Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 11.

26 - December 29, 2012

ISSN: 1712-9834

Highlights from the last two weeks...

scientists map how the brain organizes data... Nobel Prize-winner expects humans to be cloned within 50 years... Ford predicts a new wave of automotive electronics evolution... INSEAD professor uses a software program to generate 100,000 books... Goggle and Facebook are positioning to sell physical goods... Google merges offline purchase data with online intelligence to know even more about you... the future of education is not in the classroom... 3D-printed guns are now a troubling possibility... the US is repositioning its stealth strike force to counter China... Cold War strategies may be more effective in dealing with climate change... the Antarctic is warming twice as fast as expected... the US Food and Drug Administration rules genetically modified salmon is safe... Tim O'Reilly reflects on technology trends... Silicon Valley investors are frustrated by the lack of real innovations...

David Forrest is a Canadian writer and strategy consultant. His Integral Strategy process has been widely used to increase collaboration in communities, build social capital, deepen commitment to action, and develop creative strategies to deal with complex challenges. David advises organizations on emerging trends. He uses the term Enterprise Ecology to describe how ecological principles can be applied to competition, innovation, and strategy in business. David is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada, the World Future Society, and other futures organizations.

More resources ...

a book by Amory Lovens and the Rocky Mountain Institute -Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era... a link to the Synectics World website on creative collaboration... a presentation by Ray Kurzweil at Google on his new book How to Create a Mind... a blog post by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist on the secret algorithm his firm uses to pick entrepreneurs... David Forrest Innovation Watch

He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.

SCIENCE TRENDS
Top Stories: The Astonishing Maps That Reveal How Our Brain Organises Everything We See (Daily Mail) - Scientists have put together the first ever map of how the brain organises the thousands of images that come flooding in through our eyes every day. A team at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. To illustrate their findings, they have created the first map of how the brain organises these categories across the cortex. The result -- achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while test subjects watched hours of video clips -- is what researchers call 'a continuous semantic space'. The UC Berkeley team have mapped this data across the human cortex to show which areas of the brain deal with which categories of objects we see in the world around us. Human Cloning Will Be Possible Within 50 Years, Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Claims (Medical Daily) - Sir John Gurdon, the British developmental biologist whose research cloning frogs in the 1950s and 60s led to the later creation of Dolly the sheep in 1996, believes that human cloning could happen within the next 50 years. He said that parents who lose their children to tragic accidents might be able to clone replacements in the next few decades. Gurdon, who won this year's Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, said that while any attempts to clone a human would likely raise complex ethical issues, he believes that in the near future people would overcome their concerns if cloning became medically useful. The 79-year-old scientist explained that people were extremely suspicious of in-vitro fertilization when it was first developed, but after the Louise Brown, the first 'test tube baby', in 1978, the technique gained wide acceptance and is used today by thousands of infertile couples worldwide. More science trends...

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TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

Top Stories: Sensing the Future: Ford Issues Predictions for Next Wave of Automotive Electronics Innovation (Ford) - State-of-theart sensing, computing and communications systems are not only quickly changing consumer expectations in people's everyday lives, but are driving innovation in the automotive industry at an incredible pace in preparation for the future. With more than 145 actuators, 4716 signals, and 74 sensors including radar, sonar, cameras, accelerometers, temperature and even rain sensors, the 2013 Fusion can monitor the perimeter around the car and see into places that are not readily visible from the driver's seat. These sensors produce more than 25 gigabytes of data per hour which is analyzed by more than 70 on-board computers. The actuators combined with signal information from the driver assist sensors can alert the driver to potential dangers, and actively assist with parking and lane keeping. Computers Write the Books, to INSEAD Prof's Credit (PhysOrg) - English majors might warm to the question of what they want to be when they graduate. Author? OK. Writer? Fine. Master Compiler? Hmm. "Master Compiler" is not a familiar career path to English majors, but it might describe the unique work of INSEAD professor Philip M. Parker. He has a patented system for algorithmically compiling data into book form. He has brought the automatically generated books into the mainstream with Amazon listing over 100,000 books attributed to Parker, and over 700,000 works listed for his company, ICON Group International. According to reports, a separate entity, EdgeMaven Media, in addition, provides applications for businesses to create their own computer made content. The organizations pay for this service to compile data for their reports. More technology trends...

