Here are a few stats that we found interesting:
- 97 percent of U.S. households have a mobile phone.
- Total mobile traffic per smartphone in North America is projected to be 1.6 gigabytes this year, and seen to be nearly quadrupling to 6GB per month by 2020.
- There are projected to be 2.7 billion smartphone subscriptions this year, up from 1.9 billion in 2013. That number is seen growing by an average of 15 percent a year through 2020, with subscriptions seen reaching 6.1 billion at that point.
- LTE subscriptions are seen reaching 3.5 billion globally by the end of 2020.
- By 2020, 90 % of the world’s population over six years old will have a mobile phone.
- Video continues to dominate mobile networks, accounting for roughly half of mobile traffic in places with significant 4G networks.
Ericsson Mobility Report - Sees Trend Creating the Networked Society
The corporation is at a crossroads. The businesses that we have grown up with and the business models that underpin them face deep challenges. They are being reconstructed, from within and without, by pervasive technology. Their values, and the values associated with work and the workplace, are increasingly being questioned. Their model of resource use, of “use it and throw it out,” is increasingly running up against constraints of supply costs. New ways of designing and managing businesses, and new business models, are inevitable.
In short, the assumptions that governed the mass-production businesses of the 20th century, and were codified by managers, researchers and academics in the '50s and '60s, have run out of gas. They are no longer fit for purpose.
Our leading businesses already understand this and are acting on it. Across the business world there are examples of companies that have started to absorb the lessons of the 21st century and have started to adapt. They are innovating their business models, their corporate systems, and their organizational hierarchies. The sense that change is in the air is amplified by the number of business initiatives that have been sparked recently. By way of illustration, one influential CEO, Paul Polman, at Unilever, is engaged with four such initiatives: the Inclusive Capitalism Taskforce, the Sustainable Economy Project, the B Team and the “We Mean Business” coalition.
- In summary, the whole story can be wrapped into three guiding principles: Organizational culture is more important than strategy
- Intrinsic values are becoming more important than extrinsic values, for both customers and employees
- Connection is the key to both driving down cost and driving up customer engagement
The 21st Century Business
This is for people who ‘really’ ‘really’ LOVE their coffee. The article is clear and a delight to read with great links to supporting information and products. Ottawa now is home to a number of small batch artisan coffee roasters - which means we can get fresh roasted great coffee if we want to. This is the movement diametrically opposite the movement toward the convenience and mystery coffee of pods. :) Even if you don’t like coffee this is a great article that may make you reconsider your ‘tastes’.
What does this have to do with the future? The 3rd wave of coffee represents the shift away from industrial mass-produced approaches to our economy - and also represents a new approach based on ‘passion’ for experience rather than simply commodities.
Nth Wave Coffee - aka I’m better at drinking coffee than you are
About four years ago I started drinking coffee again. I’d quit the stuff cold turkey after a decade of drinking gut-searing Mr. Coffee shit. In the meantime I spent several years going deep in tea — a beautiful discovery of richness and attention to detail that I give credit to for my ultimate leveling up in coffee.
Then my friend GK wrote a compelling blog post about coffee. I was convinced. But if I was going to dance with this exotic mistress, I was going to do it right.
Let’s get it straight, coffee is a drug. And most of us are abusers. Coffee is a potent stimulant that has real, significant effects on your biochemistry. And most people who drink coffee do so thoughtlessly. They are addicted.
But, as Paracelsus said, “The dose makes the poison.” As is the case for all drugs, if you use coffee mindfully rather than thoughtlessly, it becomes a very powerful ally. There are two oddly separate communities these days who are being mindful of different aspects of coffee. The “bulletproof coffee crew” and the “coffee snobs.” As it turns out, I happen to be a member of both — and I believe that by combining them, I’ve achieved a coffee mojo that takes it to another level. I’m certainly not alone, but that’s not the point. The point is that everyone should be here.
