Touching a revolution: a breakthrough 18th century medical book in Leuven, Belgium

In Scalable Innovation we mention the genius of Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682-1771), an Italian doctor who started a revolution in healthcare, by systematically cataloguing human diseases and matching them with autopsy results. According to Encyclopedia Britannica,

In his voluminous work On the Seats and Causes of Diseases as Investigated by Anatomy (1761), he compared the symptoms and observations in some 700 patients with the anatomical findings upon examining their bodies.

Today I had a chance to work with this remarkable 18th century book at the University Library in Leuven, Belgium.

The library staff brought the 2-volume book on special pillows; you can see one of them on the first picture above. Morgagni's printed work was designed to help practicing doctors and students of medicine; its first 100+ pages comprise several indices, so that the reader can identify a disease or a body part by symptoms, patient complaints, autopsy results, anatomic details, etc. (see the third picture above).

While touring the library, I discovered a Stanford connection too. In the 1920s, President Herbert Hoover ( the very first student of Stanford University) chaired the Commission for Relief in Belgium that sponsored restoration of the library after it was burned down by German troops during the World War I. The United States provided $500,000 for the project.

tags: history, innovation, medicine, healthcare, storage

Forming startup teams: an Israeli version of Silicon Valley

MIT Tech Review (7/11/2013).
Israel’s Military-Entrepreneurial Complex Owns Big Data.

MIT Tech Review: Each year, Israel’s military puts thousands of teenagers through technical courses, melds them into ready-made teams, and then graduates them into a country that attracts more venture capital investment per person than any in the world.

By contrast, in the US, tightly knit entrepreneurial teams form in college dorms, labs, and high-tech workplaces. Working at the edge of technology is another critical ingredient for success. As a result, the startup team has the following essential characteristcs:

1. - tech frontier proximity
2. - alertness to opportunity
3. - motivation (competitive drive)
4. - focus on getting things done
5. - high skills
6. - high challenge (facing difficult open-ended problems)
7. - connections necessary to recruit talent and obtain financing (network)
8. - low costs
9. - reputation for getting things done (see esp. p.4)

In the system model (see Scalable Innovation, Fig 2.2), the team is the Packaged Payload delivered by the Israeli Army (the Source) to innovation-making companies (Tool). The marketplace for high-tech products acts as a the Control; internal and external connections as the Distribution.

Scalable Innovation. Fig 2.2. System Diagram.

 Reputation (p. 9 on the list above) relates to the Aboutness (see chapters 4 and 5) that allows the marketplace to judge the teams efficiently.

GE's Novel Battery to Bolster the Grid

Slowly but surely, the green tech revolution is beginning to bear fruit in places where electric grid cannot support 24/7 access to power.

(7/12/12) MIT Technology Review:

Yesterday GE officially opened a sprawling, $100 million battery factory in Schenectady, New York. The factory, which will eventually employ 450 people, makes a new kind of battery—based on sodium and nickel. GE says the technology, which is more durable and charges more quickly than lead-acid batteries, will make off-grid power generation more efficient and help utilities integrate power from a wide range of sources, including intermittent ones such as wind and solar power.

The first applications will be somewhat less ambitious. GE's first customer is a South African company—Megatron Federal—that will use the batteries to power cell-phone towers in Nigeria. Those are usually powered by diesel generators. Pairing the generators with the new batteries can help them run far more efficiently. "You save 53 percent on fuel, 45 percent on maintenance, and about 60 percent on diesel generator replacements," says Brandon Harcus, division manager for telecommunications for Megatron Federal. "For our Nigerian application, the savings are substantial, about $1.3 million over 20 years per cell tower. You use a lot less fuel and produce a lot less carbon."  

tags: control, storage, energy, distribution, synthesis, 3x3

Winner-takes-all market: Internet video.

Pew Research Center released its report on Youtube and news. According to the report, Youtube now dominates Internet news and even beats TV in the current events category.

(July 16, 2012) Seven years after it was developed by three former employees of PayPal, the reach of YouTube is enormous. The video sharing site is now the third most visited destination online, behind only Google (which owns YouTube) and Facebook, based on data compiled by Netcraft, a British research service. According to the company's own statistics, more than 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. The site gets over 4 billion video views a day. Slightly under a third of those, 30%, come from the United States.

