IFTF's Future Now

links for 2005-12-31

• New World Notes: BEST OF NEW WORLD NOTES 2005
  excellent snapshots--be prepared to read!--of the best Second Life reporting around
  (tags: games cyberspace entertainment culture virtual_economy future)
• Ogre to Slay? Outsource It To Chinese - The Archive - The New York Times
  ''If they didn't work here they'd probably be working as waiters in hot pot restaurants,'' he said, ''or go back to help their parents farm the land -- or more likely, hang out on the streets with no job at all.''
  (tags: games China entertainment cyberspace employment work youth)
• Lampposts used for internet services - Technology - smh.com.au
  "smart" solar powered lamp posts in Africa
  (tags: light_infrastructure Africa environment Internet)
• Population Bulletin: China's Population: New Trends and Challenges
  This Population Bulletin draws from a growing body of statistical data and research (see Box 1, page 4) to look at some of the demographic changes that have occurred in China's recent past, beginning with a brief introduction to China's demographic histor
  (tags: China statistics population future)

More Women than Men Now on Net

In the December report by the Pew Charitable Trust, further summaries and a pointer to full report:

" ... Pew Internet Project surveys between January and June in 2005 show that 67 percent of the adult American population goes online, including 68 percent of men and 66 percent of women. But women slightly outnumber men in the Internet population because they make up a greater share of the overall U.S. population...."

Serious Games: Food Force

The military has long used simulations and games for training and strategy analysis. I worked on some of these as early as the 70s. Lately their realism and predictiveness have improved remarkably. Now the UN's World Food Programme has come up with a game called Food Force that tries to do the same thing for humanitarian efforts: " ... that sends children ages 8 to 13 on six realistic aid missions ..." . Its freely downloadable, have not done that yet. Not intended to be predictive. The Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars recently ran a review of serious games. They are continuing some efforts on the broad use of games for issue understanding. CBS article that places it in some useful context.

" ... Eventually, "serious games will take over the world" of gaming, predicts Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association in San Francisco. People will use video games for learning so easily and so often that they won't think twice about it, he says. People using video games will no more be labeled "gamers" than people today who listen to music are labeled "listeners," he says ... "

Seeing the world in analog circuits

Today's San Jose Mercury News has an article on analog circuit design. Since my sister-in-law worked in the field for a time, I might have a particular reason for being interested in the piece; but once I got into it, I realized that there actually were about five layers of interesting complexity in it.

First, the explanation for why analog chips are getting more, not less, popular.

Globalization and the rise of a tech economy worldwide often lead to images of Silicon Valley engineers and software developers being outsourced or offshored. But the analog engineer, long in high demand, is enjoying even more of a heyday as the world goes digital. They're largely immune from offshoring.

Global use of products such as cell phones, digital cameras, digital music players and satellite radios continues to grow. And more content, such as music, video and data, are being digitized to run on such devices. In order for digital devices to operate, they need chips that can take signals from the real world -- such as sound, power and temperature -- and compress them into a format that can be understood by a computer as zeros and ones.

So the demand for many types of analog chips in the $32 billion-a-year analog market continues to grow. So does demand for these specialized designers.

This fits with two things we've talked about at the Institute: the "sensor revolution," which Paul Saffo wrote about in 1997; and the growing overlap between the digital and physical worlds.

Digital circuits in chips are either on or off, zeros or ones, while analog deals with the continuous waves and the imprecise realm of real-world signals. ``Analog deals with the gray,'' Monticelli said.

Analog chips have a few hundred transistors vs. millions in digital chips, but because they are dealing with so many imprecise elements, the analog layouts need to be checked by hand. The chips also need to be tested by hand, because there are not nearly as many software design tools or test and simulation tools for analog chips as for digital ones.

Analog chip design is highly collaborative -- passed down from generation to generation, like artisans learning from master tradesmen.

The collaborative nature of analog design makes it an unlikely field to be outsourced anytime soon to new engineering centers in India or China.

This can be read as a variant of the "the Chinese don't do really high-end engineering" argument that one hears. The more sophisticated version is what I've come to think of as the Tacit Knowledge Defense (it's always good if your industrial policy can sound like a kung fu fighting style). The TKD consists of several moves:

1. Really arcane, or insanely successful, kinds of creative work depend less on mastery of formal bodies of knowledge than upon tacit knowledge.
2. No one can explain what goes into tacit knowledge-- not even the people who possess it.
3. Since it can't be codified or put on a wire, it can't be exported.
4. Bonus advanced move: Tacit knowledge is possessed by groups, not just individuals.

