IFTF's Future Now

Deconstructing turbulence

via FutureFeeder-

Richard Feynman once called turbulence the most important unsolved problem in classical physics - so it's notable that MIT researchers are making some headway in understanding its underlying structure.  They tracked the motion of minuscule particles in a turbulent fluid using lasers, high definition cameras, and software to follow the particles over small increments of time.

MIT researchers report that they have visualized for the first time a convoluted tangle underlying turbulence. This work may ultimately help engineers design better planes, cars, submarines and engines.
...
The researchers identified a complex network of two types of curves formed by two distinct groups of particles. The first type of curve, which the researchers colored red, attracts other fluid particles. At the same time, the second type, colored blue, repels other fluid particles. Both sets of curves evolve with the flow.
...
The MIT researchers call their discovery the "Lagrangian skeleton" of turbulence because their particle-based approach is motivated by the work of 19th-century mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange. "Lagrange developed mathematical tools still used today for calculating mechanical and fluid motion," said Peacock.

Web 2.0 video creator writes about empathy on the web

Michael Wesch, PhD, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, who made the popular Web 2.0 video answers some questions at Battelle's Searchblog about the motivation behind his video.  I like that he talks about the opportunity not in terms of information but in terms of visibility and the chance for empathy.  Empathy through a computer screen is pretty hard, but it's worth the effort to make the state of the world more visible online - as in Gapminder or World Mapper, or to highlight violations of peoples' human rights - as in WITNESS.

For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization....

So if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind. I’m not being overly utopian and naively saying that the Web will make this happen. In fact, if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.

Meetro's Location-Aware IM Goes Mac

Paul Bragiel, who moved his startup Meetro out here to Palo Alto about 6 months ago to pursue fame and funding, has announced the availability of a Mac version of their location-aware IM client. It's loads of fun, so please try it out. Windows too.

Is it Who You Know?

IBM Think Research site's latest featured concept is Social Network Analysis. Good overview.

... Social Network Analysis is a set of survey methods and statistics that reveals the hidden connections between people. The outcome of an SNA shows where collaboration is breaking down, where talent and expertise could be better used, where decisions are getting bogged down or where opportunities for innovation are being lost. The data give leaders the information they need to take actions: perhaps including making role and responsibility changes that would foster cross-group communications; developing methods for improving trust; using technology to reach others more effectively; or realigning reward and incentive programs ...

Also here is a draft text on Social Network Analysis. More on the topic.

Tide Coldwater Social Network Visualization

The Tide Detergent brand has introduced a new formulation: Tide Coldwater, and as part of its rollout, is working with the Alliance to Save Energy (ASE) to create the Coldwater Challenge, to decrease energy used for laundry. It’s a simple, clever use of social networking and visualization that allows to create your own personal map of influence as it evolves over time. You also get a free sample of the detergent sent to you.

Great to see a math-and-visualization based marketing idea. How many people will Coldwater Challenge engage? How effective is it in driving sales? How might you construct other, similar engagement posts?

Since its rollout earlier this week, there have been over 41,000 people who have engaged. Press item from earlier this week. From the site:

The ColdWater Challenge Map utilizes a new system that facilitates web-based sign-ups and social networking. This interactive map of the United States illustrates the diffusion of the ColdWater Challenge by tracking the spread of forwarded emails, highlighting the "six degrees of separation" between consumers who have accepted the challenge.

By recording each person that participates, and who he or she has invited or emailed, the system is able to calculate and display the actual impact of every individual. By allowing people to track their own impact on a cause, the ColdWater Challenge Map helps prove that one person can make a difference.

Inkjet in the NYT

John Markoff's latest article in the New York Times, on HP's plans for the future of inkjet, show how hard it can be to stay ahead of the future. We've been very interested in the evolution of inkjet from a printing to a manufacturing technology, and Markoff outlines some plans in this direction:

The company, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., plans to use the technology for inkjet printing to aggressively enter a range of new markets beyond printing, including television and computer displays, printed electronic circuits, automotive fuel-injection systems and even drug delivery for treatment of diseases like diabetes....

Beyond printing, Hewlett-Packard has been actively exploring the use of inkjet technology for drug sprays used to treat diseases. Using inkjet systems offers advantages in particle size and dosage control, the company argues. Although the company has made working prototypes, no products or business alliances have been announced.

Another promising area is "printing" electronic circuits. In April, the company announced that it had successfully printed a fully functional transistor, but it acknowledged that there was still significant development work yet to be done to create products.

Nanogeography

Nanovip.com, a nanotechnology business directory, has published an interesting set of charts on the geographical distribution of nanotechnology companies. Their findings are not too surprising for anyone who follows the field (nor are they significantly different from what we've talked about in our research): the U.S. leads in total number of nanotechnology companies, with certain countries in Europe and Asia coming on strong.

Building circuits with DNA

One of the interesting distinguishing characteristics of nanotechnology, and to some degree MEMS, has been its willingness to harness natural phenomena for technological purposes, and to use natural organisms as sensors or motors. The New York Times (free registration required) reports on the latest work in this vein (New Scientist also has a report):

In an advance that might provide a practical method for making molecular-size circuits, the smallest possible, scientists in Israel used strands of DNA, the computer code of life, to create tiny transistors that can literally build themselves.

"What we've done is to bring biology to self-assemble an electronic device in a test tube," said Dr. Erez Braun, a professor of physics at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, and a senior author of a paper describing the research today in the journal Science....

