IFTF's Future Now

Technology, perception and coffee

Slate as an article about experimenting with a new $11,000 coffeemaker, the Clover 1S, that is inspiring rave reviews among coffee fanatics. You can read the article in various ways-- a sign of the amazing ways Western civilization is decaying, perhaps-- but I see it as an interesting example of how new technical capabilities change the way we apportion our attention. Just as the invention of the telescope and microscope in the seventeenth century made it possible to study phenomena that had previously been unknowable, so do things like exceptionally precise coffeemakers encourage us to think about ordinary things like coffee in new ways.

[There are] six variables that contribute to the taste of brewed coffee—choice of bean, grind, "dose" of coffee, brewing time, temperature, and amount of water. The first three, for better or worse, are in the hands of the barista ("Call me when you get a better grinder!" [Clover rep David] Latourell half-teases the Grumpy staff)—but the Clover can precisely regulate the last three.

Adams spends several hours brewing cups of coffee with different temperatures and brewing times, and comes up with some very different results-- and, just as important, exactly the same results when he resets the machine to a previous setting.

I'm becoming a Clover addict, just as I feared. It's not the tasty coffee itself that's drawing me in—although that caffeine euphoria certainly colors my mood. It's the joy of tinkering, really delving into the possibilities of a coffee bean in a way I've never considered before....

The immediate consequence of the Clover and its precision isn't necessarily better coffee, but more attention to coffee. By creating this rigorous laboratorylike brewing environment, it encourages cafes to explore the nuances of different beans, where and how they're grown and dried and sorted and roasted....

Is owning a Clover worth $11,000? Not for the individual—don't be silly. But even a smattering of Clovers in the right hands promises to broaden the way we think about coffee. The very fact that an $11,000 coffee machine is receiving such excited media attention seems like a clear sign that we're headed toward a "third wave" of coffee, an age of terroir, aided by technology that can give different beans the different careful treatments they deserve.

[To the tune of 2Pac, Dr. Dre & Roger Troutman, "California Love (Remix)," from the album "All Eyez on Me".]

Technorati Tags: attention, coffee, psychology, technology

Patent for smart phone

Techdirt reports on the best patent troll case since Despair trademarked the frowny emoticon:

This past Tuesday, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent on "a mobile entertainment and communication device." Reading the patent, you realize it describes the quite common smartphone. It's a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files. The patent holding firm who has the rights to this patent wasted no time at all. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, it filed three separate lawsuits against just about everyone you can think of.

For those keeping score at home,

That's a total of 33 defendants sued just minutes after this patent issued. And what a patent it is! The '783 patent has 125 claims. The broadest claim appears directed to a cellphone with a wireless internet connection, a memory card, a microprocessor, a display panel for displaying internet data. So far, so broad. Also required are 1 of the following: voice dialing, wireless earphone, or wired earphone with microphone. OK, then also required are that the phone is capable from downloading one of the following from the internet: videos, music, or videos and music combined. The patent has a little over 4 columns in the specification, but has almost 32 columns of claims!

Technorati Tags: patents

Finally, an inexpensive solution to the Chinese Hamster Ovary cell transportation problem

Wired reports on a impressive piece of improvisational science: while waiting for their lab's equipment to arrive, UC Merced engineering professor Michelle Khine, an expert in microfluidic systems, and her research group "designed complicated patterns in Auto CAD, printed them onto Shrinky Dinks, and then heated the plastic toys in an inexpensive oven."

As the sheets became smaller, the lines of print would bulge out. Taller and more pronounced, the miniaturized pattern served as a perfect mould for forming rounded, narrow channels in PDMS -- a clear, synthetic rubber.

In addition to making some simpler devices, Khine and her team emblazoned a Christmas tree design into a piece of PDMS and showed how it can blend different types of food coloring to make a rainbow pattern. Since microfluidic devices are sometimes used for biological research, the young professor also showed that Chinese Hamster Ovary cells can flow through through the narrow channels.

An article published in the Royal College of Chemistry's journal Lab on a Chip describes the lab's

rapid and non-photolithographic approach to microfluidic pattern generation by leveraging the inherent shrinkage properties of biaxially oriented polystyrene thermoplastic sheets [those would be the Shrinky Dinks-- ed.]. This novel approach yields channels deep enough for mammalian cell assays, with demonstrated heights up to 80 µm. Moreover, we can consistently and easily achieve rounded channels, multi-height channels, and channels as thin as 65 µm in width. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of this simple microfabrication approach by fabricating a functional gradient generator. The whole process—from device design conception to working device—can be completed within minutes....

Unlike the expensive setup and laborious processing required to make the silicon wafers, this approach only requires a laser-jet printer and a toaster oven, and can be completed within minutes. Moreover, we can achieve multi-height designs within the device, which typically requires a laborious and iterative process using standard lithographic approaches.

A few weeks ago I pointed out Attila Csordás' article on DIY biology. This is another data-point suggesting that the DIY biology world isn't close-- if you're ingenious and have the toys at hand, it's here.

Technorati Tags: biology, biotech, innovation, DIY, users

DIY Biology

We do a lot of stuff here at the Institute on user-driven innovation. As one of the first nodes on the ARPANet-- the original "users are driving innovation" playground-- and a place that's followed the evolution of online collaboration pretty much since Day 1, it's been interesting to see the concept go mainstream in the last couple years. Now it's clearly spreading from IT and the Web to other areas, including biology. Attila Csordás encouraged bio-DIYers, "do not hesitate:"

[I]n the not so distant future, self-aware citizens may manage their own stem cells, grow them in the garage, and store them in the fridge. It could be a form of autonomous medical self-insurance.

Incredible as it may sound, the basics of molecular biology - what is DNA, how genetic information is coded, how it turns to RNA, which base triplets fits to which amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, that make up your body - can be learnt within 2 hours. Another intensive two weeks in an official lab with an instructor and you can work with them.

Csordás argues that if you can learn the basics of PCR and in vitro cell culture-- both of which are now relatively cheap, well-known technologies-- you can do it. Baris Karadogan (at From Istanbul to Sand Hill Road) draws out some implications:

Welcome to open source science, welcome to do it yourself biology.... With so much information on the Internet and such ready access to scientific data, what Attila wrote about could very well be commonplace in 5-10 years. This is a world where people could be "playing around" with their own biology. I see two big impacts right away.

First, tinkering is the best way to invent things, and this would really push the envelope in scientific and practical discovery. Second, if you think governments are having a hard time figuring out the laws to govern file sharing, let's see how they'll deal with "amateur genetic engineering". This will be a huge issue. Imagine people coming up with "user generated biotechnology".

Update: Attila points me to a recent interview he conducted with biotech startup founder Jim Hardy. "Make no mistake," he argues: "biotech is the next IT."