Then things get really interesting.

Recently, at Linear in Milpitas, a group of more than a dozen semiconductor engineers stood around a large conference table, scrutinizing a massive sheet of paper with the layout of a chip being developed for LCD TVs -- a bit like artists looking at a canvas.

The brightly colored design showing circuitry grids and their connections took up the entire table. As they walked around it, some made notations on the paper with black markers. The discussion was animated, with ideas, suggestions and debates going back and forth.

[Bryan] Legates, a boyish-looking design manager with dirty blond hair and a slightly stocky build, gave his input to the chip's principal designer, Mike Negrete, 24.

The interaction between the more experienced and the less experienced is key in developing analog design skills. "That room is where the real magic happens," Legates said.

This sounds strikingly similar to what happens at many Institute events. I like to say that if there are more than two IFTF people in a room, someone's going to write on a wall (we have whiteboards or windows everywhere). Not only are we a highly visual culture, but we also tend to be very public in our visualization: our habit is to construct them in ways that invite collaboration. To make them inviting, you put them in a public place-- on a whiteboard, not your own notebook-- and you make them big enough so other people can easily see and add to them.

It makes me wonder: how many collaborative work environments don't have objects or representations large enough for people to gather around, talk through, and work on together? For all the fascination with collaboration in business today (think of the number of companies who don't think that collaboration is important), I suspect we underestimate the degree to which scale and physical layout affect the way that collaboration happens, and the kinds of knowledge that can be shared among participants. Of course it's possible for collaboration to happen electronically, among people who live miles apart; but there are things that you can communicate in the room-- and things that you think to communicate-- that you can't over e-mail or blog posts.

And how long before you can replace the room with a wire-- before you can have virtual collaboration that really is a replacement for being in the same room with other people? Is it just a matter of bandwidth and processor cycles? Or are there essential elements of collaboration that can't be bottled?

Technorati Tags: collaboration, design, outsourcing, Silicon Valley

links for 2005-12-24

• Smart Buildings Breathe and Blink
  "Lance Hosey, of Atmo, and Soo-in Yang and David Benjamin, of the Living, have designed responsive building systems that exploit the inherent properties of materials through biomimetics."
  (tags: biomimicry architecture design)
• IDFuel, the Industrial Design Weblog
  Decries the "trend in manufacturing of making products that have less servicability than the last generation, and instead rely on larger subasseblies."
  (tags: design manufacturing)
• Tree planting not always green
  "Planting forests to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can have a range of side effects, including drying up streams and making soil saltier, according to a global study."
  (tags: environment economics)
• Nature's Coming Revolution
  Critical review by Ted Dace of Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature.
  (tags: environment)
• Korean Stem Cell Lines Faked
  "A team of independent investigators at Seoul National University has determined that at least nine of 11 human embryonic stem cell colonies whose creation was announced amid great fanfare earlier this year were fakes"
  (tags: biology Korea stem_cells science)

Environmental accounting: What do you want two plus two to equal?

Another piece from BBC News highlighting the challenges in making environmentalism and economics work and place nicely:

Trade can 'export' CO2 emissions

New research from the US shows that trade can significantly affect emissions of greenhouse gases.

Researchers found that US imports of goods from China cause a greater production of carbon dioxide than if the goods were made in the US.

Factories in developing nations tend to use more energy than in the West.

The researchers say emissions control measures such as the Kyoto Protocol could "export" carbon-intensive industries to the developing world....

Between the years 1997-2003, [NCAR researcher Shui Bin estimates]... the US "saved" 1,711 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions by importing goods from China rather than making them within US borders.

Technorati Tags: business, carbon trading, environment

Yet more flexible battery madness

Okay, not "madness" in the sense of "crazy," but rather in the sense of "people won't stop announcing stuff." This latest from BBC News:

Gel battery boost for radio tags

Japanese company NEC has developed a lightweight, flexible battery that is less than a millimetre thick and can be recharged in half a minute.

It is called the Organic Radical Battery (ORB) and is based on a type of plastic that exists in a gel state.

The gel allows the battery to be extremely pliant, with a thickness of 300 microns.