This is a great introduction video (8 min) to futures literacy. The KnowLab is being developed by Riel Miller a wonderful Canadian futurist and director of foresight for UNESCO. A must see.
Futures Knowlab
Using The Future
Using The Future is an introduction to anticipatory systems. It is powered by collective intelligence and learning by doing. It allows everyone to develop their futures skills.
Experts build better projects by engaging with more people. Organisations participate in risk and reward.
The whole issue of McKinsey’s 50th Anniversary Special is available online and downloadable as a pdf. Here’s the lead article.
Management intuition for the next 50 years
The collision of technological disruption, rapid emerging-markets growth, and widespread aging is upending long-held assumptions that underpin strategy setting, decision making, and management.
Intuition forms over time. When McKinsey began publishing the Quarterly, in 1964, a new management environment was just beginning to take shape. On April 7 of that year, IBM announced the System/360 mainframe, a product with breakthrough flexibility and capability. Then on October 10, the opening ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympic Games, the first in history to be telecast via satellite around the planet, underscored Japan’s growing economic strength. Finally, on December 31, the last new member of the baby-boom generation was born.
Fifty years later, the forces symbolized by these three disconnected events are almost unrecognizable. Technology and connectivity have disrupted industries and transformed the lives of billions. The world’s economic center of gravity has continued shifting from West to East, with China taking center stage as a growth story. The baby boomers have begun retiring, and we now talk of a demographic drag, not a dividend, in much of the developed world and China.
We stand today on the precipice of much bigger shifts in each of these areas, with extraordinary implications for global leaders. In the years ahead, acceleration in the scope, scale, and economic impact of technology will usher in a new age of artificial intelligence, consumer gadgetry, instant communication, and boundless information while shaking up business in unimaginable ways. At the same time, the shifting locus of economic activity and dynamism, to emerging markets and to cities within those markets, will give rise to a new class of global competitors. Growth in emerging markets will occur in tandem with the rapid aging of the world’s population—first in the West and later in the emerging markets themselves—that in turn will create a massive set of economic strains.
Here’s a very recent report - this is the pdf of the executive summary.
GENESIS RESEARCH REPORT OCT 2014
FAST FORWARD 2030
The Future of Work and the Workplace
What was unexpected, but became clear through this research, were deep attitudinal changes occurring across geographies and generations to seek greater meaning and joy from work and the places of work. In 2030, the many places where we work and live will be diverse and entwined: humanity, creativity, culture and community will be integral.
The ideas, trends and behaviours that will shape work and workplace in 2030 are already perceptible today. Some are clearly evident whilst others are emerging quietly around us.
Artificial intelligence was a common theme amongst interviewees and in fact experts predict that 50% of occupations in corporations today will no longer exist by 2025. Business leaders we met discussed radical changes already underway in their organisations. Data in the US suggests that technology already destroys more jobs than it creates. Since 2000, GDP has been able to grow faster than employment.
I wonder what management will be doing in 50 years?
Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Reveals Why Robots Really Are Coming For Your Job
Nobel prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz has a new NBER paper out that comes to a worrying conclusion — the robots really are coming for your job.
In economic theory innovation should make workers more efficient — they can produce more for less — but it comes at the cost of lower skilled jobs as fewer people are required to produce the same amount of output.
However, (again in theory) the gains made by workers who remain in employment should be greater than the losses incurred by those who lose their jobs and their gains help drive more skilled job creation in other industries.
Unfortunately theory doesn't always fit neatly when confronted by reality. And Stiglitz claims this is exactly what has happened with innovation. Stiglitz argues that truly disruptive innovations, of the kind that drove the Industrial Revolution, require widespread economic restructuring to allow those who are being pushed out of an industry to locate alternatives. Sadly, he says, "markets often do not manage such restructurings well" leading to long periods of high unemployment and increased inequality.
So if many of us are facing technological unemployment - what are we going to do?
