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