See the story at Cnet.com.

BrewDog is a brewery in Scotland that pushes all the limits of what beer can be. I respect them for that, and I actually met James Watt, one of the founders, at a tasting at ChurchKey in DC recently.

Here’s James Watt, speaking about BrewDog’s latest record-breaking, 55%-alcohol beer:

“The impact of The End of History is a perfect conceptual marriage between taxidermy, art and craft brewing.”

That’s right, taxidermy. Because this here beer isn’t served in a brown paper bag like those 40s you used manhandle in college.

No, this beer is served in what I can only assume is the appropriate “koozie” for such a novel:

A squirrel.

It tastes alcoholic and... furry.

At 500 or 700 GBP, depending on the species, this is one expensive rodent. (As of 7.22.2010, the beer is sold out.)

Watch the video about the beer’s creation:

The End of History from BrewDog on Vimeo.

via It’s the World’s Strongest, Most Expensive Beer — Inside a Squirrel – Asylum.com.

Why do I think perpetual motion machines will be appearing frequently in the news? Because, with today’s focus on clean and efficient energy, we are going to find numerous good-willed, if scientifically challenged, inventors producing machines that seek to defy that little, old field we like to call “physics.”

Background Reading

Perpetual Motion (Wikipedia)

History of perpetual motion machines (Wikipedia)

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

Powertread: Stealing Power from Cars

The first PMM post is highlighting Powertread, a device for capturing energy from cars in traffic and converting it into electricity.

It’s literally a series of tubes filled with water that, when run over, force their contents through a turbine to generate electricity. One car driving over one of the things generates 580 watts of electricity at 36 amps. That’s not an awful lot power, but imagine a dozen of the things lined up at a busy off-ramp, run over by thousands of impatient drivers every day, and you can see the potential. The Singaporean government does too, providing grants to fund the project and two shopping malls there have already signed up to purchase the results.

via Powertread turns gridlock into electricity with a series of tubes from Engadget.com

Here’s what’s wrong this idea:

Any energy that is captured by this device must be taken directly from the vehicle crossing its tubes. If the device captured, say, 100 Joules from a passing car, the car itself will end up with about 300 Joules less energy, once the efficiency of electricity generation is considered. (These numerical values are assumptions for the sake of this post.)

In essence, what’s been created is a very roundabout method of electricity generation. Gasoline is converted from chemical energy to kinetic energy in a moving vehicle. This energy is then transferred from the vehicle to water to a turbine blade to a generator. The overall efficiency of this system can’t be greater than 10%, and it will certainly be expensive, to boot.

Now, the argument of the inventors is that cars in traffic will be braking anyway, and this device will slow down vehicles rather than allowing the vehicle’s braking energy to be wasted as heat. From an energy standpoint, that is a more defensible. However, the device is still worthless from a practical standpoint.

First, we are growing our fleet of hybrid vehicles which have built-in capabilities to recapture braking energy and store it in batteries. If cars already have the capability to capture braking energy everywhere they drive, why try to capture energy outside the car only where you’ve placed Powertreads? Second, the energy captured by these devices will be very intermittent-not a continuous flow of steady wattage-and that creates practical challenges for inverters and storage devices. Third, driving over these tubes will feel like hitting a speed bump, and drivers will certainly hate the experience.

I’m glad these inventors are working to help save energy, but I’m sorry to say that they should tread away from the Powertread idea today and start working on something a bit more practical for tomorrow.

The facts in this story prove yet again that, in science at least, truth is often stranger than fiction.

I had heard previously of applying this new microbial science as a potential new forensic tool. (CSI needs something new-they use the same human DNA tests every episode.) In this application, they would utilize the trail of microbes we leave behind as tool for identifying criminals. Think living, microbial fingerprints. Here’s an article about microbe fingerprints. (Bonus, the article is written for kids. Kids need science for their futures, and science needs kids for its future.)

I would not be surprised if the link grows stronger between underexposure to bacteria during childhood (too many antibiotics and not enough dirt) and the occurrence of allergies and asthma.

Here are a few excerpts from the NYT article:

“We have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis.

…

The new surveys are helping scientists understand the many ecosystems our bodies offer microbes. In the mouth alone, Dr. Relman estimates, there are between 500 and 1,000 species. “It hasn’t reached a plateau yet: the more people you look at, the more species you get,” he said. The mouth in turn is divided up into smaller ecosystems, like the tongue, the gums, the teeth. Each tooth-and even each side of each tooth-has a different combination of species.

…

Lungs have traditionally been considered to be sterile because microbiologists have never been able to rear microbes from them. A team of scientists at Imperial College London recently went hunting for DNA instead. Analyzing lung samples from healthy volunteers, they discovered 128 species of bacteria. Every square centimeter of our lungs is home to 2,000 microbes.

…

Out of the 500 to 1,000 species of microbes identified in people’s mouths, for example, only about 100 to 200 live in any one person’s mouth at any given moment. Only 13 percent of the species on two people’s hands are the same. Only 17 percent of the species living on one person’s left hand also live on the right one.

…

In addition to helping us digest, the microbiome helps us in many other ways. The microbes in our nose, for example, make antibiotics that can kill the dangerous pathogens we sniff. Our bodies wait for signals from microbes in order to fully develop. When scientists rear mice without any germ in their bodies, the mice end up with stunted intestines.

…

Caesarean sections have also been linked to an increase in asthma and allergies in children. So have the increased use of antibiotics in the United States and other developed countries. Children who live on farms – where they can get a healthy dose of microbes from the soil – are less prone to getting autoimmune disorders than children who grow up in cities.

via How Microbes Defend and Define Us from NYTimes.com

In a study published in May in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, they reported that, to no one’s surprise, the men who sat the most had the greatest risk of heart problems. Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars as passengers or as drivers had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting.

via Phys Ed: The Men Who Stare at Screens – Well Blog – NYTimes.com

I’m an active person. I enjoy running, cycling, and hiking. But maybe those mobile activities just aren’t enough to keep me safe from the 8+ hours I spend 5 days a week sitting at my desk in the office. I’m not alone–the desk job seems to be the default job in the U.S. in the 21st century.

So, how do we continue to reap the rewards of our technologically advanced, service-based economy, without slowly killing ourselves in the process?

Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic, has one possible solution: the treadmill desk.

In 2005, Dr. Levine led a study showing that lean people burn about 350 more calories a day than those who are overweight, by doing ordinary things like fidgeting, pacing or walking to the copier.

To incorporate extra movement into the routines of sedentary workers (himself included), Dr. Levine constructed a treadmill desk by sliding a bedside hospital tray over a $400 treadmill.

Without breaking a sweat, the so-called work-walker can burn an estimated 100 to 130 calories an hour at speeds slower than two miles an hour, Mayo research shows.

via I Put In 5 Miles at the Office – NYTimes.com

Work-walker? I want to be a work-walker. Not only would it be good for my heart and muscles, but it will keep me more-awake after lunch and add variety to my posture position. Sitting hunched over a keyboard for so many hours is terrible for my back and shoulders. Reports also say that walking helps avoid A.D.D.-like distraction.

Now, would I $400o for a Walkstation? No way. Besides the fact that the name sounds like a Sony gas station, that’s way too much for a desk.

Instead, I’m going to pick up a treadmill of Craigslist and attach a desk myself. I already paid for a mechanical engineering degree, anyway. Hell, an engineering degree is practically a license to be a cheap-o and build my own stuff from scratch.

Typing while walking on a treadmill–much safer than texting while walking across a street!

The utility industry has some serious work ahead to prepare for the emergence of plug-in electric vehicles from the development pipeline. Customers will be expecting high-voltage power in places where it’s not available today, like parking lots at the office. Customers will also need a way to pay for this electricity, with a new metering and billing system. In the long-run, a smart-grid that can pull power from vehicles, as well as charge them, could help smooth out the variation in solar and wind power.

It’s not surprising that one of the utilities working at the edge of electric car infrastructure is in California — the state leads in renewable energy and energy efficiency deployment as well. Southern California Edison isn’t blanketing its territory with upgrades, an unaffordable venture; rather, it’s using innovative measures to estimate where electric vehicles will be parked in the future and beginning the upgrades far in advance.

It’s refreshing to see forward thinking like this in the utility industry. Between the Smart Grid deployments funded by the recovery act and these preparations for electric vehicles, we’ll have much more flexibility to take advantage of renewable energy and next-gen vehicles in coming decades.

Electric Vehicle-Ready Smart Grid

Find more details at FastCompany:

One utility that thinks it will: Southern California Edison. The utility covers a massive swath of land that includes 5 million meters, 14 million residents. By 2020, the utility’s customers could have up to 1 million EVs on the road. But SoCal Edison is already gearing up for the early adopters, explained Pedro Pizarro, the executive vice president of Power Operations for Southern California Edison. “If you have a block with three or four Priuses, that’s probably an early adopter neighborhood,” he said. SoCal Edison is in the midst of surveying its customers to find out which ones plan on buying EVs early. The zip codes with the highest amount of early adopters will likely receive upgraded wiring and circuitry that can handle all the excess pressure on the grid from EVs.

Yes, this is the kind of thing I would read for leisure… don’t judge.

Next step: Planning a trip to visit China and India and learn about their innovation cultures first-hand.

Description of the report:

The return of the once-dormant economies of China and India to dynamism and growth is one of the most remarkable stories in recent history. The two countries are home to nearly 40 percent of the world's population, but until recently neither had played an influential role in the contemporary global economy.

In the past two decades, China and India have liberalized internal economic policy, treatment of foreign investment, and trade, and have experienced economic growth at sustained high rates. From the point of view of the United States, however, the most important development in the Chinese and Indian economies in the long term may be the strides they are making in developing their own domestic innovation capacities. After a long period of underinvestment, both countries have committed to growing their science and education systems to bolster research and further economic expansion.

Some observers of the recent growth have said that both countries are surging in their efforts to spur innovation; others have emphasized the potential of one country over the other; and still others have suggested that both China and India have a long way to go before achieving innovation-driven growth. With such a range of views, The National Academies set out to describe developments in both countries, in relation to each other and the rest of the world, by organizing a conference in Washington, D.C. The conference, summarized in this volume, discussed recent changes at both the macroeconomic level and also in selected industries, and explored the causes and implications of those changes.

via The Dragon and the Elephant: Understanding the Development of Innovation Capacity in China and India: Summary of a Conference.

Considering that riding my bike through DC streets feels about as foolish as diving into a shark tank, this is good news. Hopefully these recommendations will be backed up with the big, honkin’ carrot of federal DOT funding for projects with comprehensive bike and walking path improvement provisions.

Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.

We are integrating the needs of bicyclists in federally-funded road projects. We are discouraging transportation investments that negatively affect cyclists and pedestrians. And we are encouraging investments that go beyond the minimum requirements and provide facilities for bicyclists and pedestrians of all ages and abilities.

To set this approach in motion, we have formulated key recommendations for state DOTs and communities:

• Treat walking and bicycling as equals with other transportation modes.
• Ensure convenient access for people of all ages and abilities.
• Go beyond minimum design standards.
• Collect data on walking and biking trips.
• Set a mode share target for walking and bicycling.
• Protect sidewalks and shared-use paths the same way roadways are protected (for example, snow removal)
• Improve nonmotorized facilities during maintenance projects.

Source: My view from atop the table at the National Bike Summit

I worked from home on Monday due to the remnants of the Snowpocalypse, and I couldn’t resist cooking some soup for warmth and comfort. A survey of the ingredients on hand led me down the road to Tom Ka Gai, or Thai Coconut Chicken Soup.

The result was very satisfying, with creamy coconut and earthy mushrooms providing rich, comforting flavors while the lime and lemon zest sent off an irresistible aroma. I took the easy way out and prepared this soup in the slow cooker, simmering the chicken, stock, mushrooms, garlic, and ginger at a low, slow setting before adding the remaining ingredients.

Enjoy.

Thai Chicken-Coconut Soup

4 ounces cellophane noodles
6 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1–2 red Thai (or jalapeño) peppers, seeded and finely chopped (plus slices for garnish)
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon grated ginger
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
1 teaspoon grated lime zest
1/4 cup fresh lemon (or lime) juice
4 tablespoons Thai fish sauce, divided
1/2 pound shiitake mushrooms, sliced (3 cups)
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 5 ounces each), cut into 2 1/2-inch-long by 1/4-inch-wide strips
1 cup regular or light coconut milk
2 cups baby spinach
2 tablespoon chopped cilantro (plus sprigs for garnish)

Place noodles in a bowl; add enough warm water to cover and let sit until soft, about 15 minutes. Drain. Combine broth, pepper, garlic, ginger, lemon zest, lime zest, lemon juice and 3 tablespoon fish sauce in a medium saucepan. Season with salt. Bring to a simmer, add noodles and cook 3 minutes more. Using tongs, transfer noodles to a bowl and cover with foil to keep warm. Add mushrooms to broth; season with salt, if desired; simmer 3 minutes more. Add chicken and coconut milk and simmer, stirring, until chicken is just cooked, about 3 minutes. Stir in spinach until it begins to wilt, about 1 minute. Add chopped cilantro and season with remaining 1 tablespoon fish sauce. Using tongs, divide noodles among 4 bowls. Ladle soup into bowls and garnish with sprigs of cilantro and slices of pepper.

Well, when you skydive from 22.7 miles above the earth, it turns out you have time for 6 minutes of life flashing before your eyes.

I’ve got a lot of living left to do; I’m not sure there are six minutes of highlights from my life worthy for that montage.

Six minutes is more like a short film, or an infomercial, than it is any fleeting vision of memories past.

But Felix Baumgartner, the Austian lunatic who will attempt this record-breaking skydive, is an adventurous guy, so six minutes shouldn’t be a problem for him.

Excerpt:

Baumgartner, who became the first person to cross the English Channel in freefall in 2003, will be lofted to a height of 36,575 metres in a helium balloon. After floating up for roughly three hours, he will open the door of a 1-tonne pressurised capsule, grab the handrails on either side of the exit, and step off, potentially breaking records for the highest parachute jump, as well as the fastest and longest freefall.

He will face extreme peril. He should reach supersonic speeds 35 seconds after he jumps, and the resulting shock wave “is a big concern”, the project’s technical director, Art Thompson, said at a press briefing on Friday. “In early aircraft development, they thought it was a wall they couldn’t pass without breaking apart. In our case, the vehicle is flesh and blood, and he’ll be exposed to some extreme forces.”

Still, project medical director Jonathan Clark noted there has been one known instance of a pilot surviving the destruction of a plane at three times the speed of sound. “We know it’s not just theoretically possible, it’s possible,” he said.

After falling for about six minutes, Baumgartner should open his parachute at roughly 1520 metres.

The jump height is above a threshold at 19,000 metres called the Armstrong line, where the atmospheric pressure is so low that fluids start to boil. “If he opens up his face mask or the suit, all the gases in your body go out of suspension, so you literally turn into a giant fizzy, oozing fluid from your eyes and mouth, like something out of a horror film,” Thompson explained. “It’s just seconds until death.”

via ‘Space diver’ to attempt first supersonic freefall – space – 22 January 2010 – New Scientist.

J&G Steakhouse is a well-appointed restaurant in the W Hotel serving beautiful, flavor-filled dishes beyond just cuts of beef.

I sampled the offerings at J&G during Restaurant Week, helping bring the price down to a level as palatable as the food. Fortunately, the presence of RW didn’t seem to diminish the quality of food or level of service provided, a phenomenon that I’ve encountered at other establishments during this event. (Of course, this being my first visit to J&G, I draw this conclusion without a frame of reference.)

Atmosphere:

Small, star-like lights dot the ceiling, casting dim light that sets a mood without hiding the beauty of the food or one’s date. The tables down the center of the restaurant abut on one side large, sofa-like, mauve benches. So large, in fact, that when combined with the room’s high ceilings and tall windows, one feels though he has started to shrink. I was pleasantly reassured when my feet still were able to reach the floor.

