Brown Bag at the Movies – Selected technical topics(12)
Greetings!
For this installment of Brown Bag at the Movies we will be viewing (abstract below):
- Marketing for engineers: <http://dangerousprototypes.com/2010/12/06/this-is-how-you-sell-microchips/> 2:16
- How algorithms shape our world 15:23
- Cracking Stuxnet, a 21st-century cyber weapon 10:41
- Fighting viruses, defending the net 17:35
- Upside of Irrationality, The Not-Invented-Here Bias: Why “My” Ideas Are Better than “Yours” 4:56
- A robot that flies like a bird 6:20
- Marketing for engineers 2: <http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/07/12/lattice-ecp3-fpga-jamz-video/> 3:41
08-09-2011 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
Brown Bag at the Movies – Selected technical topics(11)
Greetings!
For this installment of Brown Bag at the Movies we will be viewing (abstract below):
- Engineering of the 10,000 Year Clock 32:50
- The Future of Fabrication 30:53
- Lamps 001/1 3:02
07-26-2011 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese
Over at Make Magazine’s blog is a call-to-action article that makes the case that we need to learn Chinese to fully participate in the world economy.
In this week’s article I’ll talk about why I think it’s a good idea for any maker to consider picking up some new language skills and specifically what I’m doing. A lot of my articles tend to be about the future (I can’t wait to look back on these 5 years from now). So, yes, I think a lot of us are going to find speaking, reading, and writing the language of the soon-to-be biggest economy in the world and, who makes almost everything, is a good idea. It’s something to consider learning, starting now, particularly for makers, especially the ones who run maker businesses.
Why? To begin, we’re not going to be “first” any more.
According to the International Monetary fund folks (IMF), by 2016 China’s economy will be the biggest in the world, surpassing the USA. We’re currently in the #1 spot, China is #2, and Japan just fell to 3rd place last year.
China’s economy is expected to grow from $11.2 trillion (2011) to $19 trillion in 2016, and the U.S. is expected to go from $15.2 trillion (2011) to $18.8 trillion in 2016, which would make China about 18% of the world economy.
Red Teams, Blue Teams, Tiger Teams Too…
A red team is an exercise in non-conventional thinking. Has your organization tested its assumptions, plans, and future products yet? “Red teaming is not forecasting; red teaming is the art of challenging assumptions and exploring the possible.”
The below are excerpts from The Role and Status of DoD Red Teaming Activities:
Red teams and red teaming processes have long been used as tools by the management of both government and commercial enterprises. Their purpose is to reduce an enterprise’s risks and increase its opportunities.
Red teams come in many varieties and there are different views about what constitutes a red team. We take an expanded view and include a diversity of activities that, while differing in some ways, share a fundamental feature.
Red teams are established by an enterprise to challenge aspects of that very enterprise’s plans, programs, assumptions, etc. It is this aspect of deliberate challenge that distinguishes red teaming from other management tools although the boundary is not a sharp one. …
…
In general, red team challenges can help hedge against surprise, particularly catastrophic surprises. It does this by providing a
- Wider and deeper understanding of potential adversary options and behavior that can expose potential vulnerabilities in our strategies, postures, plans, programs, and concepts. This role (to explore technically feasible and responsive threats) has become increasingly important as a complement to the more traditional intelligence-based threat projections (capabilities-based versus threat-based planning).
- Hedge against the social comfort of “the accepted assumptions and the accepted solutions”. This includes hedge against bias and conflict of interest.
- Hedge against inexperience (a not uncommon situation in DoD and other Government Agencies where leadership tenures tend to be short).
Areas where red teams can and do play an important role within DoD include:
- Training
- Concept development and experimentation (not just an OPFOR for the experiment but continuous challenge by red teams throughout the concept development process)
- Security of complex networks and systems
- Activities where there is not much opportunity to try things out (for example, nuclear weapons stockpile issues)
…
The red team itself is only one element in a red teaming process. The process can be explicit or ad hoc. Elements of the process include the following: who the red team reports to; how it interacts with the management of the enterprise and with “blue” (the owner of the activity it is challenging), and how the enterprise considers and uses its products.We identify three types of red teams. Our expanded notion of red teams includes teams established to serve as:
- Surrogate adversaries and competitors of the enterprise,
- Devil’s advocates,
- Sources of judgment independent of the enterprise’s “normal” processes (often from team members with experience from positions at higher levels in industry or government).
And an example of a historical “red Team” activity:
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). On the first day of the crisis, October 16, President Kennedy organized the “Ex Comm” (the Executive Committee of the National Security Council) to help advise him on the situation, and U.S. responses to the unfolding crisis. His choice of those in the Ex Comm (especially his brother and the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy) was a deliberate move to provide alternatives for courses of action and act as a counterbalance for the strong military response, originally being advocated.
Here’s a Red Team Testing Methodology.
Here’s the Red Team Journal.