Technorati Tags: biotech, innovation, users

Kitchen Budapest

On my last day in Budapest, Anthony and I dropped in on Kitchen Budapest, a new digital art / prototyping / cool new stuff place, sponsored by Magyar Telecom.

via flickr

As I understand it, the company isn't looking to Kibu as a source of new products-- they don't have to create X number of prototype cell phones or products per quarter-- but instead as a source of inspiration, a place to see interesting things. Definitely nice work if you can get it!

The space isn't huge, but it's very pleasant, and has a nice buzz. It's on Raday utca, which is one of the hipper neighborhoods in the city-- sort of a paprika-dusted version of Williamsburg or SoMa-- and the building itself is a grand old stone pile. Inside, it's all open space and clean lines, but not antiseptic. They have a couple things that I hadn't seen before, but would like to get for the Institute, or just for my own home office. The black paneling on the columns, for example, is pressed wood with a magnetic laminate: presto, floor-to-ceiling magnetic boards. Very handy.

via flickr

We had just enough time to see some demos of things they're working on. Two of them completely blew me away. The first is a mind-mapping or relational mapping program that's written in Flash. They call it Zui, because it's also a zooming browser: you can dive into an area, see new details, go deeper on some particular detail, etc., etc. (A demo is here.)

via flickr

The Institute makes a lot of maps, and so I'm always interested to see programs like these. What impressed me about this is that it's browser-accessible, and it's also offers a way to combine abstraction or high-level organization-- the top layer of the map-- with lots of interesting detail that reveals itself only when you call for it.

So that was very neat. But what blew me away was seeing it in combination with a touch-sensitive screen they've created.

via flickr

The system consists of a glass screen with infrared sensors, backed with paper. Behind it is a projector that throws images on the screen, and a camera that watches what users are doing.

via flickr

Put all the pieces together, and you have a system that lets you project a map, then move around it by using gestures.

via flickr

They've also created a table version with a camera mounted above. What this let you do is put physical objects on top of the map-- say, a Post-it with some words, a photograph, etc.-- which the camera then records, and integrates into the map: in other words, put a physical object on the surface, and it's transformed into a digital object on the screen. Very, very cool.

Technorati Tags: art, Budapest, convergence, design, digital culture, digital-physical, Hungary, Kitchen Budapest

IFDTF: Institute for Doing the Future

David Pescovitz, Mike Love and I joined Bob Johansen at SQUID Labs today, where Bob talked about IFTF, our foresight/insight/action mantra, and his book, Get There Early. SQUID Labs is a unique breeding ground for innovation with a social bent. From their website:

At SQUID Labs we develop breakthrough technologies and find solutions to unique engineering problems. Our exceptional team has expertise in a wide range of technical fields: from chip design and electronics to robotics, materials, embedded systems and manufacturing. We have created a highly dynamic and creative work environment which helps to inspire our consulting and contract research efforts.

In the course of our work (and play) we have developed novel and diverse technologies for a wide range of applications including printed electronics, lens molding, and high performance kites. SQUID Labs is characterized by our multidisciplinary skill set and our ability to combine those diverse skills to create novel solutions.

"We're not a think tank, we're a do tank"

While we at IFTF spend most of our time thinking about the future, the guys over at SQUID Labs are doing the future. IFTF is about foresight; SQUID Labs is about action. As one of the SQUID guys said today, you might think of them as the Institute for Doing the Future.

A great example of something to come out of their work is a SQUID spinoff company, Potenco. SQUID Labs co-founder Colin Bulthaup is the company's CEO. Their product is a pull-cord generator, intended for use with the XO Laptop (One Laptop Per Child Project). Check out their website for the specs. It's a great solution to the problem of providing electricity to places that lack an energy infrastructure.

One of the most interesting things that came out of today was an understanding of how the two organizations could really work together. We would be able to provide an idea of what areas or technology or engineering will present problems or dilemmas potentially needing solutions, and the SQUID Labs team could take cues from our forecasts to start working on these solutions before the problems really become problems.

They also happen to have a very cool location, in the control tower on the Alameda Naval Air Station.

Quote of the day

"America's primary export, it appears, is trial-and-error, and the innovative knowledge attained in such a way." (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

How do you select user innovations?

Tuesday I went to a reception at the Innovation Center Denmark, an outfit on Page Mill Road that helps Danish tech companies interested in doing stuff in the States. They're a small but very interesting group, and the evening featured a talk by architect and industrial designer Frederik Andersen. Andersen cofounded a small design firm, Goodmorning Technology (what an optimistic name).

A good bit of the talk was about user reinvention, and its increasing importance in the design and innovation process. For me, the talk brought up a question: how do you figure out which user innovations are worth paying attention to? If the great virtue of user-driven innovation is that-- to borrow the language of evolutionary biology-- its a mechanism for generating a lot of mutations, what's the selection mechanism? Ultimately, of course, useful mutations will be more widely adopted than others; but most companies would like a way to detect the most promising ones before then.

Frederik's answer was that, at this stage, the selection process is still largely intuitive; which I suspect is the answer most people would give.

Pelle Braendgaard has blogged the talk more extensively.

Technorati Tags: denmark, design, innovation

Campbell's Forward Thinking Strategy Connects to Its Past Innovations

The Campbell Soup Company, one of the Institute's long-running corporate sponsors, announced today that it's looking to sell the very profitable Godiva Chocolatier division it acquired in 1974. The main reason cited for the sale - chocolate no longer fits into the company's strategic focus on simple and healthy meals. Most analysts expect that the proceeds of the sale will be used to fund several strategic directions core to the company's future vision - expansion of health-focused foods like V8 and expansion into emerging markets like Russia and China.

I've recently been working closely with Campbell's and in the process reading through Douglas Collins' fascinating history Campbell's: America's Favorite Food. Growing up in southern New Jersey, the Campbell's myth was always that the sandy soil of the Garden State had created a perfect growing environment for tasty tomatoes, and the rest was history. And that was true - for the first 30 years or so it was Joseph Campbell's knowledge of agriculture and partner Abraham Anderson's tin smithing wizardry that distinguished the company.

But things really started in the early 20th century when Campbell's began to teach American how to eat soup.

As Collins explains, soup was not a big part of the American diet before the 20th century - Americans generally ate simple preparations of the rich, bountiful agricultural products of the New World - meats, vegetables, and grains. It took the vision of Dr. John Dorrance, an MIT-trained chemist who brought back the habit of soup at mealtime from his graduate studies in Germany. After he convinced his uncle (who had taken over the company as President in 1890 after Joseph Campbell died) to hire him in 1897, Dorrance began aggressive development of condensed, canned soups - perfecting both canning techniques and soup flavor and recipes. Up until that time, poor quality control in canning was a common source of spoil and food poisoning. And the melding of New World modern convenience and Old World sophistication represented by condensed soup found a broad market in America's rapidly urbanizing population.