J&G Steakhouse and its large sofa seating

Food:

The dishes enjoyed off the RW menu included, with comments appended:

First course:

Salmon tartare, ginger dressing, fresh radish (a better dish than any salmon sushi I’ve eaten)
Rice cracker crusted tuna, citrus-chili sauce (very nice tuna, although I’d prefer without the crust)

Main course:

Roasted golden tilefish, glazed mushrooms, poblano and dill (my first tilefish, I was impressed with the intense, seared crust obtained; a rich mix of mushrooms was more satisfying than the typical buttons)
Seared cod, scallion-chili sauce, basil and celery (had just a bite of this; firm and buttery)

Dessert:

Pot de crème, liquid caramel (heaven in a pot; my favorite desserts are, like this, simple in presentation but rich in flavor)
Green apple crisp, cinnamon ice cream (dining partner: “possibly the best crisp I’ve ever had.”)

My overall impression of the food is excellent. The ingredients are high quality; the dishes provide interesting flavor combinations that are balanced, not off the wall; the preparation is careful; the plating is attractive; and result is success.

Service:

Attentive. (Sometimes excessively so. I had to keep one eye on my half-eaten first course to prevent it from being whisked away while I was absorbed in conversation.)

Conclusion:

I recommend J&G for a fine dining experience that provides an upscale yet comfortable setting and that serves high-quality, attractive food without being haughty. I will certainly return. And I’ll try the steak.

For expert reviews, look here:  Washington Post Full Review by Tom Sietsema and Washington Post 2009 Fall Dining Guide.

Let’s see if photos work. Here’s an example.

One more kitchen gadget for the junk heap. As Alton Brown would say, this is an undeniable uni-tasker. It’s a martini machine. Why do you need a machine to make a martini? Well, because shaking a shaker is so much darned work.

Uni-tasking martini machine

I never assumed that filming cooking shows was easy, but this article gives some idea of all the preparation that is required before filming can begin. And it turns out that the TV chefs have little people on their shoulders giving them cooking advice the whole time!

Excerpt:

One of the most surprising behind-the-scenes facts is the tiny earphone worn by many of the cooking show hosts. “Cooking on TV is a hard job,” Novatt says. “You need to really actually cook while listening to the culinary producer whispering in your ear telling you to smile and to move your hand because it's blocking the celery, all while you also have to pay attention to the studio director on the floor who is pointing to which camera you have to face.”

“What's great about the Food Network studio environment,” says Sunny Anderson, star of “Cooking for Real,” “is having a team where, if I miss an ingredient in the rush or forget how much time I have left, a gentle voice chimes in my ear to keep me on track.”

via Behind the scenes on Food Network – latimes.com.

Now a British architectural design firm is giving the more conventional combustion power plant a much-needed makeover. Of course, this plant doesn’t burn coal, but substitutes palm kernel shells instead.

Why not make these facilities good-looking and integrated into the environment? Sure, they lose their attraction as a movie setting for climactic clashes between humans and alien invaders, but they’re likely to endear much more good will with the surrounding community who views the plant out their kitchen windows.

Fancy-schmancy biomass plant

Excerpt:

Heatherwick Studio has just released its design for a biomass station on the banks of the River Tees in British town Stockton-on-Tees, for British company BEI.

The facility is expected to pump out 49 MWe–enough to power 50,000 homes. Those homes are expected to see their per capita carbon footprint cut by as much as 80%, since the electricity will be generated simply by biomass generators that will burn palm kernel shells, rather than coal.

Thomas Heatherwick, Heatherwick Studio’s founder, has a genius for offbeat architecture, made with experimental techniques–for example, he designed a colony of houses with tinfoil and a bridge that curls up like a snail.

This time, the building has been conceived as less of a power station, and more of a local attraction and amenity. The building’s skin will literally be green, made up of exterior panels planted with local grasses. Inside, in addition to offices and the biomass factory, there will be a visitor’s center.

via Heatherwick Turns Biomass Into a Thing of Beauty | Design & Innovation | Fast Company.

The dish is tostadas with mango pomegranate guacamole, black beans, cotija, and cabbage slaw. Here’s a photo:

I was able to pick up all the ingredients at Lily’s Mexican Market in Columbia, MD near the office. It’s a wonderful little Mexican grocery with a kitchen in the back, and I’m always the only gringo there. They make fresh tortillas every day, and they also have a meat counter (carniceria), produce, and baked goods (panaderia).

As you’d guess, the guacamole is complimented with fresh mango and pomegranate seeds. Next comes cilantro-lime black beans, followed by crumbly, salty, irresistible cotija chese. The cabbage slaw (ensalada de repollo in Spanish, translates to cabbage salad) is in a cilantro/lime/garlic/chipotle dressing with radish. This was all layered on either crispy tostadas or tender tortillas made the same day. Me gusta.

Recipes:

Mango Pomegranate Guacamole
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/350568

4 ripe avocados (2 pounds total) 
1 cup finely chopped white onion
2 fresh serrano chiles, finely chopped (2 tablespoons), including seeds
1/4 cup fresh lime juice, or to taste
3/4 cup pomegranate seeds (from 1 pomegranate)
3/4 cup diced peeled mango 
1/2 cup chopped cilantro

Accompaniment: plantain chips
Garnish: lime wedges

Halve, pit, and peel avocados. Coarsely mash in a bowl. Stir in onion, chiles, 1/4 cup lime juice, and 1 1/4 teaspoons salt, then fold in pomegranate seeds, mango, and cilantro. Season with salt and additional lime juice.

Cooks’ note: 
Guacamole can be made 4 hours ahead and chilled, its surface covered with parchment paper or plastic wrap. Bring to room temperature and stir before serving.

Gourmet
November 2008
by Lillian Chou

Mexican Cabbage Slaw (Ensalada de Repollo)

1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon ancho chili paste or adobo sauce (from a can of chipotles in adobo)
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/4 cup oil
2 cups finely shredded green or red cabbage
1 bunch radishes (about 6), julienned
1/2 bunch fresh cilantro, roughly chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt

Whisk the garlic, chili paste, lime juice, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Slowly whisk in oil to make a dressing. Add the cabbage, radish, and cilantro and toss.

The terminology Poundstone uses seems roughly analogous to that employed by other businesses in portfolio planning, the BCG Growth-Share Matrix.

From the New York article:

Puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses; those are a few of the terms consultants now use when assembling a menu (which is as much an advertisement as anything else). “A star is a popular, high-profit item-in other words, an item for which customers are willing to pay a good deal more than it costs to make,” Poundstone explains. “A puzzle is high-profit but unpopular; a plowhorse is the opposite, popular yet unprofitable. Consultants try to turn puzzles into stars, nudge customers away from plowhorses, and convince everyone that the prices on the menu are more reasonable than they look.”

Instead of puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses charted based on popularity and profit margin, the BCG matrix uses stars, cash cows, dogs, and question marks organized by market growth rate and relative market share. So, the tools are similar in their mechanism but analyze slightly different marketing situations.

While a cash cow sounds like an expensive filet mignon, I can see why Poundstone wouldn’t want to label any restaurant dish with “dog”. These are both simple but powerful tools that can be used in strategic planning exercises to illuminate options for improving future profitability.

Another indispensible but deliciously simple strategy tool? SWOT.

Via Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide via Marginal Revolution via New York Magazine.

Well, Sugapil is here to fill the void created by those stillborn dream drugs. With sugar pills.

It’s such a relief to see honesty in marketing.

From Sugapil.com:

Harness the power of your mind.

Sugapil©-like placebo has been shown to work effectively in hundreds of randomised control trials.

Most recently Sugapil©-like placebo was shown to help 60.1% of patients suffering from painful knee arthritis(1).

via Sugapil – harness the power of your mind.

Have you ever heard a pianissimo on the radio? Nope. How can a song build to a rewarding musical climax without crescendo?

As we come to the end of the decade, we turn to one of the more dramatic changes we’ve heard in music over those 10 years: It seems to have gotten louder.We’re talking about compression here, the dynamic compression that’s used a lot in popular music. There’s actually another kind of compression going on today — one that allows us to carry hundreds of songs in our iPods. More on that in a minute.

But first, host Robert Siegel talked to Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer. For more than 40 years, he’s been the final ear in the audio chain for albums running from Jimi Hendrix to Radiohead, from Tony Bennett to Kronos Quartet.

Bob pointed to a YouTube video titled The Loudness War. The video uses Paul McCartney’s 1989 song “Figure of Eight” as an example, comparing its original recording with what a modern engineer might do with it.

“It really no longer sounds like a snare drum with a very sharp attack,” Ludwig says. “It sounds more like somebody padding on a piece of leather or something like that,” Ludwig says. He’s referring to the practice of using compressors to squash the music, making the quiet parts louder and the loud parts a little quieter, so it jumps out of your radio or iPod.

Ludwig says the “Loudness War” came to a head last year with the release of Metallica’s album Death Magnetic.

“It came out simultaneously to the fans as [a version on] Guitar Hero and the final CD,” Ludwig says. “And the Guitar Hero doesn’t have all the digital domain compression that the CD had. So the fans were able to hear what it could have been before this compression.”

According to Ludwig, 10,000 or more fans signed an online petition to get the band to remix the record.

“That record is so loud that there is an outfit in Europe called ITU [International Telecommunication Union] that now has standardization measurements for long-term loudness,” he says. “And that Metallica record is one of the loudest records ever produced.”

via The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse : NPR.

Take Christmas lights. As a teenager, I had no intrinsic motivation to hang the family Christmas lights. In my mind, hanging the lights had competition only with before-school snow-blowing as the most torturous task associated with miserable Midwest winters. Lights tangle. Ladders are a hassle and liability. And, inevitably, no amount of pre-hanging electrical testing will prevent one strand from inexplicably dying as soon as the decorating is complete.

But Ric Turner sees the winter differently. And he certainly has a better touch with electricity and lights. Take his recent project, turning his house and yard into an interactive Guitar Hero game sprinkled with over 21,000 lights.

Ric, you are engineering geek (guitar) hero of the week. I’m impressed by your imagineerativity. (Aren’t you impressed by my language innovation?)

By the way, I can safely compliment Ric only because I live too far from home to be conscripted into light-hanging service.

Read this explanation from Ric of how he created the lighting system.

And watch the video here:

And the presence of Andrew Bird at #5 on the list tosses stinging salt in my influenza wounds – I had tickets to see Bird when he came to DC recently, but in the end had to sell my tickets because I was sick with H1N1. Ouch.

I can’t fault the selections in terms of quality. I am thoroughly enjoying the music while typing this post. In the end, however, this playlist represents just one dimension of the multi-faceted musical world in which I choose to exist.

So, go ahead, download some of these albums. But find yourself some music from other countries and genres, too.

Regina Spektor (left), Grizzly Bear (top middle), Dirty Projectors (bottom middle), M. Ward (top right), Andrew Bird (bottom right)

Excerpt:

We could tell early on that 2009 was going to be an outstanding year for music. Bands such as Animal Collective, Andrew Bird, Bon Iver and Antony and the Johnsons all released new music, and that was just in January. By the time we posted our online ballot to vote for the year’s best music, we had a dizzying array of albums and artists from which to choose.

Thousands of votes poured in and, just as it is every year, the race was very close. In our mid-year ballot, Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion was the most popular album. But by the end of this year, Grizzly Bear had edged its way to the top, with Animal Collective, Phoenix, Neko Case and Andrew Bird rounding out the top five.

Story: All Songs Considered Listeners Pick The Best Music Of 2009

Apparently DARPA is funding research to develop a synthetic “black ice” that can be deployed to keep the enemy from following them, you know, across narrow bridges. Think of it as a very high-tech banana peel from Mario Kart.

From DARPA:

The unrestricted mobility of enemy forces in the crowded urban battlespace severely reduces the effectiveness of military and peacekeeping operations. This, coupled with difficulties in the identification of adversaries amongst the local populace, creates a dangerous environment that risks coalition and civilian casualties. In response to this challenge, DSO is developing the Polymer Ice Program, which aims to replicate the properties of “black ice” for use in a broad range of hot, arid environments as found in the Middle East. The polymer-based artificial ice material will achieve effective mobility control by the precise and reversible reduction of ground traction. A nontoxic reversal agent will also be developed for both man and machine to achieve instantaneous traction restoration on contact. Polymer Ice will ideally provide asymmetric mobility capabilities to our warfighters while adversary mobility is simultaneously severely restricted.

via Defense Sciences Office – Polymer Ice.

From the BBC:

In a document published on the agency’s website, officials point out that “to get from point A to point B, one must have sufficient traction with the ground”.

Darpa believes a polymer-based compound could replicate the properties of black ice – a thin, translucent slippery coating, typically found on roads in winter – to reduce traction.

The agency’s wish list for the “Mobility Control System” includes the polymer ice or raw materials to produce it very quickly, a spray-on reversal agent and a means to clean the ice up.

“Such a system will provide unprecedented situational control and sustained operational tempo,” said Darpa.

“It would degrade the ability of our adversaries to shoot and chase us.”

via US military looks to ‘black ice’.

Well, novel if you don’t count the fact that evolution invented this technique first.

A company called Carbozyme is finishing lab tests to mimic the method used by our bodies for transporting CO2 by applying it to the challenge of capturing and sequestering CO2 from coal power plants.

As cells pump CO2 produced during respiration into the blood, the enzyme carbonic anhydrase converts the gas into bicarbonate for easier transport to the lungs. There the same enzyme works in reverse, turning the molecules back into the CO2 gas you exhale. This action could play the critical role of selectively capturing CO2 from mixed gas emissions for later sequestration.

The company Carbozyme is finishing up lab tests of a system that consists of millions of microscale, porous tubes coated with a synthetic version of the enzyme. As a mixture of smokestack gases passes through the tubes, the enzyme pulls CO₂ from the mix and turns it into bicarbonate and back, isolating CO₂ so it could be pumped underground and stored in layers of basalt rock. Based on lab tests and models, the system should use about a third less energy than other methods while avoiding the hazardous chemicals typically used to grab CO₂.

via Human Blood May Hold the Secret to Clean Coal | Popular Science.

So cool. Don’t give up on this challenge just yet.

This sounds like a significant technical challenge. If one desires to take advantage of aerodynamic gains, as the article suggests, the vehicles will need to be driving with very little space between (think NASCAR). Safely executing automated bumper-hugging driving will require nearly instantaneous ability for the auto to perform an emergency breaking procedure, in the case of the vehicle directly in front doing the same.

Better hope you’re not about to take a sip of hot coffee when your car decides to do that.

Excerpt:

Researchers in the European Union are using telematics to create “road trains” that join the benefits of carpooling with the freedom of driving alone.

The latest concept, part of the EU’s Safe Road Trains for the Environment initiative, groups cars with similar destinations into road trains over long stretches of highway. The lead vehicle will be driven by an experienced motorist — it may even be a bus that regularly travels the route — while the functions of each following vehicle will be automatically controlled and tethered to the actions of the lead car so that individual drivers can hammer out e-mails or eat breakfast. Despite the project’s name, cars can exit at any time.

While the project, which goes by the acronym SARTRE, sounds futuristic, all it requires are navigation systems that communicate with the lead vehicle and control acceleration and steering. The project’s lead agencies estimate that vehicles will begin testing in 2011 and say a full-scale rollout is likely within a decade.

With Road Trains, Highways Become Public Transportation | Autopia | Wired.com.

For example, take a simple-sounding question like, “How much energy is required to produce a ton of iron?”

This is a relatively straightforward analysis if the scope of energy usage includes only the iron plant. You count the fuel and electricity going in; you count the iron coming out. Divide the former by the latter and badda-bing. Done.