Here’s something (a very short article) which is hugely inspiring. The images (at least a dozen) are spectacular a Must View
a look inside ra paulette's hand dug luminous caves in new mexico
a look inside ra paulette’s hand dug luminous caves in new mexico
wielding a wheelbarrow-backpack, american artist ra paulette hikes a mile into the sandstone mesas of northern new mexico. for over ten years, ra has traveled alone to his luminous caves, chipping scraping and digging away into the mountainsides carving out wondrous light-filled caverns. each pile of dirt was intentionally dug and personally discarded by ra, as the concepts of the luminous caves delves even deeper than the sheer wonder of one person creating a masterpiece of this scale, alone, every day for over ten years.
paulette was always struck by the relationship between humans, nature, and the inner soul. a solitary walk through a forest is more than a casual stroll, it becomes an introspective pilgrimage. when complete, the caves are meant to provide surreal transformative environments for this exact purpose- they are designed to foster ‘spiritual renewal and personal well being‘. illuminated only by light tunnels in the ceilings, each chamber possesses its own unique qualities. although the designs cannot really be likened to any one specific style, each space exhibits a mastery of textures brought to life by light, each creating their own feeling. when complete, the caves will become a venue for artistic events and personal discovery. by combining a sense of wonder, beauty, and the sacred, paulette attempts to change our actions as a society to help bring about change.
I remember when the Internet was a fad. In the US it was estimated that in 2001 about 50% of the US population connected to the Internet (this was dial-up since broadband had just become available through telephone lines) - in the world there were only 370 million people connected at that time. Now parents and kids have their own laptops/phones/tablets connected wirelessly - all this in just 13 years!!! Where will we be in another 10 years?
More Than 90 Percent of U.S. Households Have Three or More Devices Pinging the Internet
How much do Americans love the Internet?
Well, Ericsson counted all the ways.
It turns out that 90 percent of U.S. households have three or more Internet-connected devices, while just under half of households have five or more devices and nearly a quarter use seven or more devices. The average number of connected devices per household is 5.2, with that number seen to be climbing in the coming years.
Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to lead the way in LTE subscriptions, with more than 25 percent of mobile subscriptions in 2013 being of the LTE variety. That number is seen reaching 40 percent this year.
Those are just a couple of the findings in Ericsson’s latest quarterly stat-packed overview of the global Internet market.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is lauded as the Next Big Thing - here is a great and relatively balanced article exploring the potential of the IoT - where it is and where it can go. This is a must read for anyone interested in the future.
Internet of Things: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Internet of Things (IoT) is a phrase gaining foothold in the international lexicon of technology. It refers to the growing number of everyday objects that are able to connect to the internet and communicate with each other.
Kevin Ashton coined the term “Internet of Things” to describe a system where the Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors. The ‘thing’ could be anything from a shoe, watch to medical instruments and household devices. But a ‘thing’ needs to have certain qualities to be part of the ‘Internet of Things’.
A Unique identity; Ability to wirelessly communicate; Ability to sense; Ability to be controlled remotely.
Is IoT just a hyperbole?
If you go by Gartner’s 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technolgies, there is a clear indication that IoT is at the peak of the hype cycle - what they call the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’. Gartner also suggests that it will take 5 to 20 years for IoT to reach the ‘plateau of productivity’.
Although the hype is a little premature and expectations are inflated, I believe IoT is not something that can be dismissed so easily.
The Internet of Things isn’t coming, it is already here.
Here’s a link to the Gartner report:
Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps the Journey to Digital Business
2014 Hype Cycle Special Report Evaluates the Maturity of More Than 2,000 Technologies.
2014 Marks 20th Anniversary of the Gartner Hype Cycle
Speaking of the IoT - here’s something that management in the next few years should be thinking of.
Is Your Organization Ready for the Impending Flood of Data?
You’ve got several orders of magnitude more data coming your way, warns Google’s chief economist.
