than just a web mail. It is one of Google Apps that make the company a major player in the cloud services for consumers. A more realistic comparison would be against Facebook, which has 250 million users worldwide.

A 100X change

Aug. 13 (Bloomberg):

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute looked for compounds that could destroy the stem cells, which often resist conventional cancer treatment. One, salinomycin, cut the number of stem cells at least 100 times more than did Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s Taxol, a common chemotherapy medicine, according to a report on the findings published today in the journal Cell.

It'll probably take at least 10-15 years before this research results in an working therapeutic medicine. And after some much investment in time, money, and effort, the medicine will be very expensive. Everything is so expensive in healthcare, it's unbelievable. If computers were developed the same way we would still work on IBM mainframes.

Dilemma of the Day: gel condoms

New Scientist, 11 August 2009.

Patrick Kiser, whose team developed the gel at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, says that the objective is to give women in countries where HIV is rife a cheap way to protect themselves from viruses and pregnancy even if their partner is unwilling to wear a condom.

Dilemma:
A. The gel has to be penetrable to enable unobstructed sexual intercourse.
B. The gel has to be impenetrable to prevent infiltration of sperm, HIV, and other sexually transmitted viruses.

Solution: Separation in Time (upon condition)

The gel is liquid as long as it is in contact with the acidity that is normal in a vagina, but will turn solid when it encounters semen, which is slightly alkaline. Any particles wider than 50 nanometres – including sperm, HIV and other viruses such as the herpes virus and the papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer – are trapped.

Money makes the world go around!

Just like that, and your phone has become your wallet:

Using eBay's PayPal technology--and only PayPal--iPhone users can now make a purchase bid on a new item directly from the device, without having to go back and use a regular computer or deal with the payments in mobile Safari.

trackback

A 10,000X change

The pattern of progress in genome sequencing looks like Moore's law on steroids:

Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Helicos Biosciences Corp.’s gene- sequencing machine mapped the genome of a Stanford University professor, who developed the technology, for less than $50,000 using the labor of just three people, researchers reported.
The cost has dropped from about $300 million required to decode a full human genome during the early stages of gene- mapping, when multiple computers and machines were needed plus the labor of more than 250 scientists and technicians

Add to it the ability to turn on an off specific gene expressions and you get a possibility of human evolution within one generation.

Can you imagine a world in which people mutate faster than viruses?

Citius, Altius, Fishius

Forget health care. This country needs a diet & exercise reform:

Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Lots of exercise, combined with eating a diet rich in fish, fruits and vegetables, may lower a person’s chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease, a study by Columbia University Medical Center in New York found.

Those who adhered most closely to the Mediterranean diet and were the most physically active had about a 60 percent lower risk of developing the disease compared with those who didn’t follow the diet or exercise, according to research today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study found the overall risk for getting Alzheimer’s was 9 percent for those who combined the most exercise and healthiest eating compared with 21 percent for the least.

The study builds on previous research that showed sticking to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, red wine, fish and fresh produce lowers the odds of developing Alzheimer’s disease. The authors said this was the first research to look at the impact of a combination of Mediterranean diet with exercise.

The battle of the junk food giants

Now, McDonald's competes with Starbucks directly in the Fat+Sugar market:

McDonald’s move into mochas and iced lattes has helped the fast-food chain report its seventh consecutive month of increases in global sales this year, underscoring the resilience of its business model in the recession.

Other burger chains will probably follow the trend, and we'll have another cycle of obesity epidemic around the world. The price for coffee will probably go up too.

trackback

iPhone app for check deposits:

USAA, a privately held bank and insurance company, plans to update its iPhone application this week to introduce the check deposit feature, which requires a customer to photograph both sides of the check with the phone's camera.

"We're essentially taking an image of the check, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would," said Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice president.

The image processing technology used by the banking app is essentially the same as the one demonstrated by Ray Kurzweil, but the business model of the former looks a lot stronger.

In any case, both applications live in the niche created by the transition from analog (paper) to digital (electronic transfer). They will go away as soon as the transition is complete.

More doom and gloom from scientists:

...epidemiologist Warren Hern of the University of Colorado at Boulder, even likened the expansion of human cities to the growth and spread of cancer, predicting "death" of the Earth in about 2025. He points out that like the accelerated growth of a cancer, the human population has quadrupled in the past 100 years, and at this rate will reach a size in 2025 that leads to global collapse and catastrophe.

[Marc] Pararelli [of Colorado State University at Pueblo] is even more pessimistic. The only hope, he says, is a disaster of immense scale that jolts us out of our denial. "My sense is that only when the brown stuff really hits the fan will we finally start to do something."

The good news is that if the Earth is going to die in 2025 anyway, we don't have to solve the US health care problem now! :)

I wonder whether a massive shift to consumption of virtual goods is going to change the situation for the better. It takes less energy to telecommute than to drive and less resources to manufacture Second Life outfits rather than similar real ones. In the end, consumption can be channeled from resource-hungry to resource-saving goods, provided we develop enough of those. It's a matter of culture, not biology.

Doing first, thinking ... maybe later.

