Smart highways

I feel like I might have posted about these things before, but given my past blog posts on the topic, I figured it was worth sharing either way. Via Barry Ritholtz comes a quick summary of these so-called "smart" highways, which are scheduled to debut in the Netherlands later this year. Pretty cool stuff.

From their own fact sheet (with some funky translations):

Smart Highway are interactive and sustainable roads of today. Designer Daan Roosegaarde and Heijmans Infrastructure are developing new designs and technologies for this Route 66 of the future. 

New designs include the ‘Glow-in-the-Dark Road’, ‘Dynamic Paint’, ‘Interactive Light’, ‘Induction Priority Lane’ and ‘Wind Light’. The goal is to make roads which are more sustainable and interactive by using light, energy and road signs that automatically adapt to the traffic situation. 

Awarded with a Best Future Concept by the Dutch Design Awards 2012 the first meters Smart Highway will be realized mid 2013 in the Netherlands. 

The "Dynamic Paint" design, for example, puts designs on the road that will change based on temperature and general road conditions, to better inform drivers of what to expect. And the "Induction Priority Lane" has induction coils underneath the surface, which can allow electric cars to recharge their batteries as they drive on them.

Here's a short video showing what these guys are doing, and what's possible.


Futuristic highways glow in the dark by Daan Roosegaarde and Heijmans from Daan Roosegaarde on Vimeo.

While this still seems like pretty crude and early-stage technology, I think it's a good step toward being more creative with how we think about our roads and their functions. The days of having a piezoelectric national highway system that powers the cars that drive on it may not be so far away, after all.

Finally, some real innovation

You see, guys, what have I always been telling you? If we really want to get some real innovation in this country to get us out of our economic doldrums, we just have to start taking our cues from Russia. Wait, that can't be right...

In October, design practice Y/N studio caused a stir by designing a blueprint for a swimming lane along Regent's canal in London, so that people could swim to work. Now, the Estonian architecture studio Salto has built an equally inventive solution to the boredom of the morning commute – a 51m (170ft) -long trampoline, so that you can bounce to your destination. 

 

The trampoline, called Fast Track, has been built and installed at arts festival Archstoyanie, and has been a hit since it was opened at the end of November in the Nikola-Lenivets forest, in south-west Russia. Made of black rubber, it is, according to Salto "an attempt to create [an] intelligent infrastructure that is emotional and corresponds to the local context, giving the user a different experience of moving and perceiving the environment".

Hey, that's a fantastic idea! It's green, it gets us off our butts and exercising a little bit, it encourages our long-lost love of nature... what could possibly go wrong? Oh... right.

More on 3-D printing (Japan edition)

Since I'm always talking about 3-D printing, this little news item seemed like it had to be passed along here.

3D printers – it’s a word that offers glimpses into the future that seems so far, and yet is so close. The technology, which allows you to replicate 3D objects the same way you make a photo copy, has been around for a couple years now, but, for the most part, has been far too expensive and inaccessible to the public. 

But now, what’s being called the world’s first 3D printing photo booth is set to open for a limited time at the exhibition space EYE OF GYRE in Harajuku. From November 24 to January 14, 2013, people with reservations can go and have their portraits taken. Except, instead of a photograph, you’ll receive miniature replicas of yourselves. 

Reservations are taken only through the website. You can pick from 3 sizes, S (10cm), M (15cm) and L (20cm) for 21,000 yen, 32,000 yen and 42,000 yen, respectively. But there are group discounts! This would be really fun to do with your kids, who seem to grow up just way too fast.

For those wondering about the conversions, the sizes are roughly 4 inches, 6 inches, and 8 inches, for $264, $403, or $529. Obviously not cheap, but still sort of awesome if you happen to be passing through Tokyo in the next few months (and who isn't, right?). Check out the pics:

I assume the thing is capable of capturing some sweet action poses as well, even though our Japanese models seem to have been angling for the "coffin" pose for some reason. For anyone who ever grew up wishing they could have their own action figure, this is about as close as you're gonna get. Well, unless you feel like enlisting...

[Spoon & Tamago]
(h/t Marginal Revolution)

3-D printing and patents

I've been writing a lot about 3-D printing lately (because I think it's awesome), and I also recently wrote a post about our nation's patent system (because I think it's broken). Last week, I came across an article from The Economist that brought those two topics together—in a way that might not make me particularly happy.

What could well be the next great technological disruption is fermenting away, out of sight, in small workshops, college labs, garages and basements. Tinkerers with machines that turn binary digits into molecules are pioneering a whole new way of making things—one that could well rewrite the rules of manufacturing in much the same way as the PC trashed the traditional world of computing. 

The machines, called 3D printers, have existed in industry for years. But at a cost of $100,000 to $1m, few individuals could ever afford one. Fortunately, like everything digital, their price has fallen. So much so, industrial 3D printers can now be had for $15,000, and home versions for little more than $1,000 (or half that in kit form). “In many ways, today’s 3D printing community resembles the personal computing community of the early 1990s,” says Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group in Washington, DC. 

As an expert on intellectual property, Mr Weinberg has produced a white paper that documents the likely course of 3D-printing's development—and how the technology could be affected by patent and copyright law. He is far from sanguine about its prospects. His main fear is that the fledgling technology could have its wings clipped by traditional manufacturers, who will doubtless view it as a threat to their livelihoods, and do all in their powers to nobble it. Because of a 3D printer's ability to make perfect replicas, they will probably try to brand it a piracy machine. 

