The 3Doodler Pen (wotevernext)

Eradicating the Bottom of the Pyramid: ‘Open Source Ecology’ True Frugal Hyperinnovators

If you don’t know about ‘Frugal Innovation and the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP)’ here’s a quick précis.

Basically, there 4 billion people on the planet living in a spectrum of relative-to-absolute poverty. That within that BoP 4-billion, sits approximately 1 billion people living on under 2 dollars a day ($730 per year).

So just over a decade ago the late Prof. C.K Prahalad proclaimed that the best way to tackle poverty at the $2 dollars a day BoP, is to fight it by turning it into a profit centred market-space. A worldwide market worth 7.3 trillion dollars!

Prahalad Hyperlogic is this: if you innovate life subsistence and enabling products and sell them at a price the BoP can afford and still make a return, then you set off a virtuous circle. People at the BoP begin you climb the wall of the Pyramid and out of crisis.

Well that is the first step in the BoP innovation equation.

A further step is slightly – or fantastically - more ambitious: to innovate systems of technologies and tools that build basic infrastructure development that supplies clean water and foods, habitats and agriculture systems, etc, that the BoP can invest in through micro-loans and community pooling investures.

Well, it never ceases to amaze me on my research into Innovating to enable the BOP, and I recently came across these guys: ‘Open Source Ecology (OSE).’

OSE explain:

‘Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size Lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.’

OSE was founded by Marcin JAKUBOWSKI in 2003 and true Hyperinnovator. His ambition is ‘closed-loop manufacturing a reality.’ His main focus is ‘evolving to freedom by eliminating resource scarcity as the main force behind human relations - with the wise use of modern technology adapted for human service.’

And this is OSE strategy.

‘The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts. Key Features of the GVCS: Open Source – Low Cost Modular – user Service able – DIY – Closed-Loop Manufacturing – Heirloom Design – Flexible Fabrication.’

OSE say:

‘A modern, comfortable lifestyle relies on a variety of efficient Industrial Machines. If you eat bread, you rely on an Agricultural Combine. If you live in a wood house, you rely on a Sawmill. Each of these machines relies on other machines in order for it to exist. If you distill this complex web of interdependent machines [Hyperinnovation] into a reproduceable, simple, closed-loop system, you get these:’

‘The GVCS 50’ in development; 50 tools to realise their goals.

3 examples:

3D Printer: an additive manufacturing technology where a three dimensional object is printed by laying down successive layers of material, just like a printer except in 3D.

3D Scanner A device that can generate a 3D digital scan from a real-life object, where the file can be used to reproduce the object in 3D with a device such as the 3D printer or CNC Precision Multimachine.

Linear Solar Concentrator an infinitely-scalable, linear device which concentrates solar radiation onto a linear target for generating heat or steam to produce electricity.

Click here to see full list.

Also:

‘Download the CAD data here and the entire set of CEB Press documentation can be found here, in addition to the assembly videos. Please watch and download them and drop us a line to let us know what you thought. Were the videos easy to follow along? Think the instructions fell short? Were they useful? Do you have suggestions for how to make them better? We look forward to your feedback.’

OSE Guys, I am truly humbled. 

Your project is amazing. Thrilling, actually...It's people like you who really give me hope for the future.

 Chris Anderson, TED Curator.

The End is Nigh!

What does a self-consistent, intelligent and capable person do? Which goals are so sound, so promising and so exciting that you can allow those goals to fully motivate you? Which goals can you embrace in the knowledge that you stand on a firm foundation, that your thinking is clear, and that you can be a pioneer to excel in a significant part of a vast new future? 

What is more important to you: competitive patterns of thought or a sequence of DNA? Ultimately, there is no inherent reason to be more attached to the sequence of nucleotides that defines the human form than to the one that defines the form of an ant. The part that is interesting to us is the emergent world of thought and perception. 