Just thinking about privacy makes people more cautious about sharing personal information:

A recent study by Alessandro Acquisti and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, points to why making privacy protection more conspicuous may actually deter users from sharing information.

In the paper, posted this month on the Social Science Research Network, college students were asked to complete a questionnaire about their attitude towards coursework. The team found participants were less likely to reveal wrongdoings if they were first made to think about privacy – even though that was done through an assurance of confidentiality.

This effect, called "privacy saliency", makes social networks loathe to make visible their efforts to protect privacy, says Acquisti.

via NewScientist.

Solar power as a security application:

The U.S. Army on Friday detailed what it expects to be the Department of Defense's largest solar energy project--a 500-megawatt installation at the Fort Irwin base in the Mojave Desert in California.

The location of the base in the high Mojave Desert, midway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, is ideal for solar generation, both of the photovoltaic and concentrating kind. There are a number of large solar installations at military camps which have available land and a well understood electrical load.

The Fort Irwin project is the first step in what the Army calls a far-reaching strategy to make energy supply of military installations more secure.

Predictable sunshine and predictable electrical load predictably make a good match. Also, the approach is consistent with the principle that to succeed a new technology has to be deployed in a new market (security), rather than compete on price with established technologies in established markets (commercial energy generation).


via CNet.

On Sept 10, 2007 I wrote, "My prediction is that they [drones] will replace helicopters as high resolution air vehicles: from traffic monitoring to neighborhood policing to forest fire detection to geological research."

Today, this prediction is getting closer to reality:

Your local police may soon be packing flying surveillance bots. At the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, Aeryon Labs President Dave Kroetsch gave a compelling pitch on his company, which makes a two-pound robot helicopter that has enough on-board intelligence and stability control to allow it to be flown by people who just point to locations on a Google Map-based interface.

Just in time for chapter 5 rewrite on the 10X Diagram.

Choose your parent right!

Scientific American on genes and brain:

...molecular imprints silence genes; certain imprinted genes are silenced by the mother, whereas others are silenced by the father, and the result is the delicate balance of gene activation that usually produces a healthy baby.

...researchers are also uncovering clues about how our parents’ genes influence our brain—it seems that maternal genes play a more important role in the formation of some brain areas, such as those for language and complex thought, and paternal genes have more influence in regions involved in growing, eating and mating.

In books about creativity you can find a lot of discussion on the topic of parental influences. Unfortunately, this is something we, as children, have no control over. Yet.

Strategy Deficit Disorder (SDD)

Opera Software SA is a Norwegian company that develops the Opera browser family. They started as an independent company in 1995 and had an IPO in 2004. Their primary market is embedded software - Opera browsers run on Nokia phones, Wii playstations, Nintendo DS' and other consumer electronics devices.
Opera engineers were the first to implement a number of now-standard browser features: modular design for mobile phones and PDAs, CSS support, Small Screen Rendering (SSR), support for multiple windows, cross-platform support, and etc.

Despite its engineering capabilities, Opera's share of the PC browser market today is about 1 percent. This is mostly due to a poor business model. Until relatively recently, Opera Software required customers either buy its browser or see ad-sponsored content with every page. No wonder, users prefered free Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. In addition to that, Opera's Intellectual Property(IP) strategy undermined its own technology and business position. The United States Patent Office web site shows that  they started filing patent applications in 2006 - 11 years after starting the company! A lot of the value of their pioneering IP, which could've been licensed or sold to more successful competitors, is now lost along with the product market share.
It might be that with the recent change of strategy, they will recover more value in the future.

Why emotions are contageous.

From Descarte's Baby, p. 115

This could be another human brain reaction that might be broken in a sci-fi context. What if we could control mirror neurons to process information before it is acted upon. One could argue that our emotional system developed long time ago when instant action was critical for survival. Today, it might be a maladaptation that leads to stock bubbles, copycat killings, etc.

Also relates to Neurologger research and this laughing babies video:

"Indistinguishable from magic"

Wed Jul 29, 2009 12:29pm EDT

 

LONDON (Reuters) - Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday.
A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference. "A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance," said Alan Dangour, one of the report's authors

Organic food was a great invention that created a whole industry. I don't believe the industry will go away after this announcement.

An excellent post on Moore's law and other high-tech trends. Here's what Carver Mead, who named the trend "Moore's law", said about it:

After [it] happened long enough, people begin to talk about it in retrospect, and in retrospect it's really a curve that goes through some points and so it looks like a physical law and people talk about it that way. But actually if you're living it, which I am, then it doesn't feel like a physical law. It's really a thing about human activity, it's about vision, it's about what you're allowed to believe. Because people are really limited by their beliefs, they limit themselves by what they allow themselves to believe what is possible.

A small step for a man

Potentially, a huge step forward in development of technology for delivering nano-drugs:

Nanoparticles able to make basic decisions about whether to release their contents offer the prospect of delivering drugs exactly when and where they are needed, say chemists.

Their particles only respond to two distinct and simultaneous stimuli, acting like an "AND" computer logic gate that only produces an output signal if it receives two input signals.

From a system perspective, this technology adds the Control component, which makes the system complete. Huge.