Fully 71% of adults have used sites like YouTube or Vimeo at some time, according to a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. That is up from 66% in 2010. And 28% visit them daily.

Day and Night: Twitter vs Facebook.

VBeat shows an offsetting time pattern for Facebook and Twitter. It is consistent with often stated Zuckerberg's intent to keep Facebook fun-oriented rather than work-oriented.

Twitter marketers should definitely include a link in their tweet. “We saw 86 percent higher engagement for tweets with links,” Ciarallo told VentureBeat. This is another difference vis-a-vis Facebook, where links can be counterproductive.

And while some might think that 140 characters is already pretty short, another thing that Buddy Media found is that even shorter tweets were the most successful.
“Tweets that contain less than 100 characters have 17 percent higher engagement,” said Ciarallo. “What they’re doing is leaving room for others to add their own thoughts and comments in a retweet.”

 tags:  payload, aboutness, storage, 10x, time, facebook, twitter, attention

Remotely controlled brain.

Switching technology from lasers to LEDs lets an MIT startup plant a  light-weight controller right into a lab animal brain.

Jan 23, 2012. MTR -- Optogenetics relies on genetically altering certain cells to make them responsive to light, and then selectively stimulating them with a laser to either turn the cells on or off. Instead of a laser light source, Kendall Research uses creatively packaged LEDs and laser diodes, which are incorporated into a small head-borne device that plugs into an implant in the animal's brain. The device, which weighs only three grams, is powered wirelessly by supercapacitors stationed below the animal's cage or testing area.

The wireless capabilities allow researchers to control the optogenetics equipment remotely, or even schedule experiments in advance. 

Data collection is also seems to be one of their key applications. Maybe when people agree to genetically modify their brains to emit lights, this technology will be invaluable for a new kind of communications.

tags: control, energy, storage, communications, biology, brain, startup

The quirky philosophy of social media.

Bertrand Russel writes about Idealism,

The first serious attempt to establish idealism .... was that of Bishop Berkeley.

He fully admits that the tree must continue to exist even when we shut our eyes or when no human being is near it. But this continued existence, he says, is due to the fact that God continues to perceive it; the 'real' tree, which corresponds to what we called the physical object, consists of ideas in the mind of God, ideas more or less like those we have when we see the tree, but differing in the fact that they are permanent in God's mind so long as the tree continues to exist. All our perceptions, according to him, consist in a partial participation in God's perceptions, and it is because of this participation that different people see more or less the same tree.

All our perceptions, according to him, consist in a partial participation in God's perceptions, and it is because of this participation that different people see more or less the same tree.

Let's run a thought experiment and think about Berekeley's 'tree' as 'customized webpage.' On Facebook all pages are built on demand. They are assembled on-the-fly from bits and pieces for a particular individual. Therefore, a customized webpage only exists when the individual invokes and perceives it. Once the individual turns off her demand for the page, it disappears. In this case, Facebook infrastructure plays the role of God's mind, ensuring that the page will be available when the individual invokes it next time.

When Facebook goes bankrupt or runs out of power, the world of social media disappears. All 'trees' of our perceptions are gone, just as Bishop Berkeley had predicted.

Maybe, people keep coming back to their Facebook pages all the time because they are subconsciously afraid that their world is going to vanish without them.

Can we predict that electric battery technology will be the next big thing? Yes, because it will allow us to harvest free energy from the Sun (and the wind). Unfortunately, we blew the last investment cycle on solar (and wind) without much thinking about the readiness of the infrastructure. Therefore, it will take another 10-15 years to mature the technology. In the meantime, here's another candidate for large-scale grid storage:

(November 22, 2011. MTR) - Researchers at Stanford University have now demonstrated a high-efficiency new nanomaterial battery electrode that lasts for 40,000 charge cycles without significantly losing its charge-holding capacity. The work was led by Yi Cui, a materials science and engineering professor at Stanford University.

The electrodes maintain 83 percent of their charge capacity after 40,000 cycles—in comparison, lead-acid batteries last a few hundred cycles, while lithium-ion batteries typically last for 1,000. The electrodes also show 99 percent energy efficiency.

For completeness, Aquion Energy is developing a competing battery technology.

P.S. From a system perspective, storage solves the same kind of dilemma I described in the post about Odysseus and the Sirens [separation in Time.]

tags: infrastructure, energy, economics, storage, system, dilemma

The beginning of the real green revolution.