If you would like to see a future that includes improvements beyond our species’ status-quo, then you should work on a transhumanist strategy that optimizes pattern survival and competition, namely work on substrate-independent minds and mind uploading. There are signs of a shift from gene-survival to pattern-survival, and Universal Darwinism favors the pattern competition winners. 

Of all the transhumanist strategies, advancing substrate-independent minds (ASIM) is both connected with its originating human interests and it most directly embraces and plays the game of competitive natural selection.

Devices aim to deliver on stem-cell therapies

Bendable needle increases reach of a single injection to the brain

Neurosurgeon Daniel Lim’s injection system can bend sideways, delivering therapeutic stem cells to the brain through fewer holes in the skull (credit: J. Bardi/UCSF)

Working with bioengineers and neurosurgeons, Daniel Lim, a neurosurgeon and stem-cell scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, has designed a needle that bends for for delivering stem cells to the brain,  

The device can deposit cells anywhere within a 2-centimetre radius along a track, a volume bigger than an entire mouse brain.

Several researchers hope to use Lim’s device for clinical trials in brain cancer and neurodegenerative disease.

Lim’s device could cut down on the number of injections required for cell treatments and give more precise control of the volume of cells delivered and ensure that the cells delivered into the brain stay in the brain, avoiding the problem of reflux, in which cells injected using straight needles flow back out to the brain surface along the needle’s path.

Also, unlike other needles used for cell therapies, Lim’s device contains no ferromagnetic metals and so is compatible with MRI.

Link to Nature News reports.

I know how to tell who you are thinking about?! 

And you have been having an affair with my wife! 

But thank luck for that - you can have her!

I just won the lottory!!!!!

It is possible to tell who a person is thinking about by analyzing images of his or her brain.

Our mental models of people produce unique patterns of brain activation, which can be detected using advanced imaging techniques according to a study by Cornell University neuroscientist Nathan Spreng and his colleagues.

“When we looked at our data, we were shocked that we could successfully decode who our participants were thinking about based on their brain activity,” said Spreng, assistant professor of human development in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology.

Understanding and predicting the behavior of others is a key to successfully navigating the social world, yet little is known about how the brain actually models the enduring personality traits that may drive others’ behavior, the authors say. Such ability allows us to anticipate how someone will act in a situation that may not have happened before.

To learn more, the researchers asked 19 young adults to learn about the personalities of four people who differed on key personality traits. Participants were given different scenarios (such as sitting on a bus when an elderly person gets on and there are no seats) and asked to imagine how a specified person would respond. During the task, their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

They found that different patterns of brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) were associated with each of the four different personalities. In other words, which person was being imagined could be accurately identified based solely on the brain activation pattern.

The results suggest that the brain codes the personality traits of others in distinct brain regions and this information is integrated in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to produce an overall personality model used to plan social interactions, the authors say.

“Prior research has implicated the anterior mPFC in social cognition disorders such as autism and our results suggest people with such disorders may have an inability to build accurate personality models,” said Spreng. “If further research bears this out, we may ultimately be able to identify specific brain activation biomarkers not only for diagnosing such diseases, but for monitoring the effects of interventions.”

Eureka! Intelligent tyre sensors measures vehicle weight

RightLeft

Continental Auto Design Engineers are working to develop a tyre pressure monitoring system that can accurately calculate the weight of a vehicle.

In the past, it was more or less up to drivers to guesstimate to the best of their abilities whether or not the maximum permitted payload of a car had already been reached, says Andreas Wolf, who heads up the company's body and security group. 

Future vehicles will be able to tell the driver whether the payload has already exceeded the maximum permitted limit, or whether the tyre pressure would simply need to be adjusted accordingly. In this way, our tyre pressure sensors will not only help to save fuel, but also offer active assistance in terms of vehicle safety.

The ContiPressureCheck system will rely on sensors that can accurately detect the size of the contact patch where the tyre meets the road. 

By registering the rolling characteristics of the tyre with every revolution, and taking into account the existing tyre pressure and data about how the tyres are fitted, Wolf says the system will be able to ascertain the vehicles weight after just a few hundred meters of driving. 