The Great Pyramid of Facebook

Facebook says that over 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide). Let's put this in perspective: each year humanity spends approximately 3.5 million person-years building Facebook. Mind you that this number does not include work hours of actual Facebook employees and independent Facebook application developers. For comparison, it took seven time less effort, "only" about 500 thousand slave-years, to build the whole Great Pyramid of Egypt, which served as a tomb for pharaoh Khufu (died in 2566 BC), the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty.

Thanks to the advances in business methods, technology, and health care, we can now construct huge mausoleums in almost no time at all.

Scientists distinguish between "splitters" and "lumpers," between those who favor fine-grained distinctions and those who tend to put entities together into broad categories.
For the most part, we are lumpers. Our minds have evolved to put things into categories and ignore or downplay what makes these things distinct.
Why does the mind work this way?
We lump the world into categories so that we can learn. When we encounter something new, it is not entirely new; we know what to expect of it and how to act toward it.
Someone without the right concepts might well starve to death surrounded by tomatoes, "because he or she has never seen those particular tomatoes before and so doesn't know what to do with them." Decartes' Baby. p.39-41.

Flexible thinking techniques allow us to be both, splitters and lumpers, depending on the problem at hand. They provide guidance on how to split and how to lump. For example, lumping iPhone with phones would cause us lose sight of its ability to run thousands of applications, including voice-based ones. On the other hand, splitting it from phones creates, at least initially, a problem for consumers, who might think that having a powerful mobile computer with thousands of potential applications on it would be an overkill for making simple phone calls.

July 26, 2009:

BEIJING, (Xinhua) -- Another 10 million users had access to the broadband Internet in China in the first half of the year, adding the total to 93.5 million, data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has shown.

China had 338 million Internet users by the end of June, up 40 million from the end of last year, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in the mid-July.

Population of the United States of America is 307,009,706, which 30 million fewer than the number of Internet users in China.

Observing humans in their natural habitat

Eyeworks TV begins social experimentation on children:

The California mother of octuplets born earlier this year has signed a $250,000 (£152,000) deal for all 14 of her children to star in a reality TV show.

Rich as Croesus, take 2.

King Croesus of Lydia, born in 595BC, introduced one of the most important innovations of the ancient Greece: minted gold and silver coins. Riding the growth of Greek commerce enabled by a new standard way to exchange value in the market, the king and his city-state became rich and famous. Today, EBay aims to imitate Croesus's success with PayPal's digital coinage:

"PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay," CEO John Donahoe said in a talk at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech conference here. However, he said that shift will take four to six years.

"We need to evolve on an auctions site to an e-commerce site."

Will government stimulus slow down green energy?

In 2003, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published The Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries, reporting on a comprehensive regression analysis of the factors that might explain the different growth rates of the world's 21 leading economies between 1971 and 1998. This indicated that only privately funded R&D led to economic growth, and that publicly funded R&D did not. Worse, the public funding of R&D crowded out private funding, and thus slowed economic growth.

We should look for areas of faster growth where the government plays no role in R&D funding, e.g. software, entertainment, mobile networks, gaming, etc.

A 35,000 year old game-changing technology:

...innovation transformed India. The advent of stone microblades set the stage for the subcontinent's explosive population growth, new research suggests.

The easy-to-manufacture tools – also known as microliths – were a vast improvement over larger stone flake tools used previously, says Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the study. Because microblades could be cut from stone more quickly and in higher volumes than flakes, hunting probably became a vastly more efficient endeavour.

After all that time, the stone microblades are the only artifacts we can discover archeologically. There's no written or voice records of the period, so we automatically assume that a specific tool caused the population explosion. The reality was probably a lot more complex. New hunting tools and strategies had to develop to take advantage of the new weapon. New tribe organizational structures had to emerge to manage relationships between diverging groups of specialists. New manufacturing techniques had to be taught and deployed at scale to make a difference in the life of the whole continent. Unfortunately, we don't have access to any information about that.

Digestion index needed?

NewScientist informs us that our food labels are way out of date. They don't take into account energy required for digestion:

...digestion - from chewing food to moving it through the gut and chemically breaking it down along the way - takes a different amount of energy for different foods.

...in 2003, a team led by Kyoko Oka at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, investigated the effect of food texture on weight gain. They fed one group of rats their usual hard food pellets, while a second group received a softer version. Both pellets had exactly the same calorie content and flavour. The only difference was that softer ones were easier to chew. After 22 weeks, the rats on the soft food diet were obese and had more abdominal fat.
(Journal of Dental Research, vol 82, p 491)

Patent Value: the haves and have-nots

     In search of data on patent values, I've found a survey of German inventors by Dietmar Harhoff and Karin Hoisl(2006). The paper studies the impact of the German Employees' Invention Act(GEIA), a German law that regulates how employees are paid for their patents.
Check out the payment distribution chart: only 1% of patents results in a payout above 20% of salary; the remaining 99% barely make a dent in the inventors' income. Since patent awards are calculated as a percentage of value to the company, most likely, patent values vary as dramatically.

