Saturday, September 21, 2013
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Saturday, July 17, 2010
LGC launches ethanol reference materials
A LGC product story :: http://bit.ly/bZyQ6g
Edited by the Laboratorytalk editorial team Jul 16, 2010
LGC has extended its range of certified reference materials (CRMs) for ethanol in water, intended for the calibration and validation of methods for the determination of ethanol in biological fluids.
The two new reference materials have been produced at concentrations of 50 and 67mg of ethanol per 100ml - in line with the current blood and urine alcohol limits for drink-driving in many European countries.
These materials have been produced under LGC's accreditation to ISO Guide 34 for the production of reference materials.
The reference materials are said to meet the stringent technical guidelines of European Reference Materials (ERM) status and the data were accepted as complying with the principles laid down in the technical guidelines of the ERM co-operation agreement between LGC, BAM and IRMM.
The forensic ethanol reference materials were produced and certified by LGC through chemical oxidation of the ethanol present with excess potassium dichromate followed by titration with acidified iron ammonium sulphate.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Cool Jobs: NIST scientists deal with weighty issues daily
Richard Steiner describes his work to redefine the kilogram in terms of fundamental physical constants.
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/index.php?nid=35&sid=2004312
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/index.php?nid=35&sid=2004312
Innovation, Competition and Regulation Top List of Service Provider Concerns: Advanced Carrier Services Report
Service provider executives surveyed by Metaswitch Networks say uncertainty about new services and revenues, plus competition, remain the top concerns over the next decade. That has been true for most of the past decade, and the survey results confirm that the search for new revenue sources and the pressure of competition remain dominant facts of life in competitive and changing marketplaces.
The significant new difference is that telecom regulators—and what they might do—now are among the top three concerns. Of the three top concerns, though, only service innovation and the organizational response to competition are under direct control. See http://www.carrierevolution.com/articles/74971/what-keeps-service-provider-executives-awake-at-ni/.
About 34 percent of survey respondents indicated regulators were the single biggest threat they face, but competition from other cable companies or telcos also were at the top of respondent lists. And in a sign of where new threats are perceived,Google (News - Alert) is seen as a challenge as big as competition from “other telcos,” the survey of 165 companies found.
About 27 percent of respondents indicated cable companies were the single biggest threat. Some 20 percent of respondents indicated “other telcos” were the second-biggest threat.
But Google is not far behind cable or telco competition as a perceived threat for all contestants, the Metaswitch survey of service provider executives found. Some 17 percent of respondents said Google posed the single greatest threat to business success over the next decade.
Apple and Microsoft (News - Alert) are viewed as the least threatening of seven potential sources of competition, while Skype and other telcos are seen as mid-level threats.
The sobering findings indicate that executives now correctly understand that regulatory risk must be added to the list of top commercial risks for the next decade, even though the search for new revenues, the business models that underlie new services, and staying abreast of competitors remain top issues.
New service creation, especially uncertainty about potential demand, was cited as a huge issue. Some 45 percent of respondents indicated such uncertainty was the greatest of five challenges they face, vastly greater than ability to innovate, regulatory impact, risk of technology failure or brand exposure.
The second-greatest barrier is innovation skill, followed very closely—nearly identically—by regulatory impact. It is worth noting that demand uncertainty was deemed more than twice as big an obstacle as innovation ability or regulatory uncertainty.
On a five-point scale where “1” is the most significant danger, technology failure got a 2.87 average score, while regulatory impact got a 3.02 score. Demand uncertainty got a 1.95 score.
Risks that company brands could suffer, and innovation prowess, were issues of lesser concern to respondents.
The clear implication is that obstacles can be overcome if customer demand is known. However, respondents suggested that technology failure was the single most worrisome issue, once demand is understood.
Everyone might agree that innovation is a huge issue over the next decade, for firms in virtually every part of the business ecosystem. Business model, service and organizational innovation are on the list of subjects studied by Metaswitch. But one issue vastly outweighs the others.
Fully 71 percent of respondents indicated that business model innovation, including new revenue models, delivery and production models, were the top concern. By way of comparison, just 18 percent consider service innovation (marketing and partnerships) the top issue, while just 10 percent believe organizational innovation (people and structure) is the most-important issue.
Business risk from competition and the need to discover new revenue models and services are key concerns of executives running today’s communications businesses. But regulation also is among the biggest risks executives say will affect them most over the next decade, the Metaswitch survey finds.
Overall, it is uncertainty itself which seems to dominate executive thinking about their challenges over the next 10 years. Service providers seem confident of their ability to execute, to handle technology changes and protect good brand images.
But the unsettled and unproven customer demand for particular new services, and the creation of viable revenue models to serve that demand, while ensuring that competitors do not get ahead, are the issues that executives seem most concerned with.
Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Marisa Torrieri
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Can Environmental Regulation Enhance Innovation and Competitiveness?
http://www.isc.hbs.edu/PorterHypothesis_Montreal2010.htm
http://www.isc.hbs.edu/pdf/PorterHypothesis_at20_Montreal.pdf
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Measuring customer satisfaction with new ISO technical specification
Jun 30, 2010
from ANSI (http://bit.ly/biieeL)
ISO has developed a new technical specification, ISO/TS 10004:2010, which provides guidance to organizations in establishing effective processes for monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction is one of the key elements for the success of an organization, whether in public or private sector..
The information obtained from monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction can help identify opportunities for improvement of the organization's strategies, products, processes and characteristics that are valued by customers, and which serve the organization's objectives. Such improvements can strengthen customer confidence and result in commercial and other benefits.
ISO/TS 10004:2010, Quality management – Customer satisfaction – Guidelines for monitoring and measuring, deals with:
- Concept of customer satisfaction, and guiding principles
- Framework for monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction
- Planning for monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction
- Processes for monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction
- Maintenance and improvement of monitoring and measurement processes.