Manufacturers of famous brands have had to contend with ripoffs since time immemorial. Whole neighborhoods exist in Hongkong, Bangkok and even Tokyo that turn out imitation designer handbags, shoes and watches. China has flooded the world with cheap replacement parts based on designs pirated from the original equipment manufacturers. 

But while the pirates' labour rates and material costs may be far lower, the tools they use to make fakes are essentially the same as those used by the original manufacturers. Equipment costs alone have therefore limited the spread of the counterfeiting industry. But give every sweatshop around the world a cheap 3D printer coupled to a laser scanner, and pirated goods could well proliferate... 

As with any disruptive technology—from the printing press to the photocopier and the personal computer—3D printing is going to upset existing manufacturers, who are bound to see it as a threat to their traditional way of doing business. And as 3D printing proliferates, the incumbents will almost certainly demand protection from upstarts with low cost of entry to their markets. 

Manufacturers are likely to behave much like the record industry did when its own business model—based on selling pricey CD albums that few music fans wanted instead of cheap single tracks they craved—came under attack from file-swapping technology and MP3 software. The manufacturers' most likely recourse will be to embrace copyright, rather than patent, law, because many of their patents will have expired. Patents apply for only 20 years while copyright continues for 70 years after the creator's death.

Oh, boy. I firmly believe that 3-D printing has the potential to transform the way that many industries—particularly those involved in manufacturing—operate in this country, and that it could even help our country to break its long-standing dependence on imported crude oil (if I don't have to ship a product to you, because you can print it yourself at home, then I can pretty much put UPS and FedEx out of business overnight, significantly cutting into the amount of fuel used in this country).

But it won't happen if we don't allow for the elimination of businesses made irrelevant by new technologies. Creative destruction has always been at the core of economic progress in this country (note: "economic progress" does not necessarily mean the same thing as "economic growth", as measured by the circulation of dollars—not all "wealth" is denominated in paper currency), and to the extent that patents impede this economic progress, they must be abolished.

I think we're reaching a very dangerous point in this country when it comes to patents and the way they are used—instead of being used as a tool to protect inventors and small business owners from being ripped off, they're now being used as a cudgel by the largest companies to protect their dominant industry position and create barriers to entry for smaller competitors.

If you doubt this assertion, please refer to this piece in yesterday's New York Times, which notes that Apple and Google this year spent more money on patent lawsuits and patent purchases than they did on research and development for new products. That's a new dynamic (it's the first year that this has been the case), and it's definitely not a positive one for our country.

When we put the interests of big business ahead of the interests of society at large, we put ourselves on a dangerous path toward economic stagnation and irrelevance. Unfortunately, the majority of public policy that has come about in the last decade has done just that—from auto industry bailouts to TARP to overly broad patent law to a whole laundry list of other programs and court rulings, the past decade has been a great one for big business, typically at the expense of the ordinary American.

We need this dynamic to reverse itself, because the nation's economic future is worth more than the income statements of its largest companies. Yes, they are different things.

[Economist]

P.S.- Another interesting dynamic to watch in the 3-D printing space is discussed in this article, which I didn't have the opportunity to address in this post. I don't think that guns are the best use of 3-D printers, but they're clearly drawing a lot of attention for various reasons. Interesting developing issue.

The future of automotive transportation

While I spend a lot of time on this blog decrying the current state of our economy (and political environment), I try my best to balance that cynicism with a fair amount of optimism about our future, especially where new technologies are concerned. If we can be courageous enough to allow for the breaking down of old paradigms (and for the failure of outdated and obsolete business models), the future for our nation is indeed incredibly bright.

In that vein, a pair of articles that I read over the weekend have me particularly excited. First up, from US News & World Report:

Last week, California became the third and by far the most important state to legalize driverless cars, joining Nevada and Florida. Google has been getting most of the attention here for its work developing driverless vehicles. But it is hardly alone. Major automakers have their own projects under development. 

Google may want to leapfrog existing technology to point the way toward a driverless future. Existing auto companies will seek incremental changes that protect their franchises while moving toward an automated future. It's not clear what the pace of commercialization will be for driverless cars. 

After all, many of the improvements promised at the 1939 World's Fair in New York still have not come to pass. And there will be no shortage of open-road lovers and skeptics reluctant to cede control of their cars to a bunch of computers—shades of Skynet and The Terminator. 

But as Google, Apple, and other new-tech giants have demonstrated, the pace of change is likely to be much faster when it comes to automated vehicles. Using increasingly sophisticated sensors and software, driverless cars hold out the promise of saving lives, fuel, and time. They react more quickly to accident threats. They don't panic. They can tie into traffic grids and do a much better job of balancing traffic flows. They can optimize fuel consumption. 

We already trust a lot to technology when we drive. We generally believe traffic signals and respond to GPS guidance and traffic congestion reports. We expect speed and fuel flows to respond properly when we use cruise controls. We use digitized cameras and back-up sensors. Newer cars monitor weather conditions and automatically trigger any number of safety responses. Increasingly, we even pay for auto insurance using on-board computers to record where and how we are driving. And many of these functions are voice-activated on newer vehicles.

For more on the Google Car project, check out this video on Bloomberg—you have to admit, it looks pretty awesome. But in case driverless cars don't get you all excited, I've got another car-related article that is equally awesome. From Yahoo Finance:

Tesla Motors today unveiled its highly anticipated Supercharger network. Constructed in secret, Tesla revealed the locations of the first six Supercharger stations, which will allow the Model S to travel long distances with ultra fast charging throughout California, parts of Nevada and Arizona.  