This data would then be relayed wirelessly to the driver, informing them whether they have exceeded the recommended payload for the vehicle, or whether the tyre pressure should be adjusted.

The 10 Smartest People Alive Today

Judging how smart a person is can be a very subjective matter. Does their IQ score make them the smartest? Or is it more about accomplishments? The debate over this likely will never cease. Below, though, SuperScholar.org took a look at 10 people (in no particular order) nobody would deny are worthy of being called some of the smartest people alive today.

Fifty percent of people have IQ scores between 90 and 110, 2.5 percent of people are mentally deficient/impaired (under 70 IQ), 0.5 percent of people are near genius or genius (over 140,) 2.5 percent of people are very superior in intelligence (over 130).

Click for the list of the 10 smartest people alive today

Prototype Android Dog for Sale: $100 Billion! Any takers?

3D Motion Sketches

New Plastic Helps Mend Broken Bones

A new type of plastic someday could make fixing broken bones a snap.

Richard Oreffo, a professor of Musculoskeletal Science at the University of Southamptonin England, and colleagues have created a blend of three plastics that is tough yet highly porous. This may make it an ideal "scaffold" for a broken bone –  a placeholder structure that can be replaced with real bone tissue as the body heals.

The polymer "has this lovely honeycomb structure," Oreffo said. That allows living cells to "crawl all over it. Blood vessels can penetrate it. So it's really nice."

Oreffo's team has tested the polymer using mice that had parts of their femur bones removed. The hole was of a size “that won't heal normally," he said. "We can put these scaffolds into that [gap] and look at their repair over four to eight weeks."

When the scaffold was seeded with human bone stem cells, the bone healed faster, but even without the stem cells, the mice's bones began to fill in along the scaffolding structure.

[No Bones About It: 3D Printers May Help Fix Fractures]

In humans, the structure should serve to repair bone breaks that are too severe to heal on their own. "If you've had a car accident where you've had significant bone breaks … ideally, you want your own stem cells in there," Oreffo said. "This is a real opportunity: A scaffold that can be colonized with the patient's own stem cells."

In fact, given enough time, the new material should fully degrade inside a living body, leaving the repaired bone to stand alone.

The scaffold material is a blend of chitosan (derived from shrimp shells), polyvinyl acetate (also a component in Elmer's Glue) and poly-L-lactide, a biodegradable polymer already used in medical applications.

Researchers worldwide are pursuing approaches to healing bones using mixtures of scaffolds and stem cells. A group in Washington state made bone shapes out of a ceramic powder by using a 3D printer; another method involves creating artificial bones in a vacuum out of elastic polymers and nanoparticles.

"It's too early to say one is better than the other. We're looking at a whole range of approaches," Oreffo said. But, he added, his team’s latest approach has the advantage of being successful in animal trials.

The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro

The World's Hottest Camera Company

Nick Woodman is 37 years old. His constantly tousled sepia hair and permanent, mischievous half-grin make him look 27. And he acts 17, as I learn 30,000 feet above the Rocky Mountains, after Woodman packed me, his wife, Jill, and a dozen of his favorite colleagues and buds into a chartered Gulfstream III en route to Montana’s Yellowstone Club, the most exclusive ski hill in the U.S.

Already hopped up on Red Bull, tempered by a liter of coconut water, Woodman darts about the cabin, occasionally breaking conversation to unleash his trademark excited wail that friends liken to a foghorn. “YEEEEEEEEEEEEEOW.” A flight attendant emerges with breakfast on a silver platter. “You know what the best thing about morning ski trips are?” he asks the cabin rhetorically. “McDonald’s!” And with that he inhales a McGriddle in all of three bites.

The man-teen routine is more than an act: It’s the recipe for how he’s become one of America’s newest and youngest billionaires. A decade ago Woodman craved a camera he could strap to his wrist so that his buddies could see his surfing exploits. The result is now a consumer phenomenon called GoPro, America’s fastest-growing digital imaging company.