Electric cars and less expensive batteries begin playing the role of dynamic storage that can respond to variations in supply of local solar or intermittent wind energy. It's far from a breakthrough, but it's a good first step.

The system uses the Leaf charging station to draw from the car's lithium ion batteries and feed current into a home's electricity distribution panel. The 24 kilowatt-hours of energy storage in the Leaf is enough to power an average Japanese home, which uses about half the energy of an average U.S. household, for about two days.

If a person pays a higher price for electricity during peak times, it's possible that charging a battery at night and drawing on it during peak times could save consumers money. That's the vision of many battery companies which envision home energy storage as a way to store energy from the grid or solar panels.

The problem with Nissan's proposed setup is that after the car battery is drained, e.g. during a blackout, it becomes useless for transportation too. Not good. They need a source of cheap and/or intermittent energy that would be wasted if not stored in the battery.

In system terms, they have to solve a synthesis problem, not just graft Leaf onto an existent grid. Maybe they should make a deal with Google to build distributed local storage infrastructure.


tags: innovation, synthesis, storage, s-curve, source, control, energy, 4q diagram, environment, trade-off, breakthrough, example

Back to Edison: the war of currents revisited.

Google is helping the transition from industrial to information-age power infrastructure:

Google is investing $280 million in SolarCity, a company that leases out solar panels to home owners.
Google said it was a move to increase the amount of “distributed solar power.” That means that the power from solar panels is generated on the roofs of homes and is used by those homes instead of having to travel through a power grid. That can help reduce some of the strain on power grids during peak usage hours, when homes are drawing more electricity for air conditioning or, in the future, electric car charging.

This transition will begin in earnest when efficient energy storage becomes available to home owners and/or neighborhoods. Today, there's no practical way to store solar or wind power for future use on a small scale. Once this problem is solved, the current power distribution system, which wastes from 30 to 50 percent of transmitted energy, will be out of the picture, at least in the residential market.

Then, since the vast majority of information gadgets we'll be using consume low-power DC current, the next step will be creation of an in-home low-power DC network to feed them (rather than using AC/DC converters for everything, from PC to TV to car). This will probably take another 10 to 20 years.

tags: distribution, storage, energy, book, system, evolution, payload, s-curve, synthesis

My last year's prediction about a steep drop in electronic book prices is coming true. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc.'s top 50 digital best-seller list featured 15 books priced at $5 or less on Wednesday afternoon. Louisville businessman John Locke, for example, a part-time thriller writer whose signature series features a former CIA assassin, claimed seven of those titles, all priced at 99 cents.

All-you-can-eat book subscriptions, today we call them libraries, is probably one of the logical scenarios. Amazon or Netflix could become such new digital libraries, providing easy access for various e-readers.

tags: source, payload, service, cloud, distribution, s-curve, maturity, storage

Making ideas accessible to brain

At TED, Tom Wujec of AutoDesk shows how to communicate ideas visually, relying on human brain's ability to pick out objects and make sense out of them.

So making images meaningful has three components. The first again, is making ideas clear by visualizing them. Secondly, making them interactive. And then thirdly, making them persistent.

Whiteboards are not interactive, they don't fit Tom's second requirement.
Today's touch screens are highly interactive, but they do not provide for persistent visualization.
Large, wall-to-wall, touch-screen graphics displays in combination with the right software will create an environment where idea communication and problem-solving is incredibly productive.

tags: interaction, tool, storage, problem, trade-off, video, creativity, information, psychology, brain

A breakthrough battery technology

A German startup creates an electric battery for a long-range car:

BERLIN, Oct. 26 (UPI) -- An electric car developed by a German company Tuesday set what organizers said is a world record when it drove 375 miles without recharging its battery.

The battery, based on what DBM Energy calls the KOLIBRI AlphaPolymer Technology, comes with 97 percent efficiency and can be charged at virtually every socket. Plugged into a high-voltage direct-current source, the battery can be fully loaded within 6 minutes, Hannemann said.

The battery charging time is excellent; it's comparable with today's gas station infrastructure, but does not require it at all. Provided, of course, the high-voltage electricity can be provided safely.

tags: storage, payload, transportation, energy, 10x

10 thousand monkeys with 10 thousand VCRs

A good example for explaining the 4Q diagram: a new technology was created to address a totally new market. Even people who had no clue how devices worked bought and used VCRs.