With a mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible,” Google is a central part of the current focus on huge amounts of data. Even the name Google is rooted in largeness, as it was derived from googol, an alternate term for 10100.
Hal Varian, chief economist at Google and emeritus professor at UC Berkeley, has been with Google for more than a decade and has unique insight into the past and future of data analytics.
In a conversation with Sam Ransbotham, associate professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and guest editor for the MIT Sloan Management Review Data and Analytics Big Idea Initiative, Varian says that companies need to beef up their systems to function within an overwhelming data flow — including new voice-command system data and other computer-mediated transactions.
And here’s something from a champion of open-source intelligence.
The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy
The man who trained more than 66 countries in open source methods calls for re-invention of intelligence to re-engineer Earth
Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.
With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele's exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world.
This week, I had the good fortune of being able to touch base with Steele to dig deeper into his recent analysis of the future of US politics in the context of our accelerating environmental challenges. The first thing I asked him was where he sees things going over the next decade, given his holistic take.
"Properly educated people always appreciate holistic approaches to any challenge. This means that they understand both cause and effect, and intertwined complexities," he said. "A major part of our problem in the public policy arena is the decline in intelligence with integrity among key politicians and staff at the same time that think tanks and universities and non-governmental organisations have also suffered a similar intellectual diminishment.
"My early graduate education was in the 1970's when Limits to Growth and World Federalism were the rage. Both sought to achieve an over-view of systemic challenges, but both also suffered from the myth of top-down hubris. What was clear in the 1970s, that has been obscured by political and financial treason in the past half-century, is that everything is connected – what we do in the way of paving over wetlands, or in poisoning ground water 'inadvertently' because of our reliance on pesticides and fertilisers that are not subject to the integrity of the 'Precautionary Principle,' ultimately leads to climate catastrophes that are acts of man, not acts of god."
Speaking of more mobile devices and smart cities.
Cities Find Rewards in Cheap Technologies
Mobile apps, sensors, and other technologies help cities handle growing challenges.
Cities around the globe, whether rich or poor, are in the midst of a technology experiment. Urban planners are pulling data from inexpensive sensors mounted on traffic lights and park benches, and from mobile apps on citizens’ smartphones, to analyze how their cities really operate. They hope the data will reveal how to run their cities better and improve urban life. City leaders and technology experts say that managing the growing challenges of cities well and affordably will be close to impossible without smart technology.
Fifty-four percent of humanity lives in urban centers, and almost all of the world’s projected population growth over the next three decades will take place in cities, including many very poor cities. Because of their density and often strained infrastructure, cities have an outsize impact on the environment, consuming two-thirds of the globe’s energy and contributing 70 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions. Urban water systems are leaky. Pollution levels are often extreme.
But cities also contribute most of the world’s economic production. Thirty percent of the world’s economy and most of its innovation are concentrated in just 100 cities. Can technology help manage rapid population expansion while also nurturing cities’ all-important role as an economic driver? That’s the big question at the heart of this Business Report.
Speaking of cities and the future - here’s more confirmation of Jeremy Rifkin’s assertion that solar and wind energy is on a Moore’s law trajectory..
While You Were Getting Worked Up Over Oil Prices, This Just Happened to Solar
Grid Parity to Reach 36 States in 2016
Every time fossil fuels get cheaper, people lose interest in solar deployment. That may be about to change.
After years of struggling against cheap natural gas prices and variable subsidies, solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in 47 U.S. states -- in 2016, according to a Deutsche Bank report published this week. That’s assuming the U.S. maintains its 30 percent tax credit on system costs, which is set to expire that same year.
Even if the tax credit drops to 10 percent, solar will soon reach price parity with conventional electricity in well over half the nation: 36 states. Gone are the days when solar panels were an exotic plaything of Earth-loving rich people. Solar is becoming mainstream, and prices will continue to drop as the technology improves and financing becomes more affordable, according to the report.