Interestingly enough, planned inventions are more valuable than spontaneous ones:

"Somewhat unexpectedly, two other R&D process variables turn out to have a significant impact. First, patented inventions that are the planned product of R&D projects are more valuable than unplanned results or mere by-products of R&D.
The surprise lies in the second R&D process variable with a positive coefficient – inventions made during the inventor’s leisure time are considerably more valuable than other types of inventions."

References:
Dietmar Harhoff and Karin Hoisl. 2006. Institutionalized incentives for Ingenuity. Discussion Paper.

Healthcare has become a hot topic even for the reality TV.

TLC has ordered a six-episode series that chronicles the lives of a morbidly obese family facing everyday realities.

The family to be chronicled on the show consists of a 40-year-old man weighing 340 pounds; his 35-year-old wife, who is close to 400 pounds; and their 330- and 340-pound teenage kids.

via The Hollywood Reporter.

Why quantum mechanics might be hard to learn

From Decarte's Baby, by Paul Bloom:

The developmental psychologist Elizabeth Spelke lists four properties that all humans assume physical objects possess:

1. Cohesion. Objects are connected masses of stuff that move as a whole. If you want to know where the boundaries of an object are, ... grab some portion of stuff and pull -- what comes with what you are pulling belongs to the same object.
2. Solidity. Objects are not easily permeable by other objects;
3. Continuity. Objects move in continuous paths; the travel through space without gaps.
4. Contact. Objects move through contact. The exceptions to this rule are animate creatures.

Looks like a good list of principles to violate in a sci-fi thriller. For example, the main character(MC) encounters a creature whose eye-ears leap through space and suddenly appear in front of MC's face to perform a close-up observation. They sound like hummingbirds and "nest" in the creature's body. While gap hopping, they talk to the creature's brain via a wireless nervous system. Can be shared by a family of creatures and carry tiny but deadly poop charges :) A dragonfly with eye facets that violate principles 1 and 3 would also be a good option.
I believe there was something like that on the Incrediboy's island in the Incredibles movie. But those surveilance devices didn't leap and where clearly delineated as separate entities. Also, Michael Crichton used smart swarms in Prey.
We would need to run Altshuller's fantasy matrix to see if there's anything left to discover.

Scaffolding ideas

Our Mystery Novel course instructor, writer and editor Kathrine V. Forrest, tells us that, "the only interesting thing in a story is conflict."

Well, in invention workshops conflict is the most destructive thing. Creative juices dry out completely when people begin arguing about whose solution is better or start criticizing each other. For me, the most dangerous conflict is the one between a strong thinker, who insists on following his or her intuition, and the moderator, who wants to involve other people and/or pursue a more systematic approache. Unless it is diffused early with a joke or a credible commitment to pursue the idea at a later time, the conflict can escalate into something that resembles a fight between alpha dogs, rather than a creative session. Because of that, as a moderator and coach, I take to heart insights like this one:

One of Vygotsky's most interesting ideas in his study of the ontogenesis of higher mental functions is what he called the "zone of proximal development (ZPD)". He defined it as: ". . . the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers".

From this perspective, the methods I teach and practice enable people to solve problems that are often beyond their individual abilities. It's not just about collaboration. Rather, it is about setting up the right environment and pace of exploration so that each of the participants, including myself, can perform for others the role of a "more capable peer".

References:
Wertsch, J.V. From Social Interaction to Higher Psychological Processes: A Clarification and Application of Vygotsky’s Theory. Human Development 2008;51:66–79. DOI: 10.1159/000112532.

Swiss Post Office is going digital:

NYT: July 13, 2009

A new program lets subscribers view images of unopened envelopes and specify which ones they want opened and scanned so they can read them via the Internet.

It looks like the Japanese have implemented our old "Emulet" idea:

Wearable Sensors Help Analyze Behaviors of Factory Workers

DSS Co Ltd, a Japanese firm that edits and processes digital maps based on survey data, started a service of recording the actions of factory workers for long hours and visualize them.

Toasters unplugged!

Nikkei Electronics:

Showa Aircraft Industry Co Ltd developed a contactless power supply system that is an electromagnetic induction type and can supply power even when two coils are placed adjacent to or 1m apart from each other.
The company had a demonstration of lighting ten 100W incandescent lamps using coils that are 60cm apart from each other. In addition, when a metal frying pan was placed between the coils, it did not heat up. The size of the coils was 50 x 50cm, and the thickness was about 5cm.

Bill Gates talks about Feynman physics lectures and mentions, among other things, his involvement with Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures:

That's been really exciting to take this idea of gathering top scientists from a broad set of areas and think about problems that can be solved. And in the case of the foundation, you know, Nathan (Myhrvold) has used that ability to convene great scientists to look at things like how do you deliver vaccines without having to use as many refrigerators, or how do you pasteurize milk in a better way, some very interesting things. And then I also sit down with that group when they're looking at their rich world applications, including things around energy, and one of those has actually led to creating a company called TerraPower, which is focused on a new, very radically improved nuclear power plant design, which is a hard thing to get done, but extremely valuable if it comes through.

A further confirmation of the hypothesis that mobiles are going to displace PCs as the next innovation platform for personal computing:

For the first time criminal hackers may have succeeded in creating a network of "zombie" cellphones, infected without the owners' knowledge with software that can be used to send spam or carry out cyber attacks.

via NewScientist.