So, in short, what we see is two things at the roots of Campbell's history that bodes well for the future - its ability to scientifically ensure tasty, healthy, and safe food. And its ability to lift and re-package entire cultural systems around food - as it did when it brought the habit of soup at mealtime to America. While soup is a deeply embedded fulcrum of Chinese and Russian family life - if anyone is going to forge a consumer market for mass-produced soups, I think Campbell's is very equipped. Their recent ethnographic research on soup in these countries is a solid base of knowledge for strategy formulation. And today's move to spin-off Godiva and focus itself on this challenge is a stellar example of future-oriented thinking driving a company. It's the kind of thing we at the Institute for the Future love to see.

Technorati Tags: food, strategy

Campbell's Forward Thinking Strategy Connects to Its Past Innovations

The Campbell Soup Company, one of the Institute's long-running corporate sponsors, announced today that it's looking to sell the very profitable Godiva Chocolatier division it acquired in 1974. The main reason cited for the sale - chocolate no longer fits into the company's strategic focus on simple and healthy meals. Most analysts expect that the proceeds of the sale will be used to fund several strategic directions core to the company's future vision - expansion of health-focused foods like V8 and expansion into emerging markets like Russia and China.

I've recently been working closely with Campbell's and in the process reading through Douglas Collins' fascinating history Campbell's: America's Favorite Food. Growing up in southern New Jersey, the Campbell's myth was always that the sandy soil of the Garden State had created a perfect growing environment for tasty tomatoes, and the rest was history. And that was true - for the first 30 years or so it was Joseph Campbell's knowledge of agriculture and partner Abraham Anderson's tin smithing wizardry that distinguished the company.

But things really started in the early 20th century when Campbell's began to teach American how to eat soup.

As Collins explains, soup was not a big part of the American diet before the 20th century - Americans generally ate simple preparations of the rich, bountiful agricultural products of the New World - meats, vegetables, and grains. It took the vision of Dr. John Dorrance, an MIT-trained chemist who brought back the habit of soup at mealtime from his graduate studies in Germany. After he convinced his uncle (who had taken over the company as President in 1890 after Joseph Campbell died) to hire him in 1897, Dorrance began aggressive development of condensed, canned soups - perfecting both canning techniques and soup flavor and recipes. Up until that time, poor quality control in canning was a common source of spoil and food poisoning. And the melding of New World modern convenience and Old World sophistication represented by condensed soup found a broad market in America's rapidly urbanizing population.

So, in short, what we see is two things at the roots of Campbell's history that bodes well for the future - its ability to scientifically ensure tasty, healthy, and safe food. And its ability to lift and re-package entire cultural systems around food - as it did when it brought the habit of soup at mealtime to America. While soup is a deeply embedded fulcrum of Chinese and Russian family life - if anyone is going to forge a consumer market for mass-produced soups, I think Campbell's is very equipped. Their recent ethnographic research on soup in these countries is a solid base of knowledge for strategy formulation. And today's move to spin-off Godiva and focus itself on this challenge is a stellar example of future-oriented thinking driving a company. It's the kind of thing we at the Institute for the Future love to see.

Technorati Tags: food, strategy

Evolutionary algorithms, and design vs. understanding

This week's New Scientist has an article on evolutionary algorithms (sometimes also called genetic algorithms) and debates over their use. Put simply, EAs "mimic the processes of natural selection and random mutation by 'breeding,' selecting and re-breeding possible designs to produce the fittest ones." They might start with two current designs for an antenna, and generate a number of offspring that borrow characteristics from both. The offspring are tested; most fail to work and are discarded, while the survivors are matched up, and the cycle is repeated-- a few thousand times. The result is a new antenna design that is better than any of its ancestors.

Some of the biggest successes with EA (or evolutionary design, or artificial design, take your pick) have been with technologies where the scientific foundations aren't very firm, or don't work as well as you'd expect. Antenna design, for example, has had some notable successes with EA, in part because, as NASA scientist Jason Lohn notes, "Maxwell wrote down the four equations which govern all of wireless communication.... They describe the physics, but the weird thing is, you never use them. In practice, this field is so squirrely, the only way to learn is through trial and error. It's the school of hard knocks."

These methods have been around for a while, but they seem likely to become more widely accessible soon:

[Traditionally, EAs have required] ultra-fast computers, both to breed the thousands, or even billions, of generations and to simulate the results to select those offspring that are fit for re-breeding. This has limited their use to a few niche applications.

That is now changing with the availability of ever more powerful computers, the advent of distributed computing "grids", which pool the resources of thousands of PCs, and the emergence of multicore chips, which suit EAs because it's easy to divide up the tasks between cores. As a result, designs can now be evolved in days rather than months or years and EAs are going mainstream.

As one evolutionary designer recalled in 2004, "When I started doing this, I was running my simulations on a single Pentium 66 [MHz] PC.... That meant I had to be real careful with how large my problems were and how long it took things to run. Now, you can brute-force things a lot more easily."

So why if these methods work, and are becoming more accessible, why are they controversial? Here's where things get really interesting.

Proponents of EAs say they could replace traditional methods in many fields from designing exotic new types of optical fibre and USB memory sticks to more aesthetic computer-generated art. Critics argue that the technique may lead to designs that can't be properly evaluated since no human understands which trade-offs were made and therefore where failure is likely....

Essentially, some worry that these designs might perform better, but if we can't understand them, we won't know know what hidden costs or disadvantages they carry-- until it's too late. NASA scientist Lohn puts it a different way: he sees EA as forcing people into one of two schools of thought.

"One school of thought says you need a black box that does X, Y and Z. If I use evolution to get something that does X, Y and Z, I don't care what's in it as long as it works."

And the other school? "That one says, 'I need to understand what's in there,'" Lohn says. "Those are the people we can't really help, because a lot of times, we don't know what's in there."

So ultimately, the question isn't whether these designs work, but whether it's important for us to understand why they work.

Technorati Tags: design, evolution

Gregg Zachary on terrorism and innovation

Three years ago, Gregg Zachary wrote an essay arguing-- indeed, lamenting-- that the war on terror hadn't had much impact on Silicon Valley. In tomorrow's New York Times, he revisits that territory:

WHY has the pace of fundamental innovation in military technologies slowed? Why, six years after 9/11, is there no mega-research project — along the lines of the crash Manhattan Project that 62 years ago produced the first atomic bombs — to address the plausible security threats to the United States in the 21st century?

These two questions say a lot about how innovation happens today, and why concerns about national security, which once motivated civilian scientists and engineers to make crucial contributions to military technologies, may again shape innovation priorities.

The short answer to both questions is that the nation lacks a grand technological challenge that might galvanize the interests and energies of talented researchers and propel them into close cooperation with war-fighters in pursuit of innovations that will enhance national security.

The big story, he argues, is that while for much of the 20th century many key innovations-- particularly in computing, materials science, networking, chemistry, and other fields with military significance-- were funded or even driven by the government, today "the leading technologies are hatched by commercial companies pursuing lucrative and large civilian markets." Another big issue is that the Cold War presented the U.S. with a bounded set of enemies and problems, terrorism is a more heterogeneous problem: there can be no magic bullet.

