Monthly Archives: January 2012

Mike Lazaridis (Blackberry) at AAAS 2012 in Vancouver next month?

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Set to appear on Friday, Feb. 17, 2012 as a plenary speaker at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting, Mike Lazaridis will be speaking about The Power of Ideas.

Lazaridis’ presence (assuming he shows up) is likely to add a frisson of excitement given today’s announcement that he is stepping down as co-chief executive officer (CEO) of the company he helped found, Research in Motion (RIM) which produces the Blackberry mobile device. (Thorsten Heins, a four-year employee with the company and former Siemens AG executive, will be RIM’s new CEO.)

I was intrigued months ago when I saw Laziridis was scheduled to speak partly because of his company’s importance and current travails, partly due to his connection to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (as I recall he provides/ed much of the institute’s funding), and partly his communication strategies.

I’m inferring from the little I’ve been able to observe that Lazaridis does not perform well when criticized or attacked. There was a court case back in 2001 in the US, where Lazaridis seems to have engaged in a ‘pissing contest’ with a company I’ve often seen described as a patent troll, NTP Incorporated. I gather he initially dismissed the litigation as frivolous (did he dare them to sue?). Unfortunately he did that publicly, never a good idea when you’re engaged in a court case where people are likely to read your comments in the press. Five years later, RIM lost the case and had to pay NTP over a complicated legal argument (you can read more about that here). Frankly, it seems wrong that RIM should have had to pay money to a company that files patents for the sole purpose of suing other companies.

I’d dismiss the incident but, more recently, it took Lazaridis too long to apologize for a major service outage. In October 2011, service was lost by customers in Europe and elsewhere for three days before an apology was forthcoming. Interestingly, that was around the time the outage began to affect North American customers. Also, he’s been far less visible publicly over the last few months. (Note: Lazaridis has tended to be the public face/spokesperson for RIM, while Jim Balsillie, his co-CEO) had performed that function less frequently.)

I am looking forward to how Lazaridis performs in Vancouver in February 2012 at the AAAS meeting (Feb. 16-20).

Gung haggis fat choy and Scottish/Chinese nanotechnology

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I was reminded of a local (Vancouver, Canada) tradition when I read about a nanotechnology Chinese New Year’s card produced by a nanofabrication centre  in Scotland.

Before I get started on the Scottish researchers and their efforts, here’s a little bit about  the Vancouver tradition, which combines Scottish and Chinese celebrations for this time of year (Robbie Burns Day and the Lunar New Year). Started in 1997 by Todd Wong, Gung Haggis Fay Choy is a dinner integrating both traditions. Here’s more from the Miss604 website about this year’s (2012) event (I have removed the links that were included in this excerpt of a longer, more entertaining post that you might want to read in its entirety),

Gung Haggis Fat Choy is one unique event where you can catch poetry and Kung Fu, highland dancers performing with sheng players, and delicious deep-fried haggis dumplings. It’s an annual Vancouver tradition that combines Chinese New Year with Robbie Burns Day in a single event.

Gung Haggis Fat Choy Dinner

  • Date: January 22, 2012 (Chinese New Year’s Eve)
  • Time: 5:00pm (doors) 6:00pm (dinner)
  • Where: Floata Restaurant at #400 – 180 Keefer St, Vancouver
  • What: An 8-course Scottish/Chinese banquet dinner complete with entertainment

…

  • Hosts: TV and radio host Tetsuro Shigematsu, Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah, and scholar Dr. Jan Walls.
  • What to Wear: Kilts and tartans, as well as Chinese jackets and cheong-sam dresses are preferred. But our guests are dressed both formal and casual – be comfortable, be outrageous, be yourself.
  • The Dinner: Appetizers will arrive at the tables by 6:00pm and soon after, the dinner formalities begin. From then on a new dish will appear somewhere around 15 minutes, quickly followed by a co-host introducing a poet or musical performer.
  • Finale: The evening will wrap up somewhere between 9:00pm and 9:30pm, with the singing of Auld Lang Syne. They start with a verse in Mandarin Chinese, then sing in English or Scottish [Gaelic?]. Participants can socialize further until 10:00pm.