Tricky Question of the Month

via Cnet:

Say goodbye to spark plugs, a 19th century technology about to be supplanted by lasers. The UK paper The Telegraph reports that Ford is working with the University of Liverpool to develop a laser ignition system for internal combustion engines. That's right, engines with frickin' lasers strapped to their heads.

10 years from now, what kind of spark plug will you get with your electric Ford car? ;)

Not much progress for Microsoft's Bing (via VentureBeat):

Comscore’s latest search engine rankings reveal that Microsoft’s newest effort Bing is taking a little — but just a little — market share from Yahoo in the U.S.

Bing moved 0.4 percent over the last month to account for 8.4 percent of the total search market. Meanwhile, Yahoo declined by 0.5 percent to 19.6 percent. Google, Ask and AOL remained flat at 65 percent, 3.9 percent and 3.1 percent respectively.

Even with Microsoft's resources going after an established market leader is really tough. Practically hopeless for startups.

Lack of communication paralyzes strategy rather than tactics. This year, Tour de France organizers decided to ban radios from Stage 10 of the three-week race across four European countries. Team managers were unable to provide their riders with up-to-date information about competitors'. As a result, General Classification(GC) leaders (riders competing for the overall win of the Tour) could not make strategic decisions. Alberto Contador, who is currently the second in GC with 6 seconds behind the first place, said that "there was a degree of chaos", and "to ride without radios means that a fall in an evil moment may rob you of victory".

On the other hand, sprinters and riders low in GC didn't mind the ban because it gave them a chance to surprise leaders at the finish line.

Who won?
Mark Cavendish, the world's best sprinter today.

Another illustration to the superiority of the junk food business model:

By 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world for McDonald's, surpassed only by the land that gave the world fast food.

see a related 10X diagram in my earlier post.

Another possible reason why brainstorming feels good:

...unpredictable rewards were more pleasurable than predictable ones...this must be occurring at a subconscious level.

Gregory S. Berns, Samuel M. McClure, Giuseppe Pagnoni, and P. Read Montague. 2001. Predictability Modulates Human Brain Response to Reward. The Journal of Neuroscience, April 15, 2001, 21(8):2793–2798

backtrack

A case study for typical inventor mistakes: payload mis-identification.

Ray Kurzweil describes his approach and demonstrates a "forward-looking" implementation of a text-to-speech application for the blind:



Assignment for BUS 75 students:

What is the problem the inventor is trying to solve?
Can you improve on his solution?
How would you approach the problem in a "system" way?
Can you name a US company that markets a better solution?

More background material for the Greatest Innovations course:

Over the centuries, New York City has survived crisis after crisis—the British defeat of the Dutch, Leisler’s Rebellion, the 1863 draft riots, the 1929 crash, the attack on the Twin Towers. But none of these shocks struck as hard as the American Revolution. New York’s recovery from that shock stands as a testament to the importance of human capital in reinventing a city.

Infrastructure for efficient distribution of goods and information seems to be the key for the reinvention cycles (e.g.):

Manhattan’s largest industry today, printing and publishing, also grew out of its port. It wasn’t just that books, like any other good, had to be shipped to their customers. It was also that European ideas came to the United States by sea. For example, New York’s shipping prominence allowed the Harper brothers to get pirated British books before their Philadelphia competitors could. The Harpers’ ability to access bootlegged books easily was an early example of Gotham’s role as America’s most international city—a role that it still plays.

via Greg Mankiw's blog.

Ray Kurzwell, arguably the Edison of our times, talks about patterns of exponential growth in information technology (YouTube video). He illustrates his predictions with various graphs, including successive accelerating S-curves (screen shot below):

Interesting throughout.

The snob effect in startups with strong academic IP.

"When do start-ups that exploit patented academic knowledge survive?", a 2003 paper by Atul Nerkar and Scott Shane that shows that radical innovation backed by strong IP has a much better chance to survive in a new rather than established market.

Abstract:
Researchers have generally suggested that new technology firms should exploit radical technologies with broad scope patents to compete with established firms, implying that new firms founded to exploit university inventions will be more likely to survive... However, the existing empirical evidence indicates that the effectiveness ... of new firm strategy is contingent on the industry environment, specifically industry concentration. In this paper, we explain why this industry-specific relationship should exist and use a unique data set of new technology ventures originating at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to test our arguments.

Ungated version.

If you are into it.

From Explaining Creativity (2006), by Keith Sawyer:

Many of these [creativity] studies found that the most important characteristic of creative people is an almost aesthetic ability to recognize a good problem in their domain. They know how to ask the right questions. That’s why highly creative people tend to be creative in one specific domain: it takes a lot of experience, knowledge, and training to be able to identify good problems. p. 47.

That's why I strongly emphasize search for high-value problems in all my courses and invention workshops. The Reverse Brainstorm, the Three Magicians, the 9-screen view, the 10X Diagram, the 5-element analysis - all these tools are necessary for accomplishing what creative people have to do: recognize a good problem. Furthermore, these tools allow you to go beyond the basic creative ability and recognize a good problem outside of your domain of expertise.

Of course, only if you are into it.

