Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 9.

22 - October 23, 2010 ISSN: 1712-9834

Selected news items from postings to Innovation Watch

in the last two weeks...

cancer is a man-made disease... mapping circuits in the human

brain... a female robot learns to sing... Google tests self-driving
cars... MIT aims to reinvent manufacturing... carbon labeling is a
growing success in the UK... Australian police serve a court order on
David Forrest Facebook... US poverty reaches the highest level in 51 years... 717
advises small cities a powerful engine for global economic growth... China
organizations chokes off the world's supply of rare earths... India and Brazil
on emerging embrace green economics... the standoff in India between water and
trends, and steel... Alvin Toffler forecasts trends in the next 40 years... the future
helps to develop of farming...
strategies
for a radically More great resources ...
different future
Kevin Kelly's new book, What Technology Wants... a link to the
Changeist website on foresight, strategy and innovation... an
interview with Kevin Kelly on the evolution of technology, and where
it's headed... a post by Brent King on the iPhone application for
electronic payment now in development...

David Forrest
Innovation Watch

SCIENCE
Top Stories: Forward

Cancer ‘Is Purely Man-Made’ Say Scientists After Finding Know someone who
Almost No Trace of Disease in Egyptian Mummies (Daily Mail) might be interested
- Cancer is a man-made disease fuelled by the excesses of in this newsletter?
modern life, a study of ancient remains has found. Tumours Forward it
were rare until recent times when pollution and poor diet
became issues, the review of mummies, fossils and classical Unsubscribe
literature found. A greater understanding of its origins could
lead to treatments for the disease, which claims more than Don't want to
150,000 lives a year in the UK. receive the
newsletter?
Project will Map Googols of Brain Circuits (PhysOrg) - The
Unsubscribe
human brain is among the most complex structures in the
universe -- and researchers will try to map it in just five
years. A consortium led by scientists at the Washington
University School of Medicine and the University of Minnesota
has launched a project, dubbed the Human Connectome, that
will diagram all the major circuits in a healthy human brain.
The effort is the first of its kind and will lay the groundwork
for understanding how the human brain functions -- and
eventually, how it doesn't.

TECHNOLOGY
Top Stories:

Eerie Female Robot Learns to ‘Sing’ by Copying Human

Singer (Daily Mail) - Lady Gaga will not be losing any sleep.
But this eerie humanoid robot has been taught to sing just
like a real pop star. The life-sized robot, known as HRP-4 ,
has a realistic face and movable features that are able to
mimic the expressions of a human singer. But she is now able
to 'sing' using a synthesized voice technology that sounds
and breathes like a human too.

Google Dabbles in Robotics With Self-Driving Cars (Tech

News World) - While it has been rumored for some time,
Google announced is has been testing self-driving cars. The
company equipped six Toyota Priuses and an Audi TT with
technology that enabled a vehicle to drive from Google's
Mountain View, Calif., campus to its Santa Monica office. It
then moved on to Hollywood Boulevard. In all, Google has
sent its auto-cars more than 140,000 miles -- including along
the Pacific Coast Highway and across the Golden Gate Bridge.

BUSINESS
Top Stories:

Retooling an Industry (Boston Globe) - The Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, which has unraveled the mysteries of
artificial intelligence, recombinant DNA, and molecular level
engineering, is now focusing its brainpower on one of the
nation’s most vexing challenges: manufacturing. MIT
president Susan Hockfield recently launched an initiative to
help reinvent the long-struggling industry, mustering
resources from across the university and appointing a
committee of engineers, scientists, economists, and policy
specialists — including two Nobel Prize recipients — to tackle
the issues.

UK Carbon Label Goods Sales ‘Pass £2 Billion-a-Year Mark’

(BBC) - Sales of products carrying labels that show the
goods' carbon footprint are set to pass £2bn a year, say the
scheme's operators. The Carbon Trust, which oversees the
accreditation programme, says nine out of 10 UK households
bought a carbon-labelled product in the past 12 months.
Launched in 2007, the scheme covers more than 90 brands
and 5,000 products, including pasta, bread and shampoo.

SOCIETY
Top Stories:

Australia Police Serve Court Order Via Facebook (PhysOrg) -

Australian police served a court order on an alleged cyber
bully using the social networking site Facebook, officials said,
describing it as a national first. Victoria police got court  
approval to use the site after attempts to serve the order in
person, over the telephone or via the post failed.

