January 2012
4 posts
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Apple posts record quarterly revenue →
Apple just posted spectacular holiday quarter results. Revenue of $46 billion blew away their previous record of $28 billion, and profit of $13 billion is larger than Google’s entire revenue.
More than half those revenues come from iPhones, too, with unit sales of 37 million way above the previous record of 20 million. So, no basis in that whole “The iPhone 4S is OK, but it’s no...
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Misinterpretation masterclass
Writers in The Australian continues to misinterpret scientific statements on climate change. A recent press release from the World Meteorological Organization reported on the temperature in 2011, noting that it continues the trend of years much warmer than the long-term average:
At present, 2011’s nominal value ranks as the equal 10th highest on record, and the 13 warmest years have all...
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China is neither America's factory nor its banker
The Motley Fool, an investing website, has some analysis of commonly-repeated statements about how the US is in economic thrall to China, which are actually not true. The key highlights:
Misconception: Most of what Americans spend their money on is made in China.
Fact: Just 2.7% of personal consumption expenditures go to Chinese-made goods and services. 88.5% of U.S. consumer spending is on...
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Geoengineering and liberal biases against science →
It’s not just conservatives who dismiss science that doesn’t suit them.
While there is a lot of evidence that people with conservative (“hierarchical individualist”) leanings are more likely to ignore science that conflicts with their worldview than liberals (“egalitarian communitaritarians”), a new study shows that the right context can reduce liberal support...
December 2011
2 posts
n+1: Outsourcing Jobs →
Does Steve Jobs hate freedom - in forms beyond consumer choice?
This reflection on Steve Jobs and Apple by Gary Sternovitz is interesting but hyperbolic and quite misleading. Jobs has a reputation as a tyrant in person, and Sternovitz aims to tie that into a broader portrayal of Apple as an unfeeling company that ruthlessly exploits factory workers in its suppliers.
A few representative...
Americhrome - The Morning News →
(via Instapaper)
November 2011
6 posts
John Gruber on Steve Jobs →
John Gruber of Daring Fireball rebuts Malcolm Gladwell’s portrayal of Steve Jobs as a tweaker rather than a visionary.
Turning public libraries into public workshops →
An American public library is installing tools such as 3D printers and CNC machines to provide a cheap fabrication capability to its citizens. In the way that public libraries built people’s literacy by enabling access to books, it could be vital for community fabrication facilities to build people’s literacy in using fabrication tools - which are likely to become an important part of...
RT @edhusicMP: Clean Energy Future Bills passed, ASX energy stocks up, metals and mining stocks up, resource stocks up, sky still up
Malcolm Gladwell on Steve Jobs as a "tweaker" →
Interesting perspective on how micro-level tweaking can be what makes macro-level ideas work effectively as industrial products. A comparison exists with Microsoft, who have been pretty good at developing visions of future technology (including the videos they put out describing the future of healthcare or office work) - but haven’t really been able to execute well enough to release any...
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The Economist: Luddite legacy →
A good summary of the increasing impact that automation will have on white-collar jobs, not just blue-collar ones.
“But, it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun,...”
– From Why Science Majors Change Their Minds in the New York Times.
It seems like more project-based learning is the answer, and my experience from engineering is that the project-based classes were definitely more interesting than the theoretical ones.
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
2 posts
1 tag
August 2011
2 posts
RT @codeforamerica: MIT’s Place Pulse: A “Hot Or Not” For Cities, To Fix Broken Blocks http://t.co/hYcfaTN
RT @iftf: Southampton engineers fly the world’s first ‘printed’ aircraft - http://bit.ly/nlCzxm #FabFutures
July 2011
4 posts
About to live-tweet an event on nanomedicine for human enhancement for work. This tweet is very meta.
“Crowdsourced placemaking” - using technology to democratise urban development decisions. http://t.co/tVk2DJa
Link: First synthetic organ transplant →
The synthetic trachea was created by growing the patient’s own stem cells on an artificial “scaffold”, which British scientists helped design.
Windpipes have been grown from stem cells before, but only using the collagen “skeletons” of donated tracheas.
The landmark operation at Karolinska University hospital in Sweden could mean patients may not have to wait...
Link: 88% of US growth to profits, 1% to wages →
May 2011
2 posts
RT @RogerHighfield: S word. Why science is a vote winner http://bit.ly/kDuoV9
Link: Ephemeralization →
April 2011
5 posts
3 tags
Link: Still full of ideas, but not making jobs →
The Economist discusses why America’s underlying innovation strength - which is receiving renewed attention, especially since Obama’s State of the Union focus on “winning the future” - is not currently translating directly into more and better jobs.
Boy Scouts of America introduce robotics badge - http://t.co/tUeXYMb - Great lateral thinking to engage kids in science and engineering
Link: Absolute PowerPoint →
From the New Yorker, on the origins and influence of PowerPoint.
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Fareed Zakaria on restoring the American dream →
This is several months old now, but I just read it today at the beach. A concise analysis of the “hollowing out” of the American middle class, and the need to fix it by focusing on investment rather than consumption spending, at both the household and government levels.
March 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Link: Elon Musk on 3 world-changing inventions →
Elon Musk founded PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors, so his opinion is worth something when it comes to innovation - even if he is an investor in two of the three technologies he mentions.
Link: Business is booming →
I’m currently reading a book called A Brief History of the Future, where Jacques Attali argues that corporations will progressively dismantle anything that restricts their operations, including nation-states. That’s a bit melodramatic but, it may be an extension of the situation described in this article: offshoring is enabling American companies to post record profits without pulling...