Go anywhere active these days, whether it’s the mountains of Vail or the scuba-diving depths of Honolulu’s Hanauma Bay, and you’re bound to see a GoPro or 20. Kids these days don’t film their wave rides or half-pipe tricks. They GoPro them, strapping the $200 to $400 cameras to helmets, handlebars and surfboards. The cinema-grade, panoramic “point-of-view” footage that comes out of a GoPro transforms mere mortals into human highlight reels, without blowing a huge hole in the budget. Shaun White, who says he used to tape old cameras to his hand, used GoPros on his runs during the Winter X Games. Hollywood directors, including Michael Bay, keep crates of them on set. The NFL has tested them in their end zone pylons to capture touchdown replays. The Rolling Stones deployed them on stage. Police forces and the U.S. military have started to incorporate the cameras into training exercises. Woodman, who calls it a “life” camera, proved the point by wearing one on his chest at the deliveries of his sons. On the plane to Montana, Woodman’s GoPro crew rigged their devices in every cranny in the cabin, including on the pilots’ heads, to document their journey.

GoPro sales have more than doubled every year since the first camera’s debut in 2004. In 2012 the company sold 2.3 million cameras and grossed $521 million, according to Woodman; with $100 million in sales in January alone, that annual figure should again double this year. For the month of December GoPro was the highest-grossing digital imaging brand at Best Buy, knocking out Sony for the first time in the chain’s history. Just ten years old, GoPro was responsible for 21.5% of digital camcorder shipments nationwide in the first half of 2012, according to IDC data. Among “pocket camcorders” that figure swells to a third.

This type of growth and niche dominance have made for a “rad” business proposition, with Chinese electronics manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known as Foxconn, making a $200 million investment in GoPro in December. That valued the San Mateo, Calif. firm at $2.25 billion and shot Woodman, who sources say still owns about 45% of the company, onto the FORBES World Billionaires list with a net worth of $1.3 billion.

It’s a head-spinning turn of events for a 37-year-old Peter Pan running a billion-dollar technology company. As he barrels through Yellowstone’s freshly groomed powder in a pea-green helmet, it’s clear he’s found bliss. “YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOW,” he howls from his bloodied and chapped lips as he GoPros his every turn.

Lamborghini - Veneno

Japan Firm Offers 3D Model of Humam Foetus

Expectant parents in Japan who can't wait to show the world what their baby will look like can now buy a three-dimensional model of the foetus to pass around their friends.

The nine-centimetre resin model of the white foetus, encased in a transparent block in the shape of the mother's body, is fashioned by a 3D printer after an MRI scan.

"As it is only once in a lifetime that you are pregnant with that child, we received requests for these kind of models from pregnant women who... do not want to forget the feelings and experience of that time," said Tomohiro Kinoshita of FASOTEC, the company offering the service.

The "Shape of an Angel", which costs 100,000 yen (£1000), comes with a miniature version that could be a nice adornment to a mobile phone, he added. Many young women in Japan have decorations attached to their mobile phone strap.

The company said the ideal time for a scan is around eight or nine months into the pregnancy.

It will use ultrasound images taken at a medical clinic in Tokyo that has forged a tie-up with the company.

FASOTEC, originally a supplier of devices including 3D printers, uses a layering technique to build up three-dimensional structures. The technique has been touted as a solution to localised manufacture on a small scale.

Kinoshita said the company hit upon the idea of making 3D models of unborn babies in the hope that people would become more aware of the technology.

The company said some medics could also foresee diagnostic possibilities with the models that may help predict difficulties in the birthing process.

Three-dimensional printers have been around for several decades but advances in the technology mean it is now gaining in popularity in several fields.

hplusmagazine

If you are into the future in a rational way then this magazine will blow you away! It has a ultramodern feel and content that is smack bang up to date.

Click to review

Click for back issues.

The Fantastic Voyage

Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman have put together another breakthought text that anyone serious about living for a lot longer than you first though must read.