"In order to construct a [nanoscale] circuit," Dr. Braun said, "you need to invent ways to tell molecules where to go and how to connect to each other."

To that end, many scientists have turned to the biologically inspired notion of self-assembly, using molecules like DNA and proteins that can automatically link together in the correct configuration.

The idea of using DNA to build circuits may sound like science fiction, but a host of nanotechnology researchers are trying to figure out ways to harness natural self-assembly processes to build artificial devices. Nature already knows how to do self-assembly very well, so it makes sense to try to exploit those processes rather than come up with entirely new ones.

This is part of a much broader movement, as Technology Review noted,

[B]iomimicry has long guided research in the life sciences, its influence is now reaching surprising new industries, from... carpet factories to makers of computer chips. Entrepreneurs, product designers, and scientists are increasingly turning to nature to both improve existing products and develop entirely novel creations.

More examples at the small scale in the extended entry.

Intel and smart dust

The latest Wired Magazine has an article on Intel's investment in smart dust, focused around its "lablet" at UC Berkeley.

The article paints Intel's smart dust research as the company's route to The Next Big Thing, or The Next Big, Increasingly Tiny, Thing. There are a number of field trials of smart dust, including several that are gathering ecological or environmental data, others that integrate smart dust into devices for the elderly, and yet others that are measuring streses in buildings and bridges. Next up, the Golden Gate Bridge:

The Golden Gate Bridge... will soon play host to an experimental sensor network designed by [UC Berkeley] professor David Culler and his students. "It's hard to tell just by looking at it, but the bridge actually sways a few feet in high winds," he says. "The motes, they'll measure how far it moves to either side."

By this June, a stretch of the bridge will be lined with about 200 motes. Each will contain chips running at 8 megahertz and accelerometers designed to measure movement caused by strong gusts. Those readings will be radioed to nearby supermotes - data way stations that are 25 times more powerful than a regular mote - before being relayed to the central server. If one reading seems out of whack, it could be a sign of a structural weakness that needs addressing before the next big earthquake.

However, the article also notes that these are cool science experiments, but there's plenty to be done before smart dust is ready for prime time:

Sensors can't become the next big thing until a host of mundane technical issues are resolved: How to get the chipset radios off the crowded 900-MHz spectrum? How to program the networks to not just spew reams of information but be intelligent enough to figure out which measurements are vital and which are junk? "The challenge in tiny sensors is doing some computation at the level of the motes," says [Berkeley lablet director Joe] Hellerstein. "It's just too expensive to ship out all the data."

Then there's the power issue. Despite TinyOS's relatively scant memory requirements, the motes still burn through batteries far too quickly. And even if they didn't, there would be no room for alkaline AAs in a sensor-filled future. There's talk among researchers of using solar cells, or even MEMS devices that harvest imperceptible vibrations in the environment, but no ready solution.

The toughest challenge of all is creating motes clever enough to function without constant tending. "How do you ensure that people build motes that can be deployed by a local farmer?" asks Richard Beckwith, who heads Intel's sensor experiments in vineyard maintenance. "That's a really hard problem. I'm sure it's going to happen, but I'm not sure how."...

[Finally, today] the motes are a lot closer in size to golf balls.... [Intel's] goal is to halve the size and price of a mote every 18 months, which would have each unit about the size of a grain of rice and selling for around $5 by 2011. That would enable the company to scatter tiny self-configuring hardware as casually as corn seeds. "I want to get to where I'm cranking up huge fabs to deliver, you know, Intel Inside Band-Aids," says [CTO Patrick] Gelsinger.

RFID privacy conference

This weekend, MIT will host an RFID Privacy Workshop. There's also a blog that covers RFID related issues, and looks to me to be quite good. I hope they keep it going after the conference is over.

Foe Romeo points out some articles on RFID issues worth reading:

Rakesh Kumar's Interaction of RFID Technology and Public Policy is a clear introduction to the technology, issues and ethics - and includes The RFID Bill of Rights (by Simson Grafinkel, of the MIT Auto-ID Center):

• The right of the consumer to know what items possess RFID tags
• The right to have tags removed or deactivated upon purchase of these items
• The right of the consumer to access of the data associated with an RFID tag
• The right to access of services without mandatory use of RFID tags
• The right to know when, where and why the data in RFID tags is accessed.

RFID Privacy Using User-Controllable Uniqueness (by Sozo Inoue and Hiroto Yasuura) explores 2 methods for handing control of the IDs over to end users.

The conference has only grown more timely after the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Sunday that this spring and summer,

shelves in a Wal-Mart in Broken Arrow, Okla., were equipped with hidden electronics to track the Max Factor Lipfinity lipstick containers stacked on them. The shelves and Webcam images were viewed 750 miles away by Procter & Gamble [full disclosure: P&G is a long-time IFTF client] researchers in Cincinnati who could tell when lipsticks were removed from the shelves and could even watch consumers in action....

Experts on RFID said the four-month study in Broken Arrow, Okla., was the first of its kind in the United States. Up to now, industry leaders have denied such testing had been conducted in this country.... Researchers concealed "readers" in contact paper placed under the shelves and embedded RFID antenna chips in Lipfinity packaging.

It's becoming clearer that we need some industry-wide rules governing the use of the technology, and a public discussion of how it can and cannot be used. It's too easy for trials like these to turn into unpleasant surprises for consumers, and headaches for companies. With luck, the MIT conference will help move this forward.

[via foe romeo; thanks also to Lyn Jeffery]