In the early 1980s, an apocryphal story made the rounds among video storeowners concerning a hapless customer who brought his VCR back to the store where he’d purchased it a year earlier, complaining that it had stopped working. The storeowner looked it over, wondering if there had been some mechanical failure, but found none. Upon ejecting the videocassette currently in the deck, the storeowner found that it had been played and recorded over so many times that the magnetic tape had worn to the point of snapping. Handing the customer the tape, the storeowner asked if all of his tapes were this worn, to which the customer responded, “I didn’t even know that piece came out!”

Greenberg, Joshua. From Betamax to Blockbuster : Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2008. p 41.

Another story from the same book shows the deep roots of IP TV:

A healthcare system for trucks

Large fleet operators, such as UPS, Hertz, FedEx, and others, perform regular scheduled maintenance on their vehicles. UPS has moved one step further and introduced a "lifestyle-depended" maintenance system, which takes into account real-time and historical diagnostics data. The data is gathered by a "dumb" telemetry device embedded into each truck, then transmitted, stored, and compared to similar information captured from other trucks. As a result, the company is able to save millions of dollars by discovering and changing patterns of behavior of truck drivers, mechanics, and suppliers.

For the sake of comparison, UPS runs a population of tens of thousands of trucks. This is the size of a small town in the US. And we don't have anything even close to such lifestyle-oriented healtcare system for humans. Trucks' health is better managed than people's.

tags: detection, control, storage, distribution, problem, solution, information, cloud, health, 10x,

eyes - nerves - brain - mind

Charlie Rose hosts a group of brain scientists who explain how our vision works (video). This is the second episode of the Brain Series; in the first one they gave an overview of the series, basic layout of the brain, and questions to be explored.

The picture below shows brain areas responsible for recognizing Places, Faces, Words/Letters, and Bodies. 

A basic diagram of the neuron. Axon can be several meters long, which means it requires a lot of energy to propagate impulses through the brain. That's why thinking and perception is so resource-hungry.

Justo, these are must see shows for our book ;)

tags: brain, mind, biology, science, tool, video, storage, information

Green shoots

This is good news for green energy sources because distributed community storage will be key to efficient use of local solar and wind power:

Start-up International Battery on Monday said that it has been chosen to supply lithium ion batteries for a community energy storage pilot project run by utility AEP set to go online by the middle of this year.


In each location, the utility plans to install at least one 25-kilowatt storage unit, able to deliver one hour of electricity, or 25 kilowatt-hours of energy.

Right now, the storage system will work to smooth out peak demand, while in the future it can be used to accommodate various small-scale energy sources. From a system point of view, it is important to note that barriers to green energy are not necessarily technical.

Storage, and specifically large-scale battery systems, are expensive and can be difficult for utilities to justify financially under traditional regulations, which are structured around power plant investments.

That is, old system configurations and incentives favor traditional, century-old approach, developed to attract large-scale industrial providers and consumers. Our infrastructure is still rooted in the 19th century, and it will take a while to change it.

tags: energy, distribution, storage, control, infrastructure, solution, problem

Growing beyond hype

During the next four years, the cloud is predicted to grow very rapidly:

Another good news is that we seem to have passed the peak of the hype cycle some time earlier this year.

tags: cloud,  hype, growth, niche construction, artefact,storage

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.

The modern history of frozen foods

The modern frozen foods technology was invented by Clarence Birdseye in early 1900-s, and it took about 50 years for the original idea to succeed in the marketplace. After World War II, complimentary inventions of affordable refrigerators and microwave ovens created an environment, in which frozen foods industry could develop and thrive.

[Clarence] Birdseye worked as a fur trapper and trader in the Canadian North, where he noticed that fish would freeze almost immediately after being caught, and when cooked later -- even weeks later -- these quick-frozen fish tasted much better than fish mechanically frozen in warmer climates.

Birdseye began his experiments with freezing in 1916, and eventually came to understand that if fish was frozen very, very quickly its cellular structure was damaged far less, so that when thawed it was nearly indistinguishable from fresh fish.
...
Frozen foods went nationwide in 1944, when Birdseye suggested leasing insulated railroad cars for shipping. He further changed the grocery landscape by contracting with American Radiator Corporation to build display freezers, which General Foods then leased to stores. By the early 1950s, more than half of American grocery stores had a 'frozen food' section.