It is not intended for certification or contractual purposes, nor is it intended to alter any rights or obligations under applicable statutory or regulatory requirements.
Mr. Lally Marwah, convener of the project comments: "All organizations – private companies and public sector agencies – have customers, and their satisfaction or dissatisfaction can have far-reaching consequences for the organization. The information gained from monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction as outlined in ISO/TS10004 is vital to quality management. It can guide the organization in taking actions to sustain or enhance customer satisfaction, and help in achieving the larger goals of the organization.”
ISO/TS 10004:2010 belongs to the ISO 10000 series of standards on customer satisfaction. ISO 10001:2007, ISO 10002:2004 and ISO 10003:2007 provide guidance on codes of conduct, complaints handling and dispute resolution. ISO/TS10004 complements these standards by providing guidance on monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction. Collectively, their guidance can assist the organization to take actions which can help to sustain or enhance customer satisfaction.
By providing guidance on monitoring and measuring customer satisfaction ISO/TS 10004:2010 supports the objectives, and is compatible with, ISO 9001:2008, Quality management systems – Requirements, and with ISO 9004:2009, Managing for the sustained success of an organization – A quality management approach.
ISO/TS 10004:2010, Quality management – Customer satisfaction – Guidelines for monitoring and measuring was developed by technical committee ISO/TC 176, Quality management and quality assurance, Subcommittee SC 3, Supporting technologies. It is available from ISO national member institutions (see the complete list with contact details). It may also be obtained directly from the ISO Central Secretariat, price 118 Swiss francs, through the ISO Store or by contacting the Marketing, Communication and Information department (see right-hand column).
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Economics: Innovation central to boosting growth and jobs
Andrew Wyckoff, OECD innovation expert, explains why innovation matters to economic growth and job creation.
Source: OECD (http://bit.ly/d0UPok)
27/05/2010 - “Knowledge is the main driver of today’s global economy,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría at the launch of the OECD Innovation Strategy in Paris. “Countries need to harness innovation and entrepreneurship to boost growth and employment. This is the key to a sustainable rise in living standards.”
Governments have a key role to play to boost innovation, says the Strategy. The long-term nature of the investment needed to tackle challenges such as climate change and infectious diseases, and the risks involved in developing commercial responses to these challenges, mean that some essential research often attracts little private-sector support.
Young firms are key to job creation, the OECD says. In the United States, for example, firms less than five years old have accounted for nearly all of the increase in employment in the private sector in the past 25 years.
“Many governments raised spending on education and research as part of their stimulus packages,” Mr. Gurría said. “That was a wise move. Now, as they embark on fiscal consolidation, they should be careful not to jeopardise long-term growth by cutting spending on activities that are essential for a country’s future.” (read his full speech)
But they also need to ensure that they do not waste the money invested in fostering innovation. Simple measures like cutting red tape, reforming universities to give them more independence and opening up access to more public research data (from mapping the human genome to weather maps) can all help to increase the efficiency of public spending on innovation.
In many countries, there is scope for rationalising and simplifying policies that support innovation. Better focus on improvements in education, training and public research can also help unleash productive change, says the OECD Innovation Strategy.
Source: OECD (http://bit.ly/d0UPok)
27/05/2010 - “Knowledge is the main driver of today’s global economy,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría at the launch of the OECD Innovation Strategy in Paris. “Countries need to harness innovation and entrepreneurship to boost growth and employment. This is the key to a sustainable rise in living standards.”
Governments have a key role to play to boost innovation, says the Strategy. The long-term nature of the investment needed to tackle challenges such as climate change and infectious diseases, and the risks involved in developing commercial responses to these challenges, mean that some essential research often attracts little private-sector support.
| Governments must continue to lead and invest in research in these areas, but also do more to co-ordinate their policies across borders. This involves promoting international mechanisms to share the cost of innovation through co-operation and technology transfer between countries. The current crisis makes it even more urgent to push through necessary reforms to increase the innovative capacity of societies. Governments battling to get their economies onto a sustainable growth path need to reduce administrative hurdles for new and existing companies and make their tax policies more friendly to innovation and entrepreneurship. |
“Many governments raised spending on education and research as part of their stimulus packages,” Mr. Gurría said. “That was a wise move. Now, as they embark on fiscal consolidation, they should be careful not to jeopardise long-term growth by cutting spending on activities that are essential for a country’s future.” (read his full speech)
But they also need to ensure that they do not waste the money invested in fostering innovation. Simple measures like cutting red tape, reforming universities to give them more independence and opening up access to more public research data (from mapping the human genome to weather maps) can all help to increase the efficiency of public spending on innovation.
In many countries, there is scope for rationalising and simplifying policies that support innovation. Better focus on improvements in education, training and public research can also help unleash productive change, says the OECD Innovation Strategy.
- Read the online version of “Measuring Innovation”, a compendium of indicators accompanying the Innovation Strategy.
- See the animated charts on the R&D spending and the number of international patents.
- Innovation: Sensible strategies for sustainable recoveries, OECD Observer article by Dirk Pilat and Andrew Wyckoff (Director), OECD Science, Technology and Industry Directorate.
- For comment or more information, journalists should contact Andrew Wyckoff, OECD Director of Science, Technology and Industry (tel. + 33 1 45 24 93 55).
Monday, May 31, 2010
The Kilogram and the Kitchen Sink
Monday, May 31, 2010 (from http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25262/)
Physicists can't make up their minds how heavy a kilogram should be. Perhaps they should allow a new generation of scientists to help
The problem with this definition was not just that these conditions were somewhat arbitrary and difficult to standardise during a measurement but that only the person in possession of the bar could do the experiment. Physicists wanted a measurement that more or less anybody could make.
