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1 hour ago
Exponential Innovations Everywhere
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Joost Bonsen's Opinions on How Money, Ideas, and Talent can
Enable Health, Wealth, and Happyness for Each plus Achieve Liberty, Prosperity, and Vitality for All and Ultimately Help Us Spread Beyond Our Cradle Planet Earth
"The project aims at transforming the Syrian Economy into an Innovation Economy by building a series of innovation centers in Syria’s major cities. Each of these centers will be highly specific to its environment by capitalizing on existing industries and human capital. These centers will effectively contribute to modernizing the country while educating a future generation of critical thinkers and innovative entrepreneurs who can make a difference in their local cultures."This is most excellent and both a very compelling idea for Syria and for our Planet. We urgently need to Innovate Earth!
"History has already progressed through an agriculturalIt will be great to see Zack again, especially since we're launching the third year of our MIT Neurotechnology Ventures class this Fall 2009!revolution, an industrial revolution, and an information revolution. The Neuro Revolution foretells a fast approaching fourth epoch, one that will radically transform how we all work, live and play. Neurotechnology -- brain imaging and other new tools for both understanding and influencing our brains -- is accelerating the pace of change almost everywhere, from financial markets to law enforcement to politics to advertising and marketing, artistic expression, warfare, and even religious belief."
"Moore's Law is one [...] There must be others. [...] But we've learned to look for them. Searching, we can see similar laws peeking out now. These "laws" are reflexes of the technium that kick in regardless of the social climate. They too will spawn progress, and inspire new powers and new desires as they unroll in ordered sequence. Perhaps these self-governing dynamics will appear in genetics, or in pharmaceuticals, or in cognition. Once a dynamic like Moore's Law is launched and made visible, the fuels of finance, competition, and markets will push the law to its limits and keep it riding along that curve until it has consumed its physical potential."Just a sampling of three compelling exponentials, these drawn from Kurzweil and Christensen respectively...
"While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors. The researchers -- leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California -- generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon."While the worrisome end of the spectrum certainly appeals to the neo-luddites and fearmongers, I prefer to emphasize the positives: savvy machines will be that much more capable of serving us and helping us prosper, stay healthy, and live vibrant, vital lives.
"Long before banks, ATMs and check-cashing services, there were pawn shops. Pawning was the leading form of consumer credit in the United States until the 1950s, and pawn shops are still helping everyday people make ends meet."Turns out I've been interested in Pawn for years now, so I'm real pleased to see this show. Pawn Stars is both instructive -- because the basic economics of the business are spelled out by the protagonists in their interaction with clients -- and hilarious -- because these real-life family businessmen and the folks bringing in stuff to pawn are an authentic bunch of characters! Check out Episode One on iTunes.
"...a general method of classifying how technologically advanced a civilization is. [...] The scale has three designated categories called Type I, II and III. These are based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal, and the degree of space colonization. In general terms, a Type I civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet [~1016 Watts], Type II of its solar system [~1026 Watts], and Type III of its galaxy [~1036 Watts]."Thinking recently about Giant Leaps helping us get well Beyond Our Cradle has got me thinking how fast we might advance from today's guestimated Type 0.72 towards Type I...
"We’ve basically gone from a car-oriented city to a human-oriented city," said Lee In-keun, Seoul’s assistant mayor for infrastructure, who has been invited to places as distant as Los Angeles to describe the project to other urban planners. Some 90,000 pedestrians visit the stream banks on an average day. What is more, a new analysis by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that replacing a highway in Seoul with a walkable greenway caused nearby homes to sell at a premium after years of going for bargain prices by comparison with outlying properties. Efforts to recover urban waterways are nonetheless fraught with challenges, like convincing local business owners wedded to existing streetscapes that economic benefits can come from a green makeover. Yet today the visitors to the Cheonggyecheon’s banks include merchants from some of the thousands of nearby shops who were among the project’s biggest opponents early on."I'm especially interested in both these cases of re-discovery and renewal as well as examples where foresightful people did it right in the first place. San Antonio's River Walk, for instance, is a beautiful example where instead of channeling and covering, they created an urban greenway -- by design -- back in the 1930s...
"...the downside of modern industry is that the typical task is most efficiently undertaken by clustering many firms together in the same place. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem in that no firm wants to be the first to produce in a new location. African governments can help to counter this coordination problem by promoting export zones at ports, ensuring that infrastructure and the regulatory environment is supportive."And by Richard Liang of the CDC...
"...members of the African diaspora are returning home because they see prospects that they cannot find in the us and europe. This "reverse" brain-drain can have a positive impact, particularly in countries like Ghana where recent oil and gas finds are big news and offer good prospects. They have seen the huge potential of their homeland and are doing something about it."And by Cartridge & De Cleene from Yara...
"...the work we are doing to create an agriculture growth corridor along the existing Beira infrastructure and trading corridor in Mozambique illustrates a new way forward. Initiated in partnership with the government of Mozambique, and organisations including the Norwegian Government, AGRA, World Bank, African Development Bank and InfraCo, the concept provides an example of how to tackle constraints, such as low yields, limited access to finance and poor quality infrastructure, through a holistic and co-ordinated approach. Crucially, the initiative is underpinned by an innovative financing structure, which combines commercial and concessional sources of finance. [...] Although the Beira Agricultural Growth Corridor offers a replicable model, we need a step change in the way stakeholders collaborate to achieve real and transformative scale, and the appropriate mechanisms and frameworks to deliver this, particularly as it relates to small holder farmers. This includes, for example, a greater willingness to share the risks associated with early stage investment in agricultural innovation, especially as it takes time and patience for new approaches to bear fruit. We also require more creative and flexible ways to leverage sources of finance to support and fast track promising new business models. The Africa Enterprise Challenge fund is a good example of what can be achieved."Very interesting.
"...we need to work together to identify and support the up-and-coming new Cheetah cohort of honest, hard-working Africans [named] in honor of Ghanaian economist George Ayittey's distinction between the older generation of Hippo rulers dependent on aid and the younger Cheetah generation of fast-moving entrepreneurs."First time I'd heard of that picturesque distinction, but that's because I hadn't paid enough attention to TED talks, specifically this essential and vigorous one by Ayittey himself...
"...hands-on work to develop real solutions to developing-world problems -- in an extremely limited amount of time. Lots of action, not so much talk."Check out the summit blog and the overall IDDS website for more info! If you're able to swing by Kumasi this coming week, Tuesday, 14th July there is a talk open to the public by Paul Polak, Founder of International Development Enterprises and Author of Out of Poverty.
"In the new study, scientists tracked 76 adult rhesus monkeys from the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center starting in 1989. Half the animals were fed a typical diet of lab chow, and the rest got a version with a higher concentration of vitamins and minerals to make up for the 30% reduction in chow quantity. Over the course of the study, the monkeys that ate the regular diet were three times more likely to die of an age-related disease than their counterparts on caloric restriction. Fourteen deaths in the control group were attributable to age-related diseases, compared with five such deaths among the animals that ate 30% fewer calories, according to the study. The rates of cardiovascular disease and pre-cancerous cell growths were twice as high in the control group compared with the reduced-calorie group. The researchers also noted that although five of the control monkeys became diabetic and 11 were classified as pre-diabetic, all the calorie-restricted animals remained diabetes-free."The devilish thing here is that it's tasty to eat the bad stuff and the good stuff seems like rabbit food. Changing from my blubber-building lousy diet to something healthy is going to require going hungry and changing a lot of bad habits. Ugh.