Now for the James Watt Nanofabrication Centre”s (at the University of Glasgow) nod to the Chinese New Year, from the Jan. 19, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

It is so small that it cannot be seen by the naked eye – but a tiny Chinese New Year greetings card created by the University of Glasgow represents the huge potential for China to profit from Scottish innovation.

The card was produced by experts from the University’s James Watt Nanofabrication Centre to showcase their world-leading expertise in nanotechnology ahead of Chinese New Year celebrations, which begins on Monday 23 January [2012].

Here’s the card,

University of Glasgow's James Watt Nanofabrication Centre's 2012 Chinese New Year of the Dragon card

I was expecting to read nanoscale measurements but after reading the details, I’d say this card is not so much a nanoscale-sized card but a microscale-sized card. Still, there is a reference to the ‘nano’,  (from the University of Glasgow Jan. 19, 2012 news release,

The card is 300 micro-metres wide by 200 micro-metres tall (a micro-metre is one-millionth of a metre). It is so small that 21,600 of them could fit on an area the size of the China Post’s 36mm-by-36mm 2012 Chinese New Year commemorative stamp. The Chinese characters are just 45 micro-metres tall, and the dragon is just 116 micro-metres long. By comparison, the width of a human hair is about 100 micro-metres.

Professor David Cumming and Dr Qin Chen from the University’s School of Engineering etched the Chinese characters and dragon image onto a very small piece of glass. The manufacturing process took just 30 minutes.

…

“The colours were produced by plasmon resonance in a patterned aluminium film made in our James Watt Nanofabrication Centre. The underlying technology has some very important real world applications in bio-technology sensing, optical filtering and light control components, and advances in micro and nanofabrication for the electronics industry. [emphasis mine] …”

The most interesting (to me) part of this communication, after seeing the card, is this bit about Scotland-China relations,

 The card was developed in conjunction with Scottish Development International (SDI), Scotland’s international trade and investment body.

SDI Chief Executive Anne MacColl said: “Nanotechnology is just one area in which Scotland is considered a world leader. From renewable energy to life sciences, digital media to ICT and education to financial services, Scotland has a wealth of expertise, skilled people and knowledge.

“Chinese firms can gain a competitive edge by partnering with Scottish universities and companies across these critical high growth sectors. Innovation is key to China’s economic development and SDI’s offices in Beijing and Shanghai are on hand to help Chinese universities and firms learn more about the benefits of international partnership.”

Many examples of collaboration between Scotland and China exist today, particularly in the field of innovation-based research and development. Four mainland Chinese companies are investors in Scotland and a number of Scotland’s world-leading universities have research partnerships and joint ventures in place with Chinese academic institutions and corporations. Scotland’s First Minister recently made his third visit to China in two years, underpinning Scotland’s commitment to growing business and academic links with China even further.

To all of us, Happy New Year of the Dragon (Gung Hay Fat Choy)!

Is chocolate disappearing?

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It looks like the cacao plant used for chocolate production is at risk of being wiped out. Grrlscientist at the Guardian science blogs featured the story in her Jan. 11, 2012 posting.

… despite chocolate’s popularity in the United States and Europe, the cacao plant is in trouble. …

The most common way of growing cacao is in a monoculture, the same way that corn is grown, which makes plants much more susceptible to a plethora of diseases and pest infestations, says Dr Almeda [botanist Frank Almeda, senior curator at the California Academy of Sciences]. Making things worse, cacao farmers make less than one dollar a day, so cultivating cacao isn’t even economically feasible, so farmers are abandoning their cacao plantations.

Here’s a video from the California Academy of Sciences about chocolate,

Grrlscientist mentions corn as another food which is monoculture-cultivated and I’m going add banana as another one of these monoculture food plants and that, too, is in danger, not for the first time. (I’m not sure about whether corn is in immediate danger or not.) There’s a type of banana that we no longer eat, Gros Michel. Our grandparents did and, by all accounts, it was a better tasting banana than the one we have now but it was wiped out by disease.

Agribusiness interests found an alternative, the Cavendish banana, which is now in danger of being wiped out. (What is that saying about repeating the practices that you got into trouble in the first place and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity?) There’s  lots of information about the banana situation on the web and I found this US National Public Radio (NPR) interview from July 22, 2011 with Dan Koeppel, science writer and author of “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” which features a transcript of the interview, as well as, the audio file.