The new definition is the distance light travels in a vacuum during 1/ 299 792 458th of a second. In principle, anybody with a laser pointer, a stopwatch and a few other bits and pieces can determine this distance. At a stroke, the metre became open source.
Now physicists want to do the same for the kilogram, which is currently defined as the mass of a cylinder of platinum and iridium called the International Prototype Kilogram.
That's a problem because each time it is picked up, a few atoms rub off the cylinder making it imperceptibly lighter. For this reason almost nobody is allowed to measure the mass of the International Prototype Kilogram, which is stored in a vault in Sevres in France. So nobody really knows how much mass the kilogram is losing or indeed, whether it is gaining the weight of a thin layer of dust and impurities which must surely be gathering on its hundred year-old surfaces.
But what to replace it with? The most widely discussed suggestion is to appeal to the equivalency between energy and mass for a definition. For example, one idea is that a kilogram should be the mass of a body whose equivalent energy is equal to that of a number of photons whose frequencies sum to exactly (299792458^2/66260693) × 10^41 hertz.
If that sounds reasonable enough, you probably haven't thought about it in as much detail as Ronald Fox at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a couple of buddies.
They point out that a kilogram relying on mass-energy equivalence can only be measured using a piece of equipment called a watt-balance. This passes a current through some coils to generate a force capable of supporting a kilogram, allowing it be measured in terms of a current and voltage.
But a watt-balance is an expensive piece of kit that is hard to use, say Fox and co. They point out that the one owned by the National Institute of Standards and Technology is two stories high, cost $1.5 million to set up and requires a team of up to 5 physicists to run. And even then, the measurements are notoriously susceptible to noise.
That's hardly a device that scientists the world over will want or be able to play with.
So Fox and co have another suggestion. Why not make the kilogram equal to the mass of a certain number of carbon-12 atoms, specifically 2250× 28148963^3 of them?
Then a kilogram would be a cube of carbon 8.11cm on each side (8.11cm is roughly the length of 368,855,762 carbon atoms laid side by side).
With that definition, almost anybody could make a kilogram in their own kitchen given some carbon and a knife.
"The day we made a kilogram" might even be the kind of fun that could engage and inspire a new generation of scientists, which ought to be a good enough reason on its own on which to decide.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1005.5139: A Better Definition of the Kilogram
Why I don’t believe in technology innovation
Sitting here in Denver Airport, I think I have finally lost my faith in technology innovation. And the reason? That fiendish creation of the Gates empire, Microsoft Word.
Like a good believer, I have persevered with my faith in technology innovation as a driver of social progress. There have been niggling doubts for sure. But I’ve held fast – until now. While struggling this evening with yet another a MS Word document that didn’t survive the traumatic transfer from a PC to (horror of horrors) a Mac, everything become clear – the promise of technology innovation is nothing but a myth, created to feed our insatiable desire for change.
Eighteen years ago, I was writing my thesis – on a Mac – using an early incarnation of Microsoft Word. I typed, and what appeared on the screen matched what came out of the printer. I added equations – complex ones at that. I included textbook-quality diagrams. And my final thesis looked as good as anything I’ve produced since.
The system worked – it made my life easier. And it worked from a single 3 1/2 inch disk (remember those?) that contained the Mac’s operating system, the word processor, and all the documents I was working on.
So what has changed in the intervening eighteen years? How has technology innovation improved my life as I type away?
These days, I type into the latest version of Word, and the system hangs up on me. I try adding equations, and can’t get the formatting right. I attempt to include diagrams, and the program places them everywhere but where I want them to go. I open documents from PC-using colleagues, to be faced with text and images in places they were never meant to be.
And all this from a program that now takes up well over 50 times the disk space of its predecessor, and needs a super-computer to run on.
So much for progress.
But it gets worse.
People actually use this program. They take it’s flaws in their stride. They go to great lengths to explain how, when things go wrong, you are the problem. They enthuse over the thousand and one features that contribute precisely nothing to good writing. They even change their work habits to match the program’s foibles.
In other words, they adapt to fit the technology.
This I find deeply disturbing. People, it seems, don’t strive to do things better. They strive to do things different. And technology innovation gives them the opportunities they so avidly seek – even if it makes life harder.
How else do you explain a society that, in eighteen years, has so thoroughly embraced a product that enables them to do less for more?
Of course, my judgment might be slightly clouded by the current dogs-dinner of a document sitting in front of me that I’m expected to read and edit. Maybe technology innovation really does improve people’s lives sometimes. Maybe I should hold off on forming the Tech Innovation Unbeliever’s Association for now.
But it does make you wonder whether we’re addicted to the change that technology innovation brings, rather than the progress it promises.
And if we are, I wonder what the treatment is – tech innovation rehab?
I can see the queues forming now for the Microsoft Word Recovery Center.
Written in Ommwriter – which is not made by Microsoft
Read more: http://2020science.org/2010/02/17/why-i-dont-believe-in-technology-innovation/#ixzz0pVPWUOSV
The Global Redesign Initiative and the need for up-front investment in sustainable technology innovation
The global financial crisis of 2008-09 laid bare the inadequacies of global systems in an increasingly interdependent world, and highlighted the need to rethink the “architecture of global cooperation” – the idea at the core of the World Economic Forum Global Redesign Initiative. As the World Economic Forum publishes and discusses the outcomes of this intensive twelve month initiative, the critical need for up-front and integrated investment in sustainable technology innovation cannot afford to be overlooked.
If anyone is still in doubt that sustainable technology innovation depends on up-front investment in responsible development, just take a look at the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. With strategic investment in planning for plausible outcomes, the unfolding environmental and human disaster could have been avoided, or at least substantially reduced. Yet the failure to plan for the future and invest in technologies and strategies that would underpin safe and sustainable operations is indicative of a naive mindset within corporate and policy circles – that when problems occur, science and technology will deliver timely and effective solutions.
