Zero-combustion Paradigm Approaching: Emissions Standards, Economics Will Push Research

As governments, businesses and scientists work toward creating cost-effective solutions for zero-emissions propulsion technologies, the possibility of a zero-combustion energy production and industrial fabrication model is emerging. Preservation of the natural environment and containment of emissions-induced global climate change both require new technologies that will allow full economic output, including industry and transport, that eliminate the need for combustible fuels.

Many renewable resource technologies currently being employed or explored require the burning of some form of fossil fuel at some stage of the production of the devices that allow for energy generation. Through a series of subtle changes to policy standards, extraction, production and transport of materials, and energy distribution networks, emissions tied to those elements of the production web.

But moving toward an entirely new standard in renewable energy extraction and implementation, we can begin to envision means by which automotive vehicles will actually be self-powering, requiring no fuel per se, and creating zero environmental disturbance aside from the space they occupy and the roads they use.

The zero-combustion standard is now within reach, as versatile revolutionary energy solutions first come online and then are expanded upon. The latest solutions will merge with emerging non-energy-related technologies and be transformed into consumer solutions for battery-like devices powerful enough to extract energy from their environment and power phones, computers, homes and even automobiles and aircraft.

CPF Discussion on Food Supply Security in Africa

As part of the Crisis Policy Forum, the HotSpring collaborative innovation initiative is now planning an effort to tackle the problem of food supply management and chronic food and water scarcity in Africa. The lessons from this experiment in collaborative research will be applicable in many cases to other situations around the world, and we are open to spurring dialogue in those areas as outgrowths of this ongoing discussion.

Discussion will focus on practical solutions to:

1. Problems related to infusing food supply with enough to feed all those in need;
2. Environmental degradation: i.e. resilience services, ecological measures, ecosystem management;
3. Land use deficiencies: how to improve;
4. Animal and timber poaching;
5. Economic corrosion and instability;
6. Corruption and funding shortfalls;
7. Cooperative measures for extending food supply to conflict-afflicted areas;
8. Overcoming limits of transportation infrastructure;
9. Contagious disease: treatment, education, socio-economic impact;
10. Communications gaps: get relevant anecdotal and researched data to those who can use it.

The goal will be to actually craft calibrated solutions to the seemingly intractable problems related to food security across the diverse regions of the African continent. We hope to use collaborative research, and evolving online commentary to develop innovative practices, including funding options, which local stakeholders can implement in a variety of combinations.

More at Crisis Policy Forum: “FOOD SUPPLY RESTORATION & SECURITY: AFRICA”

Cloud Clarity vs. Shadow Banking

CAN THE BURGEONING INTEGRATED FABRICS OF WEB 3.0 HELP GENERATE A BROAD, SUPER-RESILIENT TRANSPARENCY THAT SAVES INT’L BANKING SYSTEMS?

The United States is facing what some experts are calling an “economic perfect storm“, with historical economists worrying about symptoms and reactions “not seen since the Great Depression”. Resources (natural and financial) are increasingly scarce, strained by tight credit markets and by competition from major emerging economies (China and India), and food prices are soaring.

One of the most serious aspects of the current crisis is tied to the widening deficit in the credibility of major financial institutions. The New York Times, for instance, is reporting:

The Federal Reserve not only [has taken] action unprecedented since the Great Depression — by lending money directly to major investment banks — but also has put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars in questionable trades these same bankers made when the good times were rolling.

“Bear Stearns has made it obvious that things have gone too far,” says Mr. Gross, who plans to use some of his cash to bargain-shop. “The investment community has morphed into something beyond banks and something beyond regulation. We call it the shadow banking system.”

The lesson may be that we have a problem of endemic manipulations, permitted by current regulatory and technological standards. What if it were possible to build into international banking institutions —including but not limited to the manner and volume of transactions engaged in by investment banks— a transparency-insuring mechanism based on the dispersed computing power of an integrated web-based “cloud” matrix?

