Discovery Channel: Top ten discoveries of the decade

Here's the link to the entry page: click me.

In terms of impact on future innovation, I think the more important ones are #4 (Stem cells), #2 (Human genome map), and #1 (Global warming).

From a purely psychological perspective, items on the list satisfy the criteria for objects that traditionally inspire awe: they are either extremely large or infinitesimally small.

tags: science, greatest, psychology, health, environment, discovery, technology

Greatest innovations: the Eurepean military renaissance.

FOUR military innovations in early modern Europe facilitated the rise of the West. After 1430, the development of heavy bronze gunpowder artillery made possible the destruction of almost all fortifications of traditional vertical design, while a century later the creation of fortresses of geometrical design restored the advantage in siege warfare to their defenders. Around 1510, naval architects began to place heavy artillery aboard full-rigged sailing vessels, creating floating fortresses that proved incomparably superior to any non-Western fighting ships. Finally, in the 1590s, the invention of infantry volley fire (one rank of infantry firing in unison and then reloading while other ranks fired in turn) permitted the defeat of far larger enemy forces, whether mounted or on foot, in the field. These four developments had by 1775 allowed relatively small groups of Europeans to conquer most of the Americas, Siberia, and the Philippines, and parts of South Asia-over one-third of the world's land surface-and to dominate the world's oceans.

The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of Nieuwpoort
(1600), and the Legacy
Author(s): Geoffrey Parker
Source: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Apr., 2007), pp. 331-372
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4138272

The guns on ships are particularly of interest because they allowed to protect trade routes essential to the development of major European industrial powers. The shipbuilding also had to change to accommodate heavier loads.

Volley fire is a good example of solving the dilemma: you want to reload your gun, to have it ready to fire, and you don't want to reload it, because during reloading it makes you vulnerable to enemy's charge.

tags: problem, greatest, innovation, solution, dilemma, course, example, strategy

A money lightning bolt! A digital one!

Another entrant into the mobile payment market:

The Square hardware is a small, inexpensive card reader that plugs into the audio jack of a compatible device, including a mobile phone (it's starting with the iPhone and currently has job postings up for BlackBerry and Android engineers). It processes credit card payments, geotags their locations on a map, and e-mails a receipt to the buyer.

As I wrote earlier, eBay is also betting on the emergence of the digital wallet. Long-term, money - a digital signal - will be handled by software, rather than dedicated hardware, but the Square solution might succeed as a short-term stop-gap effort to get small businesses onto the mobile transactions bandwagon.
I wonder how IPv6 is going to affect the picture. Ideally, you would just "ping" your money to the vendor, without any credit cards at all.

tags: money, transfer, payload, control, greatest, infrastructure

Retail: The Battle of Technologies

NYT reports on a potential price war between Amazon and Wal-mart:

This fight, then, is all about the future. Rapid expansion by each company, as well as profound shifts in the high-tech landscape, now make direct confrontation inevitable. Though online shopping accounts for only around 4 percent of retail sales, that percentage is growing quickly. E-commerce did not suffer as deeply as regular retailing during the economic malaise, and it is recovering faster than in-store shopping. People are also shopping on smartphones and from their HDTVs.

By BRAD STONE and STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

Published: November 23, 2009

Amazon is going to win this war, unless Wal-mart takes dramatic steps to improve its e-tailing strategy. Since at least the last Christmas shopping season, Amazon's biggest advantage has been its ability to aggregate demand and effect real-time supply-demand pricing.

tags: distribution, control, commerce, greatest, 10X, battle

The chicken and its three eggs.

Philosophy of technology is a 2,500-year intellectual exercise, and according to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Technology is a continuous attempt to bring the world closer to the way it is to be. Whereas science aims to understand the world as it is, technology aims to change the world.

This tells me that there should exist a fundamental difference between the logic of scientific discovery and the logic of invention, which most of the books on creativity completely ignore. Unfortunately, philosophy of invention doesn't exist. Though, there are some attempts to create a philosophy of creativity.

Just for fun, below are Google timelines for philosophy, invention, science, and technology.

tags: technology, science, invention, timing, evolution, system, greatest

The more I read about robots, the more I think that the most useful of them will come with functionality and scale that are very different from human abilities and size:

The surgeons of tomorrow will include tiny robots that enter our bodies and do their work from the inside, with no need to open patients up or knock them out. While nanobots that swim through the blood are still in the realm of fantasy, several groups are developing devices a few millimetres in size. The first generation of "mini-medibots" may infiltrate our bodies through our ears, eyes and lungs, to deliver drugs, take tissue samples or install medical devices.

Most importantly, new diagnostics and control technologies need to be invented to guide the bots in these new applications.

tag: tool, system, health, control, detection, greatest, scale

Is Facebook a status function?

Philosopher John Searle describes a certain type of invention, he calls it status function, instances of which exist only because people collectively believe in their functions:

Think of the difference between a knife and a 20 dollar bill. The knife will cut just in virtue of its physical structure. But the 20 dollar bill will not buy just in virtue of its physical structure. It can only function as money if it is recognized, accepted, and acknowledged as valid currency. The knife function can exist for anybody capable of exploiting the physics, but the status function can only exist if there is collective representation of the object as having the status that carries the function.