February 2011
3 posts
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Link: Print me a Stradivarius →
The Economist says, “This week we focus on a development that hardly anybody has heard of, but we reckon is going to change everybody’s lives.” Glad to see non-technical audiences are starting to catch on to the importance of 3D printing!
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Link: China's social networks →
In the government-enforced absence of Facebook, many social networks are springing up in China. They have some revealing differences to Western websites, such as a very relaxed attitude toward copying each other.
January 2011
6 posts
3 tags
Link: Idea to Market in 5 Months →
The Glif, a small tripod attachment for the iPhone 4, provides a great case study of how rapid prototyping and web-based services are going to change manufacturing. This write-up from one of the Glif’s creators shows how quickly they were able to conceive, design, fund, and ship it. Very interesting prospects for lowering the barriers to innovation.
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Link: Stuxnet and Iran's nuclear program →
A wrap-up from Wired on the brilliantly elusive and deadly Stuxnet computer worm that has crippled up to one-fifth of the uranium enrichment centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz plant. In particular see the link to a report in today’s New York Times that is coming out with more evidence of state intelligence agency involvement than I had previously seen.
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Link: James Fallows on cyberwar →
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Link: A Light in India →
David Bornstein of the New York Times reports on rice husk biomass power for the extremely poor villages of Bihar in India. This sort of innovation at the low end of the market, where low price and high reliability are more important than fancy features or the latest technology, is really worthwhile.
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Raging against the machine
The roaring furnaces of England during the Industrial Revolution, churning away in grimy Dickensian factories, could not be further removed from the quiet, pristine offices of a 21st-century Finnish software company. But despite their separation in time and technique, both settings were built with a common purpose: to take work out of the hands of artisans and use machines to make it simpler,...
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Link: When Innovation, Too, Is Made in China →
From the New York Times. Will be interesting to see how China’s capacity for huge quantity in fields like patents and scientific research (which is growing quickly) translates into quality and revenue.
December 2010
4 posts
2 tags
Link: Undermining China's Monopoly on Rare Earth... →
From Technology Review. Access to rare earth elements will be increasingly important in the next few decades. They’re some of the trace materials that are vital for modern electronics, and the fact that they may be running out receives a lot less attention than peak oil, for example.
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Link: African Huts Far From the Grid Glow With... →
From the New York Times.
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When Geneva meets genetics
This was originally written for The Sydney Globalist, an undergraduate international affairs magazine. It was named best article in the issue, which had the theme “Borders”.
On a steamy day in 1974, from a facility nestled in the mountainous Puerto Rico jungle, humankind made its first concerted attempt to cross our most imposing border: the void separating our solar system from the...
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The fabric of humanity
This was originally written for a competition run by the Global21 network, asking students to imagine life in 2021, which it won.
The world is coming apart at the seams, and we couldn’t be happier.
That’s true on two levels. We’re enjoying a radical democratisation of many aspects of our society, dismantling restrictions and giving everyday citizens more power than ever to...
August 2010
2 posts
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Election fallout: Lessons for progressive...
This was not an election we “had to have”. On the face of it, our newly hung parliament might seem to reflect the same anti-incumbent mood that is sweeping many parts of the US, and which put the Tories into minority government in the UK. But we weathered the recession well, with our unemployment roughly half theirs, and comparatively tiny government debt as a proportion of GDP. So it’s not “the...
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Communicating climate science
Last year I took a (sadly carbon-intensive) trip to Perth to visit the Greenhouse 2009 conference. It was a great chance to see firsthand the scientific process of investigating changes to the climate, and be reassured that sensible debate is not at all suppressed. While there I took part in a workshop run by Australian Science Communicators, which discussed how to best communicate the complex...
July 2010
1 post
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Consensus or senseless?
The ALP’s nervous decision to shun their electoral mandate for a strong climate policy in favour of an apathetic “wait and see” approach cost Kevin Rudd his job. Confident of winning the election and thus spared of the need to take dramatic action, they are now trying to avoid frightening the horses by announcing a range of half-measures rather than anything that can be painted as a “great big new...
June 2010
1 post
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Why study science?
This was written for a competition at Sydney University asking why we should study either arts or science. It won, and was later printed in The Australian newspaper.
Artists are oddly insecure about science. John Keats lamented its ability to “unweave the rainbow”, and Walt Whitman urged us to ignore “the learn’d astronomer” and instead just look at the stars. Implicit in these lines is the...
April 2010
3 posts
2 tags
To boldly go
As the T-shirt grumbles: this was supposed to be the future!
It’s 2010, the date picked by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke for the sequel to his seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey. The followup, Odyssey Two, paints a grand picture of moonbases and interplanetary exploration, culminating in (spoiler warning) the discovery of aliens on Jupiter’s watery moon Europa. But our present reality is...
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A binary world: China, the US, and digital oceans
Written for the Winter 2010 issue of Perspective. For the article as published, including references, see this PDF.
Forecasting is big business these days, and predictions on the future of international relations are highly sought after. As companies and governments seek to manage and exploit the transition to a Pacific-centred world, the simmering battle for primacy between the United States and...
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Dr Strangelife
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Echo Chamber
Borders are a funny concept. It’s odd the way the hand of fate paints these arbitrary lines, often invisible, but sometimes made painfully obvious by barbed wire. Lines that divide people into peoples and determine, on the basis of random chance, how children are raised and adults are governed. But within the borders of a nation, there...