Speaking of smart cities with technology - this should be coming to all our cities. It’s not a big jump from an e-Booth to ubiquitous wifi.
From Phone Booths to Hot Spots
Say goodbye to the almost 10,000 pay phones of New York City. They’re going to be replaced over the next four years by sleek nine-foot-tall structures the city calls Links.
Every Link will be attached to fiber optic lines under the city streets. When the system is completely built out four years from now, Links spaced about a block apart will provide a cloud of gigabit-speed wifi access — a hundred times faster than the average public wifi now available elsewhere — over the entire city. For free.
Check the date—this is not an April Fool’s joke. Yes, I know that sounds too good to be true. But I have reason to believe that this project will work out. Because it has to. First, the city is seizing the opportunity hidden in the challenge of its full-of-potential yet decaying pay phones, which, though past their prime, are conveniently powered by electricity and connected to communications lines. Even more important, however, may be the simple fact that New York City is way past due for a technological upgrade. Without this wifi move—or something like it—the city will cease to be a global contender.
New York is excited about transforming the 20th Century phone booth into the 21st Century wifi hot spots (still far from Dr. Who’s work). But China is in a position to truly re-imagine the smart city.
China’s Future City
China has put political muscle and technology into Tianjin Eco-City.
Strolling along sidewalks shaded by plane trees, one might take Tianjin Eco-City for just another of the many residential areas sprouting up all over China. But on closer inspection, this place is different. The roadside trash cans are covered with solar photovoltaic panels so they can light up at night; free electric buses connect different districts; the drainage wells for storm water are all embedded in the curbs.
There are less obvious features, too. The pavement is laid with pervious sand bricks for efficient drainage, and the water supply is designed to minimize leakage. Rainwater and wastewater are collected separately, and 18 submersible axial flow pumps capable of pumping 42.1 cubic meters of water per second divert the rainwater to artificial wetlands.
Here, on a piece of land about one-half the size of Manhattan, is one of China’s first attempts at sustainable urban development. It aims to address two of China’s most pressing challenges: the rapid population migration stressing the country’s already-large cities, and its growing pollution and environmental problems. The national government has praised the project as a success, but only 20,000 people have moved in, a fraction of the 350,000 the city is designed to house by 2020.
The Eco-City project, a collaboration of China and Singapore, is located on the eastern border of Tianjin, a manufacturing city of nearly 15 million people. Total investment has not been disclosed, but project officials say that as of 2012, 40 billion yuan ($6.5 billion) had been invested in fixed assets. Tianjin is one of four cities directly governed by China’s central government, and the Eco-City is located in its first “comprehensive reform and innovation area,” a designation associated with favorable investment and trade policies.
Here is something for all of us - who must face the blank page - or even the page with stuff on it and try to keep putting more stuff on it.
The Habits of Highly Productive Writers
There are no tricks to make writing easier, just practices you can develop to get it done
Many writers I know love Joyce Carol Oates—some even refer to her as JCO, as if she were a brand as recognizable as CBS or BMW. But just as often, the mention of her name is met by groans and complaints about how much she’s written. Her productivity seems like an affront.
When someone’s doing a lot more than you, you notice it. It brings out your petty jealousy. And if you’re like me (occasionally petty and jealous), it might make you feel crappy about yourself. Which is, let’s face it, ridiculous. No one else’s achievements take anything away from yours, or mine. The fact that another writer is working hard and well should be nothing more than inspiration, or at least a gentle prod.
So I started to think about the practices of highly productive writers. What are the personality traits and habits that help people crank out the pages? Here are a few that occur to me:
Speaking about performance this is a great article - that looks at the new fundamentals of excellence. To excel at anything people have to develop domain specific orientations to build upon general talent and passion. And more than mass education and training, excellence requires the need to personalize training to the individual. The emerging technology of the quantified self will enable and facilitate this - social scientists concerned with education, development and training be ready.