Sadly, this is not the case. In the face of high impact and increasingly complex technologies, new approaches are needed to developing the science, policies and tools that will underpin sustainable innovation. This is at the center of a new proposal coming out of the World Economic Forum Global Redesign Agenda to develop a Global Center for Emerging Technology Intelligence – or CETI. The proposed Center aims to ensure that governments, businesses and other stakeholder organizations are equipped to make the most effective use of science and technology innovation in addressing the global challenges of the 21st Century.
CETI is just one of many proposals in the recently-published World Economic Forum Report of the Global Redesign Agenda – Everybody’s Business: Strengthening International Cooperation in a More Interdependent World.
As Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum writes in the report’s preface,
“Our purpose has been to stimulate a strategic thought process among all stakeholders about ways in which international institutions and arrangements should be adapted to contemporary challenges. This report summarizes and interprets the significance of the proposals that the Forum’s many communities have developed in response to this challenge.”
The ideas and proposals presented in the report are essential reading for anyone concerned about sustainable growth in a changing world. But, just as the recent financial collapse and the current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico were cased in part by a lack of foresight and investment in the future, many of the ideas here assume that science and technology will underpin proposed actions. The reality is though that this will only happen with strategic investment in sustainable technology innovation on a scale that, as yet, does not occur.
And this is where the Global Center for Emerging Technologies Intelligence comes in.
The full CETI proposal can be read here. But the main details of the proposed Center are outlined below:
Context
Emerging technologies are critical to long-term global prosperity. They represent the innovation that adds necessary economic and social value to materials, products and processes. And they provide potential solutions to a wide range of pressing global challenges including energy generation and storage, health care, climate change, food security and access to clean water. Yet without better global cooperation on technology innovation, many potential emerging technologies will not mature to the point at which they can be used effectively.Government and corporate decision-makers are foundering in a world dominated by rapid and unprecedented social and technological developments. They are limited in their ability to anticipate and respond to new developments and they lack the mechanisms necessary to work with non-traditional but increasingly influential stakeholder groups.Proposal
The Global Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence will directly address this need. A neutral, transparent and authoritative organization, the Centre’s leaders and staff will work with decision-makers at the highest level in industry, government and other organizations in ensuring the best possible tools are available to support the successful and sustainable development and implementation of new technologies.The mission of the Centre is to ensure that governments, businesses and other stakeholder organizations are equipped to make the most effective use of science and technology innovation in addressing the global challenges of the 21st Century.Explanation/Rationale
Why a Global Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence Is NecessaryScience and technology have been at the heart of economic growth, social prosperity and improvements in quality of life for close to ten thousand years. From the agricultural revolution to the information revolution, advances in society around the globe have been underpinned by new discoveries, and their innovative use in new products and processes. Nearly 250 years ago, the invention of the Spinning Jenny vastly increased speed with which cotton could be turned into yarn, revolutionizing the textile industry and helping usher in the industrial revolution. The discovery of penicillin in the early 1900’s allowed previously fatal infections to be treated, opening the door to modern surgical procedures. In the mid twentieth century, the invention and subsequent development of the transistor initiated a technology revolution that is still driving economic and social growth. And more recently, innovations in global communication, social networking and information processing have begun to empower global communities in ways unimaginable a few years ago.Yet despite the clear impact of these and other examples, the continued success of science and technology as an engine for economic and social growth is not guaranteed. Over the past few decades, global economic and social landscapes have shifted radically, leading to new thinking on how to tap into the potential offered by emerging technologies. A growing global population, coupled with a widespread desire for a first-world quality of life, is placing unprecedented demands on resources around the world. Humanity’s actions are becoming uniquely entwined in environmental reactions, redefining our relationship with the planet on which we live and depend. And modern communications are making a mockery of geographical and institutional boundaries that have endured for hundreds and thousands of years. These three factors not only place new demands on how emerging technologies are used; they also rewrite the rules for using them effectively.Recent attempts to introduce genetically modified foods into commerce in Europe provide a sobering lesson in how easy it is to mishandle emerging technologies. Despite little evidence to the contrary, apparent concerns over health and environmental impacts severely retarded the implementation of a technology that could save and improve millions of lives around the world. Yet these concerns were grounded in a backlash against corporate control that cut consumers out of the decision-making process. And through a socially-savvy media, people were galvanized to say “no” to “frankenfoods” – not because of the science and technology, but because of the way they were handled.Missteps over the development of genetically modified foods are a prominent case among many where the trajectory of a technology has been dictated by social concerns as much as scientific evidence. It is becoming increasingly clear that hierarchical, evidence-based decision-making is not sufficient on its own to ensure the success of new technologies. In part, the situation is exacerbated by peer to peer global communications, where virtual groups can be informed about, motivated by and empowered to take action on emerging issues before institutional decision-makers are even aware there is an issue to respond to. We now live in a world where an incident in China, or the Middle East, can influence attitudes and actions in regions like Europe and the Americas in a matter of minutes through media like FaceBook and Twitter.The impact on realizing the social and economic potential of new technologies is potentially profound. Established approaches to government and corporate policy-making founder in the new social order, and are limited in their ability to anticipate and guide new developments effectively. They lack the responsiveness, adaptability and foresight to anticipate hurdles to progress, or to work through partnership with non-traditional but increasingly influential stakeholder groups – including