Techonomy

Bill Gates on in-person vs. online education

At the Techonomy conference in San Francisco, Bill Gates closed the event and answered questions from the audience.

One woman asked him whether he thought that online education could potentially supersede in-person education.

Bill Gates: Non-profits vs. for-profit businesses

At the Techonomy conference in San Francisco, Bill Gates closed the event and answered questions from the audience. One woman asked why non-profits can't behave more like for-profit businesses. Gates said that wasn't necessarily the best idea.

A Techonomic Engineering View of Life Extension

Written by Brian Wang of the nextbigfuture.com

There was a writeup by Chris Mooney about the Longevity Dividend session with Jay Olshansky. There is a lengthier presentation of Jay Olshansky's case for a Longevity Dividend. I agree that longer and healthier lives provides a massive economic boost. This is seen by the historical rise of life expectancy from about 35 years to 80 years over the last hundred years. It can also be seen by the economic devastation when life is shortened and health is destroyed by Aids in Africa.

However, Jay Olshansky is only talking about extending current life and health expectency by 7 years. Standard medicine and public health are providing increases in life expectancy of 0.1 to 0.3 years for each calendar year that passes. There is an another approach to life extension which is strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS). This is an engineering (techonomic) approach that was initiated by Aubrey de Grey.

 

 

Sean Parker on Facebook Causes and the value of Chat Roulette

During the final sessions of the Techonomy conference, moderator David Kirkpatrick conversed with Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn and Sean Parker of the Founders Fund, Founding President, Facebook.

Parker talked about Facebook Causes and why he's obsessed with live video and why Facebook invested in Chatroulette.

Nicholas Negroponte on the latest success of One Laptop per Child

At the Techonomy conference in San Francisco, Nicholas Negroponte talked about the latest success of the One Laptop per Child. The most impressive advance is that children are teaching their parents to read. Watch.

Erika DeBenedictis - Robotic Piloting to Anywhere in the Solar System and using Space Based Resources

Written by Brian Wang of nextbigfuture.com

Erika DeBenedictis is a high school student who wrote a prototype software system that would allow a spacecraft to autonomously calculate and fly low-energy orbits.

Erika is one of ten winners of the Intel Science contest who were at the Techonomy conference.

The Interplanetary Superhighway is based on a mathematical concept known as invariant manifolds (the tubes).

<blockquote>
One may be able to travel large distances in the Interplanetary Superhighway without any propulsion. However, this may not always be the case. This is because the manifolds are actually in phase space which includes both position and velocity. Thus for true intersection to occur, the velocities must also match. Since the manifolds more frequently intersect in position space than in phase space, a change in velocity may be required. The energies required by the trajectories to travel on the Interplanetary Superhighway are typically cheaper propulsively than standard transfers. But this may require much longer time.</blockquote>

The full writeup is 22 megabytes and takes some time to download.

Erika has already been given a tour of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
NASA engineers did show her the latest work on ion drives. Different kinds of ion drives can be matched to the composition of different asteroids. This would enable a vision of mostly autonomous robotic spacecraft using low energy orbits who could go to the asteroids and refuel themselves and mine asteroids for material for near earth colonies and projects.
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David Gelertner Lifestreams and Mirror Worlds

Written by Brian Wang of nextbigfuture.com

David Gelertner was writing about the concept of Lifestreams back in 1995 and 1996.

A lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. The tail of your stream contains documents from the past (starting with your electronic birth certificate). Moving away from the tail and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents --- papers in progress or new electronic mail; other documents (pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software) are stored in between. Moving beyond the present and into the future, the stream contains documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists.

You manage your lifestream through a small number of powerful operators that allow you to transparently store information, organize information on demand, filter and monitor incoming information, create reminders and calendar items in an integrated fashion, and "compress" large numbers of documents into overviews or executive summaries.

There are now several ways to realize the vision of lifestreams today. There is twitter with geotagging and there are social media aggregation sites like posterous.

When I asked Gelertner how different twitter with geotagging and RSS feeds (with RSS readers) are from his vision of Lifestreams, he answered that twitter has the realtime aspect but is too much about trivial things. I believe that more depth and relevance is a matter of better filtering and searching of twitter and subscribing to people and things that have a higher ratio of indepth twittering. Twittering is able to circumvent the short message bformat y including links to details articles. RSS readers lets you merge the output of many websites that you choose to follow.

The Lifestreams vision would want better searching and filtering for relevance, authority, time ordering and location and have better more powerful manipulation. Currently it is usually difficult to efficiently and effectively subscribe to part of a twitter or RSS feed.

Mirror Worlds is a book written by Gelertner in 1991 (the link is to the Google Books copy). In Mirror Worlds, Gelertner predicted and envisioned much of what exists in the modern internet and lay the foundation for the Java programming language and Jini.

There was a video interview of Gelertner by ZDnet. The first part is below. All three parts are on Youtube.

 

Digging deep into company knowledge to improve productivity

So often when I attend conferences there's this driving desire to define the subject of the talk before we begin discussing. Objectively, it's a good idea, but it rarely allows you to launch your session with a bang. Regardless, here goes:

Productivity = Output / Input

In the long run productivity drives the wealth of nations and the competitiveness of companies. Being productive still matters.

Productivity's hurdle

"If HP knew what HP already knows," said HP's Lew Platt of his company's inability to know at a high level what all the employees know at a ground level. One possible solution for this type of company myopia is to "narrate your work," suggests Dave Winer. It sounds egotistical and narcissistic, but providing that information to higher ups allows deeper insight into the organization.

My Critique of Amory Lovins on Nuclear Energy

 Written By : Brian Wang of nextbigfuture.com

Amory promotes micropower as the great new hope for energy and how it is better than oil, coal and nuclear energy. I am with him that micropower is better than oil and coal for electricity.  However, micropower  is mostly diesel, biomass and natural gas of small and big sizes. Natural gas has 4 deaths per TWH (Externe source). So 2500 Twh (to displace nuclear power) would be 10,000 deaths per year. The diesel (oil) portion is 35 deaths per TWH. The biomass about 10 deaths per TWH (35,000 deaths per year if diesel was the main source). The blended rate of deaths per TWH from micropower is over 12 deaths per TWH. Far higher than the 0.65 deaths per TWH calculated by Externe for nuclear power. Even if the micropower deaths per TWH was cut in half for lower distribution losses the number is still far higher. Diesel and natural gas are not renewable. Over 75% of the power that Lovins is talking about is diesel, natural gas and biomass.

Amory also tries to use distorted statistics to indicate that nuclear power will not be growing or is too slow to add power.

Nuclear power had massive growth through the 1970s and even through the 1990s. This was because of improved operations and power uprates and the during the eighties with the French buildout. The new nuclear buildout will start having large impact starting at the end of 2010 with two reactors in China and then in 2011 with over ten reactor completions.

2010 9 new reactors, 6.2 GWe
2011 11 new reactors, 9.3 GWe
2012 10 new reactors, 9.92 GWe
2013 12 new reactors, 13.08 GWe
2014 14 new reactors, 13.63 GWe

My projection for world nuclear generation is

2009 2559 TWhe
2010 2700 TWhe
2011 2800 TWhe
2012 2885 TWhe
2013 2964 TWhe
2014 3120 TWhe

World wind is now at about 300 TWhe and solar electricity is at 20 TWHe.

Kevin Kelly on "What Technology Wants"

At the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, California, I chatted with Kevin Kelly, former Wired Magazine writer and currently author of the book, "What Technology Wants." Kelly's suggests that a wider definition of "technology" will allow us to see new opportunities for innovation.