technorati tags: MediaX, DARPAGrandChallenge
Bernardo Huberman, Consulting Professor, Applied Physics is speaking here at MediaX on "Harvesting Implicit Knowledge" -- he proposes that a key differentiator of great organizations is their ability to extract, aggregate analyze and properly act on information quickly.
Today we need to discover communities of interest. We can do this by looking at the electronic communications that we use - tools like email and even powerpoint. People that communicate often tend to establish links that persist. Thus using the connections implicit in email communications it is possible to surface the connections between individuals in a company, uncovering implicit organizational structures.
One of the reasons we are talking about this at MediaX is that this effort is an example of how there can be cross-fertilization from adjacent fields. The way in which this group is developing the notion of implicit communities is by applying a concept from mathematics -- "betweenness centrality" -- in which a graph has community structure if it consists of groups of nodes with many more links within each group than between different groups.
technorati tags: MediaX
Enormous congratulations to Ellen Levy, Director of Industry Research and Collaboration for MediaX at Stanford University. I am sitting in the audience now, listening to the opening comments from John Hennessey, President of the University. The fact that John is here, giving these opening remarks, is in itself an enormous endorsement for the incredible work that Ellen and her organization are doing to connect industry with research. And the program over the next day and a half speaks to the enormous breadth of the collaboration that is being nurtured by this organization.
John notes that "..increasingly Universities will be the place that basic research and core technologies are developed." He is laying out an ambition program for evolving the educational initiatives as well as the research agendas that Stanford is undertaking. Examples that John offers for questions a University is uniquely suited to asking:
"How would you design the Internet today, if you could start with a clean state."
"What are the implications when people live not 10 years past their retirement age, but 20, 30, even 40?"
He closes with a quotation: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used to create those problems" - Albert Einstein
technorati tags: MediaX, Stanford, EllenLevy, JohnHennessy
Integrating the UTC Power fuel cell with a hybrid-electric drive system has enabled us to achieve twice the fuel efficiency of diesel.For the planet's sake, lets hope this trial is successful and brings more fuel cells to market quickly.
I rarely endorse products, but once in awhile I am blown away by how great a company, service, or product is -- so I want to tell everyone I know. Such is the case with Anthology Solutions which makes a terrific networked storage solution called Yellow Machine. I bought one for my home network, but they are focused on the small business market right now. For less than $2 per gigabyte I got a 680 gigabyte networked home storage solution that worked right out of the box with minimal setup (and nothing very technical). I bought their 1 terabyte version which, running RAID 5, comes out to the 680 gb of usable space. Now everyone in the family can safely back up files. More importantly, we are now running iTunes (which drives our stereo 90% of the time) from any computer in the house, accessing a shared iTunes music directory on the Yellow Machine.
A few other notable features -- the Yellow Machine ships with a VPN router with double firewall and an 8-port LAN switch and WAN gateway. So not only is this a RAID 5 storage solution, but it is also your network hub and firewall to the outside world. All for $1,299!
The company has 1.6 and 2 terabyte models planned as well.
The coolest thing? 1 terabyte tucked under my arm when I left work on Friday to go home and set it up. Geesh, I remember when the first commercial 1 terabyte data storage facility was turned on (to much fanfare)... oh well, I guess I am getting old!
A long time ago (and I'll go and dig up the blog post link later) I had an extended debate with Larry Lessig about software copyright. It was great to hear him speak today at Mashup Camp and to hear how his thinking has evolved. Or maybe I just misunderstood him... The core of the debate was about whether when someone asserts a copyright claim over software, whether there should be a published human readable form of that software provided to the marketplace. I pointed out that if software companies were compelled to do so, it would gut the value that copyright might offer in the first place.
Today, Lessig offered a similar point, but with the clarity that such human readable form could be provided in a "time-encrypted" format, such that it could only be readable at the point that the copyright had expired. Now that idea makes sense.
technorati tags: mashupcamp
technorati tags: mashupcamp
technorati tags: mashupcamp
technorati tags: mashupcamp
At best we might say that it is "self-organizing" which might work... In the great Heideggerian tradition (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) I think the style is more of a reaction to standard conference style. So maybe this is an anti-conference rather than an unconference... But this is another way to say that I think we are on our way to another kind of conference but that we aren't there yet.