consumers.Yet this disconnect between established policy mechanisms and new approaches to implementing emerging technologies is occurring at a point where future global prosperity is more dependent than ever on new science-based solutions to pressing problems.Providing people with access to healthy food and clean water; managing climate change and its impacts; treating disease; generating and using energy wisely; coping with pollution—over the next fifty years, global challenges in these and similar areas will reach an unprecedented level. Without rapid and targeted advances in science and technology, humanity will not be able to face them without paying a large price. Now, perhaps more than at any time in history, we need the tools that science and technology provide to face an uncertain future. And just as the challenges are global in scope, so the solutions will need to be global in reach.In emerging areas such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology and geoengineering, there is growing awareness that a new paradigm is needed if the technologies are to be developed effectively—one that predicts and avoids potential hurdles, develops and implements new technologies in partnership with multiple stakeholders, identifies and addresses possible health and environmental impacts before they occur, and responds rapidly to new developments. Yet there is a gaping chasm between the knowledge that a different approach to policy-making is needed, and an understanding of what this new approach should look like.This is the gap that the Global Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence will fill. Working with decision-makers at the highest level in industry, government and other organizations, it will aim to ensure that decision-makers have the best possible tools at their disposal to ensure the successful and sustainable development and implementation of new technologies.The Goals of a Global Centre for Emerging Technology IntelligenceBe an authoritative and neutral source of intelligence on emerging technologies and the opportunities and challenges they raiseThe Centre will work towards becoming the premier go-to source of information on emerging technologies for decision-makers, the media and the public. This will be achieved through developing a global network of experts on emerging technology policy, potential and risks, building in-house expertise, producing high value/high impact products and working closely with the media. The Centre will also promote accessibility, inclusiveness and strategic partnerships in an attempt to bridge divides that can characteristic advance technologies.Provide timely information on emerging opportunities and challengesThe Centre will develop in-house expertise in identifying, evaluating and assessing new opportunities and challenges related to emerging technologies. Assessments of emerging issues will be published and made publicly available on a regular basis.Bring senior stakeholders together to identify emerging issuesThe Centre will bring high-level experts and decision-makers together on an annual basis to identify emerging issues and inform a rolling two-year programme of targeted projects.Publish targeted research, analysis and recommendationsBased on a two-year strategic plan, the Centre will publish analyses and recommendations on key emerging technology issues.
The bottom line here is that sustainable technology innovation doesn’t just happen – it requires sustained, strategic and substantial up-front investment in the knowledge, frameworks and policies that will allow innovation to address global challenges without creating new problems. CETI is one approach to addressing this need. But whether this proposal is developed or something else is adopted in its place, one thing is very clear – global redesign will not happen unless we rethink sustainable technology innovation. And for that to happen, science and technology need to be pushed mush further up the global agenda.
Read more: http://2020science.org/2010/05/31/the-global-redesign-initiative-and-the-need-for-up-front-investment-in-sustainable-technology-innovation/#ixzz0pVNXkFXR
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Are 5,001 Facebook Friends One Too Many?
Jennifer Daniel
LOOKING AT YOU, AND YOU AND ... Jennifer Daniel, an illustrator, created a fan page on Facebook and asked friends to submit their images for this mosaic; 238 of them did so.
By AIMEE LEE BALL Published: May 28, 2010 (http://nyti.ms/bC4r97)
THE British anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar has posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained (read: friends) is limited by the size of the human brain, specifically the neocortex. “Dunbar’s number,” as this hypothesis has become known, is 150.
Facebook begs to differ.
What would be an impressive, even exhaustive, number of friends in real life is bush league for Facebook’s high rollers, who have thousands. Other social networks use less-intimate terminology to portray contacts (LinkedIn has “connections,” Twitter has “followers”), but Facebook famously co-opted the word “friend” and created a new verb.
Friending “sustains an illusion of closeness in a complex world of continuous partial attention,” said Roger Fransecky, a clinical psychologist and executive coach in New York (2,894 friends). “We get captured by Facebook’s algorithms. Every day 25 new people can march into your living room. I come from a failed Presbyterian youth, and there was a part of me that first thought it was impolite not to respond. Then I realized I couldn’t put them all in a living room — I needed an amphitheater.”
Facebook discourages adding strangers as friends, adding that only a tiny fraction of its 400 million users have reached the 5,000 threshold, at which point Facebook wags its digital finger and says: That’s enough. The company cites behind-the-scenes “back-end technology” as the reason for the cutoff, implying that the system will implode at the sight of a 5,001st friend.
“You hit this limit, and you have to commit Facebook murder, or perhaps ‘culling’ would be a better word,” said Sreenath Sreenivasan (5,000), dean of student affairs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His page bears the admonishment, “FB will not let me add any more friends,” and he periodically posts a message asking some on his list to “unfriend” him.
What may seem surprising is that the subset of people with sizable lists is not limited to unemployed 20-somethings, commandeering tables at Starbucks and deluding themselves that they’re “networking,” social or otherwise. The high-users include plenty of grown-ups with real jobs and, seemingly, better things to do with their time than updating their “status” for strangers, former colleagues and camp buddies from 300 years ago.
“At one point, I arbitrarily decided that for every new friend I confirmed, I had to delete one, like people with small closets do with their clothes,” said Kurt Andersen (3,072), the host of “Studio 360” on public radio. “I devoted an entire weekend to going through them. But it made me feel like a 14-year-old girl: ‘I’ll be friends with you but not with you.’ ”
Facebook friends grow like kudzu for a variety of reasons, often personal or professional marketing — a proxy for the exchange of business cards (so old school). As in life, social networking lends itself to expanding social circles with like-minded people, so there are autologous Facebook cabals for foodies, literati, political junkies, perhaps gardeners, probably plumbers, definitely Civil War re-enactors (whose membership seems to be self-selected from former high-school audiovisual clubs).
