Using your hands

Gregg Zachary in last week's New York Times wrote a terrific little piece on "a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering: a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands." I talk about it at some length on my End of Cyberspace blog.

Energy grid limitation on the growth of alternative energy

The New York Times recently had an article on how the U.S. electric grid is turning out to hinder the development of wind power:

When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.

That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.

The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.

Read more >

Open Bioscience: Where Will the Distributed Scientists Go to Work?

IFTF researcher David Pescovitz shared an article from Nature News today that covers the proliferation of crowdsourced biodata sharing. Recent months have seen a flurry of launches of open, loosely structured repositories of complex biochemical pathways like WikiPathways, Protein Data Bank Wiki and WikiGene.

Innovation in Africa: "Inside Nairobi, the Next Palo Alto?"

Interesting article describing the innovation capacity of Africa. Mobile devices may be the vehicle by which the African continent can flex it's innovation muscle. More than home electronics/computers/cars, mobile devices are in the hands of many people in the African continent and they are teaching the Western world how to innovate with these devices.

Article from NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/business/worldbusiness/20ping.html?ex=...

Chinese universities now top the NSF list of institutions sending students to American graduate schools

For decades, American graduate schools have attracted students from all over the world. Over time, of course, the origins of international graduate students has shifted. For years, the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates has been following where Ph.D. recipients received their undergraduate degrees, and each year it publishes a list showing what universities and colleges graduate the largest number of students going on to get Ph.D.s in the U.S.

The latest survey shows that in 2006, two Chinese universities contributed more Ph.D. students to American graduate programs. This is notable because until now, American universities have dominated (but not monopolized) the top five slots.

Seeing the future in stock photoraphy

An article in today's Slate looks at how stock photography houses commission photographers to shoot scenes that advertisers are going to want in the future. Essentially, "suppliers of the world's commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future."

Getty gave me lists of the most popular search terms on their database for 2006, 2007, and the first half of 2008. Only three entries showed up in the top 10 on all three lists: business, people, and woman. (Woman climbed from eighth to fifth to first, which Waggoner attributes to the increasing global presence of women in the workplace and thus the increasing global demand for photos and video depicting women in the workplace.)

Other terms fade in and out. Soccer makes a single top-10 appearance in 2006—a World Cup year. (Getty will refresh its soccer content as the 2010 World Cup approaches in the expectation that soccer will be ascendant.) In a development that may be of no surprise to you, Christmas has been showing up earlier and earlier. "It hit the top 10 in June last year," says Waggoner. "We usually don't plan for it until August."...

Beyond the numbers, sometimes the composition of images can tell a story. "We saw a big shift after 9/11," says Waggoner. "Family entered the top 10 in search keywords and in revenue-generating subject matter for us, but there was also a change in how families were shown. Whereas before it had generally been everybody in a row, now a child was often moved to the foreground of the photo with the parents' attention focused on him. And there was a lot more black and white being used, suggesting a sense of nostalgia." In the last couple of years, the trend has shifted back toward photos of lone people looking into the camera. Waggoner surmises that this is "testimonial" imagery, playing on the appeal of real people as authentic-seeming message-bearers.

One can't make too much of this-- stock photography is as subject to the whims of fashion as any field-- but as an indicator of popular mood, it's interesting.

New report on the U.S. innovation system

The Institute does quite a bit of work these days on the future of innovation and innovation systems. So I was interested to see a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Forum (ITIF) on the U.S. innovation system. (It also caught my eye because long ago I took a sociology of work class with one of the report's authors.) From the press release:

Cease-and-desist letter sent to California-based personalized genetics startups

California likes to think of itself as a high-tech friendly place, and generally it is. However, Alexis Madrigal reports that the state government has decided to go after personal genetics companies:

Last Monday, the state's laboratory field services group issued 13 cease-and-desist letters to genetic testing companies. Wired.com obtained a copy of the letters (pdf.) from two recipients. And the tough talk in a recent teleconference among regulatory officials confirms the seriousness of the department's intent.

"We [are] no longer tolerating direct-to-consumer genetic testing in California," Karen Nickles, Chief of Laboratory Field Services at the health department, told members of the Clinical Laboratories Advisory Committee on June 13.