But what about the energy consumed to mine the iron ore out of the ground? And to transport the ore to the iron plant? And to transport the iron from the plant to its destination? And to mine the coal out of the ground? And to convert the coal to coke? And to manufacture the bulldozers and trucks that mine the coal and ore? And to manufacture the steel that goes into the equipment? Now we’re back to iron, again. We’re not close to done and we’ve already tied ourselves in a knot.

In practical terms, it’s impossible to include all the factors in an energy analysis like this. At some point, the analyst has to draw an arbitrary line and say, “Good enough.” Hopefully, this line is drawn in a place where the ignored factors constitute an insignificant percentage of the total result.

A recent report from the National Research Council tries to expand the scope of the analysis of energy costs. It takes into consideration the health impacts of energy use, which are rarely specified in quantitative terms.

By design, this report does not include the costs of energy use in terms of climate change, but that is a beast of a study on its own. Analyzing climate change costs requires forecasting the future, while this report is based on historical data.

The report also ignores the national security costs of energy use. I understand why this is hard to measure, but it should definitely not be ignored. What is the cost of wars over control of the terrorist-riddled oil-producing nations that we are dependent upon for importing petroleum, both in dollar terms and in lives lost?

Food price increases are not considered, either. What is the cost, particularly to the poorest in the world, of using food crops to produce ethanol? An economist could, if necessary, produce a figure tying these figures together. “Malnutrition deaths per gallon”, perhaps.

Nonetheless, this is a valuable report that will hopefully illuminate for many the hidden costs of our energy use. Understanding these costs allows us to make better-informed decisions, considering all the benefits and pitfalls before creating unforeseen negative side effects.

Don’t forget the importance of scope. It’s always a bigger picture than you can imagine.

Excerpt:

“Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use,” a new report from the National Research Council, a branch of the National Academies, tries to put a dollar figure on what economists call externalities.

The study, however, comes with a major caveat: it did not look at the impact of energy on climate change and ecosystems, or at rising food prices and the risks to national security.

Still, the report, which was requested by Congress in 2005, estimated that the hidden cost of energy on human health was $120 billion in 2005, the last year for which full data was available.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest contributors to these extra costs were coal-fired power plants, which generate half of the nation’s power but which also accounted for $62 billion in hidden damages associated with the emissions of pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, and particulate matter like soot or fine dust.

The report also found that in 2005 the vehicle sector produced $56 billion in health and other non-climate-change damages, with $36 billion from light-duty vehicles and $20 billion from heavy-duty vehicles.

via Report Shows Hidden Costs of Energy – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com.

But sadly, sickeningly, this story is real. We can’t ignore the gruesome and depressing reality of situations like this one, where people’s ignorance leads to unjust suffering by innocent children. Until the world is aware of what’s happening, these kids won’t be saved.

So much is wrong; where do we begin? It’s not a simple scientific misunderstanding, an old wives’ tale like eating too soon before swimming, that leads to torture and execution of humans. This is a fundamentally disrupted society, one based upon hideous dogma and a lack of real education.

Teaching people that witches, in fact, don’t exist will not repair the splintered holes in this society. The damage is so tremendous, the gap between reality and an ideal so large, I don’t know what tools will stand to do the repairs.

Excerpt:

EKET, Nigeria (AP) — The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.

His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.

A month later, he died.

Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of “witch children” reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files.

Some of the churches involved are renegade local branches of international franchises. Their parishioners take literally the Biblical exhortation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

via Churches involved in torture, murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches — latimes.com.

In essence, cheaper CCS will produce a greater volume of carbon credits, thereby dropping the price of the credits supply-and-demand-style.

Hopefully this reevaluation of the costs of capping carbon emissions will give a helping hand to cap and trade regulations that have yet to reach the Senate floor.

Excerpt:

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — There’s good news for supporters of the Waxman-Markey climate bill from Professor Stefan Reichelstein. Although passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2009, the bill is expected to spur a contentious debate in the Senate starting this fall. Opponents argue that the bill’s proposed “cap-and-trade” system will take a high financial toll on energy consumers and companies alike, and devastate the economy at a time the country can least afford it.

Reichelstein and doctoral student Ozge Islegen believe they have evidence to the contrary. Reichelstein and Islegen have examined the financial impact of regulating coal-fired power plants that produce carbon dioxide emissions under a cap-and-trade system and found the financial burden to be much less than previously projected.

via Reducing CO2 Emissions Could Be Significantly Less Costly Than Predicted.

Excerpt:

If all this talk of moon bombing has you curious about space exploration, you’re in luck: National Geographic recently produced this astonishingly elegant map of every space exploration in the last 50 years. Every. Single. One. (If you’re annoyed by that zoomable map, you can view a large version here or here.)

The trick lies in the graphing system itself: What looks like arbitrary squiggles from afar is actually a record of the path traced by various missions. In turn, these become a handy chart of the places we’ve visited most frequently–our moon leads at 73 missions, followed by Venus at 43 and Mars at 40.

via 50 Years, 200 Missions: Flybys, Gravity Assists, Asteroid Touchdowns Mapped Out | Design & Innovation | Fast Company.

How about designing a power system that needs to survive temperatures ten times hotter than the center of the sun?

This is the intimidating challenge facing the scientists and engineers who are blazing a trail in nuclear fusion research. The technical scope and scale of this challenge is as large as the clean energy reward should they ever succeed in their mission.

If you are attracted to high risk and high reward technology, this might be the place to be.

Excerpt:

At a fusion power plant, the fuel needs to be burned on human, not cosmological, timescales. The heavier isotopes deuterium and tritium are a little easier to burn than ordinary hydrogen, but even so, to get a good blaze going inside ITER the temperature will have to be racked up to a hellish 150 million kelvin. That brings a mountain of engineering problems. Not least is how to contain a plasma of electrons and atomic nuclei that is 10 times as hot as the sun’s core.

Even the most hardy of construction materials cannot withstand temperatures of more than a few thousand kelvin. So the solution is to weave a cage for the plasma from magnetic fields.

via Building a second sun: Take $10 billion, add coconuts – tech – 12 October 2009 – New Scientist.

But the statistics from ISU still show a disturbing dark side. Of 5,086 undergraduates, only 755 are female (15%). I can tell you from my experience as a male engineering student, it would be much easier to get excited about going to thermodynamics class if more than only 1 out of 5 in the class were female…

With 5,086 undergraduates majoring in engineering this fall, the Iowa State University College of Engineering has achieved a 25-year high in enrollment. The increase is 410 more students than last fall.

The college, which is routinely among the top 10 in the nation for undergraduate enrollment, has averaged more than 4,600 students per year since 1998. Enrollment has exceeded 5,000 students just three other years—1982–1984.

The biggest increases for 2009 are for resident freshmen (45) and resident transfers (39) followed by foreign transfers (36) and nonresident freshmen (29). The enrollment figures also show positive trends in gender and ethnic diversity. The number of females is 755, up from 681 in 2008. The number of underrepresented students is up 79 from last year and represents 8.6% of the engineering student body.

via ISU College of Engineering News – Engineering enrollment exceeds 5,000.

Climate bankruptcy would not be so benign. How much is saving the lives of billions of people worth?

Another study has been released which estimates the cost of long-term climate change mitigation is not that high, with figures in this case of only 1 to 3 percent of GDP.

“The net cost to U.S. households and the economy looks to be pretty small,” said Frank Ackerman, a professor at Tufts University and a senior economist with the Stockholm Environmental Institute, in a recent interview with Green Inc.

He suggested that the 1 percent to 3 percent estimate was akin to one year of foregone economic growth in the United States.

The article:

A group of eight leading climate economists has a message for United States senators now considering a bill to cap emissions: don’t think of long-term mitigation costs as a massive expenditure, but rather a form of reasonably-priced “planetary climate insurance.”

via The Economics of Climate Stabilization – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com.

Wright Brand bacon and its sexy new packaging

Wright and Interbrand have done their part in advancing bacon branding from an art into a science, as they finished a recent multi-stage, two-year bacon marketing project. You have to read some of the impressive marketing-speak stuffed in this press release:

… reposition Wright Brand so it could … become more emotionally relevant to consumers.

Emotionally relevant bacon? I guess that’s not implausible. I do occasionally turn to bacon for comfort when I’ve had a bad day.

… recommended brand position of “More of what you love about bacon”

Bacon is what I love about bacon. Are you selling free bacon?

… the strategic foundation for the updated brand mark and packaging system …

A plastic bag is now referred to as a “packaging system”?

… rooted in understanding and delighting the target market of bacon enthusiasts who love bacon …

I now have another item to add to my list of hobbies on my Facebook profile: “bacon enthusiast.”

via Package Design eSolutions #61, May 29, 2009.

How about we slip some science education reform into the health care reform bill before passing that baby through Congress?

From MediaMatters:

The Truth Is Out There

As health insurance reform makes its way through congress, it’s easy to observe the partisan fighting in Washington and believe the country is deeply divided over a “public option.”

Luckily, that is not the case. Americans love choices. They want the opportunity to choose to purchase a public health insurance plan.

A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that 65% favored a public option, with only 26% opposed to it.

To put that number in perspective: a 2007 Associated Press/Ipsos poll found that 34% of Americans believe in UFOs.

It speaks volumes about the status of the health care debate among the public when it is more mainstream to believe aliens are flying around in spaceships than to oppose the public option.

The people of this country have spoken. It’s time Washington listened.

via More Americans Believe In UFOs Than Oppose A Public Option | Media Matters Action Network.

The answer is 145 miles. In other words, you’re never more than 2 1/2 hours from a Big Mac.

Excerpt:

“For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map. There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer. Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!”

via Infographic of the Day: McDonald’s Heat Wave | Designage | Fast Company.

Congratulations to all the area breweries who took home awards! Flying Dog Brewery came in with 4 medals (3 golds!) and Dogfish Head with 3 medals.

I also have to throw some props out to Pizza Port/Lost Abbey Brewing back in San Diego. They treated me well back there, both with their amazing brews and their delicious pizza. At GABF, they wrangled up 11 awards alone! Nice work.

Delaware breweries

Maryland breweries

Virginia breweries

Pizza Port/Lost Abbey Brewing Co. (San Diego, CA)

via 2009 GABF Winners.

Excerpt:

AFTERMATH

Once the true brews were revealed, the tasters were – as Schultz predicted – surprised and delighted by Starbucks VIA, which was just as good (if not better) than some upscale coffee drinks. Nobody made immediate plans to switch their morning routine, since the idea of instant coffee remained “kind of gross.”

But one taster saw potential: “This is dangerous news for us café junkies,” she joked. “It’s the coffee equivalent of carrying around a needle.”

via Starbucks Instant Coffee: Our Be-All, End-All Taste Test | Popwise | Fast Company.

(And watch for the spelling of words such as “public.”)

The Funniest Protest Signs Of 2009

Then, read this.

Thank you, someecards. Thank you very much.

Why is the Chamber so opposed to our nation taking action to prevent further climate change? According to at least 3 major reports, a green economy will create a net number of new jobs, anywhere from 3 to 30 million, depending on your source.

All these new green businesses are just the kind of company that should find friends in a chamber of commerce. But something tells me the clean tech industry and the Chamber don’t see eye to eye today.

Excerpt:

A new report released today says that if we shift our economy — to a greener, low-carbon economy — we will have more jobs, not fewer.

Earlier this week, Tony Blair (former prime minister of the UK) and the Climate Group reported that if we worked to avoid climate change we’d create 10 million new jobs by 2020 — worldwide. Another recent study by Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council says that such a shift could increase employment in the EU by 2.7 million jobs by 2030.

One more report, released today by the Global Climate Network (an alliance of nine influential think tanks) comes to similar conclusions.

via Green Economy = More Jobs : CleanTechnica.

I respect the right of people to pay for porcupining (acupuncture) or extra-expensive bottled water (homeopathy) out of their own pockets, but I certainly don’t want to pay for this useless treatments out of my taxes.

Hmmm… Unless I can include “microbrew therapy” as an alternative medicine. Now you’re speaking my medical language.

Think Tank Objects to Taxpayer Funding for Therapeutic Touch, other Alternative Medicine Therapies

Health-care reform should prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to cover non-evidence-based medicine, says CFI report

(Washington, D.C.) –The Center for Inquiry’s Office of Public Policy (OPP), a group that lobbies for sound science in government policy, today released a report titled A Fracture in our Health Care: Paying for Non-Evidence Based Medicine. The report is highly critical of an effort underway to amend current health care reform legislation with provisions allowing taxpayer dollars to support unsubstantiated “alternative” medical treatments.

Americans are increasingly turning to various forms of alternative medicine. The Washington Post has reported that 38% of adults in the United States have turned to acupuncturists, holistic chiropractors, herbal and homeopathic healers, and various other forms of non-standard treatments. Now senators Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), and Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), along with support from the ranking member on the Senate health committee Senator Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming), are sponsoring an amendment to the health care reform bill which would support funding for alternative medicine, and also require all insurance companies to cover state-licensed alternative medicine providers, under the guise of prohibiting “discrimination” against such providers.

“Our report seeks to sound some alarm bells: we are coming dangerously close to having lawmakers legitimize quackery by putting the government stamp of approval on these unproven treatments,” said Ronald A. Lindsay, President and CEO of the Center for Inquiry. “We call upon the legislative branch to follow President Obama’s lead and insist that public policy be informed by sound scientific evidence.”

The CFI report focuses specifically on the lack of evidence for therapeutic touch (TT), an example of the kind of non-evidence-based medicine that would be covered under the Harkin amendment. During therapeutic touch, practitioners purport to massage the patient’s “biomagnetic field” with their hands. The report exposes this as nonsense, revealing that the purported magnetic field is far too weak to affect any biochemical processes, and is billions of times less energetic than the energy our eye receives when viewing even the brightest star in the night sky. The report points out that a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that  “Twenty-one experienced TT practitioners were unable to detect the investigators ‘energy field’. Their failure to substantiate TT’s most fundamental claim is unrefuted evidence that the claims of TT are groundless and that further professional use is unjustified.”

“CFI strongly opposes the wasting of taxpayer dollars on this and other non-evidence based medicine,” said Dr. Lindsay.

Dr. Wallace Sampson, a well-known critic of alternative medicine and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, an affiliate of CFI, said “Therapeutic Touch, an example of ‘Distant Healing,’ is a scientific absurdity. This is bold foolishness, elected representatives legislating into policy their own personal delusions. This is abuse of public office; and reason enough for recall or being voted out of office.”

The Center for Inquiry’s specific policy recommendations contained in the report are as follows:

• Government should spend no taxpayer dollars in support of any alleged medical treatments or healing protocols, such as Therapeutic Touch, that have no grounding in experiment or in our understanding of basic scientific fact.
• Any health care reform bill Congress passes should prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to cover non-evidence-based medicine.
• Congress should greatly reduce or eliminate funding for the NIH National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), as a decade of study has shown that most alternative cures work no better than placebos.

“The United States can ill afford to continue wasting precious resources on unproven – and often disproven – medical techniques. (In the process of) reining in the ballooning cost of medical care, every dollar of health care funding is needed to provide tested, proven medical treatment to those who require it.  It is inexcusable to squander scarce resources by funding unsubstantiated, non-evidence-based medical techniques that have no basis in theory or experiment,” states the report.

A Fracture in our Health Care: Paying for Non-Evidence Based Medicine was authored by Eugenie V. Mielczarek, emeritus professor of physics at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA., with assistance from Derek C. Araujo, general counsel of the Center for Inquiry; Adam Magazine, a volunteer attorney for CFI in New York City; and Lori Sommerfelt, a sociology major at American University in Washington, DC.

A downloadable PDF copy of the full report is available online at www.centerforinquiry.net/touch.