The technology at the heart of the Supercharger was developed internally and leverages the economies of scale of existing charging technology already used by the Model S, enabling Tesla to create the Supercharger device at minimal cost. The electricity used by the Supercharger comes from a solar carport system provided by SolarCity, which results in almost zero marginal energy cost after installation. Combining these two factors, Tesla is able to provide Model S owners1 free long distance travel indefinitely. 

Each solar power system is designed to generate more energy from the sun over the course of a year than is consumed by Tesla vehicles using the Supercharger. This results in a slight net positive transfer of sunlight generated power back to the electricity grid. In addition to lowering the cost of electricity, this addresses a commonly held misunderstanding that charging an electric car simply pushes carbon emissions to the power plant. The Supercharger system will always generate more power from sunlight than Model S customers use for driving. By adding even a small solar system at their home, electric car owners can extend this same principle to local city driving too. 

The six California locations unveiled today are just the beginning. By next year, we plan to install Superchargers in high traffic corridors across the continental United States, enabling fast, purely electric travel from Vancouver to San Diego, Miami to Montreal and Los Angeles to New York. Tesla will also begin installing Superchargers in Europe and Asia in the second half of 2013. 

The Supercharger is substantially more powerful than any charging technology to date, providing almost 100 kilowatts of power to the Model S, with the potential to go as high as 120 kilowatts in the future. This can replenish three hours of driving at 60 mph in about half an hour, which is the convenience inflection point for travelers at a highway rest stop. Most people who begin a road trip at 9:00 a.m. would normally stop by noon to have lunch, refresh and pick up a coffee or soda for the road, all of which takes about 30 minutes. 

"Tesla's Supercharger network is a game changer for electric vehicles, providing long distance travel that has a level of convenience equivalent to gasoline cars for all practical purposes. However, by making electric long distance travel at no cost, an impossibility for gasoline cars, Tesla is demonstrating just how fundamentally better electric transport can be," said Elon Musk, Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO. "We are giving Model S the ability to drive almost anywhere for free on pure sunlight."

Make it through that whole thing? Good. To date, I haven't been particularly excited about electric cars, in large part because previous models have mostly relied upon existing sources of electric energy, the majority of which is generated from the burning of fossil fuels (largely oil and coal). In other words, there's no real fundamental change, just a shifting of where the fuel is burned—in a power plant instead of in your car.

But if we can make a shift to solar, then that's a legitimate game-changer in the automobile world. Of course, as I've mentioned on here once before, what would be even cooler is if we could figure out a way to turn all of our highways into piezo-electric energy generators, with the cars effectively powering themselves, at least in part. Spray some transparent solar film on the outside of all the car's windows, and we could take this whole thing even another step further.

Yes, I know that some of this probably sounds insane, but I also think it's completely possible and plausible. The technology all exists, it's just a matter of harnessing it in a way (and scaling it up to a point) that makes it broadly useful and usable.

Do I think that a future of self-driving cars which use virtually no energy is possible? Absolutely. Do I think that we as humans have the courage to embrace that future, if it means destroying entire companies and industries in the process? That jury's still out. But I certainly hope so.

[US News]
[Yahoo Finance]

Jay Leno's 3-D Printer

I've posted about 3-D printing here once before, and it's awesome. I don't particularly like Jay Leno (especially after what he did to Conan), but this is also awesome.

Jay Leno has a lot of old cars with a lot of obsolete parts. When he needs to replace these parts, he skips the error-prone machinist and goes to his rapid prototyping 3D printer. Simply scan, print and repeat. 

"One of the hardships of owning an old car is rebuilding rare parts when there are simply no replacements available. My 1907 White Steamer has a feedwater heater, a part that bolts onto the cylinders. It's made of aluminum, and over the 100-plus years it's been in use, the metal has become so porous you can see steam and oil seeping through. I thought we could just weld it up. But it's badly impregnated with oil and can't be repaired. If we tried, the metal would just come apart.  

So, rather than have a machinist try to copy the heater and then build it, we decided to redesign the original using our NextEngine 3D scanner and Dimension 3D printer. These incredible devices allow you to make the form you need to create almost any part. The scanner can measure about 50,000 points per second at a density of 160,000 dots per inch (dpi) to create a highly detailed digital model. The 3D printer makes an exact copy of a part in plastic, which we then send out to create a mold. Some machines can even make a replacement part in cobalt-chrome with the direct laser sintering process. Just feed a plastic wire--for a steel part you use metal wire--into the appropriate laser cutter.  

Inside the printer, the print head goes back and forth, back and forth, putting on layer after layer of plastic to form a 3D part. If there are any irregularities in the originals, you can remove them using software. Once the model is finished, any excess support material between moving parts is dissolved in a water-based solution. Complexity doesn't matter, but the size of the object does determine the length of the process. Making a little part might take 5 hours. The White's feedwater heater required 33 hours.  

Any antique car part can be reproduced with these machines--pieces of trim, elaborately etched and even scrolled door handles. If you have an original, you can copy it. Or you can design a replacement on the computer, and the 3D printer makes it for you. 

That is so completely awesome, and I can't wait for stuff like this to become more widespread (and it will, eventually, as resistant as we all may be to change).

When I see amazing innovation like this, I instantly become a little upset at our societal tendency to continually prop up old failed businesses with terrible business models (like airlines, banks, and car manufacturers). In order for our economy to make progress over the long run, we need to be willing to let older companies die off. In this case, traditional car repairmen would certainly resist the introduction of NextEngine scanners and printers on a wide scale. But if we cave to their concerns, we'll never get anywhere. This technology is awesome, and I want it.