Zachary concludes:

For great leaps forward in military technology, the commercial market alone provides no answers. Instead, the gulf between civilian researchers and war-fighters — a gulf decades in the making that is addressed only haphazardly today — must be bridged. And the best way to do so is for both sides to agree on a grand national security challenge.

In short, America needs a mega-project that brings together a Silicon Valley all-star team and the nation’s savviest soldiers.

But is such a mega-project possible, in an era of small, varied enemies? Is it even desirable to formulate the problem of defending against terrorism in such terms, or would it be counterproductive? The danger, it seems to me, is that a mega-project invites a mega-solution: something big, centralized, and inappropriate to the scale of the problem.

Technorati Tags: military, terrorism, Silicon Valley, business, innovation

Medical innovation: Could the U.S. slip?

The Washington Post's Amar Bakshi writes about the Artemis Medical Foundation, an about-to-open clinical research center in India. It's an interesting piece for two things. The first is its blunt critique of American medical research: Artemis founder Kushagra Katariya (formerly a professor at the U. of Miami) declares, “Opportunities to develop cutting edge [medical practices] are fast disappearing in…the United States."

He says that when it comes to developing a new, improved way to treat patients, he can do it “quicker, develop it better, and have the ingredients to really take it much further" than he could in the same amount of time in the U.S.

Here, he can combine his clinical practice with scientific research and technological development, all at a breakneck pace.

"Clinical research and translational research is down 70% in the U.S.," he tells me, laying out two primary explanations:

First, he blames “the lobbies, restrictions, confidentiality problems, insurance companies regulating what needs to be done, what can be done, what cannot be done…the usual ambulance chasing that occurs." In the U.S. there’s too much red tape.

Second, there’s an “inhibition of intellect coming together.” Because “provisions for funding are few and far between," there is a huge amount of “talent divided among 200 universities" that don't always collaborate.

This, in addition to "super-specialization," creates a "silo-mentality" between and within leading institutions. “Clinical applicators at the bedside” and the “researchers in the lab” are like “two parallel railway tracks that never meet” even though they’re working toward the same goal, improved patient care. In India, he says, ideas are fresh and different sectors are more amenable to being brought together to “beat the disease.”...

This sense that the funding, institutional, and reward structures for scientific research have become too conservative-- not in the political sense, but in the sense of being risk-averse, incrementalist, and overly fond of specialization-- is something I've heard in virtually every workshop I've done with scientists. It's a theme I especially hear with young scientists-- and it's strong enough to now serve as a disincentive for some of them to stay in academia or pure research.

(The article doesn't ask whether that speed is a consequence of patients bearing higher risks. An American-trained doctor working in India comments that while "India could be a cheaper option" for "routine medical procedures... one has to realize that ordinarily no one is held accountable if something goes wrong. So do it at your own risk.")

The second interesting thing in the article is Katariya's perspective on the global movement of talent. Because of low wages, there are still lots of Indian-trained doctors who leave for better-paying jobs in Europe, the Middle East, or North America. But

does Katariya stress keeping doctors in India? “No,” he says. “We want people to get experiences everywhere else that the world has to offer, but at the end of the day…we want to bring it back to India....because the local talent, the local ingredients exist to be able to create that stuff [new treatment methods] over here much faster than at a Hopkins, or Cleveland Clinic, or a Stanford or the big names you hear about in the U.S.”

This assumption that flattening the world of science-- to borrow from Tom Friedman-- will be good for everyone is one that I've heard, with greater or lesser undertones of anxiety, among senior scientists and policy people in Europe and the U.S.

Technorati Tags: science, India, medical tourism, brain circulation

Battle of the Biotech (Super)Clusters

Nature Biotechnology has a great article about this week's announcement of Massachusetts' new economic development initiative - the Supercluster. "From the floor of the Biotechnology Industry Organization's (BIO) annual meeting in Boston, Governor Deval Patrick and Mayor Thomas Menino announced that Massachusetts's Supercluster will be getting a $1 billion secret weapon to fight those clandestinely working to undermine the state's lead in biotech."

Fight whom? Not terrorists, but the next worst thing: the Californian Institute for Regenerative Medicine which according to Nature "threatens to suck companies, people and jobs out of
the Boston metropolis' heart and allow California to usurp the
Massachusetts area's crown as the number-one biotech cluster."


Supercluster is a $1 billion package of public money to bring together "world-class science, talent, mentors and funding, quality of life, laboratory and office space, inter- and intra-institute collaboration, established biotech firms and support services, access to patients and markets, and last but by no means least, tax incentives."

There's an awful lot at stake for Beantown. According to the Boston Globe (which has not-as-good, but free coverage of the announcement), while only 1 in 50 Americans lives in Massachusetts, fully 1 in 7 biotech jobs does.

The state does seem to have a lot of interesting ideas for investing in biotech:

• The Massachusetts
  BioManufacturing Center in Lowell, which has incubated 20 companies take research to the manufacturing stage.
• a Life Sciences Investment Fund
• A Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center that helps entrepreneus navigate the new venture capital enviroment - where investors shy away from products in early stages of development, leaving medical patents rotting on the shelves.
  

This topic is particularly heavy on my mind right now, as I am preparing to go to Barcelona in early July to give a talk on "the geography of creativity" at the annual meeting of the International Association of Science Parks.

Telepresence: it's the details?

In the first years after its founding in 1968, one of the biggest projects the Institute for the Future undertook was a study of online collaboration systems, and their impact on organizational behavior. The dream of the electronic system that's as good as a real meeting refuses to die; but unlike some futuristic technologies (I'm talking to you, personal jet pack), this one seems to be getting closer to reality, as this weekend's New York Times article on the latest high-end telepresence systems suggests.

High-end videoconferencing — the magical ability to be two places at once — has had a bumpy past, plagued by jerky gestures, out-of-sync lips and sound and cumbersome equipment. Few executives liked what they saw, including unflattering pictures of themselves, and most thought the business tool was not worth the price.

But now, thanks to new technology, videoconferencing is delivering on its promise as an alternative to traditional business travel. The high-definition TV images are sharp. Broadband fiber-optic cable has replaced tired telephone lines. And the equipment is often installed in studios that are handsome and appropriately corporate....

Two things are notable about this upsurge in telepresence.

First, the video, audio, and connections are all unquestionably getting better. But what's really interesting to me about these systems, and what makes them more successful, are the low-tech details that HP, Cisco and other companies use to fill in the gaps between video and reality.

Cisco’s virtual meeting room includes an IP (Internet Protocol) phone, three broadcast-quality cameras, three ultrasensitive mikes, three 60-inch plasma screens, a crescent-shaped table that seats six and soft back-lighting.

“The table is maple to complement faces,” said a Cisco spokeswoman, Jacqueline Pigliucci. The studios are painted in identical colors, to give the impression that the people on the screen are in the same room.