I have included below the text from a PDF document attached to an online course, BCH 5045 – Graduate Survey of Biochemistry, at the University of Florida. I assume it was written by the course’s instructor, Dr. Charles Guy.

http://hort.ifas.ufl.edu/teach/guyweb/bch5045/Vampires%20and%20Biochemistry.pdf

Vampires and Biochemistry

Perhaps you are a fan of Twilight the movie or the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, or True Blood the television drama series created and produced by Alan Ball, based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels by Charlaine Harris. Vampires with their frightening appearance and unusual powers and weaknesses can cause one to pause and question how this is possible. Can this mythicalogical being brought to life in Dracula, the 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula, have any basis in reality? Is there any connection to what we know about biological systems that could explain vampirism? I doubt that you would be surprised if I said yes, since this is a biochemistry course website.

Although I am no expert on the vampire mythology or the speculative scientific explanations, there are a few possibilities that others have proposed. Perhaps the most robust explanation is that the vampirism is based on the viral disease rabies (Gomez, 1982; 1992; 1998). The vampire folklore originated in Central Europe in the latter half of the 18th century where injuries caused by rabid dogs and wolves was common (Theodorides 1986). At this time, Eastern Europe was rife with claims of vampire sightings. The 3-dimensional structure of the rabies virus nucleoprotein-RNA complex is shown to the right, and what an incredibly amazing structure it has.

Perhaps the most defining characteristic of a vampire is the biting of its human victim. This affirms the fact that a vampire is a living being, and as such he or she becomes inclined to bite those around them and not only to feed on a victim’s blood, but potentially spread the disease that has already infected them (Theodorides 1998). This is strikingly similar to what can occur when rabies has been transmitted to a person. Disease symptoms include cerebral dysfunction, anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, paranoia and a terror progressing to delirium. Large quantities of saliva and tears are produced, and difficulty swallowing stemming from throat and jaw paralysis causes panic when the person cannot drink or quench his or her thirst. Who hasn’t heard of rabid animals indiscriminately attacking and biting someone?

Dr. David H. Dolphin in a lecture at an AAAS meeting is attributed to have proposed an alternative explanation for the vampire myth that werewolves and vampires may have been based on people suffering from a rare class of genetic diseases known as porphyrias. He suggested that characteristics commonly associated with vampirism such as protruding teeth, avoidance of sunlight, drinking blood, and disfigurement could have been the symptoms of people with a porphyria. Porphyrias are a group of rare genetic diseases that primarily manifest their effects in blood as a result of a defect in the production and synthesis of the heme prosthetic group in hemoglobin (Cox 1995). Symptoms of the disorder porphyria cutanea tarda include disfigurement by light-induced blisters that can cause scarring and skin discoloration. In severe cases, excessive hair growth on the face and hands, gum degeneration, and neurological disorders can occur. Those suffering from a porphyria must avoid the sun and some compounds that can exacerbate the symptoms, including certain metabolites that accumulate in, you guessed it, garlic. Repeated blood transfusions can be required to treat the disease.

Porphyria cutanea tarda results from a dominant mutation in the gene encoding the enzyme urophopyrinogen decarboxylase (Taylor 1998). This enzyme catalyzes the fifth step in the porphyrin biosynthetic pathway that produces precursors for the synthesis of heme-containing molecules. Mutant skin cells accumulate uroporphyrinogen, the enzyme’s immediate precursor. Uroporphyrinogen when illuminated by light will become highly reactive and begin transferring electrons to molecular oxygen. The resulting production and accumulation of reactive oxygen species will cause extensive damage to skin cells and can kill them.

Hampl and Hampl (1997) have suggested that a deficiency of niacin and tryptophan could produce symptoms compatible with being the basis for the vampire myth. Pellagra is a vitamin deficiency disease characterized by lack of niacin (vitamin B3) caused by decreased intake of niacin, tryptophan, or possibly leucine. The protein amino acid tryptophan is a precursor of niacin biosynthesis and niacin is a building block of the nicotinamide coenzymes essential for a host of biochemical processes. People suffering from pellagra are hypersensitive to sunlight. The skin of a pellargrin exposed to sunlight becomes red, scaly and marked by hyperkeratosis. Inflammation and edema can occur and lead to depigmented, shiny skin and/or brown scaly areas. Niacin deficiency will also cause brain degeneration and dementia with symptoms that include insomnia, anxiety, unjustified aggression, and depression. Pica can accompany pellagra. Pica is a craving for substances not usually regarded as food such as ice, clay or other crunchy substances. This odd symptom can be a cause of iron deficiency, or a symptom of an iron deficiency in the person who has become anemic. A pellagrin who happens to become extremely anemic because of gastrointestinal bleeding could give the impression of being ‘the living dead’ (Hampl and Hampl 1997).

So there you have it. There could be a connection between the folklore of vampirism, and clinical symptoms of known diseases, or just as likely perhaps not. We will never know for sure, but this little story briefly illustrates how biochemistry can relate to myths and classical literature and suggest interesting possibilities.

Albertini A.A., Wernimont A.K., Muziol T., Ravelli R.B., Clapier C.R., Schoehn G., Weissenhorn W., Ruigrok R.W. (2006) Crystal structure of the rabies virus nucleoprotein-RNA complex. Science 313, 360-363.

COX A.M. 1995. Porphyria and vampirism: another myth in the making. Postgrad. Med. J. 71: 643–644.

Gomez-Alonso J. 1982.Rabia y vampirismo: hiptjtesis sobre una interpretacion medica del vampirismo. Jano (Barcelona) 514: 30-33.

Gomez-Alonso J. Rabia y Vampirismo en la Europa de los Siglos XVIII y XIX. Tesis Doctoral. Madrid: Facultad de Medicina

Gomez-Alonso, J. 1998. Rabies A possible explanation for the vampire legend. Neurology 51: 856-859

Hampl J.S. and Hampl W.S. 1997. Pellagra and the origin of a myth: evidence from European literature and folklore. J. Royal Soc. Med. 90: 636-639.

Taylor, C.B. 1998. Vampire Plants? Plant Cell. 10: 1071-1073.

Theodorides J. 1986. Histoire de la Rage, Cave Canem, Paris: Masson, 78-9

Theodorides J. 1998. Origin of the myth of vampirism. J. Royal Soc. Med. 91: 114.

I particularly stunned by the cost difference for MRIs in the US versus Japan: greater than an order of magnitude, which is to say, shockingly different.

Excerpts:

Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)

and

U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France’s health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada’s universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.

and

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has “the finest health care” in the world. We don’t. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

via By T.R. Reid — Five Myths About Health Care in the Rest of the World.

In fact, there is some concern that the deluge of antibacterial products sold today may have more negative side-effects than positive. For one, the products may lead to the evolution of bacteria resistant to antibacterial formulations. The use of such products may also increase the frequency of allergies in children because the kids are not exposed adequately to naturally occurring bacteria.

Excerpt:

There are some things it is better just not to think about. Like the 10,000 bacteria you inhale with each breath in the average office building. Or the 10 million bacteria in each glass of tap water. Microbiologists have now added something else to the list of things too gross to contemplate: the deluge of bacteria that hit your face and flow deep into your lungs in the morning shower.

via Bathing, but Not Alone – NYTimes.com.

Excerpt:

I can’t believe I am standing today in a Christian church defending the proposition that we should lessen the suffering of those who cannot afford health care in an economic system that often treats the poor as prey for the rich. I cannot believe there are Christians around this nation who are shouting that message down and waving guns in the air because they don’t want to hear it. But I learned along time ago that churches are strange places; charity is fine, but speaking of justice is heresy in many churches. The late Brazilian bishop Dom Hélder Câmara said it well: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.” Too often today in the United States, if you talk about helping the poor, they call you Christian, but if you actually try to do something to help the poor, they call you a socialist.

via Why Is Universal Health Care ‘Un-American’? | CommonDreams.org.

Excerpt:

The clear message Chu took home from China was that its leaders are dead serious about climate change and clean energy. They won’t accept an emissions cap before we do — understandably, since our per capita emissions are still four times higher — but they’re preparing for a carbon-constrained economy. They already have cars that are more fuel-efficient than ours, and they’re developing more-advanced transmission lines. They’re still building a new coal-fired plant almost every week, but two years ago, they were building two of them every week. They’re making a huge push into wind and solar and should be the world’s largest producer of renewables by 2010. “Every Chinese leader I met was absolutely determined to do something about their carbon emissions,” Chu said. “Some U.S. policymakers still don’t think this is a problem.” (Read “One Voice in a Billion: Changing the Climate in China.”)

In fact, GOP leaders have said that global warming is a hoax, that fears about carbon are “almost comical,” that the earth is actually cooling. When I asked Chu about the earth-is-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past 12 years — and that 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post-1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures: “See? It’s gone down! The earth must be cooling!” But then he got serious, almost plaintive: “You know, it’s totally irresponsible. You’re not supposed to make up the facts.”

Welcome to Washington, where a Nobel Prize winner’s opinion is just another opinion, where facts are malleable and sometimes irrelevant. It’s tough to be Mr. Outside in a town where policy happens on the inside. Congress is blocking Chu’s plan to create eight “Bell lablets” to investigate his game changers, along with his efforts to scuttle hydrogen-car research he considers futile. He’s trying to make DOE’s bureaucracy more nimble, but it still pushed less than 1% of its stimulus funds out the door in five months. And while Chu ends speeches with Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about “the fierce urgency of now” — one of Obama’s favorites — the clean-energy bill is on hold until health care is done. There’s still a broad perception in Washington that dealing with climate change will require sacrifices that Americans won’t tolerate.

The Chinese don’t seem to worry about that. At one point, Chu acknowledged that democracy makes change a lot tougher, although he hastened to add that he’s a big fan of democracy. “We just have to do a better job communicating the facts so the electorate can educate themselves,” he said. Soon he sounded like he was talking to himself again: “Let’s be positive. The facts really do matter to the American people.”

via Steven Chu, A Political Scientist — Printout — TIME.

This should be good news for those bemoaning the decline of the industrial manufacturing segment of the American economy. We can replace the forging of automobiles with the forging of controversy by the media.

If the media can whip up a storm this quickly 0ver a pair of shorts, then one finds some insight into how much of this health care debate, and the oft-covered clashing between progressives and conservatives, might be just a illusory flame fanned by news outlets.

After all, how much of health reform coverage is about issues and how much is about “death panel” sound bites? Yes, an ill-minded politician must first utter those drivel words, but after they leave his or her mouth, they are born into a life of their own via the resuscitative breath of the news. I’d rather the phrase were never spoken at all, but avoiding the over-exposure of such distracting and worthless issues would be a worthy consolation.

Next story: Justice Sotomayor photographed on vacation not wearing her judge’s robe!

(See poignant story below from Newsweek about the “news” of Michelle’s shorts.)

Who, Exactly, Is Outraged At Michelle Obama’s Shorts?

Kate Dailey

(Dana Felthauser/AP)

Michelle Obama wore shorts to visit the Grand Canyon. Have you heard? Everyone is up in arms—if by “everyone” you mean no one, or rather a large, shadow-y group of no ones.

According to the Today show, “some” are calling her fashion choice inappropriate—but the article quotes only those who support the look or, in the case of Washington Post fashion writer Robin Gihven, those who are “ambivalent” about bare legs for an August hiking trip in Arizona.

The Examiner declares Obama beautiful, then bemoans the fact that “some members of the media and the public” are upset. Who are those members of the media and the public? We don’t know—the article then goes on to endorse Obama and rebuke the nameless attackers. Even in the comments, readers overwhelmingly approved of Obama’s choices, save for the few spare trolls that will always criticize a photographed celeb (the shorts are unflattering, etc). My experience from reading the NEWSWEEK comments shows that if there’s something negative to be said about the administration, an anonymous reader will usually say it, often in several consecutive posts. If the comments are mostly positive, then there probably isn’t much of a controversy.

Continue reading at:

The Human Condition : Who, Exactly, Is Outraged At Michelle Obama’s Shorts?.

From the New York Times:

The Swiss Menace

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: August 16, 2009

It was the blooper heard round the world. In an editorial denouncing Democratic health reform plans, Investor’s Business Daily tried to frighten its readers by declaring that in Britain, where the government runs health care, the handicapped physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance,” because the National Health Service would consider his life “essentially worthless.”

Professor Hawking, who was born in Britain, has lived there all his life, and has been well cared for by the National Health Service, was not amused.

Besides being vile and stupid, however, the editorial was beside the point. Investor’s Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain — or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain. The screamers on talk radio and Fox News would have you believe that the plan is to turn America into the Soviet Union. But the truth is that the plans on the table would, roughly speaking, turn America into Switzerland — which may be occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters, but wasn’t a socialist hellhole the last time I looked.

… continue reading here: Op-Ed Columnist – The Swiss Menace – NYTimes.com.

It is important to also look at the concept of healthcare “rationing” from a global perspective.

Healthcare Rationing: What Price Is A Life?

Was Dick Cheney’s quadruple bypass surgery worth the money?

In the United States healthcare reform is policy wonk talk for changing up the way Americans ration health. Conservatives criticize change in the healthcare status quo as “rationing”. Liberals blithely promise reform will not include “rationing”. Both are fibbing.

Rationing healthcare is what health systems do. No scheme, no government, no insurer, no individual (save perhaps the über-rich) has unlimited money to buy all the healthcare everyone wants.

In America, we ration healthcare by place of employment. If you have a steady job with a large employer, you probably have decent health insurance. If you are self-employed, maybe not.

Vice President Dick Cheney suffered four heart attacks beginning at age 37. Thanks to American socialized medicine for elected officials, Cheney has been cared for at the very best taxpayer-subsidized hospitals. His is a life worth saving.

If Cheney were a poor, young, Latina private housekeeper, most likely he would not have had health insurance when he needed it. And, it is damn certain he would not have gotten any preventive checkups in, no doubt, a “secure, undisclosed location”.

If Mr. Cheney were born in the developing world, he might well have died in infancy. Dr. Donald R. Hopkins, Vice President, The Carter Center, writes, “Children born in most advanced industrialized countries…experience infant mortality rates of 10 per 1,000 live births…and can expect to live an average of more than 70 years. Children born in developing countries…face infant mortality rates of 150 or higher (with) a life expectancy of 50 years or less.”

The cure for measles, a highly contagious disease, has been in use for over 30 years. As a result, measles has been wiped out in the developing world. In poorer countries, measles still infects 30 million people annually, mostly kids.

Would you deny the Vice President, a former heavy smoker, his quadruple bypass surgery (estimated cost: $45,000.00) to pay for inoculating 180,000 children against measles (estimated cost: 25 cents per child)? That is reality of global healthcare rationing.

900,000 poor children are annually sentenced to death because measles inoculations are unavailable (rationed?). Would you spend a quarter to save a child’s life?

via Healthcare Rationing: What Price Is A Life? — Social Edge.

Plastic reshaping wine trade — latimes.com.

1 c sugar
3 1/2 T corn starch
2 T white corn syrup
1 c water
1 pinch salt
3 T peach Jello (1/2 package)
Peaches (peeled, sliced, enough to fill the crust)

Add all ingredients except Jello mix and peaches to a saucepan and boil until clear. Remove from heat and add Jello. Stir. Let filling cool a bit at room temperature.

Pour over peaches in pie crust. Cool pie in refrigerator to sit. Top with whipped cream.

Easy no-rolling-pin crust:

1 1/2 flour
2 T powdered sugar (or granulated in a pinch)
1/2 t salt
1/2 c oil
2 T milk

Mix all ingredients and press into pie pan. Bake at 325 for 30 minutes.

Obama at Newton, Iowa factory

Obama used the town of Newton, Iowa and the Trinity Structural Towers factory there as an example of the potential for clean energy businesses to replace jobs lost in mature manufacturing industries. The Maytag appliance factory in Newton — now inhabited by Trinity with 90 employees — once employed 4,000 people before closing entirely as manufacturing shifted overseas.