[Popular Mechanics]

The changing business of education

I've come across a couple of interesting articles recently that have made me wonder if (some) schools are actively anticipating the bursting of the student loan bubble, and responding in advance by streamlining their processes and making education less expensive (and more democratic). The most intriguing of these articles was cited in this post on the Marginal Revolution blog, discussing a new approach to math classes at Virginia Tech.

There are no professors in Virginia Tech’s largest classroom, only a sea of computers and red plastic cups. 

In the Math Emporium, the computer is king, and instructors are reduced to roving guides. Lessons are self-paced, and help is delivered “on demand” in a vast, windowless lab that is open 24 hours a day because computers never tire. A student in need of human aid plants a red cup atop a monitor. 

The Emporium is the Wal-Mart of higher education, a triumph in economy of scale and a glimpse at a possible future of computer-led learning. Eight thousand students a year take introductory math in a space that once housed a discount department store. Four math instructors, none of them professors, lead seven courses with enrollments of 200 to 2,000. Students walk to class through a shopping mall, past a health club and a tanning salon, as ambient Muzak plays... 

Virginia Tech students pass introductory math courses at a higher rate now than 15 years ago, when the Emporium was built. And research has found the teaching model trims per-student expense by more than one-third, vital savings for public institutions with dwindling state support. 

“When I first came here, I was like, ‘This is the dumbest thing ever,’” said Mike Bilynsky, a freshman from Epping, N.H., who is taking calculus. “But it works.” 

No academic initiative has delivered more handsomely on the oft-stated promise of efficiency via technology in higher education, said Carol Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation, a nonprofit that studies technological innovations to improve learning and reduce cost. She calls the Emporium “a solution to the math problem” in colleges.

This is an interesting development, particularly in light of Stanford and Harvard's recent decisions to begin streaming online courses for free to the masses over the internet.

While Stanford and Harvard's programs' ostensible purpose is to "democratize education", it's hard to understand why they would be so willing to give their product away for free (of course, we could argue that their real product is "diplomas", not "education", but that's an argument for another day). One answer might be that they're experimenting with new (and cheaper) ways of delivering their educational product to consumers, using the public as guinea pigs rather than their tuition-paying students. It's just a theory, but I think it makes a lot of sense.

The simple fact is, the traditional model of education (professor lecturing to a room full of bored students) has in many ways outlived its usefulness (a topic I first explored in this blog post). It's wildly inefficient, and it's now becoming overly expensive to deliver. Many schools on the cutting edge of education are wondering whether there might be a better model out there, and they're beginning to experiment with new options.

Granted, the schools are only doing this experimentation out of necessity, recognizing that the trend of ever-skyrocketing tuition costs simply cannot continue forever. If the schools don't adapt now, they risk being left behind (or left for dead) if and when the bubble bursts. But regardless of the reasons for the experimentation, the outcomes are nevertheless intriguing, and I'm interested to see if projects like the Math Emporium start to catch on elsewhere.

I'm certain that similar experiments will face an extraordinary amount of pushback in the short term (particularly from professors who earn their living from the old model), and maybe they should. But I'm hopeful that a new and more efficient higher education model awaits--and that I won't have to mortgage my house to send my daughter to receive it.

[Marginal Revolution]

When innovation doesn't lead to progress

MIT News has a pretty fascinating article up this week that gives a slightly surprising answer to the question of why average automobile fuel efficiency has not improved in recent decades, despite near-constant efforts to solve the fuel efficiency puzzle. Let's let them tell the story (emphasis mine).

Contrary to common perception, the major automakers have produced large increases in fuel efficiency through better technology in recent decades. There’s just one catch: All those advances have barely increased the mileage per gallon that autos actually achieve on the road. 

Sound perplexing? This situation is the result of a trend newly quantified by MIT economist Christopher Knittel: Because automobiles are bigger and more powerful than they were three decades ago, major innovations in fuel efficiency have only produced minor gains in gas mileage. 

Specifically, between 1980 and 2006, the average gas mileage of vehicles sold in the United States increased by slightly more than 15 percent — a relatively modest improvement. But during that time, Knittel has found, the average curb weight of those vehicles increased 26 percent, while their horsepower rose 107 percent. All factors being equal, fuel economy actually increased by 60 percent between 1980 and 2006, as Knittel shows in a new research paper, “Automobiles on Steroids,” just published in the American Economic Review.

The puzzle basically boils down to an earn-more, spend-more cycle, where we continually fritter away the gains that technology has given us. Simply put, the technology of 20 years ago simply could not have produced a heavy, powerful SUV with any sort of fuel efficiency whatsoever. Now that it's feasible, we want it, and consumers want the power and size more than we care about the added fuel economy. As a result, overall fuel economy stays pretty much constant, while the cars we drive change drastically.

This is a pretty difficult problem to solve, and not just in the arena of automobile manufacturing. When we as a nation earn more money or become generally more productive, we rarely redirect our newfound earnings (or time) into productive avenues--instead, we fritter it away on conspicuous consumption or myriad time-wasting activities. If we ask ourselves why, the answer is invariably hidden among many layers of complex and bizarre human psychology, often augmented or reinforced by a herd mentality. Yes, I'm rambling.

Ultimately, though, this is just another obstacle to technological progress, the first of which--our societal aversion to change--I mentioned in this post several months ago. Having good ideas available is a necessary condition, but not sufficient. To move forward as a society, we must be willing and able to truly embrace the new possibilities that have been opened up for us--and not to fritter those possibilities away mindlessly. In the case of fuel efficiency, it seems, we've been our own worst enemy. That's too bad.