The couple people I've talked to who've used these systems say that the room design is what really makes the illusion work. Another is that the service on these high-end systems is very good: as one consultant quoted in the New York Times article says, "Walk in a Halo room, and everything is ready to run." (No one ever has to reboot a real conference room.) Of course, seamlessness comes at a cost: about $18,000 a month, to be precise.

In other words, it's not just that the technology is getting better in the conventional, specs-are-getting-more-impressive kind of way: the experience of using these systems is changing for the better because their designers are paying more attention to deployment and maintenance. Nothing breaks the illusion of seamlessness like having to reboot the computer the video conference was supposed to run on.

The second notable thing is who's really using these systems.

It might be just an artifact of a very small sample size, but the heaviest users I've heard of are groups who already have standing meetings, not people who are using these systems to substitute for first-time meetings with prospective clients. The technology isn't bringing together people who have never met before, but is strengthening an connection between colleagues. As Business Week reported earlier this year,

A typical user is private equity star Blackstone Group. Several times a week, CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman gathers senior managing partners around a polished conference table in the firm's New York headquarters on Park Avenue for a five-way video call.... Blackstone has 40 video rooms stationed around the world. One executive is so enthralled with the system that he keeps the conference connection running in his office all day long. "We're big proponents of videoconferencing because of the way it enhances the quality of meetings," says Harry D. Moseley, Blackstone's chief information officer.

Financial and consulting firms have been particularly avid purchasers. Deloitte & Touche USA is installing a dozen $250,000 video suites made by Polycom so that various business units can collaborate on outsourcing ideas or interview job candidates from India. AIC Ventures, a real estate investment company, has three video rooms: one in its home base of Austin, Tex., another in Dallas, and one in Chicago. They are used for everything from reviewing new Web page designs to celebrating the close of a big deal with a (now crystal-clear) ring of a tabletop gong.

This is a bit like the experience we've had at the Institute with Google Docs: that collaboration tool has its uses for asynchronous collaboration among geographically-dispersed authors, but the best uses come when authors are in the same room, and able to talk about the document in real time.

Despite this, at least one telepresence consulting company argues that this isn't the future: "effective inter-company business," they maintain, "will be propelling this industry forward in the coming years (remember where you heard it first!).... The future of telepresence will be about connecting with vendors, customers, and joint venture partners... to lower the shared costs of business relationships."

Technorati Tags: collaboration, displays, office, video, work

Phase Z.Ro

As I was walking down the hill from Biopolis, I saw a little development between the Ministry of Education and the subway stop: several yellow buildings that announced themselves as the Phase Z.Ro, a "technopreneur park."

via flickr

If Biopolis seemed familiar, an attempt to outdo Western scientific facilities on their own terms, Z.Ro (get it?) struck me as something potentially quite different.

For one thing, the place makes your average Silicon Valley tilt-up look like Versailles. Each three two-story building is made of prefabricated panels, making them look like cargo containers that have been painted yellow, had windows and doors punched in them, and wired with AC and Cat-6 cable.

cargo container chic, via flickr

It's easy to dismiss such a modest place, but maybe this is the social equivalent of a disruptive innovation. Maybe the real future of innovation isn't in glittering science cities like Biopolis, but in grittier places like this?

in the shadow of biopolis (that's helios in the background), via flickr

Technorati Tags: innovation, science cities, Silicon Valley, Singapore

Biopolis and the new urban science

I spent last week in Singapore, speaking at a conference on RFID in Asia, and visiting with various futures groups in the Singaporean government. But the thing I was really looking forward to doing in my free time was not shopping (though the shopping is very good), nor the food (which was excellent): rather, it was the chance to see Biopolis.

biopolis sky bridge, via flickr

Biopolis is one of the cornerstones in the Singaporean government's effort to turn the city-state into a regional (indeed, global) center for biotech research. Novartis and SKB already occupy parts of two buildings; five others are mainly occupied by labs run by A*Star; and two more are under construction. Over the long run, they want to build more local talent in the basic sciences underlying biotech, and support the development of a native biotech companies.

map of biopolis, via flickr

Not only is it architecturally very exciting-- the best contemporary Singaporean architecture is all post-Rem Koolhaus and Zaha Hadid swooping lines and glass, Biopolis also beautifully exemplifies a couple trends in the design of spaces for science that Anthony Townsend and I wrote about in the 2006 Ten Year Forecast (warning: it's a huge PDF-- 24MB).

Technorati Tags: biotech, innovation, science, science cities, Singapore

The reality of biotech

New York Times reviews Gary Pisano's new book, Science Business: The Promise, the Reality, and the Future of Biotech. The big claim of Science Business is that contrary to popular perceptions (or perceptions within the biotech world), biotech is actually

no more efficient at drug development than traditional big pharmaceutical companies. That conclusion runs contrary to popular belief that scrappy, driven biotechnology entrepreneurs can run rings around the bureaucratic drones of Big Pharma.

Biotechnology has been “one of the biggest money-losing industries in the history of mankind,” Arthur D. Levinson, chief executive of Genentech, told analysts in New York last year. He estimated that the biotech industry as a whole has lost nearly $100 billion since Genentech, the industry pioneer and one of its most successful companies, opened its doors in 1976. Only 54 of 342 publicly traded American biotech companies were profitable in 2006, according to Ernst & Young.

Most biotech enterprises face a host of daunting challenges. While they can work much more nimbly than their brethren in Big Pharma, they also lack some of the hard-won experience that large corporations bring to the drug pipeline. Moreover, biotech companies often aim at harder-to-conquer diseases and use more experimental technologies, further complicating their quests.

Technorati Tags: biotech, books, innovation, pharma

PARC and the semi-myth of missed opportunities

In an otherwise good article in the New York Times about Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and its efforts to build a new search engine around its natural language processing technologies, this irritation:

In Silicon Valley and beyond, PARC has often been called the lab of missed opportunities. It has been credited with many breakthroughs, including the graphical user interface and the Ethernet networking technology, that have revolutionized the computer industry, but that were commercialized by others.

Well, its often been called things like that, but they're not entirely true. Sure, there are some famous examples of technologies that started, or were refined, at PARC that Xerox itself didn't commercialize-- the computer mouse, the GUI-- but as Michael Hiltzik points out in his great book Dealers of Lightning, this isn't the whole story. As I wrote in my review of Dealers of Lightning:

PARC in the 1970s was an incubator of many of the technologies that now define personal computing, as well as a vision of a world in which computers would be cheap, portable, widely available, and easy to use. This seemed audacious in the days of expensive mainframes and programmer priesthoods, but has now become conventional wisdom. Dealers of Lightning chronicles those inventions and their uneven commercial development. Historians have long wondered why Xerox developed the key technologies of the modern computer age, only to let others capitalize on them.