Right now there are a line of "technology providers" introducing themselves... at 30 seconds each none of this information is going to stick. So I guess this part of the morning is to give us a chance to wake up... Next up we are supposed to propose conference sessions and build our own conference organically -- hey, I'm game... just skeptical ;-)
technorati tags: mashupcamp
You have to get a little bit worried with information like this --
twice as much ice is going into the sea as it was five years ago.The article goes on to talk about how sea levels were 25 meters higher than they are today the last time the earth's average temperature was 3 degrees warmer than it is now... and we are rebuilding the levees in New Orleans for a category 3 hurricane? Hmmm....
Most people when they hear the words "actuarial tables" think of statistical analysis and insurance and other boring subjects... But after reading a recent article about US biologist Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University and his presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in St. Louis, I began to wonder if the way we create actuarial tables is all wrong. And if so, there will be enormous implications far beyond the insurance industry since we base many of our business decisions, political decisions, and personal life decisions on how long we think we will live.
According to the US Government, if you are born today you are likely to live to be about 74 years old as a male or about 80 as a female. Here is the statistical table from the social security website. What this means is that the average age at death for all people born today is 74 (I'll use the male statistics throughout this, but you can go look up the female statistics on the table if you are interested). This means that every infant that dies brings down the "average" life expectancy. Thus, as you would expect, as you grow older your "life expectancy" increases. At 20 years of age, the average life expectancy has increased to over 75 years. That is, of all the people still alive at 20, they will on average live another 55 years.
This method of calculating life expectancy assumes that relative lifespans are constant. Or, to quote the SSA website,
"The period life expectancy at a given age for 2001 represents the average number of years of life remaining if a group of persons at that age were to experience the mortality rates for 2001 over the course of their remaining life."
But this last point is precisely the one that Dr. Tuljapurkar brings into question in his report. He claims that at the current pace of medical advancement that we are adding one year of life expectancy each five years of medical research. Thus the life expectancy for someone born today should be 20 years longer than the "...mortality rates for 2001..." -- and this is just the average...
In his report he suggests that by 2050, we should be thinking that a retirement age of 85 is normal. Based on 2001 mortality rates, only the top quartile will live to be more than 85 years old. Even assuming that over the 50 years, we have added an average of 10 years of life (or, made 85 year olds as healthy as 75 year olds are today) only about half of all citizens live to be over 75 today. So these raises an interesting question about "retirement" age -- how should we think about these "golden years?" Who gets to participate? Only 50% of the population?
One of the interesting aspects of the actuarial table is looking for the "knee" in the graph. If you think about the primary causes of death you can group them largely into 3 categories -- accidents, self-inflicted, and disease. Most of the medical research that Dr. Tuljapurkar is talking about addresses disease, and in particular disease afflicting us in our old age. Thus even if the ultimate age at which we leave does not grow substantially, the "knee" in the curve could move dramatically.
91% of all US males make it past their 50th birthday. 85% are still alive at 60. At 65, when our parents think they should retire, 78% of american males are still alive. The die-off acclerates into the next few decades. 10 years later, at 75, only 58% are still alive, a 20% loss in 10 years. By comparison, between 50 and 60 only 6% die.
It seems reasonable to assume that a lot of these people are dying from preventable diseases. Even that changes in social behavior (the reduction of smoking, for example) already is going to have a big impact on this "knee" in the graph. Thus it may be reasonable to think that, rather than assuming an 85 year old in 2050 will be as healthy as a 75 year old is today, that as many as 78% of all Americans in that cohort are still alive at 85. This is a lot different than thinking that they are as healthy as 65 year olds. In fact, we may be a nation of hospital bound, breathing tube linked, living dead in 2050. The fact that medicine can keep us alive does not address the question of our quality of life at that age.
There is one male in the US out of every 100,000 born in 1906 that is alive today. The real question for the medical profession is not whether 100 years old will become, for our children, the average life expectancy. But rather, whether or not we will be living happy and healthy lives into our second centuries.
