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Five for Friday: Best of the Eyjafjallajokull Eruption

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Now that flights through European airspace have resumed, we’ve rounded up the best images, data, and research to come out of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption. We know that the ash has affected millions—farmers, manufacturers, the airlines, business and pleasure travelers, to name a few—but the eruption and its news coverage also offered crash courses in geology, climate change, predictions and risk, geography, and aeronautic technology. After the jump, we find a silver lining in the volcanic ash cloud.

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Five for Friday: Top Five Ways to Imitate

Friday, April 16th, 2010

Business culture is obsessed by only two things: innovation and Steve Jobs. In contrarian spirit, we thought it a good time to take a look at the unsung art of imitation.

Usually viewed as a moral hazard, from the schoolyard (copycat) to the courtroom (IP-theft)  imitation is actually the principle source of diversification. Darwin’s notion of evolution describes the paradoxical principle that replication implies differentiation. Similarly, culture is often defined as the capacity to imitate others, but instead of uniformity, imitation leads to the formation of distinctive cultural groups. Global imitation leads to distinctiveness because local contexts demand adaptation.

“Great artists don’t borrow, they steal,” said Picasso. If imitation’s an art, it’s because creative adaptation is far more complex than replication. Below are five ways to imitate (and perhaps innovate) successfully.

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Five for Friday: Top Data-Driven Innovators

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Google is of course the king of the new data-driven companies, introducing a business model where data gathered from product use and users is more valuable than charging for the products themselves. In the wake of Google, we rooted around for some of the most innovative data-gatherers and users out there (with some help from the very special April issue of Forbes on the data-driven company.)

1. OkCupid: because it’s the “Google of online dating” (and we want to date statisticians)

OkCupid, one of the world’s most popular dating sites, was founded by four…Harvard mathematicians. Not your grandma’s Shadchen; they’ll take the data-driven approach. According to the NYTimes, “to find matches, OkCupid members answer questions, most of which are generated and submitted by users, that range from pedestrian to risqué. The answers are weighted and analyzed by several sets of algorithms to calculate percentages of compatibility with other users.” But the site is also interesting in baring the patterns and correlations revealed by the data they’ve amassed: whether or not it flatters its users’ (typically urban and liberal) sensibilities. (Apparently race and the presence of cleavage shots influence online dating success). The clever use of data to promote happy matches would alone make OkCupid worthy of its spot on our list. But their blog OkTrends—a major source of traffic, credibility and buzz for the company—is what really blows us away.

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Five for Friday: Five Good Reads

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

1. It was a “smashing” week for that seemingly “cursed” large Hadron collider @ CERN.  Now we can hope to see into the orgins of time itself…but, personally, I wonder what complications from the future the CERN collider might still face.  While Holger Nielsen’s unlikely 2008 explanation for the problems befalling the collider prove once again that the real world is stranger than fiction, here’s a list of some best-selling beach-reading that features the electron collider as a major plot element, from blowing up the Vatican to recharging giant robots…

2. This week in criminality: Wired’s article tells the tale of preternaturally gifted security hacker, Gerald Blanchard. “Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a criminal mastermind. The [Sisi] star was the heist that transformed him from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal virtuoso.” He was finally nabbed by the Winnipeg police in 2007.  (When you’re done with this you can read all about the diamond heist in Antwerp)

3. After taking a spin (ahem) through the scientific and criminal achievements of the decade, you might be ready for the relative repose of fiction.  Electric Literature’s mission is to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence in popular culture.  In the current issue you can read Rick Moody’s “Some Contemporary Character”–entirely tweetable, melancholic reports on urban dating that might make you feel better about tweets.

4.  Big Data Freedom:  Or how the ’10’s will be all about Data

“Now that we can store so much data, it is attractive to do previously unimaginable things with it. We are sure to see cool applications in fields from the internet to biotechnology to nanotechnology and fundamental materials science research. Almost all advances in every field of science and technology are now heavily dependent upon data and computing.”

Or, as Bradford Cross says, “the Data Renaissance is here. Be part of it.”  (You can start by reading the article).

5. Clay Shirky on Complexity.  Shirky reminds us here of some interesting observations made by Tainter in his 1988 The Collapse of Complex Societies.  “When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change.”  But Shirky’s not prognosticating social collapse; rather he’s showing how Tainter’s insights apply to complex business models as well.