While a primary function of Web 3.0 must be the innovative enhancement of privacy safeguards, it should become increasingly possible to create broad-spectrum data-screening aggregator applications that allow for the creation of a banking process safeguard fabric. Multiple unique and even competing software analysis platforms could work on the same expansive datasets to help prevent dangerous overdependence on excessively volatile market trends.

Web 3.0 Must Make Information More Free, the Individual More Autonomous

We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society. The New Scientist magazine reports in its March 15-21, 2008 edition that “web 3.0 will be about making information less free”.

We must, as end-users, content creators, innovators and even pioneers in media and technology, consider that for very serious and transcendent reasons, this cannot be permitted to become true. Web 3.0 must be liberating, and it must expand, not shrink the freedom of information that stems from the First Amendment to the US Constitution, free and open society in general, a free press specifically, and the Internet’s empowerment of the individual.

If we are to be a global society, or a “globalized” society, if we are to have a planetary consciousness, or benefit from the “village” dynamic inherent in global trade and telecommunications, then we must ensure that individual freedoms are not limited by global media powers or by governments who think there is something expedient about limiting media freedoms. When freedom of information is restricted, human beings suffer, in real terms, and economic vitality is slowed and economic resilience damaged.

Technology is the great economic immune system for industrial and post-industrial societies. It breeds competition, innovation, the expansion of learning and individual potential, opportunity and social mobility, and it spurs the exploration of new directions in thought and production. Information technology is helping to create a global fabric of human ideas, individuals and broader societies, interwoven in a complex web of shared and competing interests and shared and competing freedoms.

The mass convergence of new media, established media, commercial activity, personal communications, event planning and vital services (such as medical, financial, travel and utility), poses an obvious threat to the freedom of individuals to remain unmonitored or unexposed to new risks and new controls. But information serves us best when it is free, when it is untainted by powerful interests, when it moves where it needs to move, finding its level like water.

People move toward information and information moves toward people, in ways that cannot be calculated from a media conglomerate’s boardroom, and which, for better or for worse, do not parallel anyone’s particular bottom-line. Yet major telecoms are planning to stratify web-speeds for paying media giants, and advertisers are looking to recruit bloggers to create specialized information which actually functions like a covert advertisement.

Segmenting the web further by charging for the permission to let end-users access your servers via the highest bandwidth is a direct assault on media freedoms and access to information. It is also an attempt to ensure that most web traffic ensures at least 3 separate payments to the telecom for a single event. This attack on Net Neutrality —tied to the basic freedom of the press— runs contrary to the real promise of Web 3.0 and media hyper-convergence.

Deceptive or manipulative advertising formats are not inherently an attack on web freedoms, but they do pose a threat to the equality of access individuals may have to quality information as such. This means consumers may actually opt to create or to frequent services that shy away from those practices, which may in many cases be closed services or “gated communities” that provide their audience with a self-image of privilege, though their main function would be to limit the flow of information.

Neckband Senses Nerve Impulses, Reconstitutes Speech Not Spoken

The news may best be stated as smart neckband makes “telepathic” chat possible. But it is more appropriate to say that a group of cunning neurological researchers and engineers have found a way to tap thought about speech and recreate speech, even where the person in question chooses not to utter a word, or is unable to.

The new device does not actually achieve telepathy, but it does appear to tap into the specific impulses that would create specific sounds through the vocal chords, allowing it to recreate those sounds, and achieve speech where no words are spoken. The end-user will have to “train” both mind and voice to work with the device, to produce the highest level of accuracy.

In an on-stage demonstration, seen in the following embedded video from YouTube, there appears to be significant delay in this early version of the technology, but it’s ability to capture the colloquial word-choice and the manner of speaking of the individual are surprising.