The article is by James Surowiecki of Wisdom of Crowds fame. Worth the read.
Better All the Time
How the “performance revolution” came to athletics—and beyond.
Today, in sports, what you are is what you make yourself into. Innate athletic ability matters, but it’s taken to be the base from which you have to ascend. Training efforts that forty years ago would have seemed unimaginably sophisticated and obsessive are now what it takes to stay in the game. Athletes don’t merely work harder than they once did. As Mark McClusky documents in his fascinating new book, “Faster, Higher, Stronger” (Hudson Street), they also work smarter, using science and technology to enhance the way they train and perform. It isn’t enough to eat right and put in the hours. “You need to have the best PhDs onboard as well,” McClusky says. This technological and analytical arms race is producing the best athletes in history.
The arms race centers on an obsessive scrutiny of every aspect of training and performance. Trainers today emphasize sports-specific training over generalized conditioning: if you’re a baseball player, you work on rotational power; if you’re a sprinter, on straight-line explosive power. All sorts of tools have been developed to improve vision, reaction time, and the like. The Dynavision D2 machine is a large board filled with flashing lights, which ballplayers have to slap while reading letters and math equations that the board displays. Football players use Nike’s Vapor Strobe goggles, which periodically cloud for tenth-of-a-second intervals, in order to train their eyes to focus even in the middle of chaos.
Training is also increasingly personalized. Players are working not just with their own individual conditioning coaches but also with their own individual skills coaches. In non-team sports, such as tennis and golf, coaches were rare until the seventies. Today, tennis players such as Novak Djokovic have not just a single coach but an entire entourage. In team sports, meanwhile, there’s been a proliferation of gurus. George Whitfield has built a career as a “quarterback whisperer,” turning college quarterbacks into N.F.L.-ready prospects. Ron Wolforth, a pitching coach, is known for resurrecting pitchers’ careers—he recently transformed the Oakland A’s Scott Kazmir from a has-been into an All-Star by revamping his mechanics and motion.
Then there’s the increasing use of biometric sensors, equipped with heart-rate monitors, G.P.S., and gyroscopes, to measure not just performance (how fast a player is accelerating or cutting) but also fatigue levels. And since many studies show that getting more sleep leads to better performance, teams are now worrying about that, too.
Speaking of Big Data - here’s an approach to understanding how languages changes that could be applied to many types of social analysis. The examples in the article aren’t necessarily earth shattering in their insights - but it’s an interesting approach.
Linguistic Mapping Reveals How Word Meanings Sometimes Change Overnight
Data mining the way we use words is revealing the linguistic earthquakes that constantly change our language.
Today, Vivek Kulkarni at Stony Brook University in New York and a few pals show how they have tracked these linguistic changes by mining the corpus of words stored in databases such as Google Books, movie reviews from Amazon and of course the microblogging site Twitter.
They have developed three ways to spot changes in the language. The first is a simple count of how often words are used, using tools such as Google Trends. For example, in October 2012, the frequency of the words “Sandy” and “hurricane” both spiked in the run-up to the storm. However, only one of these words changed its meaning, something that a frequency count cannot spot.
So Kulkarni and co have a second method in which they label all of the words in the databases according to their parts of speech, whether a noun, a proper noun, a verb, an adjective and so on. This clearly reveals a change in the way the word “Sandy” was used, from adjective to proper noun, while also showing that the word “hurricane” had not changed.
The parts of speech technique is useful but not infallible. It cannot pick up the change in meaning of the word mouse, both of which are nouns. So the team have a third approach.
This maps the linguistic vector space in which words are embedded. The idea is that words in this space are close to other words that appear in similar contexts. For example, the word “big” is close to words such as “large”, “huge”, “enormous” and so on.
By examining the linguistic space at different points in history, it is possible to see how meanings have changed. For example, in the 1950s, the word “gay” was close to words such as “cheerful” and “dapper”. Today, however, it has moved significantly to be closer to words such as “ lesbian”, homosexual” and so on.