This is only one example, but it does illustrate the gap between America’s past manufacturing heyday and the size of today’s clean energy industry, even considering the potential growth of the latter. We certainly need these new jobs in order to replace those recently lost, particularly in the auto industry. But how do we encourage the manufacturing of these new clean energy innovations to occur in the US rather than overseas? Will clean energy companies make their global operations decisions any differently than hundreds of other industries already have, shifting production to low-cost countries like China?

I hope so. This is not only an employment issue but a national security issue. We need control of local clean energy resources to replace our dependence on petroleum from the Middle East.

I am excited to hear that a cap-and-trade program might finally emerge in the US. As I’ve written before, until carbon emissions impose a cost on emitters commensurate with the impact of the emissions on the climate, none of our ambitious goals to cut energy consumption and increase renewable energy usage will be feasible.

Obama’s speech barely addressed the piece of the clean energy economy that will have the greatest impact on the state of Iowa — biofuels. Iowa already produces large amounts of corn-based ethanol, but most agree that ethanol derived from food crops is not a long-term solution. Moving forward, advanced liquid biofuels will be essential to reduce petroleum consumption, as many applications, particularly diesel engines, cannot typically not be replaced with batteries and electric motors. Future biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol, will grow into a huge section of the agricultural economy, and agriculture is certainly Iowa’s backbone.

I look forward to watching these initiatives move forward. Let’s see what Congress does next.

Flag of America, United States of

The renaming is intended to quickly move the position of the United States to 4th on the alphabetized list of countries, behind only Afghanistan, Albania, and Algeria, from its previous position of 186th out of about 195. This new positioning promises dramatic reductions in list scrolling when AUS citizens complete the country field on internet address forms.

President Obama said of the change, “The United States has always been the number one country in our hearts. Now it is a bit closer to number one on the internet, too. No longer will you, your children, or your children’s children, face the wasteful and frustrating burden of scanning a long list of countries when ‘America, United States of’ is right near the top. Can we save our fingers and our mouse scroll wheels from penalizing, unending wear and tear? Yes we can.”

Economists estimate that the change will shorten the average form-filling process by 0.4 seconds. Extrapolated over the AUS population, this change will save approximately 7 million hours of form-filling per year and reduce energy usage by 560,000 kWh per year.

The change goes into effect today, April 1st, 2009, also known as April Fool’s Day.

This particular talk is by Jan Chipchase, principal researcher at Nokia, and is titled, Our Cell Phones, Ourselves. He’s got a pretty sweet gig. He travels around the world, observing people and their use of mobile phones, amongst other individual and social behaviors.

I always find it valuable to be reminded that adoption of a given technology globally does not necessarily occur fit the same pattern as in developed nations, much less the US.

For example, listen to the story about African makeshift “banking” via mobile phones. Would we call sending money in this manner a “wireless transfer”?

Plus, they have some awesome new artwork for their 75 Minute IPA bottle label:

Dogfish Head 75 Minute IPA label

What’s a chumby? The quick answer is this: chumby is many things, and the list never stops growing.

We last wrote about chumby in April 2008, when they raised $12.5 million in a Series B round in order to “accelerate growth of the company, and expand and broaden the Chumby Network to other screen-based Internet connected devices such as LCD TVs and digital photo frames.”

Well, it looks like they are accomplishing their goal.

Chumby Industries, Inc. recently announced a new partnership with Broadcom to integrate the chumby network into devices, such as internet-connected TVs, set-top boxes, and Blu-ray players, featuring Broadcom’s chipsets.

Chumbys of all shapes and sizes

So, that means chumby is:

• chumby, a huggable, Wi-Fi-connected clock/radio/widget-playing device
• the chumby network, freely providing over 1,000 widgets in more than 30 categories, such as weather, social networks, photos, sports, news, entertainment, videos and more
• chumby-enabled, internet-connected digital photo frames
• chumby-enabled portable media players and portable TVs
• now, chumby-enabled, internet-connected TVs, set-top boxes, and Blu-ray players
• … and surely more to come

Video: Sneak peak of upcoming chumby integrations

What do all these different manifestations have in common? Answer: an open source, Linux-based platform and a cloud-based content network. The open source platform runs on a local device, chumby industries hosts the widgets, and the ‘net connects it all.

Not only does the chumby network provide live information to devices, but a user’s widgets are synchronized across various devices, providing a coherent experience from one screen to another. Many chumby widgets are social-enabled, allowing for sharing of content, photos, video clips, games or messages with friends who own a chumby-powered device.

Chumby Change

The chumby device. (Credit: chumby industries)

If the chumby network is free for users, then where is chumby making money? Selling chumby devices?

No, the iconic, padded chumby, currently selling for $200, is reportedly priced at a break-even point. (If you’d like to learn more about the manufacture of chumbys, and back-stories on Chinese society, read eye-opening accounts about setting up production in China from Andrew “bunnie” Huang, chumby’s VP of Hardware Engineering here.)

Instead, chumby aims to profit from the chumby content network, including:

• Sponsored advertisements, both interstitial (yes, they’re skippable) and embedded (like “this widget brought to you by Coca-Cola”)
• Service fees for subscription content
• Referral fees (pointing users to media, stores, products, etc)
• Payment fees (taking a cut from purchases)

Video: Preview of chumby on Broadcom-powered TV

What’s Next?

There’s no doubt that content previously confined to the internet is moving (finally) to other screens, particular TVs, but Chumby is facing serious competition for those eyeballs. It’s like there’s a piñata full of eyeballs, and chumby + Broadcom, Yahoo! + Intel, Sigma, Sony, and, without a doubt, Google and Microsoft, are all swinging sticks wildly in an attempt to crack that donkey open.

The battle has begun. But can chumby carry enough a big enough stick to the fight? They’ve made important partnerships and progress to date, but as they shift their focus away from their iconic chumby device (aka “iPod touch knocks up a hacky sack and has a baby”), can their brand compete with the mighty Yahoo!?

Chumby is the nimble lightweight in this fight. It’s small, nimble, and quick, and it can use its smaller size to take advantage of deals that companies like Yahoo! can’t afford because of it’s required rate of return.

It’s still early in this sage of convergence, probably just midway through Round 1, so sit back and enjoy the show.

In February of 2008, six guys in San Diego decided to fundamentally change the software community for the better.

You need only read the first sentence of OpenCandy‘s About us page to learn a telling amount about the new company: one, they carry a grand vision for the impact their product will have on the software business, and two, there are a lot of dudes at this place.

Let’s tackle the latter characteristic first.

Who are all these guys?

Well, they’re ex-DivX employees, particular those who were building Stage6, a high-quality internet video sharing service that never escaped the gravitational pull of beta, despite its popularity.

What’s their grand vision?

Simply put, their goal is to improve the distribution and monetization of downloaded consumer software. They aim to do this by helping increase software distribution volumes, by monetizing this distribution through referrals, by providing marketing data to software creators, and by helping consumers find relevant applications. To fund their pursuit of this goal, they’ve raised $3.5 million in Series A funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and angel investors including Reid Hoffman (Chairman of LinkedIn, Board of Mozilla), and Jordan Greenhall (Former CEO and Co-Founder of DivX).

How’s this work?

The OpenCandy plug-in is bundled with an existing software installer. Let’s call this software Orange. While Orange is being installed, OpenCandy recommends to the user another application that is, in theory, relevant to the user. Let’s call this recommended software Banana.

Banana is picked from a fruit basket pool of applications chosen by the publishers of Orange. Orange Co. can hand-pick free recommendations (no charge to Banana for being recommended), can allow OpenCandy to select paid referrals (a “bounty” is paid to Orange if the user installs Banana), or a mix of the two.

The user can then choose to opt-in and install Banana. I emphasize opt-in because the recommended software will not be installed by default, an important distinction from annoying installers like RealPlayer that try to stick the user with 20 extra programs.

Another important note is that the Banana software is not included with the Orange installer, so the size of the installer is not noticeably increased (only by the negligible size the OpenCandy).

In fact, it is not determined what software will be recommended until the Orange installer runs. When it does run, OpenCandy scans the user’s registry for installed programs, operating system details, and chosen language. This information is sent to the OpenCandy servers where some magic happens (including consideration of which recommendations are converting best), and then a personalized recommendation is sent back to the installer in response.

For example, if a user has several already developer tools installed, OpenCandy might recommend Notepad++, a popular text editor. If a user is installing Miro, an open source video player, OpenCandy might recommend Audacity, an open source audio editor.

(If this process threatens your sense of privacy, then you’re not alone. Several blog comments have echoed this sentiment, so OpenCandy’s CEO, Darrius Thompson, answered some of the frequently asked privacy questions here.)

If the user opts to install Banana, or whatever juicy personalized software is recommended that day, OpenCandy will download the necessary installer and handle the installation process. Opting in will not interrupt the in-progress Orange installation.

You can see screenshots of the process here.

Let’s talk money

OpenCandy is aiming to charge between $1 and $2 each time an application is installed through a recommendation. It then splits these revenues with the publishers of the original software.

The OpenCandy team learned a lot about sponsored recommendations at DivX, where the company was reportedly raking in around $20 million annually for bundling software like the Yahoo! Toolbar with the DivX player.

Trick or treat

So, what’s it going to take for OpenCandy to find success and change the software world?

Fundamentally, there needs to exist a strong, profitable market for downloadable consumer software, because OpenCandy’s business is built upon that ecosystem. Downl

Thomson Reuters has partnered with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society to launch the Media Cloud, a set of research tools for tracking online media coverage.

The joint effort is meant to bring some clarity to the vast tangle of news and information on the Web, attempting to answer questions about what types of stories are covered by which media sources, where stories begin, and how blogosphere coverage compares to that of the mainstream media.

The open-source project will debut in the second quarter of 2009.

On the Media Cloud site, the team asked the question, “What Are Your Research Ideas?“.

I’m interested to see the full capabilities of this system when it launches later this year. I’m sure it will reveal some interesting truths about the nature of news network effects. It might also assist in media research projects such as those on media bias. But one question came to mind that I couldn’t shake, so I left this comment on the post:

I’m wondering if Media Cloud will be able to analyze not only information in and around a news story, but statistics on the people who READ a story, pass it on, etc. It seems that in today’s world of immediate global communication, these figures are necessary to draw important conclusions about the relative influence of different news outlets. Do you have any ideas for obtaining or estimating the number of people who read about a given topic for each source covering it? Data such as unique visitors to a page and "send to a friend" emails is typically confidential.

A database of news stories, content analysis, trackbacks, citations, and more, can tell a lot about the distribution and nature of news coverage. But it doesn’t answer the question, “What news source is most influential?“

It seems to me more information is required to answer this question. For example, in studies of the influence of Fox News’ conservative bias, researchers measured the change in voting patterns by households who gained access to Fox News versus those households who did not have access to the channel (the control group).

Nonetheless, Media Cloud sounds like an intriguing research project, and I’m happy to hear that the software will be open-sourced and available to the world for study and collaborative improvement.

PSFK recently posted (via Edible Brooklyn) about a nascent young farmers movement and its emerging name, Greenhorns.

Growing up in Iowa, I was surrounded by farming most of my life. At the same time, I was not raised in a farming family myself. So, my knowledge and understanding of the modern farming lifestyle falls somewhere in the middle between a concrete-imprisoned New Yorker and a dirt-under-the-nails Iowan farmer.

I haven’t seen The Greenhorns documentary yet, but I have already sensed the critical factor that will determine the success of this movement.

Will small farms, selling their products locally to the surrounding community, be hip enough to be sustainable?

Farming is hard work. The only guarantee is uncertainty. What will the weather be this year? Too wet to plant? Too dry to grow?

Future young farmers won’t be drawing to the profession by promises of fame or fortune. So what will they receive?

They will need to feel respected. They will need to feel valued. They will need to feel like others care.They will need to feel hip.

Besides, consumption of local produce is up against some innate obstacles today. It often costs more and/or requires more effort to obtain local produce than it does to jot down to the cheap mega-super-hyper-big-box grocery mart. Plus, eating locally leads to inevitable sacrifices. Can one ever buy a local orange in Iowa? Can a local banana be bought anywhere in the US?

Assuming that one’s decision to eat locally is voluntary, not mandated by, say, extreme carbon taxes, a serious change in behavior is required. This won’t be easy.

The Spendid Table radio show organized a group of people whom spent one year eating locally called the Locavore Nation. Such a task isn’t easy – it requires serious commitment and a drastic change of lifestyle just to find dinner on short notice. Imagine driving down the interstate at 11pm. McDonalds, Wendy’s, Subway, 7-Eleven, In-N-Out. Where’s the local food? Sorry, you’re eating long-distance or you’re going hungry tonight.

Unless you’re into foraging for edible greens in the median.

[via PSFK]

Would you consider the research and development Microsoft is doing on the social networking aspects of email communication to be innovative?

My answer: Yes. Just from this short video I can tell Microsoft is one of the leaders in terms of investment in the way established communications methods, such as email, can be mined for increased usability, efficiency, and added value.

Why isn’t Microsoft recognized for innovation to the degree that they are, in reality, actually innovating?

My answer: Because they hide this stuff inside their monstrous corporation and don’t release it for the world to play with!

I have been reading about innovative enterprise collaboration research from Microsoft for years, but it seems that very little of these products actually get released into the wild. Microsoft is still stuck in its old behavior pattern of keeping products locked up internally and working to incorporate every desired feature before releasing the product to the public. 

That worked with operating systems (except maybe Vista, the scourge of my computing life) and office suites because they were used primarily by individuals perform siloed tasks.

Collaboration and communication software, on the other hand, is used to perform work across groups of people and the tool’s efficacy is largely determined by how well it integrates into human social behavior patterns.

Microsoft needs to kick these in-development projects out of the next and see if they can fly in the real world.

Microsoft needs to leverage the desire of its users to collaboratively participate in the development of their own solutions, collecting feedback from users and incorporating this voice of the customer into the next revision.

Take the lid off, Microsoft, and let us see what you’re cookin’! 

Social Views of Email on the Desktop | Chris Pirillo.

UPDATE: This post pokes a bit of fun at Nokia. I do this for the sake of humor, not because I dislike Nokia or its products. They’re making some great devices, and as they roll out more CDMA phones in the future, I wish them the best of luck. Plus, I’m on Verizon and I would love to have a smartphone option besides a Blackberry!

I’m adding a conclusion to the top of this article to ensure you get something “useful” from reading. Then you can continue reading the rest of the post and just have fun!

Conclusion

Much of the focus of innovation in the mobile industry is around user experience and interaction, which is great news for us users. From mobile gaming experiences to social networking to web browsing to usability to voice recognition to location-based services to music and multimedia innovation, companies like Nokia are focusing on making their devices more capable, more versatile, and easier to use. Mobile startups will be excited to hear that the global corporations are open to accepting “not invented here” technologies and integrating them into their products.

Example of a sexy cell phone. This is the kind of outfit your phone should wear to high-tech speed dating.

The Rest of the Story

San Diego’s CommNexus periodically hosts the business equivalent of speed dating sessions with mobile companies.

In the words of CommNexus:

“MarketLink a.k.a. High-Tech Speed Dating:

MarketLink is a FREE program that pairs local companies with multinational corporations hoping to identify and license new technologies. MarketLink brings parties of mutual interest together by orchestrating an event that will offer selected companies the opportunity to present to technology executives from visiting corporations in a personalized 1-on-1 session.”

These events are intended to match the innovation needs of the global corporations with the innovation strengths of the small companies and startups that otherwise might be ignored or by their larger, more popular peers. (Like a standard Hollywood depiction of high school, the jock/quarterback spends an entire semester sitting next to his one true love in chemistry class, but doesn’t realize she exists until she takes off her glasses and lets down her hair for prom.)