[MIT News]

Clip of the Week

Alright, good times this week. Let's all enjoy some mindless internet video, shall we?

This guy here is terrified of puppies, which is sort of humorous if you like laughing at other people's severe psychoses (guilty). If you're into college football, you'll probably see replays of this play for a long time. And if you enjoyed this video from Clarke & Dawe, then you'll enjoy this one as well.

Following along with my theme of innovation and technology, I highly suggest you watch this video about a new (and safer) technology for in-car navigation systems. Very cool stuff.

And yet, that still wasn't the coolest technology-related video I came across this week. This was. Liquid nitrogen + magnets = awesome. I seriously can't stop watching this video. Also, I want a hoverboard.

Google is nuts

Ever wonder why Google does some of the things they do, without requiring you to pay anything? Google Earth, Gmail, Google Maps, Picasa, Google Reader, etc.? The reason, of course, is that just about everything Google does is an exercise in data collection and data mining. That data collection enables them to enhance their core offerings to make them more capable and useful, which allows them to effectively write off any costs associated with the peripheral products as "R&D costs".

Here's one particularly creative example, courtesy of the Marginal Revolution blog.

By 2007, Google knew enough about the structure of queries to be able to release a US-only directory inquiry service called GOOG-411. You dialled 1-800-4664-411 and spoke your question to the robot operator, which parsed it and spoke you back the top eight results, while offering to connect your call. It was free, nifty and widely used, especially because – unprecedentedly for a company that had never spent much on marketing – Google chose to promote it on billboards across California and New York State. People thought it was weird that Google was paying to advertise a product it couldn’t possibly make money from, but by then Google had become known for doing weird and pleasing things...

What was it getting with GOOG-411? It soon became clear that what it was getting were demands for pizza spoken in every accent in the continental United States, along with questions about plumbers in Detroit and countless variations on the pronunciations of ‘Schenectady’, ‘Okefenokee’ and ‘Boca Raton’. GOOG-411, a Google researcher later wrote, was a phoneme-gathering operation, a way of improving voice recognition technology through massive data collection.

Three years later, the service was dropped, but by then Google had launched its Android operating system and had released into the wild an improved search-by-voice service that didn’t require a phone call. You tapped the little microphone icon on your phone’s screen – it was later extended to Blackberries and iPhones – and your speech was transmitted via the mobile internet to Google servers, where it was interpreted using the advanced techniques the GOOG-411 exercise had enabled. The baby had learned to talk.

Well played, Google. Very well played. The author goes on to wonder what might be possible if Google turned its voice recognition software loose on its massive library of YouTube videos, thereby making it possible to create an instant transcript of every video in the YouTube galaxy.

Pretty amazing when you think about it. Also mildly creepy. Just remember, whatever you're doing... Google knows about it.

[Marginal Revolution]

Clip of the Week

I don't have a whole lot to choose from this week, especially since I used up my favorite clip from the past few days when I excerpted it for Quote of the Week on Tuesday. I do have a few amusing clips, including this clip of kitten DJs and this incredibly strange (and awesome) cartoon summary of Yao Ming's just-concluded NBA career.

But my main man the Red Cowboy has been slinging a lot of traffic my way recently, so I thought I'd show my appreciation by sending some back his way (or at least giving a well-earned shout out). In this post, the Cowboy shares a video that resulted from the American Express Members Project, about a group of Harvard students who developed an energy-storing soccer ball.



It's a cool video, but an even cooler concept. As we try to solve our global energy crisis and move away from our reliance on petroleum-based solutions (a fight that's been going on for about four decades now), there's been a significant focus on searching for "renewable" sources of energy.

Of course, I've always thought this search presented a somewhat strange phrasing of the problem. According to the law of conservation of energy, energy (like wealth in the stock market) can be neither destroyed nor created--it can only change form or type. Therefore, in theory at least, essentially every source of energy is (or can be) renewable--it's simply a matter of figuring out how to store the energy that is being produced when the other source of energy is consumed. This soccer ball is one example of exactly that, as is the piezoelectric energy technology that is currently being developed.

Now, clearly there are certain types of energy that can't feasibly be captured or renewed, and I'm absolutely not a physicist or someone who pretends to know all there is to know on the topic of renewable energy. But it's cool to see a creative way of storing and re-using the energy that we unconsciously expend every day, and I salute the Harvard students for their creativity.

In praise of IBM

IBM is turning 100 this year, and in celebration of that fact, the company is gradually releasing a list of its 100 most significant contributions to American society (their so-called "Icons of Progress"). A bit self-congratulatory, sure, but it's a truly impressive list that shows just how adaptable and transformational Big Blue has been as the U.S. economy has twisted and turned and ambled its way through a strange century.

Technology has come a long way since the days of President Taft, and IBM has been there every step of the way. That's no small feat in the famously fast-moving and unforgiving world of high-tech (just ask Sony... better yet, ask Gateway), and I don't blame them for taking a step back to appreciate it all. From inventing the UPC code to developing the floppy disk to (of course) the creation of the PC to even creating the accounting setup that supported our Social Security system, there is almost literally no area of American life where IBM's impact hasn't been felt.

In an era where many of our biggest companies seem intent on lobbying their way to prosperity, afraid that innovation in their industries might threaten their existing business (I'm looking at you, auto and gas companies), IBM is a refreshing example of a company which has consistently viewed innovation not as a threat, but as an opportunity. They have been unafraid to make some of their older products obsolete in the process of working toward a better and more efficient world. In doing so, they have taken part in an unprecedented era of technological growth and change, with their fingerprints all over it.