ORBs could eventually be embedded into devices such as smart cards, wearable computers and intelligent paper.

Currently the battery, when in card form, can be recharged with a card reader device in 30 seconds.

The absence of harmful chemicals typically used in rechargeable batteries also makes it quite environmentally friendly, according to NEC.

The ORB has huge potential when combined with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags - tiny microchips that hold unique identifier information attached to a small antenna.

Technorati Tags: batteries, epaper

Carbon sequestration and water

One of the more notable developments at the intersection of economics and environmentalism has been the growth of carbon trading markets. In the 1980s, sulfur dioxide markets helped substantially reduce acid rain in the United States, and carbon trading is seen as a useful tool against global warming-- not to mention a significant new commodities market. (Shell and BP, among others, have developed internal carbon trading markets, in part to cultivate expertise that they hope will eventually form the basis of new businesses.)

But Nature reports on a new study led by Duke University biologist Robert Jackson (who is, according to his faculty Web page, director of "Duke's Center on Global Change, the Duke University Program in Ecology, and Duke's Stable Isotope Mass Spectrometry Laboratory," as well as the "National Institute for Climate Change Research for the southeastern U.S.," as well as the author of a forthcoming children's book about the environment-- clearly a lazy guy) that examines the impact of carbon forestation programs on local water supplies.

Planting forests to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can have a range of side effects, including drying up streams and making soil saltier, according to a global study. The discovery highlights the tradeoffs involved in tree-planting projects, say researchers.

Because plants use carbon dioxide to grow, planting forests of large, fast-growing trees is one way to remove the gas from the atmosphere, thus staving off global warming. But such forests need a lot of water... The [Duke] team surveyed more than 500 places where new forests have been planted over the past half-century. In 13% of cases, streams dried up completely for at least a year. On average, plantations cut local stream flow by more than 50%.

These changes occur partly because tree-planting projects choose fast-growing species that suck up more carbon dioxide.... Often these are evergreen trees that grow all year round, meaning that they take up a lot of carbon dioxide and water.

Of course, the logical conclusion here is not (despite suggestions to the contrary) to speed deforestation, in the interests of having more water available for people. But it does highlight the existence of tradeoffs in what we've perhaps naively regarded as no-lose propositions. If deforestation is a problem, and carbon trading can create an incentive to plant more trees, how could there be a downside? Things, it turns out, are more complicated than that.

More broadly, the Duke project also calls attention to the fact that there are depths of complexity in environmental and ecological management that we're still trying to get our hands (and brains, and computer models) around. Recently I interviewed an ecologist who argued that projects like carbon trading, and more generally efforts to assign economic values to ecological processes in general, and to understand the specific economic value created by particular places, would be one of the drivers of earth and climate science in the coming decades. While there's a left-wing critique of the argument that market processes can be brought into alignment with ecological interests (Joel Kovel's recent Enemy of Nature and this 2004 essay are representative examples), this professor saw things differently.

The idea that you should put value on ecological processes, she argued, led quickly to a recognition that complexity was worth paying extra for. Put another way, rain forest provided more services than a tree farm. It would also create an incentive to look more closely at some basic biological processes. Just how much carbon does a tree absorb in year? How much water is cleaned in this watershed? How much damage to the neighboring city does this swamp prevent during the flood season? You can't make money if you don't know what value you've got; and knowing something is valuable creates additional incentives to treat it well. Being able to more comprehensively catalog these benefits, and the costs-- how much malaria does that swamp generate?-- is an essential part of that project.

Technorati Tags: business, carbon trading, environment

Lessons from Mattress Flipping

A piece on the math of mattress flipping. Of interest because it deals with home care, but also because its about 'golden' or universal rules. These can also be as simple as the establishment of standards, such as driving on one side of the road. Ways for people to do things that maximize results and minimize errors. The next best thing to Poka-Yoke principles, which aim to eliminate errors by making them impossible. An example of this is phsyically keeping you from removing the key in a car unless it is in park.  The article also brings up group theory, a rare thing in industry.

links for 2005-12-23

• Mass Media's Last Blast | MediaChannel.org
  The real story isn't so much the death of the old mass culture or the rise of a new, fragmented technoculture, but the empowerment of the American consumer — which isn't quite the same as the American citizen.
  (tags: media blogging)