Here’s how it might apply to open source software development, Your Open Source Management Approach: Red Team or Blue Team?
Also see Tiger Team and Red Cell.
Rare Earth Minerals…
Rare Earth Elements (REE) play a strategic role in our modern technium.
Rare earth elements became known to the world with the discovery of the black mineral “ytterbite” (renamed to gadolinite in 1800) by Lieutenant Carl Axel Arrhenius in 1787, at a quarry in the village of Ytterby, Sweden. — Wikipedia
With worldwide demand for rare-earth metals amounting to 134,000 tons last year, and only 124,000 tons being produced, the difference has had to be made up from dwindling stockpiles. By 2012, demand is expected to reach 180,000 tons, which could exhaust the world’s remaining inventory. The result has been panic throughout industrial countries. — The Economist
China controls 97 per cent of the world’s supply and has been tightening its export quotas, sparking concerns that the rare earths could live up to their name. — New Scientist
A simple timeline:
[7/03/2011]
[6/17/2011]
[6/8/2011]
[3/4/2011]
Countries including Japan, South Korea and Germany may have to offer technology transfer deals in order to better compete with China in the hunt for African rare earths.
For the United States, which relies on rare earths for almost all of its high-tech weaponry, procurement is a matter of national security, with a U.S. Congressional Research Service report advocating a strategic partnership as a hedge against Chinese rare earth hegemony.
[12/29/2010]
[9/30/2010]
“The United States was once self-reliant in domestically produced [rare earth elements], but over the past 15 years has become 100% reliant on imports, primarily from China,” a new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service observes. “The dominance of China as a single or dominant supplier […] is a cause for concern because of Chinas growing internal demand for its [own rare earth elements],” the report said.
[9/22/2010]
[4/14/2010]
[3/9/2010]
[1/2/2010]
Failure to secure alternative long-term sources of rare earth elements (REEs) would affect the manufacturing and development of low-carbon technology, which relies on the unique properties of the 17 metals to mass-produce eco-friendly innovations such as wind turbines and low-energy lightbulbs.
[8/24/2009]
Resources:
Brown Bag at the Movies – Selected technical topics(10)
For this installment of Brown Bag at the Movies we will be viewing (abstract below):
- Bill Ford: A future beyond traffic gridlock 16:49
- Will Wright makes toys that make worlds 16:40
- Leonard Susskind: My friend Richard Feynman 14:42
- David Merrill demos Siftables 7:12
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Brown Bag at the Movies – Selected technical topics(9)
For this installment of Brown Bag at the Movies we will be viewing (abstract below):
06-21-2011 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
Letter to entrepreneur : Bill Gates (Metabolomics)
Recently I noticed that the X-Prize Foundation has — in cooperation with Qualcomm — decided to offer a “Tricorder X PRIZE, a $10 million prize to develop a mobile solution that can diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians.” This reminded me of a letter I wrote last year regarding metabolomics…
Mr. Bill Gates
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
PO Box 23350
Seattle, WA 981022 June 2010
Re: Putting the personal in medicine.
Mr. Gates,
I’m an engineer. When I’ve got a problem I apply a simple objective process – identify, measure, and improve (IMI). In contrast, medicine follows a subjective process of observation (signs, symptoms) and instant test results to determine a diagnosis. Given that there are over 10,000 known diseases, 3,000 drugs, and more than 1,000 lab tests, it’s highly unlikely that any given doctor has the knowledge and experience to arrive at a correct diagnosis.
What would happen if medicine followed IMI?
1) The medical version of identify is a science called metabolome and is:
The “complete set of small-molecule metabolites (such as metabolic intermediates, hormones and other signaling molecules, and secondary metabolites) to be found within a biological sample, such as a single organism.” — Wikipedia
2) The medical version of measure is a technique called metabolomics (or metabolic profiling) and is:
The “systematic study of the unique chemical fingerprints that specific cellular processes leave behind” – specifically, the study of their small-molecule metabolite profiles. – Wikipedia
Dr. Art Robinson, one of the pioneers of modern metabolomics, offers:
“These [unique chemical fingerprints] are the immediate result of most biochemical activity. Moreover, they are interlocked in many different biochemical pathways. Therefore, it is not necessary to measure every one. There may be 5,000 substances of importance, but a sample of 500 carries information about the other 4,500 as well. For example, about 30% of the substances in urine are correlated with physiological age. Some go up with age. Some go down with age. It is not necessary to measure 5,000 compounds. A subset of 200 is sufficient to reliably measure physiologic age.” – Dr Art Robinson paper
3) The medical version of improve is the correlation of an individual’s metabolome with disease profiles so appropriate corrective/preventive action can be taken.
How can this be personalized?