Jeffrey Toobin, a CNN legal analyst, credits (or blames) the election of 2008 for his Brobdingnagian list. “During one of the many primary nights, there was a shot of me from behind in the studio,” said Mr. Toobin (5,000). “Some intrepid viewer did a freeze frame showing that I was on Facebook at the time, and put it on the Web to make fun of it. Fair enough, but that mockery went viral. I now have 1,500 people pending, and I feel like I’ve declared Facebook bankruptcy. It’s the 21st-century equivalent of ‘12:00’ flashing on my VCR.”
If Facebook is a place of indiscriminate musings and minutiae, where people report their every thought, mood, hiccup, cappuccino, increased reps at the gym or switch to a new brand of toothpaste, why not indiscriminate friendships? Why deny the little frisson of pleasure when your page proclaims you are “now friends with John Smith and 27 other people?”
Facebook’s announcements and “suggestions” for new friends help to fetishize those numbers, although few will admit to an ego-gratifying interest in attaining the mythical quota of 5,000, like the Ryan Bingham character of “Up in the Air,” who’s obsessed with reaching 10 million frequent flier miles.
As a metric for status or worth, Facebook has the ability to reduce its adult users to insecure teenagers, competing for high SAT scores or a seat at the cool kids’ cafeteria table.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Data, data everywhere
Data, data everywhere
Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches
Feb 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition (http://bit.ly/9aC7D3)
See also: http://bit.ly/c2FlJo
See also: http://bit.ly/c2FlJo
Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.
All these examples tell the same story: that 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.
But they are also creating a host of new problems. Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space (see chart 1). Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.
“We are at a different period because of so much information,” says James Cortada of IBM, who has written a couple of dozen books on the history of information in society. Joe Hellerstein, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, calls it “the industrial revolution of data”. The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts. Scientists and computer engineers have coined a new term for the phenomenon: “big data”.
Epistemologically speaking, information is made up of a collection of data and knowledge is made up of different strands of information. But this special report uses “data” and “information” interchangeably because, as it will argue, the two are increasingly difficult to tell apart. Given enough raw data, today’s algorithms and powerful computers can reveal new insights that would previously have remained hidden.
The business of information management—helping organisations to make sense of their proliferating data—is growing by leaps and bounds. In recent years Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $15 billion on buying software firms specialising in data management and analytics. This industry is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion and growing at almost 10% a year, roughly twice as fast as the software business as a whole.
Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and 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.
More of everything
There are many reasons for the information explosion. The most obvious one is technology. As the capabilities of digital devices soar and prices plummet, sensors and gadgets are digitising lots of information that was previously unavailable. And many more people have access to far more powerful tools. For example, there are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide (though many people have more than one, so the world’s 6.8 billion people are not quite as well supplied as these figures suggest), and 1 billion-2 billion people use the internet.Moreover, there are now many more people who interact with information. Between 1990 and 2005 more than 1 billion people worldwide entered the middle class. As they get richer they become more literate, which fuels information growth, notes Mr Cortada. The results are showing up in politics, economics and the law as well. “Revolutions in science have often been preceded by revolutions in measurement,” says Sinan Aral, a business professor at New York University. Just as the microscope transformed biology by exposing germs, and the electron microscope changed physics, all these data are turning the social sciences upside down, he explains. Researchers are now able to understand human behaviour at the population level rather than the individual level.
The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years. Moore’s law, which the computer industry now takes for granted, says that the processing power and storage capacity of computer chips double or their prices halve roughly every 18 months. The software programs are getting better too. Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University, reckons that the improvements in the algorithms driving computer applications have played as important a part as Moore’s law for decades.
A vast amount of that information is shared. By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco, a maker of communications gear. And the quantity of data continues to grow faster than the ability of the network to carry it all.
People have long groused that they were swamped by information. Back in 1917 the manager of a Connecticut manufacturing firm complained about the effects of the telephone: “Time is lost, confusion results and money is spent.” Yet what is happening now goes way beyond incremental growth. The quantitative change has begun to make a qualitative difference.
This shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects. “What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data—and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level,” says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour. “Every day I wake up and ask, ‘how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?” says Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal-Mart.
Sophisticated quantitative analysis is being applied to many aspects of life, not just missile trajectories or financial hedging strategies, as in the past. For example, Farecast, a part of Microsoft’s search engine Bing, can advise customers whether to buy an airline ticket now or wait for the price to come down by examining 225 billion flight and price records. The same idea is being extended to hotel rooms, cars and similar items. Personal-finance websites and banks are aggregating their customer data to show up macroeconomic trends, which may develop into ancillary businesses in their own right. Number-crunchers have even uncovered match-fixing in Japanese sumo wrestling.
Dross into gold
“Data exhaust”—the trail of clicks that internet users leave behind from which value can be extracted—is becoming a mainstay of the internet economy. One example is Google’s search engine, which is partly guided by the number of clicks on an item to help determine its relevance to a search query. If the eighth listing for a search term is the one most people go to, the algorithm puts it higher up.As the world is becoming increasingly digital, aggregating and analysing data is likely to bring huge benefits in other fields as well. For example, Mr Mundie of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, sit on a presidential task force to reform American health care. “Early on in this process Eric and I both said: ‘Look, if you really want to transform health care, you basically build a sort of health-care economy around the data that relate to people’,” Mr Mundie explains. “You would not just think of data as the ‘exhaust’ of providing health services, but rather they become a central asset in trying to figure out how you would improve every aspect of health care. It’s a bit of an inversion.”
To be sure, digital records should make life easier for doctors, bring down costs for providers and patients and improve the quality of care. But in aggregate the data can also be mined to spot unwanted drug interactions, identify the most effective treatments and predict the onset of disease before symptoms emerge. Computers already attempt to do these things, but need to be explicitly programmed for them. In a world of big data the correlations surface almost by themselves.