Hiltzik points out that the company hit two commercial grand slams with laser printing, which brought in enough money to pay for PARC's more arcane research, and Ethernet, which became the de facto standard platform for networking. But faced with a global economic crisis, expiration of its basic patents in xerography and the entry of IBM and Japanese companies into its market, the company in the 1970s was too busy fighting for its survival to invest the billions necessary to develop personal computers.

Further, PARC's Computer Science Laboratory director Bob Taylor and his staff, which included such titans of computing as Alan Kay, Bob Metcalfe, and Alvy Ray Smith, weren't very interested in product development. While it didn't prevent Xerox from "fumbling the future," as the book by Robert Alexander put it, Taylor demonstrated a remarkable knack for attracting good people and encouraging high-concept research. At the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the 1960s, he had supported early work in computer graphics, networking, and the ARPANET; his group at PARC fundamentally changed the direction of computer science and personal computing. For all Taylor's flaws-- Hiltzig paints a portrait of an arrogant, paternalistic, bullying fighter who alienated some as effectively as he inspired others-- he emerges as the modern equivalent of a Medici patron, stubborn but brilliantly tasteful, and possibly the most important figure in the history of modern computing.

So the claims that PARC blew it on commercialization miss a couple important points: laser printing and Ethernet were big wins; personal computing was by no means a sure thing in the 1970, especially for a company facing huge challenges in its core business; and perhaps more important, PARC wasn't really in the commercialization business.

Technorati Tags: parc, Silicon Valley

New Urbanism and the college

The New York Times has an article about a trend among universities and colleges to invest in New Urbanism-style town development, as a way to create an environment more attractive to students, faculty, and others. Of course, large urban universities have been in the real estate development business for years (Stanford has been remarkably successful playing this market); what seems to be new is that a wider variety of institutions-- from Hendrix College in Arkansas, to Furman Univeristy in South Carolina, to Hampshire College in Massachusetts-- are getting into the game, and they're doing so mainly to make themselves more attractive to students, faculty, and others who want urban cultural amenities.

Nearly all of these developments are being built by institutions with vast tracts of unused land; officials hope to take advantage of that asset to help build endowments. Generally, these are also institutions that are not looking to expand significantly the size of their student bodies....

[O]fficials have realized that a more urbanized version of the ideal campus could attract a population well past its college years — working people and retiring baby boomers — if there is housing to suit them. And so a new concept of the college campus is taking root: a small city in the country that is not reserved for only the young.

In effect, this is a collegiate version of what Anthony Townsend and I have been studying: attempts by partnerships of universities, real estate developers, and local governments to create innovation zones that will attract world-class scientists, entrepreneurs, corporations, and start-ups.

This is a similar phenomenon, but at a different financial scale, and with a different audience in mind: not the VC-funded biotech hotshot willing to locate her company in any of half a dozen countries, but professionals, retirees, and working-class people looking to strike a balance between small-town affordability and intimacy, and academic/urban engagement.

Indeed, it sounds less like these developments don't aim to be interesting small towns, on the model of Williamstown or Amherst; they want to be urban neighborhoods, without the big city.

Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., which has created several programs to revive adjacent neighborhoods and to encourage faculty to live nearby, is building an apartment complex for undergraduates across from the main entrance to campus. There will be retail stores on the first floor.

“I think liberal arts colleges and universities are all about the serendipitous moments,” said John Fry, president of Franklin & Marshall. “You’re in the coffee shop on a Saturday morning sipping a cup of coffee and you run into a professor, and two hours later you’ve had one of those transformative moments.”

With some modification, this quote, and the idea of constructing an urban space that encourages serendipity and casual transformation that it expresses, could appear in a conversation about Bio-X, the Stata Center, the new IT-media region in Copenhagen, or any number of other new R&D spaces. In this case, the "transformative moment" probably leads to a deeper appreciation of the mind-body problem or the influence of Kurosawa on contemporary cinema, not a patent for a new kind of drug delivery system; but the underlying logic is the same.

Technorati Tags: cities, community, innovation, university

Silicon Valley's Economic Engine Spins Up for the n-th Time

When I moved out to Palo Alto in June 2005, I lived in an area of Palo Alto near Stanford University, just on the edge of what was once better known as the Stanford Industrial Park. Now its just a collection of non-descript suburban office buildings. But what was more remarkable to me was that there was a nary an I.T. startup in sight. Instead, it was like Cancer Therapy Alley... it was like a glimpse into the next big boom, based on stem cell biology. The ability of Silicon Valley to leverage its last boom into its next one - that was the big lesson for me. Stanford, and the V.C. venture community, fat on the Internet cow, had the tools and the backing to forge a new decade's worth of innovation.

It's fitting, then, that the most recent Silicon Valley Index is a story of vitality across the board - and the stem-cell boom hasn't even begun... though will Bush sidelined and the Evangelicals retreating on global warming, it's only a matter of time before the legal haze clears and we get down to some serious innovation in that department.

Some quick highlights from the Index:

• Between 2Q2005 and 2Q2006 the Valley created 33,000 new jobs - a 2.9% expansion of employment (that's coming on the heels of some 220,000 jobs lost from 2000 to 2005)
• More than half of the scientists and engineers in the Valley are now foreign-born (vs 20 percent average nationwide)
• Six of the top ten cities nationwide for patent requests were in the Valley, and 11% of all patents issued in the U.S. in 2005 went to Valley-ased companies

Go read this!

Simon Jenkins' Guardian Unlimited essay, "The age of technological revolution is 100 years dead:"

I rise each morning, shave with soap and razor, don clothes of cotton and wool, read a paper, drink a coffee heated by gas or electricity and go to work with the aid of petrol and an internal combustion engine. At a centrally heated office I type on a Qwerty keyboard; I might later visit a pub or theatre. Most people I know do likewise.

Not one of these activities has altered qualitatively over the past century, while in the previous hundred years they altered beyond recognition. We do not live in the age of technological revolution. We live in the age of technological stasis, but do not realise it. We watch the future and have stopped watching the present.

Two methods of visualizing reactions to the Presidential address

Slate/HCD Research and Institute for the Future of the Book are both exploring new methods for presenting reactions to the President's Wednesday night speech.

Slate partnered with HCD Research to survey Republicans, Democrats and Independents on the Internet for their evaluation of Bush's believability throughout his speech.  The graph is then matched to selected video clips and played back in real time.

The Institute for the Future of the Book posted the speech transcript using software they've developed that allows people to attach comments to specific paragraphs.  The commenting group is seeded with writers from Lapham’s Quarterly and visitors can join the conversation by submitting a short application.

The link between innovation and manufacturing

An article in today's New York Times reports on arguments about the link between innovation and manufacturing:

Import penetration, as it is called, worried economists and policymakers when it first became noticeable 20 years ago. Many considered factory production a crucial component of the nation’s wealth and power. As imports gained ground, however, that view changed; the experts shifted the emphasis from production to design and innovation. Let others produce what Americans think up.

Or as Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, put it: “We want people who can design iPods, not make them.” ...