From "Cortical Computing", by Greg Snyder:

A back-of-the-envelope calculation is useful. A human cortex has a density of about 10¹⁰ synapses/cm². Today's microprocessors pack roughly 10⁹ transistors in 1 cm² of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS). Thus, to build biological-scale neuromorphic circuits, electronic synapses will have to be about one-tenth the size of an average transistor. This is one important reason intelligent machines are not (yet) walking around on the street.

A 10X change in computing is coming. From what I know, the hardware side of this change is going to happen within the next 10 years. But it will probably take a lot longer for the software to catch up.

Also see: DB Strukov & KK Likahrev, 2006. A Reconfigurable Architecture for Hybrid
CMOS/Nanodevice Circuits. FPGA’06, February 22–24, 2006, Monterey, California, USA.

I've started collecting notes for my potential Winter '09-10 Stanford CSP class - "The Greatest Innovations of All Times: Past, Present, and Future." This FT interview with Larry Summers, director of the US president’s National Economic Council, has a couple of paragraphs that paint a certain future for the US:

"The president made two things clear to us early on... He would do what he had to to fix the banking system, to get the economy out of the rut in which he was inheriting it. But he had run for president to do long-run, fundamental things, like fixing healthcare, like having real energy policy, like reforming education."

This new American economy, Summers hopes, will be “more export-oriented” and “less consumption-oriented”; “more environmentally oriented” and “less energy-production-oriented”; “more bio- and software- and civil-engineering-oriented and less financial-engineering-oriented”; and, finally, “more middle-class-oriented” and “less oriented to income growth that is disproportionate towards a very small share of the population”. Unlike many other economists, Summers does not believe that lower growth is the inevitable price of this economic paradigm shift.

Patent Value Chasm for Startups

It is a common knowledge among Intellectual Property(IP) professionals that the vast majority of patents have no value. Optimists think that the share of such useless patents is about 95 per cent; pessimists contend that it is at least 99%. That is, out of a portfolio of 100 patents only 1 or 2 will be worth something over their 20-year lifespan. But even the useful patents bring most of their value during the second part of the term. This is due to the fact that it takes a decade or so for the mainstream to adopt a technology. By licensing a portfolio for royalties or preventing a competitor from entering a mature mainstream market, the portfolio owner can extract higher profits because, compared to the earlier stages, the market is much bigger and it is more difficult for competitors to implement and diffuse workarounds.

9 out of 10 startups don't live 20 years to collect on the value of their patents. Most investors(VCs) want to sell the company (liquidity event) by the end of a 5-year term. By that time, the startup doesn't have a strong patent portfolio because the majority of its patents are still in the application phase. Therefore, at the time of sale the value of the startup's patents and applications is largely discounted by the buyer. As the result, we've got what I call a "Patent Value Chasm" - a situation when a patent portfolio owner doesn't have the time to wait until his or her portfolio matures to the point when it starts bringing its real value. Essentially, the owner has to give the porfolio away.
As we can see, the incentives in the IP market work against startups with time horizon of less than 10 years.

Back to Edison

Green energy should cost less to consumers because it allows power companies to lower distribution costs. As soon as the battery technology catches up, we can go back to local AC-DC hybrid grids fed by a variety of power sources, including emergency generators.

Consider Duke Energy's smart-grid trial in Charlotte, N.C. A substation--the point that distributes electricity from long-haul transmission lines to a neighborhood--is equipped with 213 solar panels and a large battery. About 100 households have smart meters and in-home energy management tools.

When the sun is shining, the 50-kilowatt solar array makes electricity for the homes in the neighborhood. It also feeds the battery, giving the area a few hours of backup power in the case of an outage and a buffer to draw from during peak times. Consumers can take part in demand-response programs, too, to get a reduction on their electricity bill.

via CNet.

Kids from two to 11 years of age are spending 63 percent more time online than they did five years ago, says a report released Monday from Nielsen Online. Children in that age range were online an average of 11 hours in May 2009 versus just 7 hours in May 2004.

The difference between boys and girls seems negligible, which means that the next generation of consumers will not have the net gender gap. And it looks like they are moving away from TV-watching.

Building good inventor habits

NYT quotes a chapter from a book on how to be an effective CEO, which quotes "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", by Stephen Covey:

- Habit 1: Be proactive.
- Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind.
- Habit 3: Put first things first.
- Habit 4: Think win/win.
- Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
- Habit 6: Synergize.
- Habit 7: Sharpen the saw. ( work on personal growth in multiple dimensions).

Not surprisingly, Inventor's habits develop along similar lines. For example, habit 1 is built into the Reverse Brainstorming technique. It allows us to anticipate rather than react to problems. Habit 2 is represented in the Ideality Principle. You find your best solutions after you formulate the ideal solution. Habit 3 - grouping and prioritization during the second stage of Reverse Brainstorming. Habit 5 - The Three Magicians and Five Elements Analysis. A good solution comes out of a thorough understanding of all aspects of the problem. Habits 4 and 6 - System thinking. All elements of the system have to work together to achieve the outcome. Problems arise when interfaces break. Habit 7 - Inventor must work on developing imagination skills that don't necessarily relate to the narrow field of his/her expertise. It is also useful to cultivate what in Buddhism is called "The Beginner's Mind".