He claims that humans create their civilizations by inventing various status functions:

I regard the invention of the limited liability corporation, like the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, universities, museums, and money, as one of the truly great advances in human civilization. But the greatest advance of all is the invention of status functions, of which these are but instances. ... without them, human civilization, as we think of it, would be impossible.

Status functions seem to be essential for scalability. From a system point of view, they are instances of the Control component.

Source: John Searle. 2005. What is an institution? doi:10.1017/S1744137405000020

tags: invention, ideality, theory, function

Building the cloud: location, location, location

What is clear is that, over time, Microsoft will need even more capacity. That's what has Josefsberg returning to a custom "heat map" that figures out the best place to build data centers based on factors including cheapness, greenness, and availability of power, political climate, weather, networking capacity, and other factors. Choosing the right spot is critical, Microsoft executives say, noting that 70 percent of a data center's economics are determined before a company ever breaks ground.

Energy seems to be a major constraint for cloud development:

Even with only half the site ready for computers, the center has 30 megawatts of capacity--many times that found in a typical facility.

On a hot day, Microsoft would rely on 7.5 miles worth of chilled water piping to keep things cool, but general manager Kevin Timmons smiled as he walked in for the facility's grand opening in late September. It was around 55 degrees outside.

tags:energy, infrastructure, tool, cloud, computers, scale, 10x, greatest

Ten inventions that changed the world, according to the London Science Museum:

...curators select[ed] the 10 objects in its collection that had made the biggest mark on history. These then went to a public vote to find the most important invention of past centuries.
1. X-ray
2. Penicilin
3. DNA double helix
4. Apollo 10 capsule
5. V2 rocket engine
6. Stephenson's Rocket
7. Pilot ACE computer
8. The atmospheric engine
9. Model T Ford
10. The electric telegraph

tags: invention, innovation,  greatest

Warren Buffet is betting on fuel-efficient transportation infrastructure:

Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Warren Buffett’sBerkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed to buy railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. in what he described as an “all-in wager on the economic future of the United States.”
The purchase, the largest ever for Berkshire, will cost the company $26 billion, or $100 a share in cash and stock, for the 77.4 percent of the railroad it doesn’t already own.

Trains stand to become more competitive against trucks with fuel prices high, he[Buffet] has said.

It's also a bet that there will be no significant change in the transportation technology. Introduction of energy-efficient trucks will take a very long time.

see also Energy Use for Transportation from DOE.

tags: greatest, infrastructure, example, distribution, transportation, efficiency, niche construction,

Money and Monkeys

A New York Times magazine (via Freakonimcs) article about monkeys that learned to use money:

The essential idea was to give a monkey a dollar and see what it did with it. The currency Chen settled on was a silver disc, one inch in diameter, with a hole in the middle -- ''kind of like Chinese money,'' he says. It took several months of rudimentary repetition to teach the monkeys that these tokens were valuable as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly valuable the next day. Having gained that understanding, a capuchin would then be presented with 12 tokens on a tray and have to decide how many to surrender for, say, Jell-O cubes versus grapes. This first step allowed each capuchin to reveal its preferences and to grasp the concept of budgeting.

Over time, the capuchins learned to behave just like people: gamble and trade goods, favors, and sex for these shiny useless discs.

tags: money, greatest, control, incentives, behavior

Local electric power production and storage is needed

Two cases when adding new consumption or production capacity (Tool) leads to unintended consequences for the existing infrastructure (Distribution).

The first example relates to the predicted increase in the number of electric cars in California:

Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) -- California’s push to lead U.S. sales of electric cars may result in higher power rates for consumers in the state, as a growing number of rechargeable vehicles forces utilities to pay for grid upgrades.

A typical Santa Monica circuit, which serves about 10 households, may be overloaded should two or three of those customers charge vehicles simultaneously, even if they do so overnight during off-peak hours, Ted Craver, Edison’s chief executive officer, said in a phone interview on Oct. 20.

While surplus power is available at night at cheaper rates, the grid needs adjustments to handle such charging, Craver said. For example, additional or larger transformers may be needed in neighborhoods with numerous plug-in car owners.

In the second example, Science magazine describes the potential impact of biofuel production on the water distribution infrastructure:

Biofuels promise energy and climate gains, but in some cases, those improvements wouldn't be dramatic. And they come with some significant downsides, such as the potential for increasing the price of corn and other food staples. Now, a series of recent studies is underscoring another risk: A widespread shift toward biofuels could pinch water supplies and worsen water pollution. In short, an increased reliance on biofuel trades an oil problem for a water problem.

Making matters worse, other U.S. energy sectors are growing and increasing their demand for water. Another recent report from Argonne by Deborah Elcock, an energy and environmental policy analyst, for example, found that water consumption for energy production in the United States will jump two-thirds between 2005 and 2030—from about 6 billion gallons of water per day to roughly 10 bgd—driven primarily by population growth. About half of that increase will go toward growing biofuels.

tags: five element analysis, tool, distribution, system, greatest, maturity, hype, energy

Don Reisinger at CNet writes:

After Sid Meier announced on Thursday that a new Civilization title called Civilization Network was on its way to Facebook, it had me thinking: what other games could I play until I'm ready to take on Meier's new title next year?