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In Honor of Ada Lovelace: Top (Female) Innovators

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Ada Lovelace

We’re celebrating Ada Lovelace Day with an early Five for Friday! In a previous Five for Friday, we profiled five top innovation experts…all male. Today, in honor of Ada Lovelace, we’re filling in the gaps by looking at five female innovators.

1. Massively Multiplayer Science: Jane McGonigal, Director of Game R&D, Institute for the Future

You can read all kinds of things on the Internet. How can this attention be turned into engagement? Jane McGonigal, director of game R&D at the Institute for the Future, suggests we turn to the world of play for answers. She’s fascinated by players’ dedication to games, describing them as a “super emotionally charged community” in a 2009 Fast Company profile, and how this networking might generate collective intelligence that could be harnessed to solve real-life problems.

Indeed, McGonigal’s goal is for a game designer to win a Nobel Prize by 2032. (She leaves the subject—and the possibilities—open.) A recent project was Evoke, a massively multiplayer online game whose goal was to empower young people to come up with creative solutions to the world’s problems. Missions in Evoke were threefold: learn, act, imagine. Players who completed missions were rewarded with membership in the Evoke network, and a few won invitations to an Evoke summit in Washington, D. C.

McGonigal’s future projects include massively multiplayer science, or MMS. “The concept is simple: Build scientific practices into a collaborative gaming framework, and you can unleash hordes of players to gather observations, find patterns in data, and contribute new hypotheses,” McGonigal wrote in Seed magazine. “It may not seem like science as we know it, but…scientists often solve problems by forming networks, working together in teams.” The challenge is to keep people interested beyond the first few months, after the novelty wears off. She suggests a game-like structure for an MMS competition, with progressively harder challenges and bigger rewards.

McGonigal’s blog posts and articles are at AvantGame, and her first book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Happy and How They Can Change the World, appears later this year.

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Five for Friday #10: Top Data Visualizations

Friday, March 19th, 2010

According to a recent special report by the Economist on “big data”:

the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account…

A new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

In addition, the push for open data in government will see, increasingly, the use of data visualization to sway political discourse.

“Vision takes up 50% of our brain’s resources…the more visual an input becomes the more likely it is to be recongized and recalled,” says Russell Davies on his must-see talk on the political power of data visualization.

Here’s the top five data visualizations chosen for their visual appeal, acuity and overall awesome.

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Five for Friday: Top Sci-Fi Inventions of Tomorrow

Friday, March 12th, 2010

We have trouble imagining the future, and understandably so. Descartes said it’s impossible to conceive of anything truly new; we can only rearrange what we’ve experienced in novel ways.

Accordingly, most of the technologies that appear in science fiction films are simply the ones we have now, only smaller, faster, stronger, airborne. But if you review technological development over the last two millenia, you’ll find novel ideas still found a way to sneak in somehow: we now rely on processes that the Athenians could never have, well, dreamt of in their philosophies.

The science fiction author and filmmaker can be more liberal in conceptions of the future than an analyst striving for accuracy. The latter (whose attempts have been lovingly chronicled on one of our perennial favorite blogs, Paleofuture) is too obscured by present technology; fin-de-siècle depicitions of the future’s flying machines are usually variations on a zeppelin. Artists, though, are less restricted by fashion and physics — and it’s their visions that make us dream of the future.

Ironically, they sometimes prove to be the most accurate.

The following are our top five favorite sci-fi inventions of cinema and fiction, with reflections on their feasibility and impact on our lives. Our imagination may be limited by the possibilities of today — but however vain our attempts may be to accurately reflect the reality of tomorrow, these inventions are still pretty frakking cool.

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Five for Friday: Biggest Breakthroughs in Open Science

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Ways.org (World Association of Young Scientists)—one of hypios’ favorite social networks for scientists—polled its network on the biggest developments in open science in 2009. Here’s the network’s top five breakthroughs (as determined by the first round of polling), with annotation courtesy of hypios.

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Five for Friday: Top Innovation Experts

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Who do you trust when it comes to innovation? Whose advice on innovation has really helped you? Here’s a few innovation experts (in no particular order) who have inspired hypios. Feel free to add to our list in the comments.

1. Adaptive Path: The Experience Is the Product

The 2009 Wired article “The Good Enough Revolution” makes the case for accessibility over features, ease of use over bells and whistles. Customers don’t care about the latest technology unless it caters to their needs, so ‘cheap and simple’ is often the recipe for a winning product.