I recently received notice of an upcoming “High-Tech Speed Dating” session with Nokia. (According to the email, Nokia had 37% of the global device market share in Q4 2008, which is all the more remarkable considering they haven’t sold a device in the US since candy-bar phones in the ’90s.*) The list of prospective technologies, titled provides useful and concrete insight into the R&D focus of the mobile industry today. Here’s Nokia’s list with my comments in red:

What Nokia is Looking For:

Nokia is interested in engaging and partnering with firms that have next-generation or disruptive technologies in the following areas:

Social Networking

– Looking to combine the best characteristics of Twitter and 12Seconds with their new microblogging service, 12Characters. The most common message sent is, ironically, “12Characters”. (Go ahead and count.)

Mobile Internet and Browsing

– Researching nanotechnology advances such as nanotubes, because the internet is a series of tubes, and the smaller the tubes, the more internets you can fit in a phone.

Multimedia (Future Innovations)

– Not just plain multimedia, but future innovations multimedia, like special episodes of Lost made just for mobiles. They’re like the TV series, but edited down to only scenes where the plot is advanced. They’re 15 seconds long and come out once every two weeks. (Can you tell I’m a frustrated Lost fan?)

Music (Future Innovations)

– Not just plain music, but future innovations music, like when guitars have been replaced UFO Flutes (blowing into an alien’s ear while covering combinations of his 8 nostrils to produce different pitches)

Email and Messaging Solutions

– Nokia is rushing to roll out integrated email in its phones before anyone else thinks of it. It’s considering naming the phone the Belatedberry.

Location Based Services and Applications

– They’re calling their location-based service the “System To Always Locate & Know Everyone’s Region” (or STALKER)

Audio / Voice Quality

– Why do you keep asking me, “Can you beer me now?” I wouldn’t be talking to you on a cell phone if you were close enough to hand you a beer.

Voice Recognition

– Until I can whisper sweet little nothings into my phone and it replies with confidence-building compliments about my wonderful personality and dazzling good looks, voice recognition has room for improvement.

High Speed Connectivity and Side Loading

– Nokia is turning up high speed internet to the max. They’re skipping from 3g up to 11g.

Enhanced Usability

– I think these “enhancements” are related to the implanting of silicone cases to make the phone owner’s pocket bulge bigger.

User Interface

– We need something to compete with the iPhone

Touch UI Innovations and Performance

– We really, really, really frickin’ want to beat the iPhone!

Antenna Technologies

– I hope they’re not bringing external antennas back, they haven’t been gone long enough to be retro yet

Sensors

– The accelerometer senses when the phone user consumes too many shots and falls of his barstool, automatically playing “Another One Bites the Dust” in response

Battery Technologies and Power Management

– Some day in the future, Nokia cell phone batteries will be so powerful that when you plug your phone into your hybrid’s lighter jack, the phone charges the car

Video / Photo Editing for Mobile Environment

– Because navigating a timeline of hundreds of clips, transitions, titles, and effects is so much fun on a 24″ monitor, why wouldn’t you want to do it on your 3″ phone screen while waiting in line at the grocery store?

Gaming Experience Enhancements for Mobiles

– You’ve already heard of iPhone apps where the accelerometer is used for hitting an imaginary golf ball or where shaking the phone finds a restaurant. Nokia is combining an accelerometer with a blood alcohol content (BAC) sensor near the microphone for its new game “The Drunken Stumbler.” You score points based on the combination of high BAC + low stumbling + # of dials to ex’s.

Mobile OS

– Rumor is a San Diego biotech firm is doing genetic engineering to crossbreed the iPhone OS, Android, and the Palm Pre OS into some sort of super-mobile OS. Only time will tell how many extra camera eyes it will have.

* I didn’t actually research this fact. I just don’t see Nokia phones around.

Here are some enjoyable hipster critiques:

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization from Adbusters (apparently quite a popular site for hipsters, ironically)

MasterCard Commercial

Hipster Olympics

POYKPAC Sports presents the Hipster Olympics, live from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Inspired by Monty Python’s classic sketch “Upperclass Twit of the Year”.

Some via: LaughingSquid

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BUGbase with keyboard and display modules

No, this is about the BUG do-it-yourself gadget from BUG Labs.

From their site:

BUG is a collection of easy-to-use electronic modules that snap together to build any gadget you can imagine. Each BUGmodule represents a specific gadget function (ex: a camera, a keyboard, a video output, etc.). You decide which functions to include and BUG takes care of the rest, letting you try out different combinations quickly and easily. With BUG and the integrated programming environment/online community (BUGnet), anyone can build, program and share innovative devices and applications. We don’t define the final products – you do.

BUG debuted around CES 2008, and this year, at CES 2009, they announced five new BUGmodules. The BUGprojector sounds awesome, enabling the projection of a 480×320 screen (using DLP® Pico™ technology from Texas Instruments) anywhere. Another new module is BUG3g GSM, adding phone functionality and SIM card input. So, you can basically build your own custom phone with off-the-shelf hardware.

The BUGbase is an ARM-based computer running a Linux kernel and all the software is open-source. I know what you’re thinking… “An open-source, Linux-based phone. Are we talking about Android here?”

No, this is separate from Android, although there has been talk on the BUG boards about modding Android and running it on the BUGbase. But there is definitely some crossover in possible applications and customizability with important implications for the BUG Labs team and the future of their product.

Now that developers can buy an Android Dev Phone (or use a normal T-Mobile G1), many of the hobbyist applications that might have been created on the BUG can be built on Android instead. The G1 has many of the same features out-of-the-box that BUG provides in BUGmodules, including: touchscreen, keyboard, accelerometer, camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, microphone, and speaker. Of course, the G1 doesn’t have a video projector yet, but the aforementioned features cover the most common use-cases for a handheld gadget.

The BUG product initially struck me as a great toolkit for college students studying computer and electrical engineering and computer science, or even mechanical engineering. The platform is entirely open and documented, including the electrical and mechanical CAD files. As someone who studied engineering, I can say that the BUG sounds like a more exciting project than the usual programmable rolling robots I played with in school. All those robots could do is run into walls.

With the BUG, I can build a gadget that hangs around my neck, detects when I’m walking, pulls my GPS location, and searches the internet (via Wi-Fi or 3G) for nearby ice cream shops. (This search behavior is based on the following logic: if I’m moving, I’m burning calories, so I’m probably hungry, so I definitely want some ice cream.)

But with Android and the G1, we can do the same thing (at least in theory), and the phone is smaller and cheaper than a BUGbase with all the necessary modules. Plus, if I write this application and other people like it, too, I can share it with thousands, or millions, of other Android users. The Android userbase is undoubtedly many times larger than the BUG community.

It seems that BUG is up against some serious obstacles, so what do they do to carve out their own niche?

I love ideas like this that encourage creativity, play, and learning, so I hope that the BUG is successful. Here’s a few stratey suggestions:

Evolve the BUG developer environment to a point where someone like me, a non-programmer, can handle creating simple applications. At that point, the device will be accessible to kids and can serve as a enriching learning environment. This puts BUG in the neighborhood of toys like LEGO Mindstorm. Android is focused for use by professional programmers, so BUG won’t have the competition in this market segment.

Create lower-cost components. This corresponds with the above recommendation. If there were a BUGbase with a reduced feature set and a lower cost, it could be used by children and by schools.

Focus on gadget applications not served by Android and smartphones. As a generalized and versatile platform, the BUG won’t be able to compete directly against devices designed to be phones and mobile internet browsers. So, focus on the capabilities that the Android and G1 can’t touch. This includes applications using the projector module and… well, I’m not sure what else. But I’ll keep my eyes open for cool ideas and add them when I find them.

That’s all for now. Do you have any more ideas? How does the BUG stand out against Android as a platform for gadget experimentation?

“Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 53 percent of American adults play video games of some kind”

are just the kind of figures that lead to ridiculous venture capital funding mistakes. The number doesn’t tell me anything about how often they play (once a day or once a year), what is considered a video game (WoW or Brickbreaker), and whether the games are purchased or free.

An attractive statistic does not a functional business model make.

Posted by: Chris Zach | Dec 14, 2008 1:33:51 PM

via In-Game Advertising Starts To Drift | Epicenter from Wired.com.

It's all a big social media circle

It all started when I decided to apply for the position of Founder’s Associate at Twitter. Rather than a standard cover letter, I submitted a strategic analysis outlining Twitter’s current competitive state and its options to win the microblogging battle and larger social communications war. The primary tools used were scenario planning and Porter’s 5 Forces.

I then presented this analysis in a session at BarCampSD (San Diego) on November 12, 2008 to an audience with great interaction and sharing of thoughts.

Fast forward to the present. I have been a bit off the grid the last couple weeks while traveling home for Thanksgiving and working on the family business. So, just yesterday I read the news that Facebook had, so far, unsuccessfully negotiated an acquisition of Twitter.

About time. Their partnership was my first recommendation in the strategy presentation.

In my mind, at least an attempt by Facebook to acquire Twitter was inevitable for these fundamental reasons:

It’s a mutually beneficial relationship

Twitter gets a business model, as tweets are displayed amongst advertisements in users’ feeds.

Facebook buys Twitter’s large, existing userbase and brand recognition rather than battling Twitter head-on with a modified status feature.

They need each other

Twitter has, by far, the largest userbase of all microblogging services. But yet its size pales in comparison to the number of people using Facebook. It’s hard to imagine another way Twitter could scale its userbase so quickly.

Facebook is missing out on all the conversations that occur outside its walls on Twitter. It would be beneficial for Facebook user frequency and volume to have Twitter conversations integrated with profiles, the Facebook platform, and the rest of the user’s social graph.

I called this scenario “Slap in the Facebook World”, describing a situation where Twitter must either partner with Facebook or watch as Facebook builds a Twitter clone and leverages its size to bully Twitter out of the ring.

Other scenarios included in the presentation:

• “Twitter in the Cloud Behind the Curtain” — Twitter as a service provider, with revenue coming from premium API access
• “Microblogging the Microsoft Way” — The microblogging platform with the largest corporate userbase wins the consumer game
• “Open Sesame” — Open standards and open source win (e.g. Laconica) and no company makes significant revenues directly from the product

If you’d like to check out the strategy presentation, I’ve embedded it below.

Disclaimer: I made this presentation quickly and for the purpose of sharing indirectly, not for delivering a speech. Therefore, I don’t advise following my example in such text-heavy slides and lack of graphics. You will put your audience to sleep!

CNN is firing science correspondent Miles O'Brien

But seriously, the root of the problem is that science news does not sell like kidnapped babies news, celebrity news, or holy-crap-the-economy-is-melting news. Journalism is a for-profit business, not a for-the-good-of-the-people business.

I wonder if there is any (scientific) link between a country’s interest in science news and its performance in science and math education?

We often hear how poorly the US performs in science and math education. Is this soft education for youngsters responsible for producing science-illiterate adults? Or is the general distribution of news coverage quite similar across the world, regardless of the prowess of a country’s science education?

I would love to hear more on this, so comment if you have any ideas.

(For a concise summary of Detroits economic woes over the last few decades and through the recent loan requests, read here.)

The government has two fundamentally different questions on its hands in making these loan decisions.

Car Company CEOs at Bailout Hearing

For the Big (and shrinking) Three, the question is,

“Should the government bail out an industry that, regardless of the current recession, is responsible for driving itself to the brink of bankruptcy because of poor strategic decisions in product offering and labor management?”

For Tesla, the question is,

“Should the government bail out a high-tech startup that perhaps overreached in its goals for reinventing the automobile power system?”

Tesla Roadster

While all the companies concerned are “US automobile manufacturers”, the two questions are drastically different in reasoning.

Many have argued that bankruptcy is just the medicine Detroit needs to cure its financial woes. Others feel the painful restructuring process will do more damage to the local and national economies and related industries than is worth suffering, including the auto executives requesting the assistance.

I think the correct response lies somewhere in between. Now that the government has significant leverage over the auto companies, let’s use this bargaining position to our advantage. The EPA has always butted heads with auto industry lobbyists over fuel economy standards. Now the government can write the standards on its own terms. For example, we could model new standards after those in Europe with regulated CO2 emissions.

I’d like to avoid bankruptcies, if only for consumer psychological reasons. Consumers will avoid purchasing cars from bankrupt companies, and this will only exacerbate market share losses to foreign competitors.

But if Congress needs to send Detroit back home a couple more times (driving in their hybrids!) until they return with appropriately detailed and significant plans for their use of the loans, so be it.

Tesla is in a separate universe from the established companies. With its small size, it does not have the gravity in the national economy and its failure won’t send the US plummeting into an economic black hole.

On the other hand, its lofty vision of selling all-electric autos is a force far beyond its fleet size. While the sale of a few hundred Tesla roadsters will not make a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions, the same bunch of battery-powered cars will exert undeniable pressure on the Big Three to respond with similar offerings.

Sure, Tesla’s only product costs $100,000 and is far out-of-reach for most Americans. But consumers will look at that vehicle and then walk into a Ford, GM, or Chrysler dealership and ask for the same thing at a third of the price. They’ll figure that with the R&D capabilities and scale of a major auto manufacturer, a plug-in auto at a reasonable price should be feasible.

Let’s face it. History shows that American auto companies lack the foresight to take longer-term, strategic factors (like the inevitable rise in cost of oil) into consideration when they do research and design vehicles. So, if they don’t possess the internal initiative to develop cleaner vehicles, then maybe Tesla is just the thorn in their sides we need.

Is it worth $400 million in loans to keep Tesla in place as a carrot to lead Detroit?

I think that is some produce that will really produce.

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)

But this post isn’t about that kind of automobile noise. This is about the noise emanating from Detroit in regards to the future of our nation’s decimated auto industry and how we — yes we, the people and our government — will be responsible for keeping the industry afloat.

Thomas Friedman opened an article in the New York Times, called “How to Fix a Flat”, on the subject with this:

Last September, I was in a hotel room watching CNBC early one morning. They were interviewing Bob Nardelli, the C.E.O. of Chrysler, and he was explaining why the auto industry, at that time, needed $25 billion in loan guarantees. It wasn’t a bailout, he said. It was a way to enable the car companies to retool for innovation. I could not help but shout back at the TV screen: “We have to subsidize Detroit so that it will innovate? What business were you people in other than innovation?” If we give you another $25 billion, will you also do accounting?

As usual, Friedman’s ideas were thought-provoking. He received 594 comments on the article before commenting was closed.

Friedman paints a picture where auto executives steered their companies away from any long-term competitiveness toward short-term fixes and Michigan’s legislators shielded the industry from the regulation that would have forced it to compete globally.

And now the industry just isn’t asking for votes in its favor it’s asking for billions in financial support. See the industry’s latest innovation below in a comic by Signe Wilkinson.

Detroit's Latest Plug-In Design

Or Nick Anderson’s comic take:

Catch Detroit

I think it is the gift of a truly talented cartoonist to create comics like these, images that make the viewer laugh out of one side of his mouth while he winces with the other. These comics are painfully entertaining.

Friedman unfortunately chose to close the essay with a tired cliche: that all the auto industries need for redemption is a year of leadership from Apple’s Steve Jobs.

While I have deep respect for Mr. Jobs and his achievements leading Apple to design some of the most popular products of this generation, the problems facing Detroit are larger than any one person can repair.

The fundamental, underlying market mechanisms that steer the behavior of the American auto industry are like, well, a buggy GPS system — they told the industry to turn left in the middle of a bridge and now the industry is through the guardrail and plunging headfirst into the abyss. (For a visual, refer again to Nick Anderson’s comic above.)

Why are the product offerings of the Big (but shrinking) Three so out of line with current consumer demands? Because the companies tuned their product lines to produce the greatest possible short-term profit, without regard to their long-term global competitiveness.

When oil was cheap and carbon even cheaper (aka free), it made economic sense to build the most expensive vehicle a customer would buy, because the pricier the vehicle, the larger the profits. And by the way, this is America, and in America, we like to get a lot for our dollar, so the bigger the vehicle, the better. It’s the same game that restaurants are playing with ever-increasing portion sizes, in a way.