Of course, there are differences in habits. Executives often have to make quick decisions. Inventors must have time to think. As G.S.Altshuller used to say, "Inventive thinking is slow thinking." Good solutions come out of what David Kahneman calls System 2, "which is the reasoning system. It’s conscious, it’s deliberate; it’s slower, serial, effortful, and deliberately controlled, but it can follow rules." Developing this system takes time and effort.

How highly educated powerful clueless people run the financial world:

From June 2004 until June 2007, Wall Street underwrote $1.6 trillion of new subprime-mortgage loans and another $1.2 trillion of so-called Alt-A loans—loans which for some reason or another can be dicey, usually because the lender did not require the borrower to supply him with the information typically required before making a loan.

...when Park [one of AIG quants] decided to examine more closely the loans that A.I.G. F.P. had insured. He suspected Joe Cassano didn’t understand what he had done, but even so Park was shocked by the magnitude of the misunderstanding: these piles of consumer loans were now 95 percent U.S. subprime mortgages. Park then conducted a little survey, asking the people around A.I.G. F.P. most directly involved in insuring them how much subprime was in them. He asked Gary Gorton, a Yale professor who had helped build the model Cassano used to price the credit-default swaps. Gorton guessed that the piles were no more than 10 percent subprime. He asked a risk analyst in London, who guessed 20 percent. He asked Al Frost, who had no clue, but then, his job was to sell, not to trade. “None of them knew,” says one trader. Which sounds, in retrospect, incredible. But an entire financial system was premised on their not knowing—and paying them for their talent!

via marginalrevolution.com

A camera that understand the nature of the soldier's world:

A key feature of the system is that it is made up of a large number of tiny imagers. These are small, simple cameras, each directed independently by a MEMS-controlled micro-mirror. Because there is no large lens, Pantoptes can be made flat, unlike other cameras.

A central processor combines the images into a single picture, producing a higher resolution than the individual imagers. The intelligence is in the way that the system identifies areas of interest and concentrates the sub-imagers on the relevant part of the scene. Christensen gives the example of the Panoptes system looking at a building in a field.

“After a first frame or two was collected, the system could identify that certain areas, like the open field, had nothing of interest, whereas other areas, like the license plate of a car parked outside or peering in the windows, had details that were not sufficiently resolved,” he tells Danger Room. “In the next frame, subimagers that had been interrogating the field would be steered to aid in the imaging of the license plate and windows, thereby extracting the additional information.”

"A central processor" seems to be an artifact of traditional thinking. Most likely, the processor will be distributed as well. A memristor-based neural network would work even better here.

Porn leads the Great Mobile Disruption:

“A mobile is far handier than a computer for Internet access -- I seldom use a PC outside the office,” said Tokyo travel agent Takeshi, 32, who declined to give his surname.

Takeshi and other pornography fans are feeding a surge in demand for movie downloads in Japan, home to the world’s first third-generation wireless network. While profiting from the traffic, Tokyo-based mobile carriers DoCoMo and KDDI Corp. say they’ve been forced to impose limits on the heaviest users as the $74 billion network feels the strain.

Ask and tell

June 23, 2009. Amazon Technologies received a US patent for obtaining customer reviews of purchased items. US 7,552,068. What's the secret for getting customer reviews? Very simple: ask!

And, while you are asking for feedback, don't forget to recommend something else that the customer might like to buy.

A critical hole in the claim, though. If the content is streamed, you might know in real time when the user completes or stops watching the video, so there is no need for estimation of the evaluation time. Based on that, a simple workaround can be constructed to avoid infringing this patent.

New McDonald has a farm. Electric battery farm that is.

What a smart move by McDonald's! They are going to build a network of Electric Vehicle (EV) charging stations:

With 30,000 restaurants serving millions of customers around the world, McDonald’s claims its participation in the EV space could help make plug-in electric cars and their requisite infrastructure more commonplace — lowering the barrier to mainstream adoption.

With this move they can kill two birds with one stone: steal fast-food customers from gas stations and make money on electricity sales. And if they add a solar and/or wind generator with appropriate storage capacity to every restaurant, they get a low-cost solution to the EV charging problem. Brilliant.

Green gone red

The latest on VC investment into green tech:

Despite the financial recession, venture capital investment in green technology rose, for the first time in six months, during the second quarter of 2009 – and the biggest winner was transport-related technology, according to the report, issued this week by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte.

Although green technology was up 12 per cent on the first quarter of 2009, rising to $1.2 billion, that's still 44 per cent down on a year ago – and venture capitalist investment in some areas continues to fall.

Solar power has been particularly badly hit. Investment dropped from $1.2 billion in the third quarter of 2008 to $114 million by the second quarter of 2009.

Cars are the easiest green target because, compared to solar electricity generators, they don't require a massive change in the existing delivery infrastructure. If the auto industry succeeds in stimulating development of good battery technology, the solar industry will follow very quickly with localized distribution networks.

Dilemma of the Day: writing about invention and innovation.