Adaptive Path, a San Francisco-based design firm, has been preaching this kind of empathetic design for years. In their latest book, Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, four Adaptive Path designers urge fellow creative types to make experiences, not products, and design for people, not demographics. If “the medium is the message” was a mantra for the 20th century, Adaptive Path updates it to “the experience is the product.” As the book’s title implies, they also remind readers that fighting uncertainty or resisting unexpected change is pointless. Instead, we should see change as an opportunity to improve a product or experience.

Adaptive Path may not be the most general resource on innovation, but it’s worth a look—especially the book, which is a short, informative read.

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Five for Friday: 5 problems submitted to “problem to love”

Friday, February 19th, 2010


hypios launched its “problem to love” competition just in time for Valentine’s Day.  The contest invites researchers, scientists, engineers, innovators, social entrepreneurs, etc. to submit their unresolved and most challenging research problems (until March 14).

Two problems will be chosen out of the batch of submissions, on the basis of jury decision and popular vote, and hypios will contribute $50,000 towards solving them.  Those lucky two will then be formalized and posted on hypios’ marketplace, with solution rights going to the problem-submitter.

So you see, it’s like adding $50,000 to your research budget.  If you’ve got a fascinating problem that our network of super-Solvers should take a look at, send it our way (hold the how to survive heartbreak or how to get world peace question, though–we’re not good at solving those)!  And don’t forget to vote (early and often).

For this very special Five for Friday, see the top five problems submitted so far, at least according to this reviewer.

1. A Low Cost, Kitchen Friendly Process for Reproducing Single Copies of Printed Circuits
Joseph Bowers

Describe a low cost, safe and convenient process for reproducing single copies of potentially complex conductive patterns that can be used in the creation of electrical circuits, such that private individuals can perform this process in their kitchen with safe, commonplace, and low cost household materials. The ideal process, including the acquisition and handling of materials, or operation of equipment, should be analogous in difficulty and required expertise to baking brownies from scratch.


Because cooking-up electrical circuits in your kitchen is an important item on any DIYers’ wish list….

2. Novel Laser Technology
Anonymous

Laser technology is used everywhere: from optical storage (DVD) to ophthalmic surgery, from metal cutting to nuclear fusion simulation. One family is composed by single crystals. A. Ikesue found a way to reduce the price and to improve the effectiveness of those lasers by synthesizing transparent ceramic out of cubic materials such as Y2SiO5. The new challenge is to find a process to produce transparent ceramics out of non-cubic materials (such as YLiF4, AlN, …). Can you find it?

This sounds like a delightful challenge, and very well-posed at that.

3. A living engine for tomorrow’s cars
William Le Ferrand

We can power cars with gas or electricity, but what about imitating nature and creating an engine based on muscle fibers? Such an engine would reuse fats and carbohydrates (or directly adenosine triphosphate) to contract slow and/or fast twitch fibers and move wheels. I’d love to get a precise explanation on how muscle fibers can be grown in a laboratory, how they can be kept alive during months/years, how they regenerate and what do they need to regenerate (food, hormones).

Bio-mimicry seems a promising approach for green technologies, at least conceptually.  Not sure if this problem description is too literal, but seems worth finding out.

4. Practical electromechanical batteries
Charlie

Electromechanical batteries (see Lawrence Livermore National Labs http://bit.ly/dDcJ1K) have the potential to have an energy density far greater than those of chemical batteries. However, an obstacle is the complexity of the systems involved in the magnetic bearing used to maximise energy storage life. I’d like to see a solution, sized to passenger vehicle use, that reduces complexity & cost of manufacture at minimal expense of energy life – i.e. utilising the best “conventional” technology.

Because if biomimcry doesn’t work…there’s always “conventional” technology.

5. Technologies for s-l-o-w-i-n-g down
Anonymous

How can technology be used to help people slow down… We seek a technology solution that would trigger mindfulness and a chance to consider balance in life. This challenge could use Web 2.0, SMS or other channels to engage minds in being present and aware of what they are, not keep moving towards an impossible goal of what they want.

Maybe it’s because it’s Friday and I’ve felt particularly inundated this week  (I feel like I’m tweeting in my sleep), but reading this problem actually soothed me.  How about using those portals and pods that we’re glued to, to lower anxiety, stress.  Beta-wave inducing music is cool, what else can you think of that will impose a little Zen?

Find the rest of the problems posted here.  Consider submitting your own or just vote!

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