America’s Poor: Where Poverty Is Rising In America

(Huffington Post) - Thanks to the recession, 2009 was one of
the worst years for poverty in America in more than half a
century. The total number of Americans living in poverty hit
43.6 million, the highest level in 51 years and the national
poverty rate rose to 14.3 percent from 13.2 percent,
according to data released last month by the Census Bureau.
All told, one in seven Americans are living in poverty.

GLOBAL POLITICS
Top Stories:

The ‘Many City’ Growth Strategy (Businessweek) - The next

stage of global growth is playing out in 717 cities with
populations that exceed 500,000. These cities are spread
across the developing world. They hold one-third of the
world's population and are growing explosively, according to
a new Boston Consulting Group analysis. They boast a middle
class that will swell by 70 percent in five years, accounting
for 30 percent of global private consumption, and they will
require up to $40 trillion worth of infrastructure by 2030.

Rare-Earth Prices Soar as China Quotas Hit Manufacturers

Abroad (Businessweek) - Rare-earth prices have jumped as
Chinese export quotas crimped worldwide supplies for the
elements used in the manufacture of disk drives, wind
turbines and smart bombs. Actions by China, which produces
more than 90 percent of the world’s rare earths, have drawn
criticism from U.S. lawmakers and officials in Japan and
Germany.

ENVIRONMENT
Top Stories:

India and Brazil Head Move to ‘Green’ Economic Future (BBC)

- Governments are increasingly taking the economic value of
nature into account in policy-making, with growing interest in
results from a UN-backed analysis. The Brazilian and Indian
governments are among those keen to use findings from The
Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb) project.

India’s Bitter Choice: Water for Steel or Food?

(Businessweek) - Global steel giants ArcelorMittal (MT) and
Posco are leading $80 billion in planned spending in India, an
investment that would vault the country ahead of Japan as
the second-biggest steelmaker. There's one hurdle: India's
farmers and their water supply. The farmers refuse to move
from irrigated land in three states that hold more than half of
India's reserves of iron ore, a key material used in the
making of steel. That's stymied Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh's ambitions to more than triple India's steel capacity,
to 232 million metric tons.

THE FUTURE
Top Stories:

Future Shock Author Toffler Looks At Trends For Next 40

Years (MI Tech News) - Future Shock author Alvin Toffler is
at it again. He's come out with a new book on the 40th
anniversary of his best seller that now forecasts the trends
that will change our lives over the next 40 years. Toffler
Associates’ 40 for the Next 40 describes the forces of change
that will yield significantly different landscapes in 2050.

Future Farms Over Our Heads (Straight Furrow) - Australian

cities must join a global network in which urban farmers grow
produce on rooftops, a leading science commentator says.
Professor Julian Cribb, author of The Coming Famine, said the
global food crisis was a forewarning of what could be
expected as civilisation ran low on water, arable land and
nutrients, and experienced soaring energy costs. Professor
Cribb said the urban farmers of the future - who would
primarily grow vegetables - would play a much larger role in
the global diet.
 Just in from the publisher...

What Technology Wants

by Kevin Kelly

Read more...

A web resource...

Changeism - Observations from Changeist, a foresight, strategy and innovation lab created
to help organizations find opportunities and develop new market spaces where technology
and emerging behaviors intersect.

Multimedia...

Kevin Kelly on Technology Evolving Beyond Us (Surprisingly Free) - MP3... Kevin

Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine, a former editor and publisher of the Whole
Earth Catalog, and one of the most compelling thinkers about technology today, talks about
his new book, What Technology Wants. Make no mistake: the singularity is near. Kelly
discusses the technium -- a broad term that encompasses all of technology and culture --
and its characteristics, including its autonomy and sense of bias, its interdependency, and
how it evolves and self-replicates. He also talks about humans as the first domesticated
animals; extropy and rising order; the inevitability of humans and complex technologies;
the Amish as technology testers, selecters, and slow-adopters; the sentient technium; and
technology as wilderness. (38m 27s) [Surprisingly Free]

Ideas and opinions... The iPhone5 Debit Card — Coming Soon? (Huffington Post)-
Brent King - "We know that Apple is working on an NFC-enabled phone, and given their
recent hires in the space, it is assumed that the iPhone 5 will be the platform for this
change. So how will Apple's NFC-enabled iPhone 5 work? We know a few things about the
likely capability of the phone based on the patents issued by Apple. Firstly, the payment
application will be a core app integrated into the phone, there will be a biometric strip
(presumably enabling fingerprint authentication) and the phone will ostensibly work just like
an EMV-chip credit card."

 
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