This summer, on the insistence of my dear wife, I am taking several Continuing Studies courses at Stanford, including Writing Today's Mystery Novel taught by Katherine Forest, a popular author and editor. Most of the people in the class are either amateur mystery writers or avid fans of the genre. Actually, everybody in the class is totally into mystery. Except me. I took the course just to expose my mind to something totally different, something completely outside of my field of expertise. So far, I have not been disappointed. There's a lot for us to learn in a mystery writing class.

For example, the last session was about characterization . Katherine explained to us that the reader experiences book through its characters. Development of the main character is the story, so everything that relates to him or her has to be done with care and precision. She said, "What the character does should be inherent in the character."

She is absolutely right. This is exactly what good literature does - it shows us actions of highly believable characters. For instance, when we read or watch a movie about Edison we follow his path from problems to solutions; from a dark lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to the proverbial light bulb in his head, to the lights on the streets of the 19th century Manhattan. As readers, we expect and get what we desire: great characters whose actions follow from their personal traits - goodness, badness, complexity, creativity, and etc.

And here lies the problem. By following the character and deriving his achievements from his personal traits, we further strengthen our natural tendency to commit what psychologists call The Fundamental Attribution Error, i.e. overvalue internal personal factors and undervalue external, situational influences. As a result, after reading a good book about a famous inventor like Edison, we are much more likely to think that the success of his inventions is due to his unique personal "inventiveness", rather than important external factors, like the availability of industrial capital, the growing influence of the media, a certain maturity of the underlying technology, and etc. Instead of learning how to analyze and take advantage of major business or technology trends, we are made to believe in "creativity", a unique trait of rare individuals.

Thus, my dilemma: on one hand, to write a interesting book about invention and innovation, I have to populate it with very special, highly believable characters; on the other hand, to expose powerful underlying patterns behind invention and innovation trends, I have to de-emphasize the characters and their personal creativity.

What and, more importantly, when something is a problem?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the noun problem as:

1 a: a question raised for inquiry, consideration, or solution b: a proposition in mathematics or physics stating something to be done;
2 a: an intricate unsettled question b: a source of perplexity, distress, or vexation c: difficulty in understanding or accepting.

Basically, the first meaning talks about something that needs a solution; the second - about a feeling that something is going wrong.
The Madoff pyramid scheme is an excellent example of how the same thing at different times can be considered, first, as a solution, and, later, as a problem. In 2004, the Securities and Exchange Comission had information about irregularities at Madoff's firm, but at the time the scheme was supposedly making money for its investors, so nobody bothered to investigate. In other words, it was not a problem then. But in 2008, the exactly same financial arrangement became a problem when people decided to treat it as such. The result of this sudden change of heart?

Madoff, 71, was sentenced to a prison term of 150 years on Monday after he pleaded guilty in March to a decades-long fraud that U.S. prosecutors said drew in as much as $65 billion.

Obviously, out ability to detect problems is rather limited, even when it concerns vast amounts of money and involves a government agency dedicated to the task. Moreover, having a powerful agency that thinks that something is not a problem is a big problem in itself. One of the ways to deal with it would be to stimulate the public's perception that huge mistakes by government agencies are inevitable and transparency of information flows is essential in detecting such mistakes.

From an inventor/innovator perspective, developing a bank of problems, e.g. by running periodic reverse brainstorms, and monitoring the change in people's perception would be an effective strategy for determining the timing of a product or service introduction.

The brain's energy consumption reaches full adult levels at around two years of age. By three the little child's brain is actually twice as active as an adult brain. ... It begins to decline around [nine or ten] but reaches adult levels only at about eighteen.
At birth, each neuron in the cerebral cortex has around 2,500 synapses. The number of synapses reaches its peak at two o three years of age, when there are about 15,000 synapses per neuron. This is actually many more that in an adult brain. -- The Scientist in the Crib. p. 186.

Does this neuron connectedness with elevated levels of activity lie at the source of child creativity?

The non-existing road to nowhere.

In one classic experiment, the Nobel Prize winners David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel covered one eye of newborn kittens. The kittens continued to do all the normal things that kittens do, but one eye rather than two. After several months, the scientist uncovered the eye and looked a the connections between the two eyes and the brain. The surprise was that if the eye had been covered beyond a particular amount of time, it was effectively blind. It was not connected to the brain. This despite the fact that the eye was perfectly normal from an optical point of view. - The Scientist in the Crib. 183.

Connections without stimulation die out. This probably holds true for social networking as well.

Banner ads are the least useful type of advertisement. That is why in early 2000s, despite the fact that search results were the same, people moved away from Yahoo to Google.

via The Business Insider.

CeaseFire, a violence reduction program in Chicago, achieved significant reduction in neighborhood shootings and killings by treating the problem as an infectious disease.

it relies on simultaneously changing attitudes and behaviour and will work anywhere.

The key is to change social norms so that violence is seen as "uncool" both by potential perpetrators and their communities, instead of being the automatic way to settle a dispute.

It would be great if we, as a society, handled the obesity epidemic and the swine flue pandemic the same way. If it were considered uncool to market junk food to people and not to wear a mask in public when sneezing and coughing.

Maybe I should start a CeaseBurger campaign :)