Cheap oil refines into cheap fuel, and cheap fuel does not provide much financial incentive for consumers to purchase fuel-efficient vehicles.

Free carbon (dioxide) means that the emission of greenhouse gases has no cost, and this leads to a similar outcome as cheap fuel, because fuel-efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions are related (inversely).

The problem is that oil isn’t cheap (the falling prices are only temporary) and greenhouse gas emissions aren’t free. Ultimately, greenhouse gas emissions have a cost and the price is paid by the environment in the form of climate change.

So, Detroit has been shielded from economic reality in the US by a curtain of cheap oil and cheap carbon. Suddenly the curtain is pulled back and, uh-oh, Detroit is caught on stage with its pants around its ankles.

It turns out that where Detroit’s competitors live — primarily Japan, Korea, and Europe — fuel is a few times more costly and greenhouse gas emissions are regulated by the Kyoto Protocol. The competitors have been preparing for the automobile market of the future for decades, but the Big Three were thrown into reality over the course of about half a product development cycle, and what a cold shower of reality it was.

Yes, the US has Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, but I won’t even bother to dive into that controversy. Let us just agree that the regulations haven’t prepared Chevy, Ford, and Chrysler for today’s sudden market reality. After all, it was CAFE that laid the red carpet for the arrival of minivans and SUVs to displace place of wagons. Wagon, as “passenger cars”, were required to have higher fuel economy than minivans and SUVs, as “light trucks”.

In the end, the US was lacking the necessary indicators of cost to influence purchasing behaviors towards sustainable automobile designs. Additionally, the stock market rewarded short-term performance, so the auto companies had no incentive to take responsibility and guarantee their own long-term competitive strength. Since the industry was blind and could not look forward to plan for its own future, we — the US people and our government — are now responsible for taking the industry by the hand and saving it from running into a wall of bankruptcy.

The government may soon step in with financial aid, it looks like we the people might all be proud new owners of auto industry stock. Of course, that stock looks less like a stork carrying a bundle of joy and more like a burning, stinking bag on the doorstep.

Just don’t step on it.

Well, Bush didn’t get that message and it turns out he’s going to screw up a few more things before he walks out the Oval Office door. As the Denver Post points out, W. is working to pass anti-consumer, anti-environment “midnight regulations” before the clock rings Jan. 20th and he turns back into a pumpkin.

“Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.”

Bush likes to swim in polluted water for fun.

So, despite the fact you thought electing Obama was going to provide a breath of fresh air — or clean water — Bush is doing his best to prevent it.

It looks like Bush can see a little more darkness at the end of the tunnel and is working to bury his legacy even deeper in a quagmire of incompetence. Can January 20, 2009 get here soon enough?

In this scenario, the country’s investments in research (bioengineering bacteria to produce cellulosic biofuels, for example) pay off and we are able to increase our exports to the rest of the world.

The key factor, though, is that the product must be manufactured in the US if we want to reduce our trade deficits and subsequently our borrowing. Biofuel processing will probably always be somewhat localized, as the cost of transport is high, and we aren’t likely to have surplus fuel anytime soon as large as our oil appetite is today. However, we can produce the bacteria, fungus, or other microorganisms in the US and export them to plants around the world.

Here’s the BusinessWeek article and here is my original post.

Update: I just found another BusinessWeek article with four ways the country can use innovation to help the economy recover:

• Inject capital
• Think global
• Focus on public programs
• Support talent

Thanks for visiting,

Chris

As the New York Times addresses in the recent article “Rivals’ Visions Differ on Unleashing Innovation”, the financial crisis is diverting attention in the upcoming election from the candidates’ science and innovation policies to their approaches for fixing the economy today. Since the media suffers from attention deficit disorder and can only devote coverage to one issue at a time, I’ll use my blog to reach the masses (mini-masses?) and share the importance of innovation to the US’s future.

First, I’ll simplify the process of national innovation to the highest degree possible. Check out this 1st-grade-math graphic I created:

Innovation Math

Let’s break this equation down.

For the US to remain an innovation leader, the country needs money to be spent on research and development combined with talented people to do the work and discover breakthroughs.

Show me the money

Where’s the money come from? It is a combination of government and corporate research investment. If you’d like to compare the Presidential candidates on their technology investment policies, read here. Both candidates support making the federal R&D tax credits permanent, which is important for encouraging corporate investment. But Obama supports significantly more government investment than McCain, and I think Obama has it right. One example: Obama supports the investment of $150 billion over 10 years in developing clean technology.

Many groundbreaking technological advances were achieved on the back of government investment in space, defense, and university basic research — fields like computing and the Internet, medicine and nanotechnology, and transportation technology like RADAR. (Note to avoid angry emails: I didn’t say the government invented the computer, just that its investment advanced the progress.) When there is no clear connection between the basic scientific research and a commercialization opportunity with positive R&D ROI, the government is needed to provide the initial investment. The government then receives its ROI when companies later commercialize the progress in research, create jobs, and pay taxes.

The argument for just how the government should manage this investment in innovation is complicated, so I won’t attempt to solve that problem in this post. However, you can hear some interesting perspectives in this podcast from the journal Nature regarding the upcoming election and national innovation policy. Here are couple takeaways to pique your interest:

• Idea to create a new National Innovation Foundation to holistically manage innovation strategy for the US
• Countries like Taiwan, Japan, China, UK, Germany, and Singapore have national innovation strategies, but the US does not
• Over the past 8 years, the number of computer science graduates in the US has declined by 50%

It’s the people, stupid

Now, let’s move on to the people side of the equation. This is why I really wanted to write this post.

All that money won’t do any good if it isn’t paying and funding the research of talented, educated workers. Undoubtedly, you’ve heard by now horrific statistics, like “China is producing 10 times more engineers than the USA.” While numbers like this might be a stretch — read this article from BusinessWeek about the apples and oranges comparison — there is no doubt that global competitiveness is higher than ever before.

We need to get serious about changing the status quo and take real action to influence youth culture and increase the attractiveness of careers in science and technology. If we want to strengthen national innovation, why don’t we first get innovative with science advocacy? According to the above podcast, there are hundreds of programs across K-12 education advocating science, but let’s face it:

Children and teens are not the most receptive to ideas of what is cool and important coming from the classroom.

Children and teens learn what is popular and desirable from their social relationships with their peers.

These programs aren’t effective enough yet because the marketing is wrong. Let’s look at this problem as a business case study and see if we can find some insight that educators are missing.

(I wrote previously about the importance of science education and strategies for making science interesting in this post. Here, I’ll take a different approach to a similar problem.)

You’re the CEO of a company — let’s call it SciTechSchool Co. — and your business model is this: for every student you encourage to be passionate about science and technology and graduate with a related degree, your company makes $100,000. Woah! What a business opportunity!

(I don’t know what the government’s marginal benefit is for each additional scientist or engineer, but it’s reasonable, if not conservative, to think these people might pay an additional $100k in taxes over their lifetimes.)

Hm… How do you show kids that science is interesting? Do you offer after-school programs to teach them more about science after they’ve had a full day at school already? No, that obviously won’t work.

Maybe, instead of trying to push science at school, you look for ways to slip science into kids’ everyday lives? How do you make science a part of youth social fabric? You make small alterations to what kids are already doing, and without them even recognizing it, they’ll be using science regularly.

Let’s use video games as an example, because we know they garner a lot of youth attention. Say Halo is the game of choice. Want to encourage electrical engineering? Players must fix the virtual wiring in their weapons and suit after being hit before they will work again. Chemical engineering? Players collect chemical components throughout the game and then mix them in precise amounts for regenerative medicine. Mechanical engineering? Players must design their own protective gear and truck armor, balancing strength and weight for the best performance. Computer engineering? Players must program booby traps to capture the enemy, like a knockout gas that is discharged when a sensor detects an intruder.

Video games often involve problem solving by design, all your company needs to do is alter these problems a bit towards science. And this is just one example, the same principle could be applied to other youth pastimes, as well. How about a simple programming language on a mobile phone or a bicycle built for modifications and upgrades?

Let’s change the way we think about science education. If business won’t provide the toys, gear, games, and websites kids need to be science-minded naturally, then let’s create an agency to evaluate and designate “SciTech” products. Then, companies can advertise the benefit to parents, and we let them claim additional tax credits for the development of these products.

It’s due time we get innovative about keeping this country innovative.

While working on a totally unrelated task, I came across a spectacular visualization tool representing the US federal budget. (Aren’t the most interesting finds on the Net stumbled upon? And I don’t mean using the official toolbar.)

Now that this post is half parenthetical, I promise I’ll write one whole sentence without any asides.

(Done. Go me!)

The visualization is in the form of a wall-hanging poster available at WallStats.com. The data represented is the breakdown of the 2009 federal budget as proposed by the White House. You can also see in the background the relative size of the federal deficit (>$10 trillion).

This poster caught my attention as it takes something exceedingly complex (5,000 pages of budget documentation) and condenses it into one large, summary graphic.

What’s that old cliche… A picture is worth 5,000 pages?

It’s intuitive, too. The size of the circle is proportional to the amount of money. There is a clear hierarchy of spending from the top level downwards.

As hard as the goverment is working to spend our money, don’t you think they could come up with stuff like this on their own? After all, the federal budget is just the tip of the iceberg as far as complex, poorly-communicated goverment activity is concerned.

Maybe they wanted to budget for a Federal Activity Communication & Explanation Department, but the circle representing the department’s budget was just too small to show up on the poster…

Now, to explain the title of this post, here are the budgets for several different departments for comparison:

Department of Defense: $515 billion

Defense and national security overall: ~$800 billion

Deparment of Energy: $25 billion (Defense-related: $16 billion; Energy efficiency and renewables: ~$1 billion)

Department of Education: $59 billion

If you were listening to the same Presidential election debate I watched tonight, you heard a lot of talk about the importance of energy security and renewable energy to “break our addiction to foreign oil.” But our we investing enough in our future energy needs? Energy efficiency and renewable energy spending is 0.16% of the defense budget.

You also heard often how the American people and their innovation skills are the country’s greatest strength and will keep us strong, safe, and healthy into the future. But are we investing enough in our children’s futures via their education? Our Dept. of Education budget is 7.4% of the defense budget.

Look at the poster. The Department of Defense battleship is so large that it could wipe the Education and Energy dingies right off the budget map.

C’mon, future leader of the USA.

Put our money where our mouths are.

Now, for something a little more light-hearted: Play some Battleship and flash back to your days of imperial naval domination as a 7-year-old!

One great iPhone feature is its ability to feed a user’s GPS coordinates into a location-based service, or LBS. This expands the usefulness of GPS beyond navigation to enhanced social networking activities. TechCrunch recently reviewed the state of major LBS applications for iPhone, and I recently attended the Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks Meetup, so it’s time for me to throw my two cents in the pool.

Regarding the title of this post: No, I’m not yet overly concerned with privacy issues regarding the sharing of a person’s location at this point. I just couldn’t think of any other good acronyms at the time. But privacy will a serious matter for the creators of LBS software, and I’m sure they will be working hard on getting the balance right between sharing location with wanted friends and avoided unwanted threats.

The major problem with the LBSs I’ve seen so far is they could more accurately be described as LBFs, or Location-Based Features. These applications don’t provide a full user social experience and don’t really stand up on their own.

As soon as Facebook and MySpace release their own location-based channel into their massive existing user bases, these LBS forerunners, as admirable as their pioneering work is, will be trumped out of the market. I don’t see significant, proprietary innovation occurring at the existing LBS firms, thereby reducing the incentive for Facebook and MySpace to acquire the technology rather than just building it themselves. Plus, any integration tasks would be as significant as building the service in the first place.

Many of the current LBSs seem to be aiming to compete with Yelp’s user-generated business review service. Again, they can quickly be trumped as it will be easier for Yelp to build an iPhone app that pulls GPS coordinates than it will be for a brand-spanking new LBS to build a competitive database of user reviews. Loopt has partnered with Yelp to use its reviews, but again, once Yelp builds the app, why won’t I just use that? Yelp already has my bookmarks and personal reviews, both which would be very useful on the mobile app.

LBS Logo Collage

Venturing a little off topic:

Imagine creating a review while you’re still at the restaurant! (Or after walking out the door if your girlfriend doesn’t approve of you tinkering on your phone during dinner.) The app knows what restaurant you’re at (as long as you have a GPS signal). It can ask you questions to prompt things you might forget later: “Was the service attentive?” or “Were the bathrooms clean?” You can upload photos of the food or interior while you’re still there.

Back on topic:

One last thing.

We don’t know how a LBS should be designed yet because it creates a new paradigm for the way society interacts.

This isn’t the fault of the current providers, but it does highlight the challenge they face it meeting customer demands and continuously upgrading and modifying interactions. For example, how often will I want even my friends to know where I am? How often will I end up changing my discoverability status back and forth? What if I turn discoverability off for an annoying “friend” but then we run into each other at the bar — will I have to lie to cover the fact that I’m digitally hiding from him? Will my phone prompt me for my status every time it detects I’m walking out of my house?

Nobody knows the answers to these questions just yet, but I think we’ll know soon enough.

One of the great things about taking a trip to the West is the peaceful serenity of the plains, prairies, buttes, and mountains. Everyone needs to disconnect from the grid occasionally and reflect on our amazing planet and the beauty that surrounds us, typically missed because his nose is buried in a cell display sending a text or checking status updates. At that point, even a 21st century man feels a connection to his ancestors who roamed this country on horseback, their newest ‘gadget’ the carbine rifle.

But then, even a nature-loving man like myself begins to miss a few things about the Internet, discovering firsthand the withdrawal induced when a beer falls over in the tent and quickly transforms a high-tech mobile gadget into a tent stake hammer.

Here are the top 5 things I miss now that I no longer have on-the-go mobile Internet access:

1. Can’t send mobile updates to this blog!
I had set up a couple methods to post in addition to the normal web interface, namely Jott and email-to-post. (Note: I haven’t found a way to post to WordPress.com from email, just self-hosted WordPress.)
I’m setting up Shauna’s phone now so we can hopefully Jott to the blog from it instead.

2. No more GPS
I used my LG Voyager not only as a mobile phone, texting machine, and Internet device, but also as a GPS navigator. This is not a good function to lose on a cross-country trip, as it’s one of the most useful features! It’s valuable for many reasons: get directions, find your current location, search for local businesses, and see how long it will take to get somewhere.

3. No mobile campground searching
It turns out it’s difficult to find a comprehensive, printed listing of campgrounds — at least one that’s not the size of a phonebook. I miss being able to search sites like Woodalls for campgrounds in a given radius.

4. No instant online photos
Until my camera adds a cell phone, I’m getting by with the cell with added camera. It doesn’t provide great photos, or even a flash, but it does the job of getting a photo from capture to sharing across the world in less than a minute.

5. No more phone
I thought I was done after #4, but then I realized that I do occasionally use my cell as a phone. I am so 2007…

I think slow is referring to my bicycling speed, but I'm not sure...

RAGBRAI is half bicycle ride, half post-pedaling party, and half people-watching extravaganza. Obviously there is some overlap to make those numbers work.

We were living in Chicago through most of the 2008 pre-RAGBRAI training season and this posed a little problem. Chicago is flat. Iowa is not (more about that later). Most of our Chicago rides were along the Lake Shore Trail. It was only a mile from my apartment and it’s irresistably scenic.

I can’t say how many training miles I put in because I was riding my new Jamis Satellite and hadn’t installed a bike computer until just before RAGBRAI. I’d guess a little over 300 miles. Recommended training was 600 miles, so I got half way there! You know that those “recommended training” distances are always over-estimated to compensate for people’s over-confidence in their abilities, anyway. (“I’m in great shape. I don’t need to train for this marathon. I’ll just wing it.”)