The device detects impulses intended to stimulate muscles in the throat that manipulate the vocal chords to create the desired sound memes that make the words intended to be spoken. If the neckband detects these impulses, but the individual does not actually speak, then the effect can be a “silent” conversation, where only the person on the other end of the connection hears anything, and those in one’s environment are none the wiser.

This could have applications for business or for journalists, who may have a use for communicating verbally while in an environment where their ability to speak aloud is limited for a given time period. It could also allow for more private communications in public places, or more importantly, give voice to those suffering from muscular, throat or neurological disorders, depending on the individual case.

The same technology has been applied to a system that allows thought about words to command an electronically-equipped wheelchair, giving new mobility and versatility to those suffering severe or total paralysis. Other medical applications could help develop new treatments for a number of muscular disorders which impair speech.

The ability to use “thought-control” to produce speech, or to reconstitute a physically-inhibted speech ability, is a powerful, if unexpected level of integration of the physical individual into the phenomenon of digital hyper-convergence. Neurological signal capture may also allow thought-control to radically transform informational media and online services, depending on the technology an individual uses to interact with those media.

The Ambient presentation of the voiceless speech neckband —branded ‘Audeo’— includes mention of a powerful, though at this date perhaps clumsy potential use for the technology: Ambient suggests that the neckband could be used to dramatically enhance the value of online information searches.

For instance, voice-enabled map searches could allow someone to “ask” —through voiceless speech and remote speech recognition— an online service how to get to a given place, or what address to go to, and receive in response a physical or audible response to that voiceless search query.

In a way, this would appear to “enhance” human intelligence, by giving access to the collective wisdom of the world wide web. But as with all such advances, it is important to recognize that certain technological “enhancements”, while they expand our access to information, do not actually expand our basic personal abilities, and to distinguish between potential complements and limitations to those abilities.

• New Scientist: “Nerve-tapping neckband allows ‘telepathic’ chat”
• New Scientist: “Thinking of words can guide your wheelchair”

Green Economy: Resilience Services Will Meet Opportunity & Urgency

The ongoing transition to an environmentally sustainable economy, focusing on energy and agricultural resources, is already opening the door to a range of new industrial and engineering services related to resource and ecosystem resilience (now understood to be vital to the stability of the natural environment whose own services underpin every element of our civilization).

More efficient management of water, better testing, diversification, distribution and self-sustainability of crop varieties, energy resources that do little to disrupt the natural environment but seriously impact the more harmful tendencies of our economic activity, sustainable transport (increasingly shifting toward the low-emissions and emissions-free standards), each play a vital role in the emerging resilience economy.

What we are building into the global economy, in the same present tense, are both severely damaging extensions of now primitive industrial methods and also the antidotes or successors to those practices. As one after another city, province, region or state, begins to view its own natural habitat as an economic asset, resilience services and the goal of self-regulating elasticity become key market-altering forces, on both the conceptual and practical levels.

New technologies may go a long way to helping us serve the resilience interests of local and international markets, in ways that remain difficult to envision. The first wave of such technologies will likely be those that supplement energy production and reduce demand for high-polluting carbon-based fuels, while advances in overall efficiency and resource-light information distribution will continue to reshape economic output in favor of resilience and sustainability.

Transport habits may change, or standards for fuel-use (partly driven by escalating costs of burning fossil fuels), while energy-efficient modes of production may allow a vast expansion of industrial productionin clean-fuel transport and the necessary support infrastructure.

HotSpring is planning research communities that will take the technical riddle of how to make the zero-combustion, zero-emission drive mechanism that fits this vital new economic outlook. Our focus on the green economy will be tied to the quest for daring, responsible, practicable advances that help us reduce the negative impact of industrial-scale human activity on the natural environment.

Nano-chemical Computation Heralds New Era in Molecular IT

Scientists have achieved the goal of creating a nano-scale “chemical brain” that can transmit instructions to multiple (at present as many as 16) molecular “machines” simultaneously. The new molecular processor means that nano-chemical computation may soon be possible, ushering in a new era in super-light, super-fast, more versatile computer processing capabilities and, by extension, robotics.