Actually, it doesn't matter what other games people will be playing. What matters is that there will be tons of games on Facebook and they will strengthen Facebook's role as an essential piece of social infrastructure for the next generation of internet users. Other digital things, like money, content, art will follow the net people.

tags:infrastructure, greatest, payload, social, distribution

invention vs innovation: a 10X difference

The difference between invention (discovery) and innovation (commercial application) was highlighted last week when Charles K. Kao was awarded the 2009 Nobel prize in physics ""for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication". Kao's work lies at the foundations of today's telecommunications technology. His share of the Nobel Prize money is about $700K. For comparison, John T. Chambers, the Chairman and CEO of Cisco, a networking and communications gear company, gets about $10M a year in salary, stock, and bonuses. Both of them are at the top of their profession, and the contrast between the rewards the society affords these two brilliant men indicates the relative value created at different stages of the innovation process.

tags: 10x, invention, innovation, greatest, economy, process, scale, niche construction

By continuities, I mean patterns that extend across time. These are not laws, like gravity or entropy; they are not even theories, like relativity or natural selection. They are simply phenomena that recur with sufficient regularity to make themselves apparent to us. Without such patterns, we’d have no basis for generalizing about human experience: we’d not know, for example, that birth rates tend to decline as economic development advances, or that empires tend to expand beyond their means, or that democracies tend not to go to war with one another. But because these patterns show up so frequently in the past, we can reasonably expect them to continue to do so in the future.

The landscape of history, by John Lewis Gaddis. p.31.

A continuity is often an indicator of an underlying infrastructure that sustains the pattern by counter-acting entropy.

tags: process, artifact, niche construction, pattern, greatest, course

An important emerging technology market:

Financial analyst Piper Jaffray estimates that US citizens will spend $621 million in 2009 in virtual worlds; estimates of the Asian market are even larger. Research firm Plus Eight Star puts spending at $5 billion in the last year.

Over in Second Life, trade remains robust. The value of transactions between residents in the second quarter of this year was $144 million, a year-on-year increase of 94 per cent. With its users swapping virtual goods and services worth around $600 million per year, Second Life has the largest economy of any virtual world

and a new problem:

Just as the digital revolution has facilitated piracy and copyright theft in other spheres, those who make a living running businesses in Second Life have seen their profits eroded by users who have found ways to copy their intellectual property (IP).

The easier it is to implement and replicate somebody-else's idea, the important IP protection becomes. Also, production processes for virtual goods in Second Life are still primitive, therefore it is difficult to have trade secrets.

tags: niche construction, 4q diagram, problem, greatest, virtual, economy, market, growth,

NYT on the emerging digital infrastructure of Africa:

October 5, 2009 5:00 PM PDT
BUSHENYI, Uganda--Laban Rutagumirwa charges his mobile phone with a car battery because his dirt-floor home deep in the remote, banana-covered hills of western Uganda does not have electricity.

In an area where electricity is scarce and Internet connections virtually nonexistent, the mobile phone has revolutionized scientists' ability to track this crop disease and communicate the latest scientific advances to remote farmers.

With his phone, Rutagumirwa collects digital photos, establishes global positioning system coordinates and stores completed 50-question surveys from nearby farmers with sick plants. He sends this data, wirelessly and instantly, to scientists in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

Once solar power generators become less expensive, Africa will be able to take full advantage of the new communication technologies.

tags: distribution, greatest, infrastructure, mobile, niche construction

The infrastructure for cloud computing and content on demand keeps growing:

The number of households with fixed broadband connections is expected to reach 422 million across the globe this year, a jump of 10.5 percent over 382 million in 2008, the analyst firm said Friday. This number will further swell to an estimated 580 million by 2013.

According to Gartner, fiber-based services will grow steadily over the next few years, with FTTH (fiber-to-the-home), FTTP (fiber-to-the-premises) and Ethernet connections accounting for about 20 percent of the global consumer broadband market by 2013.

Wireless broadband (3G,4G) will probably catch up too. Which is a great news for application and content developers.

tags: distribution, evolution, greatest, mobile

Changes in job distribution in the US over the last 150 years.

http://flare.prefuse.org/launch/apps/job_voyager

A post in Charter Cities about a particular type of risk in infrastructure investment:

The risk that a future government will breach the terms of an agreement is called political risk. An investment in a piece of infrastructure such as a power plant or an airport requires a large initial outlay and pays returns for decades. An investor who contemplates an infrastructure investment in a country with political risk has to take account of the chance that after the initial outlay, the local government will deprive it of a chance to earn the return.

From this perspective, wind and solar power generators with localized storage can be a good solution for the developing countries because they don't require massive one-time investments (cf to nuclear, coal, and hydro power).


:: infrastructure, niche construction, greatest, problem, solution