Intro:

‘Immortality is within our grasp… In Fantastic Voyage, high-tech Ray Kurzweil teams up with life-extension expert Terry Grossman, M.D., to consider the awesome benefits to human health and longevity promised  by the leading edge of medical science – and what you can do today’s to take full advantage of these starting advances. Citing extensive research findings that surround as radical as the most speculative science fiction, Kurzweil and Grossman offer a program designed to slow aging and disease processes to such degree that you should be in good health and spirit when the more extreme life-extension and life enhancing technologies – now in development – become available. The bridge to the future will enable those who dare to make the journey from century to the next…. And beyond!’

Click here to review.

MaxLife: Where Biotech, Infotech and Nanotech Meet to Reverse Aging by 2029.

On the theme of radical life-extension and age reversal, here’s an interesting website:

MaxLife asks lots of questions and gives some interesting answers to the longevity question. There are plenty of links to within and to other sites on the subject.

Take a few minutes to explore the future of long-healthy-living.

Click here to vistit site.

 How Far Away is Nanomedicine? 

Read Robert Freitas Book: 

‘Nanomedicine Volume I: Basic Capabilities.’

‘The coming ability to carry out targeted medical procedures at the molecular level will bring unprecedented power to the practice of medicine. Within a few short decades we can expect a major revolution in how the human body is healed. Nanomedicine lays the foundations for understanding this revolution and points to where it is taking us.’

E Drexler.

Nanomedicine might seem a little esoteric for an off the shelf read, but I have to say I was over whelmingly surprised to the point where I couldn’t put it down. In fact, for any aspiring medical physicians out there, before or in the early stages of your careers, I strongly recommend it. After all 10 years hence you are going to be up to your neck in this tiny world nanorobots and artificial hemoglobin.

And it’s the same for any future Engineer, Designer, Architect, or anybody who is in the creative-build business; this book will give you untold insights into the future of Nanoscale Engineering and Architecture.

Read the piece on the history of empirical medicine, you’ll see how far we have come today and how far we can go tomorrow.

A PDF version of the book is available by clicking here.

But I would say, get hold of a Hardback copy for a keepsake. After all, it is the world’s first volume on perhaps the most significant medical breakthrough since ‘Hippocratic Corpus (ca. 440-340 BC) the foundation of Greek written medicine, explicitly grounds the art upon a quite different basis — a healing system independent of the supernatural and built upon natural philosophy; and of course Galen of Pergamum (130-200 AD) providing the final medical synthesis of antiquity and the effective medical standard for the next 13 centuries; and of course.’ Now where did I get that?

Click here for preview of Hard Copy Book.

Lean Six Sigma for Service: How to Use Lean Speed and Six Sigma Quality to Improve Services and Transactions, by Michael George

I recall back in 1989, my boss Tony Lawrence (then Design Director at Concord Lighting) and I taking a long winding motorway trip to Lucus Aerospace Systems, Coventry, UK.

Back then, it was a bit of an can-opener to the world of not merely world class quality assurance in new product development; but the commitment to what it takes to achieve a status where literally products have less than 1.3 defects out of one million: yes 1.3 out of one-million units!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with 6-Sigma, it is a fact these days that 1.3 Parts Per Million (PPM) quality assurance is becoming standard. And because of that, customers expect that level of quality in everything, and that includes not just consumer gadgets, but trips on holiday, banking transaction, shopping experience, even hospital treatment and – yes – even YMCA hostels are beginning to look at 6-Sigma.

The good news is that 6-Sigma is now being rolled-out in the service industries too.

In fact, the UK’s Royal Wedding last year was a 6-Sigma occasion (and now you know why it went so smoothly). Now Marks and Sparks, many large scale Law firms, and many of the best practice service institutions such as Bank One (Chase Manhattan) and Stanford University Hospital are adopting 6-Sigma.

The book: Lean Six Sigma for Service: How to Use Lean Speed and Six Sigma Quality to Improve Services and Transactions, really does move all this on. It is practical, insightful and above all, useable with plenty of references to other reverent sources of information.