A consumer-based personal analytical device is now possible that would allow for the quantitative measurement of human health (your personal health, not the population norms now standard in medicine). This analytical device could measure metabolic profiles in breath and urine, and monitor parameters such as heartbeat and blood pressure. This device could be packaged to be about the same size as a personal laser printer. It would use your home PC for data reduction and archiving and as the gateway to your electronic medical records, and to access the world’s foremost experts in the analysis of physiological and biomedical data. This is possible because technological advances have given us miniaturized mass spectrometers and gas-chromatographs (not unlike those being used by the Mars Rovers in the search for Martian life). For instance, the Ionchip®, by Microsaic Systems Ltd, is a miniaturized mass spectrometer that “determines the chemical composition of a sample by ionizing molecules of the sample and sorting them by [their] mass-to-charge ratio.”
[Update 11 June 2011: A cool new sensor technology is based on Raman scattering, EDN magazine summarizes: “The university describes the sensor as being able to boost faint signals generated by the scattering of laser light from a material placed on it, allowing the identification of various substances based on the color of light they reflect.”]
The creation of a personal analytical device has entered the realm of engineering; the science being a settled proposition. Unfortunately even though this is possible, no one is doing it. The Shirky Principle holds that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” Medical institutions — especially diagnostics — resist change and are ripe for a disruptive technology to empower the individual (much like the personal empowerment revolution PCs ignited). This is where your foundation can come in.
I’d like to suggest that your foundation sponsor a competition to develop a personal analytical device. It should have three levels, with the first level resulting in five contenders. The second narrowing this down to two and the third selecting the best. The reason for multiple levels (and a large winner pool) is to allow other promising solutions to be developed independently (if investors are so moved). Minor competitions could also be developed for electronic data interchange, electronic medical records, big data storage, search, and pattern matching.
In closing I’d like to say that I admire the good work you’re undertaking through your foundation and wish you well in those endeavor.
Respectfully,
Chuck
To which I received the standard reply:
Subject: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 10:46:17 -0700 From: Info <info@gatesfoundation.org> To: Charles.Petras@xxxxxxxx.xxx <Charles.Petras@xxxxxxxx.xxx> Dear Mr. Petras, Thank you for contacting the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We appreciate the time you have taken to suggest sponsoring a contest to develop a personal analytical device with the foundation. It is always encouraging to hear from individuals like you who are dedicated to helping others and spreading awareness about important issues. As you may already know, the foundation’s work stems from our belief that all lives have equal value. We think all people deserve the chance to live healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, we focus on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, we seek to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. We invite you to visit our web site at www.gatesfoundation.org for more information about our programs. Again, many thanks for writing and best wishes for the future. Sincerely, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grants Inquiry www.gatesfoundation.org
Letter to entrepreneur : Thomas Heatherwick
I was very impressed with Thomas Heatherwick’s TED Talk, especially his power plant design. So I just had to suggest that maybe that design would benefit from the addition of controlled environment agriculture.
Subject: Building the Seed Cathedral Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 12:59:00 -0700 From: Charles Petras <charles.petras@xxxxxxxx.xxx> To: studio@heatherwick.com I'd just watched your TED talk and was most impressed. In regards to the Power Station project, one additional aspect of any future design should make allowances to support Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA). Since one of the natural by-products of thermal power generation (as is the consumption of that power, e.g., data centers) is waste heat, which is a free (as in sunk cost) resource waiting to be tapped. Unfortunately no one seems very interested in harnessing this resource and putting it to other uses. Recently Discovery news featured an interesting application of CEA that would dovetail beautifully with your power station design. Specifically crop production in modular units. A design similar to that could be embedded in the earthworks surrounding your station to give even greater land use efficiencies. Best regards, Chuck
Letter to entrepreneur : Verdant Earth Technologies
I was very impressed with Verdant Earth Technologies‘ controlled environment agriculture (CEA) technology, so I offered them a few ideas as to new markets they could exploit.
Subject: Controlled Environment Agriculture and the Power Industry... Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:03:00 -0800 From: Charles Petras <charles.petras@xxxxxxxx.xxx> To: info@VerdantEarthTech.com Hi I've been reading about what your doing with CEA and I think its great. You may want to investigate co-locating with data centers (up here Quincy WA has a few) and power plants since they are big producers of waste heat. Typically this heat would be available as 90 deg water flowing towards a cooling tower. From their point of view it would give them some green credibility to tout to their share holders and the public. <http://www.microsoft.com/environment/our_commitment/articles/datacenter_bp.aspx> Actually that hookup would be a novel patentable invention (i.e., using waste heat from whoever for your version of CEA). You'd probably want to hook up with some of the infrastructure people. One guy -- Mike Manos -- use to be with Microsoft and is now with DLS <http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/08/microsofts-manos-joins-digital-realty-trust/> <http://loosebolts.wordpress.com/>. My only concern is how can what your doing scale? Obviously the containers can be racked and stacked, but the issue seems to be convenient access to harvest and plant each container. It would seem that some scheme more ameniable to automation is needed. Beat regards, Chuck
reflections on the technium 