Tag Archives: innovation

my campaign platform for Philadelphia

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I have to figure out who to vote for in local elections on Tuesday (I’m writing this on Sunday, November 3), so I like to think about what I would do if I were somehow put it charge. Now, I focus on policy rather than politics, and good policy is probably not good politics, so if you are trying to get elected you should take my advice with a grain of salt.

Policies that I would support at the federal and state level do not translate well to the local level in my mind. Looking at the whole country, a fair distribution of the wealth we have is important. At the local level, we have concentrated poverty within a narrow political jurisdiction, so there may not be enough wealth to go around, and if you try to grab what wealth there is and redistribute it, you may just scare the wealth across the jurisdictional border, which is just a couple miles away in any direction. So you have to focus on growing the pie if you want to have a chance at helping the poor. The local Democrats don’t do this – they are all about redistribution, skin color, sexual orientation, etc. The local Republicans are mostly racist jerks. There are a few independents who support pieces and parts of an agenda I could get behind, but nobody comes close to supporting a complete agenda to really explore real solutions to systemic problems.

So I thought about it and here is what I came up with:

  • Improve management of all city services and departments. Does this even need to be said? Yes, absolutely. We have a political and bureaucratic culture that resists learning and is tolerant of amateurism. We need to be open to learning about and adopting best practices from elsewhere, in all areas of government. We need to recruit, train, and retain talented individuals at all levels. We need to develop the leaders of tomorrow. The end result can be better services at lower cost.
  • Grow the work force and tax base. We can make it easy to start, license, and operate new businesses. We can connect the public, private and education sectors to provide education and training that matches actual skills with actual jobs. We can expand the innovation ecosystem to encourage startups and incubators, research and development, particularly in the biotech sector which is a local strength. None of this requires huge public spending. Philadelphia was a city of 2 million that has shrunk to about 1.5. We have room for at least half a million more workers and taxpayers, even more if we are willing to densify some neighborhoods. The gentrification issue makes this hard to talk about, but these could be highly productive, educated, talented professional people. Growing the pie with new taxpayers of some financial means would ultimately be good for everyone. Perhaps the gentrification issue could be somewhat defused if these new people were encouraged to spread out across many neighborhoods, all with excellent and equal transportation, education and other city services.
  • Replace regressive taxes with progressive ones, without increasing the overall tax burden. With the overall tax base growing, we could finally think about how to make it more fair and less burdensome to hardworking people and productive businesses. I don’t have all the answers here because this is not my area of expertise, but we need to follow the evidence, best practices from elsewhere, and try to at least bring local taxes in line with the larger metro area. We need to chip away at the public pension funding problem, because that will eventually come back to bite us if we don’t.
  • Law enforcement, criminal justice, and incarceration reform. I don’t have all the answers here, but again, look at best practices from elsewhere and follow the evidence. There are enormous potential financial savings here.
  • Preschool to community college education reform. Do I have to say it again? Learn about best practices, follow the evidence and innovate continuously. This is enormously difficult in the United States, but we have to keep chipping away at it.

November 2018 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • Coral reefs are expected to decline 70-90% by mid-century.
  • The U.S. stock market is overvalued by about 40% by historic measures, and some economists think a major recession may be looming.
  • About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • New tech roundup: People in Sweden are barely using cash at all, and some are paying with microchips embedded in their fingers. New technology may allow screening of multiple airport passengers from 25 feet away with minimal disruption. This is great for airline passengers who are already expecting to be screened intrusively, but of course raises some concerns about potential uses elsewhere in the public realm. Amazon is hiring about 100,000 seasonal workers this year, compared to about 120,000 in past years, and the difference may be explained by automation. There is a new ISO standard for toilets not connected to sewers systems (and not just your grandfather’s septic tank.)
  • A unidentified flying object has been spotted in our solar system, and serious scientists say there is at least a plausible, if very unlikely, chance that it is an alien spacecraft.
  • People are taking micro doses of LSD on a daily basis, believing it boosts creativity, and there is some evidence for this although the science is not rigorous.