Targeted companies include personal genomics startups 23andMe and Navigenics. These services are seen as the leading edge of a new type of health care in which consumers can use their genetic profile to tailor their medical and lifestyle choices. The established medical community, however, is wary of the technology arguing that the medical utility of some tests is unproven. Doctors also complain that direct-to-consumer services bypass them as the gatekeepers and analysts of medical information, which they worry could confuse consumers, not to mention cost them a billing event.

The health department's actions are a direct challenge to the viability of the infant DNA-testing industry, for which physician involvement is shaping up to be a major battleground. As far back as a September 2006 meeting, health department officials were voicing concerns over "nutrigenetic tests that analyze a limited number of genes to give personalized nutritional and lifestyle recommendations."

(via Virginia Postrel's Dynamist Blog)

Pentagon moving into social science

The New York Times reports on a new Pentagon program to make more systematic use of social scientists.

Eager to embrace eggheads and ideas, the Pentagon has started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scientists and direct the nation’s brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has compared the initiative — named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors) — to the government’s effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.

Although the Pentagon regularly finances science and engineering research, systematic support for the social sciences and humanities has been rare. Minerva is the first systematic effort in this area since the Vietnam War, said Thomas G. Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning, whose office will be overseeing the project.

But if the uncustomary push to engage the nation’s evolutionary psychologists, demographers, sociologists, historians and anthropologists in security research — as well as the prospect of new financial support in lean times — has generated excitement among some scholars, it has also aroused opposition from others, who worry that the Defense Department and the academy are getting too cozy.

$50 million will be routed through the National Science Foundation, in an effort to make the program feel more familiar-- to reduce anxiety among researchers about working with the military, and increase the scholarly rigor.

iPhone and citizen science

Alexis Madrigal throws a link to the X2 Project in his post on the addition of GPS in the iPhone:

With Steve Jobs' announcement that the iPhone 3G will have geolocation built-in, plenty of people are excited about finding good restaurants near them or worried about the privacy implications....

Read more >

"Walking" in Second Life

A Japanese team of researchers, led by Keio University biosciences and informatics professor Junichi Ushiba, has created a system that allows a paralyzed man to "walk" in Second Life.
Wired reports,

Researchers at Japan's Keio University have created an experimental headset designed to monitor brain waves that allowed a man who had been paralyzed for more than 30 years to control a Second Life avatar using only his thoughts.

Read more >

Lightweight R&D Infrastructure

Interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, and his company called Intellectual Ventures http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell/?cu.... First, having just spent a few days working with Nathan, I found the following description of him hilarious:

Yet more praise

William Gunn at Synthesis describes X2 as "surprisingly interesting and engaging:"

When I read about it, it sounded interesting, but coming from futurists, I rather expected it to be all style and no substance. I was pleasantly surprised to find a substantial amount of interesting content on the site.

High praise!

Science Cheerleader and citizen scientists

I'm interviewed on Darlene Cavalier's Science Cheerleader blog.

One of the dangers of doing history of science or science studies (both of which I studied when I was in grad school, and taught before becoming a futurist) is that you end up spending time talking to your subjects. Generally, when you're an anthropologist, the people you write about don't closely read what you write about them: monographs on highland tribal manhood rituals or the semiotics of grain exchanges are hard to get through, even if you practice those things. Scientists, on the other hand, are perfectly capable of tracking down your work, and in my experience aren't shy about telling you what they think is wrong with your work.

X2 in Europe

One of the Institute for the Future's most powerful research tools is the expert workshop-- events in which a cross-section of experts spend a day brainstorming, creating maps of the future, and developing scenarios that look in depth at possible futures and our responses to them. The Institute has been organizing workshops for years, and has built up a tremendous store of both practical and tacit knowledge around them; and in addition to their being useful research tools, they're a great excuse to spend time with very interesting people.

The X2 project has been organizing workshops in Asia this spring-- I was just in Malaysia and Singapore, and we're going to Korea, China, India, and other places later this year. Now we're setting our sights on Europe.