Click here for free PDF copy. Hurry while stocks lasts @ 1.3 PPM!

Ending Aging, by Aubrey de Grey

Aubrey de Grey is an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation. He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging.

He is perhaps best known for his view that human beings could, in theory, live to life-spans far in excess of that which any authenticated cases have lived to today.

De Grey's research focuses on whether regenerative medicine can thwart the aging process. He works on the development of what he calls "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS), a tissue-repair strategy intended to rejuvenate the human body and allow negligible senescence.

To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage.

The book ‘Ending-Aging’ is not a technical book at such, but it does have few heavy medicine themes in to. However, de Grey is the one to watch when it come to the end of aging.

Click for to link to review

Life Extension Express 

by David Kekich

The health and anti-aging market is worth Gazillions of Dollars, Pounds and Yen. Yet we are some way from popping pills that will halt the tides of time.

Only there is more here!

Life-Extension Express suggests to the reader that not only is the future of Life-Extension real, but lots of applied science and understanding of the mechanisms of aging is now coming to a point where we are a few decades away from off the self health and longevity!

As the book makes clear, you will age, but at a slower rate for the foreseeable future. But as time rides by your physiological aging will slow faster!

But more?

What about the point when you stop aging, and then even begin to reverse your physical age?

What about the possibility that chronologically you are 70 years going on 35 again?

Well, start planning that career you never got around to achieving; that MegaBusiness; that adventure.

And?... 'Yes she's done it, she wins the GOLD... Yes he's done it - Touch Down!!!  And 'O'dear! It's my Great Great Great Grandson's 21st next week, I'll have to skip the Gym!'

What a world we are beginning to live in!

Intrigued? Click link to review

The author of this book changed his name to FM2030 to represent his passion and belief in the distant future. 

Your name, for example, reflects your ancestry and history. His scribe represents the future. He wrote this futures book while suffering a terminal illness back in the 1970s. 

It is profound, embedded with some big surprises. Dare you read it!

Click this link to review

Printable Organs? Breakthrough: 3D-Printed Stem Cells

Researchers claim that they have cracked the code when it comes to using 3D printing to create stem cells — so what happens next?

Unfortunately, organ donors are few and far between. Even if you have a potential match, after spending a long time on a waiting list, conditions worsen and an organ may not be accepted. The lack of available organs is one that causes hospitals to enter continual battles over the rationing of such resources. As a surgeon I know told me, this can not only strain the relationship between different hospitals, but of course also impact patients.

So what can be done, except finding artificial methods to prolong life until organs become available, or creating substitutes for organs?

A new technique, pioneered by researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland in collaboration with stem cell technology company Roslin Cellab, uses 3D-printing technology — otherwise used in robotics, gun manufacture and as a replacement for photography — in the hopes to eventually eliminate the need for organ donation, immunosuppressant drugs and organ transplant rejection.

The new valve-based process takes advantage of the fact that stem cells can now be grown in labs. A printer creates a three-dimensional sphere which contains delicate embryonic cell cultures that float in a liquid medium. These cells are then built up using an adjustable “microvalve” to create layers and encourage cells to spawn.

As stem cells can become any organ in the body, being able to quickly produce them could result in 3D-printed organs specifically tailored to a patient’s body.

Dr. Shu said:

“In the longer term, we envisage the technology being further developed to create viable 3D organs for medical implantation from a patient’s own cells, eliminating the need for organ donation, immune suppression and the problem of transplant rejection.”

The team say this is the first time that cells have ever been printed using 3D-printing techniques. More importantly, the cells survived the experimental process, and in the first stages the breakthrough will be used to develop drug-testing products.

Jason King, business development manager of Roslin Cellab, commented:

“Normally laboratory-grown cells grow in 2D but some cell types have been printed in 3D. However, up to now, human stem cell cultures have been too sensitive to manipulate in this way.

This is a scientific development which we hope and believe will have immensely valuable long-term implications for reliable, animal-free drug-testing and in the longer term to provide organs for transplant on demand.”