October 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

  • The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • I read more gloomy expert opinions on the stability and resilience of the global financial system.
  • A new depressing IPCC report came out. Basically, implementing the Paris agreement is too little, too late, and we are not even implementing it. There is at least some movement towards a carbon tax in the U.S. – a hopeful development, except that oil companies are in favor of it which makes it suspicious. There is a carbon tax initiative on the ballot in Washington State this November that the oil companies appear to be terrified of, so comparing the two could be instructive, and the industry strategy may be to get a weaker law at the federal level as protection against a patchwork of tough laws at the state and local levels.

Most hopeful stories:

  • There is no evidence that kids in U.S. private schools do any better than kids in U.S. public schools, once you control for family income. (Okay – I admit I put this in the hopeful column because I have kids in public school.)
  • Regenerative agriculture is an idea to sequester carbon by restoring soil and  protecting biodiversity on a global scale.
  • Applying nitrogen fixing bacteria to plants that do not naturally have them may be a viable way to reduce nitrogen fertilizer use and water pollution.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • New tech roundup: Artificial spider silk is an alternative to carbon fiber. Certain types of science, like drug and DNA experiments, can be largely automated. A “quantum internet” could mean essentially unbreakable encryption.
  • Modern monetary theory suggests governments might be able to print (okay, “create”) and spend a lot more money without serious repercussions. What I find odd about these discussions is they focus almost entirely on inflation and currency exchange values, while barely acknowledging that money has some relationship actual physical constraints. To me, it has always seemed that one function of the financial system is to start flashing warning lights and make us face the realities of how much we can do before we are all actually starving and freezing in the dark. It could be that we are in the midst of a long, slow slide in our ability to improve our physical quality of life, but instead of that manifesting itself as a long slow slide, it comes as a series of random shocks where one gets a little harder to recover from.
  • I read some interesting ideas on fair and unfair inequality. Conservative politicians encourage people not to make a distinction between alleviating poverty and the idea of making everybody equal. These are not the same thing at all because living just above the poverty line is no picnic and is not the same thing as being average. There is a strong moral case to be made that nobody “deserves” to live in poverty even if they have made some mistakes. And simply “creating jobs” in high-poverty areas sounds like a nice conservative alternative to handouts, except that there isn’t much evidence that it works.

new technology that can screen multiple passengers 25 feet away

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Here’s some more information on new airport screening tech (LA Times).

The screening device, which is about the size of an old-fashioned PC computer tower and weighs about 50 pounds, reads the outline of people to reveal firearms and explosives hidden under their clothes.

Unlike the TSA’s existing full-body scanners that bounce millimeter waves off of passengers to spot objects hidden under their clothes, Gramer said, the passive terahertz technology reads the energy emitted by a person, similar to thermal imaging used in night-vision goggles…

As a result, Thruvision boasts that its technology can screen up to 2,000 people an hour and detect a concealed device at a distance of up to 25 feet. Initially, the system can be used in addition to the existing full-body scanners already deployed at airports, but Gramer said the device can eventually replace parts of the TSA’s security screening system.

I think anyone will welcome a more convenient flying experience at this point, but it is somewhat sinister to think of this technology being installed in all sorts of public places, work places, police cars, etc.

applying the latest data science to intimate acts

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WARNING: I never promised this would be a 100% family friendly blog. Nevertheless, it’s been awhile since I checked in on the latest sex robots. Well, this is a blog about the fabulous science fiction future, and we all need to face up to the fact that sex robots are likely to be a part of that.

Anyway, I offer this paper first of all because it’s funny, and second of all because even if it turns out to be a joke, the technology to analyze videos of thousands of hours of sexual acts, analyze them using the latest data science techniques, and program the results into a robot almost certainly all exist. Yesterday’s “phone sex” will almost certainly evolve into tomorrow’s virtual brothel. I think it is more or less harmless although it means the way real human beings interact with each other will continue to evolve. But that has been going on for a long time and there is no reason to think it should stop now.

 

the quantum internet

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A paper in Nature explains what a “quantum internet” could look like.