Sometimes those data reveal more than was intended. For example, the city of Oakland, California, releases information on where and when arrests were made, which is put out on a private website, Oakland Crimespotting. At one point a few clicks revealed that police swept the whole of a busy street for prostitution every evening except on Wednesdays, a tactic they probably meant to keep to themselves.
But big data can have far more serious consequences than that. During the recent financial crisis it became clear that banks and rating agencies had been relying on models which, although they required a vast amount of information to be fed in, failed to reflect financial risk in the real world. This was the first crisis to be sparked by big data—and there will be more.
The way that information is managed touches all areas of life. At the turn of the 20th century new flows of information through channels such as the telegraph and telephone supported mass production. Today the availability of abundant data enables companies to cater to small niche markets anywhere in the world. Economic production used to be based in the factory, where managers pored over every machine and process to make it more efficient. Now statisticians mine the information output of the business for new ideas.
“The data-centred economy is just nascent,” admits Mr Mundie of Microsoft. “You can see the outlines of it, but the technical, infrastructural and even business-model implications are not well understood right now.” This special report will point to where it is beginning to surface.
Promoting innovation: Growth on the cheap
Promoting innovation
Growth on the cheap
The OECD tells governments how to unleash business’s creative potential
May 27th 2010 | From The Economist print edition (http://bit.ly/cDjTZM)
The grandees were also unusually attentive. Many governments are facing not only slow economic growth but also big deficits and heavy debts. At the same time, problems such as global warming and rising prices for natural resources demand their attention. Innovation, the OECD argues, offers a way out. It is already the chief engine of productivity in the rich world, and thus holds out the tantalising prospect of sustaining economic growth on the cheap. It could also provide affordable fixes to the thorniest global problems, argues John Kao, the founder of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, which advocates the use of prizes and contests to encourage breakthroughs on social ills.
But what is the best way for governments to boost innovation? Sensibly if predictably, the OECD urges investment in education, research and “knowledge-supporting infrastructure” (such as broadband internet networks and smart electricity grids). Skimping on this while money is tight, says the agency, will cause growth to suffer in the long term.
The agency also offers several more novel prescriptions. It suggests that governments should not merely encourage the supply of innovation (for example, by funding research) but also try to stimulate demand. Economies, after all, benefit not from the invention of new products or services, but from their diffusion. In countries that are good at commercialising new ideas, such as America and Norway, even newly founded firms coin valuable intellectual property (see chart).
If governments want to see a blossoming of clean technology, therefore, they should use taxes to put a price on environmental externalities (such as carbon) rather than coddle pet technologies. Public-procurement rules that favour green products can spur this market, says Andrew Wyckoff of the OECD, but he cautions against using such rules as a cloak for “creeping protectionism”. Indeed, the report recommends opening domestic research programmes to foreign firms, to take advantage of bright ideas from abroad.
The OECD encourages governments to rethink their policies in the light of globalisation and the information economy. It notes that “intangibles” such as knowledge networks and open business models now make up much of the value of firms in rich countries and that many companies produce profitable innovations with little or no research in-house. For example, most of the research behind the iPod was done by other firms, but Apple reaped huge profits from its skill in design, systems integration and marketing.
Henry Chesbrough of the University of California, Berkeley applauds the OECD’s emphasis on intangibles and open innovation, but thinks the report still focuses “too much on product-related notions of R&D”. He notes that services make up well over half of economic activity in most rich countries, but there are no common standards for measuring their inventiveness. Yet many new processes, such as selling software as a service via the internet, have in turn enabled other innovations.
Mr Kao also thinks the OECD could go further. He wants it to measure the value created by social networks and related innovations. But he praises its findings as an improvement on the imprecise and lopsided innovation policies of the past: “This moves us closer to the day when innovation will truly be a discipline.”
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Mapping Your Innovation Strategy
Harvard Business Review Article
In the complex sport of American football, teams rely on playbooks as thick as the Manhattan phone directory. But when it comes to creating innovative growth businesses--which is at least as complicated as professional football--most companies have not developed detailed game plans. Indeed, many managers have concluded that a fog enshrouds the world of innovation, obscuring high-potential opportunities. The authors believe that companies can penetrate that fog by developing growth strategies based on disruptive innovations, as defined by Clayton Christensen. Such innovations conform to a pattern: They offer an entirely new solution; they perform adequately along traditional dimensions and much better along other dimensions that matter more to target customers; and they are not initially appealing to powerful incumbents. Companies can develop customized checklists, or playbooks, by combining this basic pattern with analysis of major innovations in their markets. The key early on is to focus not on detailed financial estimates--which will always guide companies toward the markets most hostile to disruptive innovations--but on how well the innovation fits the pattern of success. It's also crucial to encourage flexibility: Companies must be willing to kill projects that are going nowhere, exempt innovations from standard development processes, and avoid burdening project teams with extra financing, which can keep them heading in the wrong direction. Companies can create competitive advantage by becoming champions at defining the pattern of successful innovations and executing against it. But as that pattern becomes obvious--and others emerge--building a sustainable advantage on innovation competencies will again prove elusive.
Innovation Metrics
One of the key challenges for companies seeking to improve their ability to create growth through innovation is that the metrics many companies use to measure innovation run a high risk of actually leading them in the wrong direction. This chapter describes key measurement traps and lays out fifteen potential innovation metrics companies can use to more accurately assess innovation-related activities.
This chapter is excerpted from "The Innovator's Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work."
Three Critical Innovation Lessons from Apple
Source: Scott Anthony, Harvard Business Review
http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2010/05/three_critical_innovation_less.html
It was September, 2005. I was fresh off of a workshop with a media company where the company's CEO noted, "Trees don't grow to the sky forever." The company's core business was strong, but the CEO told the group it had to innovate to sustain success in an increasingly turbulent environment.