But over the long run, can invention and design be separated from production? That question is rarely asked today. The debate instead centers on the loss of well-paying factory jobs and on the swelling trade deficit in manufactured goods. When the linkage does come up, the answer is surprisingly affirmative: Yes, invention and production are intertwined.

“Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory,” said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. “In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it — and we are losing that ability.”...

Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the United States Business and Industry Council, argues that in this country, import penetration is rising faster in core industries like machine-tool building than it is in other countries. And these are the industries that are, or should be, centers of innovation and invention.

As I've argued before, Silicon Valley's greatness is based on a wellspring of manufacturing genius: Christophe Lecuyer contends in his book Making Silicon Valley that growing a native base of manufacturing intelligence was important to the Valley's rise than having lots of Ph.D.s.

Technorati Tags: business, globalization, innovation, manufacturing

The death and rebirth of the manufacturing sector in Silicon Valley

Earlier this year, search engine giant Google paid over $1.6 billion to acquire the video sharing service YouTube. The 18 month-old startup had just over sixty employees, and made nothing of its own, other than a little software code; the value of the company rested in the vast audience that uploaded and shared videos. For many, the sale seemed to mark the return of the dot-com boom days, and the coming of age of "Web 2.0."

Once upon a time, though, Silicon Valley was famous because it made things. In fact, one of the best recent books about the Valley, Christophe Lecuyer's Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970, argues that the unique challenges of making electronics drove the creation of the Valley's distinct culture. The book starts with one vast insight about the nature of technology. This is it: manufacturing isn't boring. Figuring out how to produce thousands or millions of units of complicated, high-performance components requires as much ingenuity and creativity as inventing a new device in the first place, and sometimes even generates new innovations. In fact, Jean Hoerni invented the planar process for manufacturing semiconductors-- a process that is the Valley's equivalent of mass production, interchangeable parts, and sliced bread, all in one-- in response to military demands for ultra-high performance components. No military demands, no planar process, no Silicon Valley.

This attention to the factory floor leads Lecuyer to another discovery. Long before the place was famous for attracting engineers from around the Pacific, it was drawing strength and creating world-class technical skill by remixing technical and national cultures. In the 1920s, the radio scene was a mashup of professional radio engineers, amateur radio enthusiasts, and naval intelligence officers; this is one reason San Francisco-- far from either the procurement wizards in the Naval Shipyard in Washington, or the East Coast electronics factories-- had a world-class radio tube industry in the 1930s.

This is a timely book, because manufacturing isn't completely gone from Silicon Valley; in fact, it might be coming back. Nanosolar, one of a slew of new Silicon Valley companies that works on alternative energy, just announced plans to build its new factory not in China or India, but in San Jose. As one venture capitalist put it, the photovoltaic solar cell company is "trying to move the photovoltaics industry from the economics of the semiconductor business to the economics of the printing business"-- precisely the kind of move that requires manufacturing genius of the sort Lecuyer describes. Who was one of Nanosolar's early investors? Google.

Technorati Tags: books, design, innovation, manufacturing, Silicon Valley

Another "amateur expert community improved by the Internet" story

Actually given its brevity, less a story than an anecdote from the Times Online:

After a lifetime of rowing in club boats, I recently started building my own. Before the internet, it was difficult to get information or plans for amateur construction. There was a show for small wooden boats in London and some further education colleges did courses, but most boatbuilders were on their own, learning from books and bitter experience.

The web has brought about a global amateur boat- building community. We have forums and newsgroups to discuss designs and construction methods online and to keep inspiration going by swapping stories of voyages.

Members log on from around the world, although the hobby seems to be concentrated mainly in the English-speaking countries and, for some unknown reason, Poland.

It is not just contact either. The web has revolutionised the supply of materials for boatbuilding. It is now possible to download plans and order materials electronically, instead of having to motor for miles to various chandleries. This year, for the first time, a meeting was held for amateurs to bring their boats, sail each other’s creations and exchange notes.

Technorati Tags: amateur, pro-am, Web 2.0

R&D Investment Drives Economic Growth

Um... duh.

An interesting new report from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis provides an extremely detailed look at the impact of R&D investment on the growth of the US economy over the last 50 years. I never realized that economists measured R&D as an expense, rather than an investment, which is ironic because as the report argues, R&D spending is twice as important a driver of growth that the money that's put into fixed capital like buildings.

Full study

Stewart Brand on squatter innovation

Stewart Brand (the subject of a great new book by Fred Turner, by the way) is interviewed in Business Week about "Learning from Informal Urban Economies."

What's interesting is that nations have figured out that squatters simply aren't going away. They're realizing they have to be finessed rather than crushed. An interesting parallel is open-source culture. In the high-tech world, the street finds uses for things.... Squatters operate in the same way. Just getting by takes a lot of creativity. And now nations and businesses are seeing, perhaps thanks to the open-source movement, that everything that isn't a crime has an application....

Sometimes, when money isn't the most important thing and wowing peers is the main event, innovation occurs.

The short slide show is also worth a look.

Doubtless Brand (echoing Prahalad, Clay Christensen, Muhammad Yunus, and others) is right that much can be learned from squatter cities, favels, etc.. The concept of the "base of the pyramid" is already well-established; still, as always, Brand's take on the idea is interesting, even vivid.

One thing about the piece, though, that struck a discordant note: its take is a bit "We [in the Bay Area] Are the World." It describes Sausalito as a squatter community-turned-gentrified San Francisco suburb. Favelas are like Burning Man, the struggle to get electricity is like coding Linux, people hauling water to their homes is entrepreneurship.

[T]he street finds uses for things. The Internet is rife with things people are doing for free.

And then someone figures out how to make it commercial. Linux applications are a great example. There's so much innovation and creativity in free domain. And large numbers count. Events such as Burning Man produce a lot of creative things. Sometimes, when money isn't the most important thing and wowing peers is the main event, innovation occurs.

Squatters operate in the same way.

Metaphors are inescapable, but trying to understand the world on its own terms is a worthy ideal. However, I suspect that this kind of approach is inevitable when writing about Brand: the article describes the WELL as "an online community that's a predecessor of MySpace."

Technorati Tags: business, city, innovation

Manufacturing and the end of cyberspace

I have an essay on rapid prototyping, personal fabrication, and the future of manufacturing in the latest issue of Samsung DigitAll Magazine. Here's the opening:

The transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a creative, knowledge-intensive space is a development few could have seen. Are you ready for the next industrial revolution?

For many people, the word “factory” conjures up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. They imagine landscapes of machinery, consuming men and raw materials, blackening skies and destroying lives. Whatever they produce, factories are inhuman and unnatural. Certainly such factories still exist; but companies that aren’t trying to win the race to the bottom are taking different paths. The outsourcing movement, and more recent attention to product design, have eclipsed a quiet transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a more knowledge-intensive, even creative, space. In surprising ways, the factory is now following a path blazed by the design studio and modern office: it’s becoming more knowledge-intensive and flexible, even as it grows more tightly connected to markets and suppliers.