Kulkarni and co examine three different databases to see how words have changed: the set of 5-word sequences that appear in the Google Books corpus, Amazon movie reviews since 2000 and messages posted on Twitter between September 2011 and October 2013.
Their results reveal not only which words have changed in meaning, but when the change occurred and how quickly. For example, before the 1970s, the word “tape” was used almost exclusively to describe adhesive tape but then gained an additional meaning of “cassette tape”.
Speaking of maps and networks - here’s something about the biology of networks.
Largest-ever map of the human interactome predicts new cancer genes
Scientists have created the largest-scale map to date of direct interactions between proteins encoded by the human genome and newly predicted dozens of genes to be involved in cancer.
The new "human interactome" map describes about 14,000 direct interactions between proteins. The interactome is the network formed by proteins and other cellular components that 'stick together.' The new map is over four times larger than any previous map of its kind, containing more high-quality interactions than have come from all previous studies put together.
CIFAR Senior Fellow Frederick Roth, along with Marc Vidal (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School) co-led the international research team that wrote the forthcoming Nov. 20 paper in Cell. Roth is a senior investigator at Mount Sinai Hospital's Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and a professor at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto. He is also a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Integrative Biology.
The study also reveals that the network of protein interactions in humans covers a much broader range of genes than some past research has suggested. Studies often focus on 'popular' proteins that are already known to be tied to disease or to be interesting for other reasons, which has created a bias in our understanding of interactions, Roth says.
"One major conclusion of the paper is that when you look systematically for interactions, you find them everywhere," he says.
This is very cool, we’ve seen a number of advances over the traditional incandescent light bulb in recent years - here’s an advance of the bulb part and apparents we should see something this on the market by mid 2015.
Rohinni's Lightpaper Is Incredibly Thin, And Printable
Printable lighting is here, now what will you do with it?
How would you use light if it was paper-thin and could be applied to any surface anywhere? When Rohinni CMO Nick Smoot asked me that question, I was pretty stumped at first.
But he's already figuring it out. That's because Rohinni has developed a form of what it calls Lightpaper. It's a way to print lighting and apply it to nearly any surface, in any shape, and for any situation. It's a kind of stunning proposition that reminds me of the first time I heard about 3-D printing.
"With Lightpaper it's more of a platform of light that we don't even know how it's going to be used," explains Smoot. "All we know is that we're trying to unlock the ability to create light."
Consumers should start to see Lightpaper in the wild around the middle of 2015. But Rohinni won't be aiming at the home hobbyist market until after it takes hold in the commercial and industrial space.
"The magical thing about this solution is it's brighter, it's thinner, it's flexible, it's addressable, and programmable. You can address the sections of the diodes, which is a whole other space when you start thinking about solutions of light that you can address sections of."
Considering how we will light up our world - this is an interesting concept to think about changing the workplace. 2 min video - worth the ‘view’. :)
Every Room Has a View: An Inside Look at Quantum of the Seas' Virtual Balconies
Royal Caribbean’s Quantum of the Seas brings ocean views to every interior stateroom with the cutting-edge technology of virtual balconies. Get a behind-the-scenes view of this unique feature found on the world's smartest ship.
For Fun
This is simply awesome - A browser-based fluid dynamics simulator
Pictures are worth a 1000 words - this is a great comic that explains the issue better than most.
THE XKCD GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE’S MOST BIZARRE PHYSICS
Here’s a great talk from RSA
General Ignorance - John Lloyd
The remarkable mind that brought you QI, Blackadder and Spitting Image asks one of the world’s simplest but most significant questions – what do we really need to know? What should we teach our children, and what important information should all adults have at their disposal? Legendary producer John Lloyd turns his curiosity to knowledge itself, and questions whether intelligence is really all it's cracked up to be.