A couple of days later, I was talking to my colleague Matt Eyring. He said, "So Scott, you've been a big supporter of Apple over the past few years. What do you think about buying some stock?"
"Trees don't grow to the sky forever," I told Matt.
Whoops.
Since late 2005, Apple's stock has quintupled. With a market capitalization of close to $250 billion, Apple is (at least today) the third most valuable company in the world, behind ExxonMobil and Microsoft.
It's a stunning story that's been dissected to death, but still remarkable enough to warrant reflection. Ten years ago — three years after Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs had returned to "rescue" Apple — the company was still largely treading water, with a relatively meager $3 billion market capitalization. Its personal computer products had a loyal following in niche markets, but that was about it.
Over the past decade, Apple has launched five legitimately game-changing innovations:
Many expect the iPad to be Apple's sixth big success. It's still too early to tell (and, as noted before, I'm waiting for the twist), but watching my four- and two-year old children play around with our iPad leads me to believe the device has only scratched the surface of its disruptive potential. That's not to say the next decade will be as great for Apple as the past decade. It now has to think hard about how to manage conflicts that will emerge at the intersections of its businesses. The company will inevitably find it hard to maintain its growth rate as revenues approach $100 billion.
Looking back, my mistake in dismissing Matt was pretty simple. I didn't count on the impact of items three through five on the list above. It's a natural enough mistake. The number of companies that have organically created three distinct multi-billion dollar new businesses in a decade is pretty short.
And if Apple had indeed stopped at the iPod, my advice to Matt would have appeared smarter. After all, iPod sales have slowed over the past few years as that market has approached saturation. But Apple's brilliance has been to relentlessly push the pace of innovation.
Reflecting on Apple's decade of disruption highlights three critical lessons:
Of course, Jobs has been a central player in Apple's success. It's indeed unlikely that Apple could have been as successful without such a visionary, charismatic leader. But my own view is that the "black box" of innovation has cracked open, making innovation success more widely available.
Innovators around the world — whether they are intraprenreurs working for large companies or entrepreneurs set out to create the next great business — can meaningfully increase their odds of success by drawing on the increasingly deep pool of academic research and case examples. Whether they wear mock block turtlenecks is up to them.
More on: Apple, Disruptive innovation
http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2010/05/three_critical_innovation_less.html
It was September, 2005. I was fresh off of a workshop with a media company where the company's CEO noted, "Trees don't grow to the sky forever." The company's core business was strong, but the CEO told the group it had to innovate to sustain success in an increasingly turbulent environment.
A couple of days later, I was talking to my colleague Matt Eyring. He said, "So Scott, you've been a big supporter of Apple over the past few years. What do you think about buying some stock?"
"Trees don't grow to the sky forever," I told Matt.
Whoops.
Since late 2005, Apple's stock has quintupled. With a market capitalization of close to $250 billion, Apple is (at least today) the third most valuable company in the world, behind ExxonMobil and Microsoft.
It's a stunning story that's been dissected to death, but still remarkable enough to warrant reflection. Ten years ago — three years after Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs had returned to "rescue" Apple — the company was still largely treading water, with a relatively meager $3 billion market capitalization. Its personal computer products had a loyal following in niche markets, but that was about it.
Over the past decade, Apple has launched five legitimately game-changing innovations:
- The iPod. The elegant MP3 player that started Apple's decade of disruption.
- iTunes. Beautiful software with a powerful business model that showed that people would in fact pay for music if the price was right and the interface was simple enough.
- The iPhone. Dubbed the "Jesus Phone" by supporters, a smartphone that three years later still hasn't been matched by rivals.
- The AppExchange. Sure, no one needs 98 percent of the apps that Apple offers, but wow, what a selection.
- The Apple Store. The quietest part of Apple's revolution, today close to $2 billion worth of goods move through Apple revolutionary stores.
Many expect the iPad to be Apple's sixth big success. It's still too early to tell (and, as noted before, I'm waiting for the twist), but watching my four- and two-year old children play around with our iPad leads me to believe the device has only scratched the surface of its disruptive potential. That's not to say the next decade will be as great for Apple as the past decade. It now has to think hard about how to manage conflicts that will emerge at the intersections of its businesses. The company will inevitably find it hard to maintain its growth rate as revenues approach $100 billion.
Looking back, my mistake in dismissing Matt was pretty simple. I didn't count on the impact of items three through five on the list above. It's a natural enough mistake. The number of companies that have organically created three distinct multi-billion dollar new businesses in a decade is pretty short.
And if Apple had indeed stopped at the iPod, my advice to Matt would have appeared smarter. After all, iPod sales have slowed over the past few years as that market has approached saturation. But Apple's brilliance has been to relentlessly push the pace of innovation.
Reflecting on Apple's decade of disruption highlights three critical lessons:
- Don't just focus on building beautiful products. Build beautiful business models, new ways to create, deliver, and capture value. The iPod and iPhone would not have had nearly as much impact if they hadn't been matched with iTunes and the AppExchange respectively.
- Think in terms of platforms and pipelines. Competitors that chase Apple's latest release find themselves behind when six months later Apple introduces its latest and greatest offering.
- Take a portfolio approach. While Apple has been on a phenomenal run, not everything it has introduced has been a home run. For example, Apple TV hasn't had the "revolutionary" impact that Jobs predicted upon its launch in 2007.
Of course, Jobs has been a central player in Apple's success. It's indeed unlikely that Apple could have been as successful without such a visionary, charismatic leader. But my own view is that the "black box" of innovation has cracked open, making innovation success more widely available.
Innovators around the world — whether they are intraprenreurs working for large companies or entrepreneurs set out to create the next great business — can meaningfully increase their odds of success by drawing on the increasingly deep pool of academic research and case examples. Whether they wear mock block turtlenecks is up to them.
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