Technorati Tags: design, manufacturing, pervasive computing, ubicomp, Web 2.0

Mersenne Prime 43

The phrase "Mersenne prime" might bring back faint memories of high school or college math classes for many readers. Briefly, French mathematician Marin Mersenne identified a class of prime numbers that could be calculated with the simple formula

M = 2ⁿ - 1

where n is also a prime number. Ever since, a few mathematicians have searched for ever-larger primes. In the last few years, thanks to techniques that allow both the total number of known primes and the size of those primes has grown rapidly; recently, the 43rd Mersenne prime was discovered.

As the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project Web site explains, "[O]n December 15, 2005 at 8:46:48 CST on the Communications Lab computer no. 7" at Central Missouri State University, "the 43rd Mersenne prime and largest known prime number at the time, 2^30402457-1 with its 9,152,052 decimal digits, was discovered."

The Communications Lab? What's going on?

GIMPS is an example of a voluntary, distributed research system that borrows processor cycles to analyze scientific data-- in this case, testing whether a large number could be a prime. (Don't ask me for details about how those tests work; I frankly don't understand them.) The granddaddy of these systems is SETI@Home, which today runs on millions of computers. GIMPS is somewhat more specialized in its interests, but the fact that anyone would donate computer time to looking for something as obscure as Mersenne Primes suggests a phenomenon worth studying.

Projects like this are part of a growing ecology of systems that make it possible for amateur scientists and mathematicians to contribute to pure research. In the case of GIMPS, they donate a resource. (Indeed, in 1998 the 37th Mersenne Prime (2^3021377-1) was discovered by a 19 year-old college student.) In other projects, they donate observations: Cybertracker, a system developed to let African trackers record their observations of animal movements, is now used by amateur naturalists in a number of countries, including the United States. In some cases, they even share bodies of data. Farmers' records have been used to track the changes in the length of growing seasons in northern Europe (in northern latitudes, they're a month longer than they were a few decades ago). In October, for example, the UK's Nautical Almanac organized mass sightings of the crescent moon:

Dates on the lunar calendar are worked out using previous sightings of the moon's phases, but variations in visibility and the fact that the moon appears differently in the sky depending on where the observer is based means that dates are often uncertain.

Tonight, scientists say people in Britain should be able to get their first sight of the new crescent moon, which will appear on the horizon to the west just after sunset.

"We want people to look for the new crescent and then put the details of their location, the time and what they saw onto our website. We'll then use the data to calculate a more accurate lunar calendar," said Katherine Hohenkerk at the HM Nautical Almanac Office.

Incredibly, while astronomers have been observing the phases of the moon for thousands of years, there's still room for improvement.

GIMPS also suggests a way for lesser-known institutions to play a bigger role in scientific research. The GIMPS project is headquartered at Central Missouri State, and about 700 computers on-campus are running its software; another hundred are in faculty offices or homes. Central Missouri is not exactly a powerhouse in the world of pure mathematics, but this the Xth Mersenne Prime that's been discovered through GIMPS.

You can imagine how this might play out in a future with cheap sensors and even-cheaper computation.

Technorati Tags: am, science

Inching closer to hydrogen as an energy source

As many of you know, one the great challenges to creating a "hydrogen economy"-- or less grandly, any energy infrastructure that uses hydrogen as a main power source-- is that on Earth, hydrogen is ubiquitous, but never alone: it's always attached to some other jealous element. So getting the cost of the electrolysis process down is a significant thing.

Technology Review reports that GE researchers have prototyped an inexpensive electrolyzer "that they believe could lead to a commercial machine able to produce hydrogen via electrolysis for about $3 per kilogram -- a quantity roughly comparable to a gallon of gasoline -- down from today's $8 per kilogram. That could make it economically practical for future fuel-cell vehicles that run on hydrogen."

Electrolyzers are fairly simple technologies: water is mixed with potassium hydroxide electrolyte and made to flow past a stack of electrodes. Electricity causes the water molecules to split into hydrogen and oxygen gases, which bubble out of the solution. The chemistry makes a good high-school science experiment -- but commercial-scale quantities of hydrogen are extracted far more cheaply from natural gas.

The core problem in improving electrolyzers for hydrogen manufacture is not how to improve the fundamental conversion efficiency, says Richard Bourgeois, an electrolysis project leader at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY. "You can only make it so much more efficient; there isn't a lot you can do. So we've attacked the capital costs," he says.

Rather than building an electrolyzer from "metal plates bolted together manually, with gaskets between them," Bourgeois' team built one made from "a GE plastic called Noryl that is extremely resistant to the highly alkaline potassium hydroxide." Not only are the materials cheaper, but the plastic makes the whole device easier to manufacture, which further drives down the cost.

GE's new electrolyzer could be ready for production in a few years. "You can talk about transitioning to a hydrogen economy, but really these things don't move unless the economics are there," Bourgeois says. "This takes enough capital cost out of the whole electrolyzer system, so when you buy this and amortize it over so many years, you compete with gasoline."

This is the kind of innovation that's easy to overlook: driving down manufacturing costs isn't very sexy, compared to inventing new stuff. But in order to move a technology out of the early adopter market and into the mainstream, such innovations are essential. The computer mouse isn't on every desktop because of the work of Douglas Engelbart and his SRI research lab in the 1960s, nor because of Xerox PARC's work in the 1970s; their mice were pretty expensive and failure-prone. Rather, it was a group of engineers at a design startup in Palo Alto, Hovey-Kelley Design, that redesigned the mouse into something that could be manufactured cheaply and survive the rigors of office and home life.

Arguably this work wasn't as stunning as Engelbart's group's work-- it was a lot of little improvements-- but the work of making technologies that can survive in the market requires a kind of genius different from what you need in the lab. Too often, that genius is either overshadowed or devalued. It shouldn't be.

Technorati Tags: energy, innovation, manufacturing, prototyping

On the Ineffectiveness of Group Brainstorming

A link passed to me by a colleague to a very interesting article on the ineffectiveness of group brainstorming. I received my training about brainstorming in about day 5 of my employment,  and always wondered about how really valuable it was. I have seen sessions where the results were driven inappropriately by management. Like focus groups its value depends very much upon who the facilitator is, and the aims of the people you participate with:

" ... So you need some fresh, innovative ideas. What do you do? Get a group of your best thinkers together to bounce ideas of each other…? No, wrong answer. Time and again research has shown that people think of more new ideas on their own than they do in a group. The false belief that people are more creative in groups has been dubbed by psychologists the ‘illusion of group of productivity” ... Bernard Nijstad and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam argue it’s because when we’re in a group, other people are talking, the pressure isn’t always on us and so we’re less aware of all the times that we fail to think of a new idea. By contrast, when we’re working alone and we can’t think of anything, there’s no avoiding the fact that we’re failing...."