The BBC reports that:

The machine is made from 17 molecules of the chemical duroquinone. Each one is known as a “logic device”.

They each resemble a ring with four protruding spokes that can be independently rotated to represent four different states.

One duroquinone molecule sits at the centre of a ring formed by the remaining 16. All are connected by chemical bonds, known as hydrogen bonds.

The structure is just 2 nanometers in diameter, and can produce 4 billion different permutations of chemical transmission of “information”. This allows for a far more efficient distribution of information than a traditional binary circuit.

The researchers say the structure of the “chemical brain” was inspired by the activity of glial cells in the human brain. Glial cells are non-neuronal “glue” or connective cells. In the brain, they are estimated to outnumber neurons by 10 to 1 and assist in chemical transmission of neural signals. Their ability to transmit signals in parallel, or to multiple tangent cells at once, reportedly gave rise to the 17-molecule duroquinone design.

In recent years, the ability of research teams and engineers to keep pace with “Moore’s law” —which predicts that computing speed (by way of the reduction in size of processing units or the increasing density of circuits possible in a given space) will double roughly every 18 months— has been tested, due to heat-diffusion constraints and the related energy bleed.

Nano-chemical processors would enable an entirely new structure for the smallest-scale computing circuits, and could lead to serious advances in the nature and capabilities of microprocessors, which are far larger in size and could therefore contain many times more circuits than at present.

The researchers have reportedly already moved beyond the initial 17-molecule design, capable of processing 16 instructions simultaneously, to devices capable of 256 simultaneous transmissions. They are also designing a molecular device that would be capable of up to 1024 simultaneous transmissions.

• BBC: “Chemical brain controls nanobots”
• Wikipedia: “Glial cell”
• Intel: “Intel Opens First High-Volume 45nm Microprocessor Manufacturing Factory”

Cloudscape Computing: the Dispersed Matrix as ‘Infinite’ Computing Platform

As the web moves into a more mature stage of its adolescence, the beginnings of an all-media platform, computing has begun to move to the “cloud” format. Cloudscape computing means that software, files, private accounts and processing power are dispersed over an extensive array of machines across the world.

“The Cloud” is the world wide web, and the nature of cloudscape computing can provide significant, if surprising, returns in security and accessibility. Dispersing, via dedicated encryption, the bits that compose a given file over an array of servers, with some redundancy, can make it more difficult to hack into any actual file or file storage device.

And, where cloudscape storage and computing come into play, there is a genuine motivation for large organizations, or for the pressures of the vast consumer and advertising marketplace, to push for ever more accessibility (wirelessly, in mobile telephony) to online material, which could have a positive effect both in fomenting further innovation, broadening the array of services available and bringing prices down.

Cloudscape computing does have its shortcomings, or its risk areas, but all in all, it is one of the commercial practices most likely to push into new terrain in mobile and wireless web access. With that, however, comes the serious means of market control it may lend to web-based software giants like Google. As always, the freedom of content access, generation and distribution is a paramount concern.

The real change of dynamic in computing connection time and browsing tendencies, comes with the types of services that can be made available by way of dispersed or distributed document and database hosting. More dynamic websites, more graphic-intense visual content, higher processing speeds, software applications that require zero installation and zero hard-disk space, accessible-from-anywhere desktop publishing suites and content-management technologies, are just a few.

Cloudscape computing requires a level of impeccability in encryption and programming that goes beyond what has been required in consumer computing to date. But this demand is also a challenge that will help promote new exploration of the potential benefits of more complex, more flexible, more resilient encryption paradigms.

We will only begin to see real benefits of distributed computing capacity, for the average end-user, when instant document-transfer encryption stands have advanced far beyond what we now enjoy, layered and impromptu in ways that will require one or two orders of magnitude more processing speed (and bandwidth) than is now commonly available.