BUSINESS TRENDS
Top Stories: Facebook, Google Dip Their Toes in Sale of Physical Goods (PhysOrg) - Google and Facebook made their names by helping people find information or friends online. But in recent weeks the two rivals have made some surprising moves in a different direction -- the business of selling and delivering goods. Facebook is trumpeting its new Gifts service that lets users order a wide range of stuff, from wine and cupcakes to pet toys and children's clothes, and have them delivered to friends. Google, meanwhile, has been tight-lipped about its recent deal to buy a small company that operates temporary lockers where shoppers can take delivery of items they purchase online. But some believe Google will combine the startup's delivery expertise with other

services to help merchants sell products through Google. Now Google Even Watches What You Buy Offline So It Can Target You with More Personalised Ads (Daily Mail) - Just when you thought Google couldnt target you with more specific advertising -- based on your web surfing -- it's going one step further. The search giant now intends to use data uploaded by retailers about consumers' offline purchases in order to target them with even more targeted ads. In other words, it will know what you spend at the mall as well as at the keyboard. In a lowkey announcement, Google has begun the new advertising project -- Conversions API -- that will merge offline consumer information with online intelligence. With the new service in-store transactions, call-tracking and other online activities can be inputted into Google and combined with other information that will eventually optimize ad campaigns based on 'even more of your business data'. More business trends...

SOCIAL TRENDS
Top Stories: The Future of Education is Outside the Classroom (PSFK) The world is currently facing monumental education challenges. Decades of standardized testing, fear of technology, and fixation on memorization have impacted the world's youth negatively and kept them from reaching their human potential. In a recent documentary, the telecommunications provider Ericsson sheds light on shifts happening in the worlds of various educators and the learning industry at large. Watch the documentary and take a look at key takeaways from the film. Downloadable Guns are Possible, a Troubling New Development for Weapon Control Advocates (Huffington Post) - Downloading a gun design to your computer, building it with a three-dimensional printer that uses plastics and other materials, and firing it minutes later. No background checks, no questions asked. Sound far-fetched? It's not. And that is disquieting for gun control advocates. Rep. Steven Israel, D-NY, said the prospect of such guns becoming reality is reason enough for the renewal of the Undetectable Firearms Act, which makes it illegal to build guns that can't be detected by X-ray or metallic scanners. That law expires at the end of 2013. At least one group, Defense Distributed, is claiming to have created downloadable weapon parts that can be built using the increasingly popular newgeneration of printer that can create 3-D objects with moving parts. More social trends...

GLOBAL TRENDS
Top Stories: Pentagon Preps Stealth Strike Force to Counter China (Wired) - The U.S. military has begun a staged, five-year process that will see each of its three main stealth warplane types deployed to bases near China. When the deployments are complete in 2017, Air Force F-22s and B-2s and Marine Corps F35s could all be within striking range of America's biggest economic rival at the same time. With Beijing now testing its own radar-evading jet fighters -- two different models, to be exact -the clock is counting down to a stealth warplane showdown over the Western Pacific. The gradual creation of the U.S. stealth strike force is an extension of the Pentagons much-touted "strategic pivot" to the Pacific region, and echoes the much faster formation, earlier this year, of a similar (but only partially stealthy) aerial armada in the Persian Gulf. Global Warming Experts Should Think More about the Cold War (Bloomberg) - Every year the United Nations convenes diplomats from more than 190 nations to negotiate a climate change treaty, and in many years negotiators go home with little more than the promise of another annual meeting. After the failure of the 18th such event earlier this month in Doha, diplomats and organizers should focus less on the UN exercise than on combing history for a more suitable model. They might find at least three lessons from the history of arms control. More global trends...

ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
Top Stories: West Antarctic Warming TWICE as Fast as Previously Thought (Daily Mail) - West Antarctica is warming almost twice as fast as previously believed, a new study shows, heightening fears of a catastrophic thaw that raise water levels from San Francisco to Shanghai. Annual average temperatures at the Byrd research station there have risen 2.4C (4.3F) since the Fifties, it said, one of the fastest gains on the planet and three times the global average. West Antarctica holds enough ice to raise world sea levels by at least 3.3m (11ft) if it ever all melted. That process would take centuries, but even a much more modest thaw could threaten low-lying areas and coastal cities across the planet.

'Continued summer warming in West Antarctica could upset the surface mass balance of the ice sheet, so that the region could make an even bigger contribution to sea level rise than it already does,' said David Bromwich, professor of geography at Ohio State University and senior research scientist at the Byrd station. U.S. Watchdog Rules 'Frankenfish' is Safe for Environment (Daily Mail) - Genetically modified salmon could soon be found on supermarket fish counters after the U.S. food safety watchdog ruled it posed no environmental risks. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it could find no valid scientific reasons to ban production of Atlantic salmon engineered with extra genes from two other fish species. If it is now given final approval, the fish will be the first GM animal to hit supermarket shelves anywhere in the world -- and in the U.S. they may not even be labelled as modified. The FDA has already indicated the AquAdvantage salmon was safe for human consumption, but published a draft ruling declaring it unlikely to damage the environment. Their two extra genes make the fish grow twice as fast as normal Atlantic salmon and supporters say it could make land-based fish farms much easier and cheaper to run. More environmental trends...

FUTURE TRENDS
Top Stories: Tim O'Reilly's Key to Creating the Next Big Thing (Wired) O'Reilly's day job is heading O'Reilly Media, created in 1978, which began as a purveyor of distinctively friendly computer manuals and later stretched to include conferences, epublishing, and a spin-off venture capital firm. (It has done seed rounds with the likes of Foursquare, Bitly, and Chumby.) But the 58-year-old CEO is better known as a free-range proselytizer of the tech revolution. His ability to quickly identify nascent trends is unparalleled. Wired caught up with the peripatetic CEO via Skype. He was in London, preparing for a conference presentation called "Open Societies, Open Economies." Vintage OReilly. Why We Can't Solve Big Problems (MIT Technology Review) - That something happened to humanitys capacity to solve big problems is a commonplace. Recently, however, the complaint has developed a new stridency among Silicon Valley's investors and entrepreneurs, although it is usually expressed a little differently: people say there is a paucity of real innovations. Instead, they worry, technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys. The motto of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm started by Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal, is "We wanted flying cars -- instead we got 140 characters."

More future trends...

From the publisher...

Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era
By Amory B. Lovins and Rocky Mountain Institute Read more...

Trends and Futures... New Books - New and not-yet-published books on trends and futures. A Web Resource... Synectics World - Helping people work creatively and collaboratively to invent solutions to some of the worlds difficult challenges. Multimedia... Ray Kurzweil: How to Create a Mind (Authors at Google) - In How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization -- reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines. Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world's problems. (1h 19m 4s) The Blogosphere... The Secret Algorithm One VC Firm Uses to Pick Entrepreneurs (GigaOM) - Remmy Oxley, VC "Statistics and big data took over baseball scouting some years ago, with the rise of Moneyball. More recently, those tactics have spread to the political world, with presidential candidates using big data to maximize their vote, and Nate Silver using algorithms to correctly predict outcomes in all 50 states. Now we're doing it, too. Instead of relying on the gut instincts, punditry and armchair quarterbacking that VCs are notorious for, our firm is pattern replicating to decide which entrepreneurs to fund. Here are the components of a secret algorithm I developed that we use to score and rate potential investments with entrepreneurs."

Email: future@innovationwatch.com