In fact, their embrace of innovation and change throughout their history is in large part exactly why they're still here today--they were never afraid to fail, and that is why they succeeded. Too many companies today are stricken with the curse of mediocrity, afraid to risk what is already "good" for the possibility that they might someday be "great". IBM suffers from no such affliction, and that is why their contributions are so ubiquitous today.

[IBM]

The problem with innovation

Alright, you're probably tired of the topic of innovation by now, and that's fine. But since I've been writing about the topic so much lately, I thought it was appropriate to follow up with my latest thoughts. I thought it was especially pertinent today since I came across this post from Bill Conerly's Businomics blog, which brought together two of my favorite topics--innovation and education.

In the medieval university, books were scarce and expensive, far too scarce to expect every student to buy a half dozen textbooks. So professors lectured. It was a cost-effective way to transmit information.

Today, most professors still lecture. Not just in seminars covering rare information, but in basic courses taught in every college in the world: introduction to economics, first year chemistry, Calculus I, etc. Think about that. There are books covering everything said in the lectures. There are videos of great professors lecturing on the common topics. It's a colossal waste of time for every professor to lecture.

Most anything can be learned by a dedicated person studying on his own. However, most of us do better with some structure, and efficiency calls for a guide to the material and a person to answer questions when we get stuck. That should be the role of the modern professor. Design the body of material to be studied for a particular course. Recommend reading, videos, exercises, problems and projects that will help students. Be available to help students who get stuck. Ask stimulating questions. Promote discussion. Evaluate student performance, and advise on how much progress is being made. The teacher becomes a consultant...

It's time for education to step out of the medieval era.

Well said, Dr. Conerly.

He's right, of course. The problem with innovation isn't that not enough people are creating and innovating (though sometimes, that is the case)--rather, it's that we all are too slow to change our habits and adopt the new technologies that are available to us.

In the world of education--especially since the advent of the internet--basic knowledge (and even some fairly complex concepts) has never been more accessible to more people. Sites like Academic Earth and the Khan Academy have democratized education in a way that can and should be transformational for our society, and yet relatively few people have any clue that they even exist (I myself only learned of their existence a couple weeks ago).

Ultimately, people don't like change, they fear what is different, and they are devastatingly slow to accept new technologies and actually change the rhythm of their lives. Frankly, we like the current system of education and the status markers that it affords (nothing screams legitimacy quite like a degree from a highly-regarded school). Break that down, and we no longer have any reliable way of drawing distinctions between people, no smoking gun on their resumes that ensures us that they are what they claim to be. We view the democratization of education as dangerous not so much because of the uncertainty of how and what we will learn, but more because of the auxiliary systems that it threatens to destroy.

That's a hard hurdle to overcome, and it's certainly not unique to the world of education. I think that a fair analogy exists in the world of business, where despite the options for telecommuting and online meetings that services like Skype and GoToMeeting afford, we continue to spend hours commuting (and companies spend millions on commercial rent) so that we can keep on slaving away in offices with coworkers who we don't honestly like. We do this despite the fact that very few of us actually need to be in an office surrounded by our coworkers--for most companies in most industries, there's little that we gain from daily colocation, except maybe for a little bit of office camaraderie that might make us more productive. But that's an expensive trade to make, both for our companies and for ourselves.

The task, then, for the innovators and for all of us, is to figure out ways to make change less threatening. I've already embraced the freedom that the virtual corporation affords (I've worked in three different states and two different countries already this year), but I'll readily admit to being a bit of a Tory when it comes to the existing system of education--maybe that's just a result of self-preservation, since the abolishment of current institutions would be devastating to the value of my Harvard degree, but I digress.

The point is, if we're going to complain about the way things are (as so many of us like to do), we need to be ready--and I mean really ready--to drop our existing assumptions and habits when a new option comes along. Otherwise, we forfeit our right to complain about the status quo--our stubborn conservatism makes us complicit. If we want real innovation, we need to reward it by changing ourselves at the same rate that we change our technologies.

[Businomics]

Now that's what I'm talking about...

Engadget has a nice summary of last week's New York Design Week, and it's chock full of the kind of innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity that I've been begging for forever--and that you're probably tired of hearing about from me. As a sports fan, I was particularly intrigued by this paragraph, which has me thinking of all sorts of new possibilities over the next several decades.

Energy-generating architecture got some buzz this week with the unveiling of a piezoelectric energy-generating sports stadium that just broke ground in India, a floating solar-powered stadium for Miami, and an algae-powered office building that just won Metropolis Magazine's Next Gen competition. Photovoltaic technology was a hot topic as well as MU researchers developed a new breed of nano-cells capable of capturing 95 percent of solar energy and Diffus unveiled a chic solar-powered bag that flaunts its solar panels instead of hiding them.

With all of this creativity and innovation coming down the pike, it's really too bad that we've already spent billions of taxpayer dollars in the U.S. replacing nearly every ballpark and football stadium over the last two decades, all without any of the cool new technology that we really could have used (and that could have saved us big money).

With cities and states around the country facing budget crises as a result of underfunded pensions and plummeting tax receipts, it's unlikely that we'll see any of these stadiums replaced any time soon, and that's a shame. Large stadiums and arenas represent fertile ground for technological experimentation, and with the traditional use of taxpayer dollars to fund the projects, there's no excuse for not employing state-of-the-art technology and energy efficiency. Hopefully future projects will indeed employ these new efficiency-gaining technologies, and the taxpayer will benefit (or maybe won't even be needed at all, but that's probably a pipe dream). As always, time will tell.