In stage 1, users will start getting into the quantum game, in which a sender creates quantum states, typically for photons. These would be sent to a receiver, either along an optical fibre or through a laser pulse beamed across open space. At this stage, any two users will be able to create a private encryption key that only they know…

In stage 2, the quantum internet will harness the powerful phenomenon of entanglement. Its first goal will be to make quantum encryption essentially unbreakable. Most of the techniques that this stage requires already exist, at least as rudimentary lab demonstrations.

Stages 3 to 5 will, for the first time, enable any two users to store and exchange quantum bits, or qubits. These are units of quantum information, similar to classical 1s and 0s, but they can be in a superposition of both 1 and 0 simultaneously. Qubits are also the basis for quantum computation. (A number of laboratories — both in academia and at large corporations, such as IBM or Google — have been building increasingly complex quantum computers; the most advanced ones have memories that can hold a few dozen qubits.)

So it seems as though the main advantage of a quantum internet would be truly secure communications. Which I guess is at least something, but doesn’t seem as though it would revolutionize everyday life anytime soon. There are no predictions in this article about when it might happen other than “a long time”.

nitrogen fixing bacteria as an alternative to fertilizer

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The invention of nitrogen fertilizer is a key reason the Earth is able to support so many humans, but it has also taken a huge toll on our natural water bodies and climate. Grist has an interesting article on the possibility of using nitrogen-fixing bacteria, either naturally occurring or genetically engineered, on a much wider range of crops and on a much larger scale to help solve this problem.

A pack of startups is racing to market with a means of fixing nitrogen without polluting the Earth. One of them, Pivot Bio, just garnered a $70 million vote of confidence in a funding round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the coalition of big-name billionaires — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson — hoping to power climate change-beating innovation…

Next year, Pivot plans to start getting farmers nitrogen-fixing bacteria — which efficiently delivers fertilizer to crops, no fossil fuels required. Farmers will spritz seeds with a liquid probiotic as they bury them in the ground. Another startup, Azotic Technologies based in England, is racing to bring a different bacterium to market around the same time. Intrinsyx Bio — a spin-off from a company that supplies NASA with bacteria and other critters for experiments — plans to put yet another bacterium on the market in 2020. And at least one other, the Bayer-backed Joyn Bio, is just ramping up. If any of them is able to provide a viable alternative to the international fertilizer industry, it could be the most significant environmental breakthrough since Haber figured out a way to synthetically release nitrogen from its natural bonds.

So this could be a big deal. Of course, I can’t help thinking of Donella Meadows talking about “layers of limits”. Remove one layer and continue to grow and expand, and you will eventually bump up against the next one.

 

September 2018 in Review

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Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • The Suzuki and Kodaly methods are two ways of teaching music to young children that may actually help them think later in life. Training in jazz improvisation may also be good for young brains in a slightly different way.
  • There are some bright ideas for trying to improve construction productivity, which has languished for decades. Most involve some form of offsite fabrication.
  • In energy news, there’s a big idea to produce half the world’s electricity from sunlight in the Sahara desert. Another idea for collecting solar energy in otherwise (ecologically) wasted space is solar roadways, and there are a few prototypes around the world but this doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet so far. Another big idea is long-term storage of energy to smooth out fluctuations in supply and demand over months or even years.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

artificial spider silk

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Artificial spider silk is an alternative to carbon fiber.

Amsilk is located in Martinsried, Germany, and owned by twins Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann. The Strüngmann brothers made their fortunes with Hexal, a generic drugmaker, and the company’s fibers came from research by Thomas Scheibel, a biomaterials professor at the University of Bayreuth.

The fibers are made by genetically modifying E.coli bacteria to produce spider silk proteins. These purified proteins are then dried into a silk powder, which can be put into textiles, cosmetics or used as the basis for lightweight composites.

Amsilk calls it “Biosteel” and says synthetic silk is resistant, flexible and soft, giving it an advantage over carbon fiber for use in implants and prosthetics, or even aviation. “The disadvantage of carbon is that aircraft are often grounded after a bump because parts have to be replaced,” said Amsilk boss Jens Klein. Minor damage to carbon fiber can be a big problem whereas Biosteel may be able to take the knock and remain in use.