The center of the state of Iowa is called... *drumroll* State Center.

Shauna's birthday bicycling get-up. She did get some comments on the placement of those balloons.

RAGBRAI itself this year was 471 miles over 7 days of riding with 22,500 feet of climb (interactive map). The hardest day was Monday, the second day (my girlfriend’s birthday, ironically). We rode 83 miles and climbed 5239 feet. Since Sunday was a relatively short day, I didn’t experience real muscle soreness until Wednesday — it always takes 48 hours for the suffering to begin!

On the bright side, I was able to avoid chafing over the course of the week, so the worst-case suffering was avoided. (Sorry, but when it comes to long bicycle rides, you just can’t avoid this subject.) Of course, my sit bones were a bit tender to the touch, but that pain subsided to numbness after the first five minutes of the morning ride. Now, if you promise to keep it quiet, I’ll let you in on the secret to avoiding the fire of friction. C’mon. A little closer. This is top secret…

LIBERAL AND FREQUENT APPLICATION OF CHAMOIS BUTT’R!!!

This product is a gift from god dermatological scientists. I reapplied at every stop just to be safe.

Now, for the most popular RAGBRAI rumors.

RAGBRAI Rumor #1

There is pie.

Yes, there is pie in this picture. But it's harder to find than you'd think!

That statement is not entirely false, but there certainly is not the amount nor variety of pie on RAGBRAI that the media would have one believe. Especially when you’re pulling up the second half of the pack and all the good food has been picked over. (I became very accustomed to seeing half of menu boards crossed out.) My own guess is that pie is just too labor-intensive to bake in the quantities necessary to feed 20,000 hungry bikers, so it’s often replaced with grilled (frozen) hamburgers instead.

RAGBRAI Rumor #2

Iowa is flat.

As I mentioned above, we climbed 22,500 feet over the course of the week. That’s 2,000 more feet than the height of Mt. McKinley! (Of course, the Tour de France does this much climb in about 2 days, but those guys are pros!) Sure, some parts of Iowa are flat (the northern parts, particularly), but the western and southern regions have almost nothing flat. I remember thinking that exact thought, actually, during RAGBRAI. “Where the heck is flat road around here?”

RAGBRAI Rumor #3

You must be in great shape to bicycle 471 miles in one week.

The newest member of The Incredibles shows off his stuff.

While it is true that being in shape will make the ride a lot easier, I saw an incredible assortment of riders during the week, and I’m now convinced that if there is a will, there is a way to ride across the state. I crossed paths with a 72 year-old woman several times, and I’m sure she wasn’t the oldest rider out there. Some people were carrying a lot of extra weight up those hills, but they just took it slow and made it through. There were a number of riders with special trikes that are propelled by pedaling with the arms instead of the legs, and several amputee riders pedaling with their prosthetics.

And that brings me to the most important lesson I learned on RAGBRAI:

The only force that can stop you from achieving your dreams are your own doubts.

So, with that, get out of your own way and take on a dream today.

Dipping our tires in the Mississippi after completing the ride

I was doing some research recently into GPS solutions for flying as my father is training for his sport pilot license in pursuit of piloting his new powered parachute. Surfing around Garmin’s site, I was surprised to see the lack of support it provides for making a shopping decision. It’s not easy to pick the right device — in the automotive category alone, there are at least 31 different GPS devices from which to choose.

Although not unique in its lapse, I believe this sort of marketing shortcoming is entirely inexcusable. The most advanced shopping feature is a side-by-side comparison tool. How about a product advisor that asks questions about how I’m going to use my GPS or what features are important and then recommends the best options?

Want to navigate me to the best one?

I understand that Garmin does not retail its own products, but that shouldn’t keep it from helping me select the perfect product from its lineup at Garmin.com so I can go buy it at a nearby electronics store.

After all, who should be more helpful and knowledgeable regarding a product line than the company who designs and builds it? No doubt everyone in their marketing department could help me pick the right product if I met them over a beer at a local bar. But they can’t help me on their own company website?

This is a missed pre-sales opportunity, without a doubt. If I get to this site, I am already interested in Garmin’s products. Garmin needs to seize this opportunity and make sure that I find the right product from its lineup. Scaring me with a massive grid of options is as likely to send me clicking to a competitor as it is to present the best choice.

Keep the shopping simple. Don’t miss an opportunity to educate the customer on why they should by your product. 3 is better than 30 when it comes to encouraging the customer to make a decision and purchase.

Here’s the description of the event from MITEF:

Come for the excitement!

Come for the thrill of the competition!

Come to find out about some of the most innovative ideas in Chicago!

Join the Chicago innovation community as we celebrate the best and brightest new ideas that will shape our future.   Come cheer on 15 [actually 13] carefully selected presenters as they compete for a $5000 cash prize! [Split amongst the top 3 places: $3k, $1.5k, $500]

The presenting finalists will have 5 minutes and a whiteboard to describe their innovative concept in front of a panel of Chicago’s most experienced judges and an audience of 200 [I heard about 141 showed up].  No powerpoints, no props, no kidding.

As a participant, you’ll be a part of the process as your vote, over your mobile phone [if you had reception in the auditorium], will account for 20% of the total overall score.

The Whiteboard Challenge is the most exciting innovation event in Chicago and you don’t want to miss out.

The winning presentation was delivered by Dan Masterson for the Guardian Angel Outlet. See a video of the concept demo here.

Rather than talk give reviews of the concepts themselves in this quick post, I’m going to point out 3 helpful tips for delivering a less-formal whiteboard presentation as compared to a more-typical PowerPoint slide sleepfest presentation.

1. Embrace the whiteboard’s unique visual characteristics

By nature, an image on a whiteboard appears gradually as the presenter draws it, one line at a time. This has advantages over a digital presenation where it’s easy to overwhelm the viewer with too much information too fast. It also adds a subconscious suspense component as the viewer waits to see what’s going to show up, like Pictionary on business steroids.

When you’re presenting in front of a whiteboard, add visual information to the board gradually, at approximately the rate you’re divvying oral information. What you want to avoid are the extremes: talking for 4 out of 5 minues without drawing anything (you’ll lose the viewer’s attention as their eyes drift around the room to the captivating carpet stain) or drawing a complicated graphic in silence for 3 minutes (you’ll overwhelm the viewer as soon as you start talking again because you’ll have so much to explain at once).

2. Always write or draw the most important points on the board

If you’re telling the audience how many lives your product will save, or how many 100′s of millions of future customers are lining up at your door step ready to buy (must be hard to sleep at night), then make sure you write this number down (and include the zeros for big numbers — it adds drama as you draw them out, one Cheerio at a time).

And make sure you write the company or product’s name on the board. This is probably the most important thing a viewer should remember, right?

3. Watch game film — in this case, UPS commercials

What can brown do for you? In this case, it can teach you how to give a strong presentation when you’re writing on a board.

The gentle, Bob Ross-with-straight-hair presenter in these commercials (here, here, more here, and here, and on UPS.com here) can teach you a few presentation skills: even though you’re writing on a board, try to do as much talking as possible while facing the audience (people remember faces, not haircuts); draw neatly so that people can concentrate on the message (and not how you scribble like a 3rd grader); and finally, if you’re going to break tip #1 and draw something complex, at least do it right at the beginning so there aren’t interruptions to your flow for the rest of the presentation (the UPS guy gets a head start drawing during the preceding commercial, apparently).

What can whiteboard do for you?

$3,000, at least.

That’s a lot of dry erase markers.

The two topics are

my dad

and

science.

Being Father’s Day, I think it’s an appropriate time to give my father the credit he deserves for being a kick-ass dad.

When I think about what I’ve learned from my dad, one of the most important qualities is that of a scientific mind.

What do you mean, a scientific mind?

First, a little background:

My dad, Larry Zach, is a nature lover by, well… nature. His passion for observing, learning about, and being immersed in the outdoors seems to be innate, according to stories my grandma has told me about him wandering off outside alone while still in a diaper.

He would later (far post-diaper) go on to study fish and wildlife biology and teaching at university and become a middle and high school science teacher for 18 years. He is now a full-time wildlife artist.

More important than his titles and training, though, is the way his mind works, and subsequently, the way I’m wired as well.

So now we can continue with the scientific mind stuff. I think a scientific mind is one that views the world with wonder for its intricate, beautiful, and complicated workings, and with excitement for the challenge and satisfaction of understanding how it all works behind the scenes.

From as young an age as I can remember, my dad instilled in me this appreciation for nature and passion for comprehending its function. He took the time to explain how things worked and often asked me if I could figure it out myself first. He was a science teacher by nature, even outside of the classroom.

Now, I didn’t realize he was teaching me science, or to think scientifically about things, when I was a child. But I did know that I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that, if I thought hard about a question, I had a chance of discovering an answer all on my own. I enjoyed that scientific knowledge is democratic and even at a young age would expose itself for me to grasp.

To me, this scientific framework is invaluable, even in day-to-day life. Walking down the aisle of any health store or past any magazine rack is an exercise in scientific reasoning as claims for “melt away the fat!” or “erase wrinkles overnight!” shout out from the packaging. (I will write a full post soon dedicated to marketing BS, one of my greatest business frustrations.)

As soon as I read a claim, my mind is asking questions: “What evidence, and how much, does such a claim require to be proven true?” “Does the company provide any evidence?” “Does this claim fit within my understanding of how the system (the human body, in this example) works?”

Brian Greene wrote recently an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times titled “Put a Little Science in Your Life”. Here’s a short excerpt from that article:

Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

Science is a way of life and a perspective on life for me because of my dad. I am one of those “little scientists” Greene mentions who was lucky enough to grow into a big scientist without losing my intrinsic scientific passion.

But, unfortunately, we do quite poorly as a nation in educating our children with the importance and excitement of science. We scare kids and teenagers away from science before we even take the time to show them why it’s important and how it’s fun. This educational “can’t see the forest for the trees” isn’t a problem unique to science, but it does seem to make science particularly frightening for many children.

I’ll continue working with Greene’s analogy to music education. If you were a 3rd grade teacher and your goal was to encourage as many children as possible to appreciate and participate in music, which teaching method do you think would bring you the best results? in other words, when these same kids graduate high school nine years later, will the ones from group A or group B be the most musically active?

A) Start on Day 1 teaching students the most basic music theory. After all, if they’re going to understand music, they need to start at the beginning with the most fundamental principles. What is the staff? Treble and bass clef? Notes and rests?

B) Start on Day 1 by dividing the class up into competing Rock Bands and playing the entertaining video game during class. Show kids through experiences that music need not be intimidating and that it should be fun to create. Teach kids rhythm and pitch while they don’t even realize they’re learning.

I think we can all imagine, having been kids once too, which method would get us more interested in music as something fun and entertaining instead of the scary material of flash cards. (I should mention that I’m not supporting this claim with research-based evidence, so this is only a hypothesis.)

The same principle apply to science education. The world of science is one that is fascinating in its complexity and awe-inspiring in its scale. We’d do our future generations a favor if we came at science education from the perspective of Indiana Jones, using adventures to portray scientific discovery, rather than our sleepy, classic methods memorizing lists from Astronomy to Zoology.

After all, our fundamental task as educators of the next generation of citizens (all of us — not just parents and teachers), isn’t to force kids to learn as much as they can handle, but to get them so excited about learning that they’ll want to do it by their own interests.

We can give children knowledge while they’re in school, and they’ll have about 12 years worth in their heads when they’re done.

Or we can teach children why knowledge is so exciting and empowering, and they’ll yearn for it the rest of their lives.

This is what I learned from my dad, and is a lesson I’ll pass on one day when I have my own “little scientists” running around the yard.

I love you, Dad. Thanks for everything!

The relatively low risks to launching a new Internet business, compared to physical ventures with higher capital requirements, also leads to exciting, experimental ventures that can afford to launch in a less-than-perfected state and then polish and revise their product as users provide real-world feedback.

But these same qualities that attract attention of aspiring startups, like honey for entrepreneurial bees, also leads to the recurring bubbles and hype that seem inextricably tied to the Internet business world.

The low up-front investment requirements and accompanying cheap maintenance costs lead to ventures with uncertain, and often completely unknown, revenue prospects. But this itself is not the problem. I won’t dispute that a business with hundreds of thousands or millions of passionate users has a realistic possibility of eventually discovering a method to monetize those customers — even if that business model is not apparent up-front.

The problem is that a profit-producing business model is not the only wrench missing from these companies’ strategic toolboxes. On the contrary, some of these ventures are so far from defensible profitability, they’re bringing a standard wrench to a metric party.

Let’s look at Slide, the social network widget company, as an example. In its fourth round of financing, they raised $50 million, valuing the company at around $550 million. They just opened an office in New York City from which to sell more advertising. If you need more background on Slide, read here.

As I said earlier, the problem for Slide isn’t necessarily that they haven’t cracked the humongous money nut that is their 170 million unique monthly viewers. Hearsay evidence says that their CPMs aren’t anything spectacular. But they will probably figure this out eventually.

The problem for Slide isn’t that they don’t already make tons of cash off their sky-high viewership numbers.

The problem for Slide is that they aren’t going to last long enough to solve the business model puzzle.

Let’s grab a few of Michael Porter’s 5 Forces out of the strategic toolbox and start wrenching on the broken machine that is Slide — let’s say, barriers to entry, threat of substitutes, and degree of rivalry, for starters.

Barriers to Entry

The barrier to entry in Slide’s industry, producing widgets for social networks, is like a speed bump in front of a monster truck. The driver might feel it, if he’s sitting just right.

Brand identity:

Almost nonexistent. No user cares who wrote the tool that allows them to chest bump their friends. They just care that they can now do it online and no longer have to risk pecular injury or social embarrassment should their super chest bump end in a super pile of flailing arms and legs.

Capital requirements:

Lunch money. It doesn’t cost anything to put your application on a social network and the network does the hosting for you. You might even have change left over for a rectangular piece of lunchroom pizza.

Threat of substitutes

Switching costs:

Again, almost nonexistent. What keeps me from uninstalling your application from my profile and never using it again? The years of experience I’ve accumulated and deep integration of my workflow with your software? Oh wait, that’s Photoshop. Nope, I can learn a new application in the time it takes to super fart on a friend.

Degree of rivalry

Product differences:

Does Slide possess a unique ability in the industry to design a widget user interface that revolutionizes the marketplace, a la the iPod in a sea of mediocre MP3 players? Nope. Their viewer advantage is due to moving first, network effects, and questionable practices in recruiting users’ friends to add an application. But now that Facebook, for example, has cracked down on runaway app invites and is redesigning the profile page layout, Slide’s previous advantages have melted away like a chocolate bar errantly placed near my laptop’s cooling fan. (I swear it’s about to burn up.)

Now Slide needs to rely on actual product development talent to provide useful, long-term solutions for their customers — not flash-in-the-pan fads, which will never scale into a large, predictable revenue stream. Investing in venture capital is already like gambling. Slide’s investors have either steel balls or empty skulls to want to scale up the risks even greater and bet big on a company, like Slide, whose fortunes ride on something as unpredictable and finicky as consumers’ flavor-of-the-week poking preference.

Not to mention that the social networks themselves can quickly duplicate Slide’s applications on a whim and erase Slide’s business model. The next day, what were the basis of an entire company are now one of a hundred features of someone else’s product.

Sliding into home (aka The Conclusion)

If you’ve made it this far, it’s should be sufficiently clear that the strategic flat tire that will drag many Web 2.0 companies off the information super highway and into the ditch of dot-com blowouts isn’t simply their lack of a business model.

The fact that companies like Slide can build huge viewership numbers isn’t a freestanding sign of success. McDonald’s gives away millions of free toys every year. But with every one, it’s selling a burger-like hockey puck or nuggets that taste like chicken. And making money off of them, too.

Right now, Slide’s products are the equivalent of Happy Meal t