[Engadget]

This is too cool

Okay, yes, I admit that I'm a huge tool, but I'm pretty much overwhelmed by how much this interactive (click-and-drag) 3-D model of the solar system beats the hell out of the lame styrofoam solar system mobiles that we used to mess around with back in the elementary school days.

This is one of those times and places where innovation has indeed enriched our lives. My kids are gonna have a lot more tools at their disposal for learning about stuff than I did back in the dark ages of the 1980s--hopefully they'll use it wisely.

Click here for interactive graphic

(h/t Barry Ritholtz)

On corporate America and innovation

In writing this post, I feel that it is necessary to first state that I have a pretty deep-rooted disdain of "Corporate America" in its traditional sense. I think that large corporations--especially those that are publicly traded--tend to lose sight of the things that made their businesses great to begin with, focusing on short-term profitability and several other often-misguided metrics at the expense of what is actually best for the company over the long term.

Meanwhile, employees are consistently minimized, deliberately made to feel as though they are replaceable cogs in the corporate machine, always with an emphasis on process over results. While I appreciate the economic benefits that large corporations with their economies of scale can provide, I think there are often devastating emotional and psychological costs to the employees (and often the customers) of those companies.

Furthermore, true innovation tends to suffer as large corporations gradually become risk-averse and afraid to be great, afflicted with the dreaded curse of mediocrity. This last point is what leads me to write today's post. In a brilliant post on his "Overcoming Bias" blog (which I will post in its entirety because it's short), economist Robin Hanson writes about one of the more insidious roles that large corporations play in our economy, often when we're not looking.

To run an airline, you need not only pilots, airplanes, and fuel, you also need landing rights at airports matching your planned routes and times. Today airlines must buy these rights one at a time via trades, and so risk ending up with mismatched slots that they cannot use.

Thirty years ago economists designed and tested package auctions to overcome this problem. In such auctions people can bid for the package of landing slots desired, and be assured of getting either all or none of the items in their desired package. Lab experiments have documented their efficiency advantages.

At a conference yesterday, someone said that the big airlines have consistently blocked attempts to field such auctions. The reason: because they buy more total slots, big airlines can more easily put together the packages they need. Big airlines oppose innovations that would make it easier for small airlines to compete with them.

This seems similar to how last year big movie studios got Congress to change laws to block the introduction of movie futures. Such futures would make it easier for small movie studios to get funding and to convince viewers that they had a product worth seeing.

Better economic institutions help people to better coordinate. But big firms suffer this problem less, because they can more easily coordinate in the absense of such institutions. Even in the US today, big firms (often with the assistance of law and government) block a great deal of institutional innovation, in order to retain this advantage.

As if there weren't already enough barriers to entry into many industries, it's clear that the largest corporations are also capable of using their political clout (due simply to their size) to squeeze out smaller competitors in ways like those documented here. Innovation (and the economic efficiency and prosperity that innovation could provide) often ends up as collateral damage in the process.

While Hanson uses two very apt analogies, I think there is no more devastating (and wide-reaching) example of this dynamic than the auto industry. The internal combustion engine that we continue to use is incredibly old technology, and we could all enjoy the benefits (both economically and, you know, from a foreign policy standpoint) of a push to kick our oil habit. But far too many (very large) companies have far too much at stake here, and true innovation in the auto space (say, something like this) has thus lagged generations behind our technological capability.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like any change in this "large corporations rule the world" dynamic is imminent. Mish Shedlock posted over the weekend about Illinois' schizophrenic and self-defeating stance with respect to corporations, one which does absolutely nothing but harm small business competitiveness. In a recession that has already been devastating to small business, Illinois somehow feels the need to give them yet another big middle finger. That's great for large publicly traded companies' bottom lines (and CEO paychecks), but it's not necessarily good for America or the economy. Such is the state of our current political environment.

While there are definitely several large companies who buck the innovation-blocking trend that Hanson has cited, and much of my personal disdain for corporate America is admittedly emotional based on personal experience (and the experiences of several close friends and relatives), any of us who have spent hours on the phone with a "customer service" representative who dryly recites corporate policy can certainly sympathize with my feelings. But until further notice, we'll probably just have to get used to it. Unless, of course, we all feel like trying to start our own businesses...

[Overcoming Bias]

On lobsters and innovation

Since I'm always writing about the developed world's continued need for entrepreneurship and innovation, I'm always thrilled to read about and pass along evidence of true ingenuity and resourcefulness at work. Today I happened to run across two such examples, and so I'm posting them both here.

First, from The Boston Globe, a very creative solution to an admittedly not-too-important problem:

University of Maine researchers want to drive the state’s lobsters back to sea — with a 3-iron.

An engineer, a scientist, a student, and an alumna have teamed up to develop a biodegradable golf ball from crushed lobster shells that could be used on cruise ships.

Inexpensive to make, the ball is designed to sink and degrade within weeks, depending on the ocean’s depth and temperature. The balls would degrade in a similar time frame in fresh water — and break down if lost in the woods, although that would take longer.

For years, a favorite cruise ship pastime was hitting golf balls from the decks into the sea, but the practice ended after an international treaty banned the dumping of plastic, including golf balls, at sea in about 1988. The biodegradable lobster balls could revive the activity, the researchers say.

“The whole idea is that we want to use every bit of a lobster we can,’’ said Robert Bayer, executive director of the Lobster Institute, a research group based at the University of Maine.

To me, the narrowness of the implications of a discovery/invention like this are of secondary importance. I'm more encouraged by the underlying creativity and persistence that went into this endeavor, solving multiple problems at once. Without encouraging this kind of thinking and approach, we have no prayer of solving any of the bigger issues that face us a society.

