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.