This, incidentally, is also an example of higher education at its best--bringing together different people with different backgrounds and areas of expertise to creatively solve a problem. Our colleges and universities should and must be fertile grounds for innovation, and experimentation on small-scale projects like this one is a fantastic way to train people how to work together to find creative solutions. Good stuff.

The second item I came across actually followed in the path of another post I wrote several months ago, discussing the possibility of embedding solar panels in our roadways in order to feed power back to the grid. It turns out that the Netherlands is already working on plans to employ just such a strategy, but one proposal goes even farther than that. Per Washington's Blog (via Barry Ritholtz),

Another use of a free, wasted byproduct to generate electricity is piezo-electric energy. “Piezo” means pressure. Anything that produces pressure can produce energy. 

For example, a train station in Japan installed piezo-electric equipment in the ground, so that the foot traffic of those walking through the train station generates electricity (turnstiles at train, subway and ferry stations, ballparks and amusement parks can also generate electricity). 

Similarly, all exercise machines at the gym or at home can be hooked up to produce electricity. 

But perhaps the greatest untapped sources of piezo-electric energy are freeways and busy roads. If piezo-electric mats were installed under the busiest sections, the thousands of tons of vehicles passing over each day would generate massive amounts of electricity for the city’s use.

Interesting stuff. It's not hard to imagine a strategy that makes use of both solar technology and piezo-electric technology to turn our roads into massive electricity providers. Put it together with electric car technology, and you could have a very different-looking landscape on the American highways (and gas stations). I'm not saying it's likely, nor am I exactly assessing its viability or scalability. But it's definitely worth a shot--it's better than throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars in Libya chasing a broken oil-centric energy policy, don't you think?

[Boston Globe]
[The Big Picture]

Sometimes, the consumer does win

Alright, I'm always harping on the need for innovation (and entrepreneurship) to get us out of our economic doldrums. So much so that I'm not even going to bother linking to my old rants--if you've read me before, you need no reminder of my views. I usually harp about the lack of innovation, and how consolidation of industries limits competition and drives down the overall level of innovation, thus essentially screwing the consumer.

This is not one of those times. This is awesome:

This is the second major announcement by Amazon this month, following on the heels of their "free streaming video for Amazon Prime customers" offer (admittedly it's limited to select titles, but I've watched Syriana, Man On Wire, and Exit Through the Gift Shop for free this month, while paying only a combined $5 to rent The Fighter and The Prestige... and I've gotten $300 dollars worth of products, including a propane grill, shipped to me for free. Yeah, I'm an Amazon Prime fanboy--so be it).

Amazon is one of the few companies that I truly admire right now. They've got brains, they've got guts, and they truly do try to innovate and provide value to their customers in creative new ways. Their products (and their site arrangement) might not be as pretty as their competitors, but they're every bit as functional, and in some ways better (most notably, they don't "protect" their audio files like iTunes does so that they can't be played on non-Apple media players, which is bulls**t). And their prices can't be beat.

Ultimately, I admire any company with the stones to take on both Netflix and Apple in the same month. Maybe it will work out for them, maybe it won't--but any company that stared down the dot-com bubble burst and survived isn't a company I'd bet against.

A trend that needs to change

I've been pretty vocal here before about the need for entrepreneurship and innovation (I mean real innovation, not consumption vehicles like iPads or new "innovative" financial products) to bring us out of our "jobless recovery" into a real recovery, because we can't rely on our big corporations to do so. So far, not so good...

The recession caused a sharp decline in new business start-ups, intensifying job market losses and potentially putting future economic growth at risk.

The Census Bureau on Wednesday said that 403,765 new firms were started in the 12 months ended March 2009, down 17.3% from a year earlier and the fewest on records that begin in 1977.

New businesses are an important source of new jobs — without them, there would be no job growth at all. Indeed, the new Census data show that one of the reasons that the job market declines were so severe in the recession was the dearth of start-ups. Firms less than a year old employed 2.3 million people in March 2009 whereas as a year earlier start-ups employed 3 million people.

In past recessions, start-ups didn’t take nearly as large a hit as they did in the downturn that began at the end of 2007, notes John Haltiwanger, a University of Maryland economist who has worked extensively with the Census start-up data. Even in the deep recession that ended in late 1982, start-up activity held up fairly well. “Start-ups weren’t immune, but the guys in the garages were going to try to do what they were going to do no matter what,” said Mr. Haltiwanger.

Unfortunately, things seem to be going in exactly the wrong direction. The Journal article attributes a significant amount of the dropoff in startups to a lack of financing from venture capital firms, banks, etc., but I think that's overly simplistic.

I think that this generation (my generation), in large part because of an excess of student loan debt, is extremely risk-averse and afraid to put their careers on the line for something that might not pan out. They tend to take the safe play, which increasingly isn't actually as safe (or as fulfilling) as it might appear. But sooner or later, I don't think they're going to have a choice. The big companies aren't going to start hiring any time soon, and more people are graduating from college (and high school) every day.

Some of the young and unemployed will eventually have no choice but to band together and start new ventures, and our country will be the better for it. It just isn't happening yet. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

[Wall Street Journal]

Clip of the Week

Pretty simple lead-in to this one... there's a lot of cool stuff going on at this Volkswagen factory/museum in Dresden, Germany. From the delivery trams to the robotic sleds to the electrified floors, this is what innovation is supposed to look like. Impressive and fascinating.



(h/t The Big Picture)