I know I don’t usually write about this kind of thing but 20 years ago when I was completing my undergraduate degree, I took a course where we discussed the issue of monoculture and the danger of relying on one species of food plant , and just couldn’t resist writing about this any longer.

Short mention of Nanowerk and the Shorty

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Congratulations to Michael Berger and Nanowerk;s Nanotechnology News for being in the running for a Shorty Award. It’s still possible to nominate (vote) for the website through to Feb. 17, 2012.  Here’s a brief description of the Shorty awards (from the Rules page on the Shorty Awards website),

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media, by recognizing the people and organizations producing real-time short form content on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Foursquare, and the rest of the social Web.

There are specific rules,

How to Make Nominations

  • To make a nomination, fill out the nomination form at ShortyAwards.com or send a tweet like this: I nominate @TwitterUser for a Shorty Award in #category because… [must add reason here].
  • You can also tweet shorter nominations like this: #shortyawards @username #category [must add reason here].
  • Be as creative with the reason. A tweet without a reason for the nomination will not be counted.
  • The nomination must be relevant to the category.
  • Vote for as many different people as you want, in as many categories as you want, as often as you want.
  • Only one nominee and one category per tweet.
  • Voting for the same person in the same category more than once simply replaces the text of your original vote; it does not count as an additional vote.
  • You can vote in any of the featured categories or create a community category. If a community category becomes popular and has enough compelling finalists, it could become a featured category.
  • Nominees and potential nominees (everyone on earth) are welcome to campaign and encourage friends to vote for them. Nominees are encouraged to take the Shorty Interview and embed campaign videos to help both voters and members of the Academy get to know them.
  • If you change your Twitter username, any votes you received under your old user name won’t carry over.
  • Nominees can delete any nomination received by logging into the Shorty Awards profile page and clicking the “delete” link next to that nomination.
  • Nominations in certain Special Awards categories may have special instructions. Read each Special Award page to find out how to make nominations in one of those categories. Please note that there may also be exceptions to the rules for certain featured categories that supercede the general Shorty Awards rules.
  • The Shorty Awards use several algorithms to automatically disqualify nomination activity that appears to be intended to game the system. We also perform periodic audits to check if our system is being gamed. Contact us if you see any suspicious activity.
  • Nominators must be active Twitter users prior to the start of the competition. Votes originating from new Twitter accounts or accounts used mainly for Shorty Awards voting will automatically be disqualified and will not count toward the rankings.
  • We reserve the right to disqualify nominees that do any of the following: violate trademarks, infringe copyrights, impersonate others (except in the #fakeaccount  category, where this is encouraged), invade privacy, make threats of violence, promote illegal activities, promote pornography, spam others, use bots, scripts or other automated means for voting, engage in abusive behavior, promise anything of value in exchange for a nomination, or otherwise violate the friendly spirit of the awards.

This is the 4th annual event for the Shorty Awards and they do seem to have made a splash (from the About page),

“Hollywood has the Oscars. Broadway has the Tonys. Now Twitter has the… Shorty Awards” [New York Times]

I was a little curious as to who (awkward grammar choice, eh?) is hosting/promoting these awards (from the About page),

The Shorty Awards are produced by Sawhorse Media, a New York technology startup. Our sites include the leading destination for journalists on Twitter and social media, Muck Rack, the brand new Muck Rack Pro tools for communications professionals looking to connect with journalists on social media, and the directory of Twitter people and lists Listorious.

It’s a classic public relations ploy to promote your company, create an award and competition. It’s hard work so bravo to the Sawhorse Media folks for being successful with this.

Good luck to Michael Berger and Nanowerk!

Vancouver’s AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2012 meeting preview

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This morning (Jan. 19, 2012) Vancouver (or media types and various guests) were treated to what was billed as a ‘preview’ of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2012 meeting in Vancouver from Feb. 16-20, 2012.

The preview was well organized and proceeded quite smoothly although I’m not sure about its actual purpose. Generally, a press conference of this type is called to generate excitement and interest. The idea being that the now excited and interested media will report on the preview and upcoming event and pass that excitement and interest on to their various audiences. The process doesn’t stop there.

Our now excited and interested audiences are demanding more information about this event which drives the media to report about the event itself, generating excitement and interest in all the parties that keeps growing and developing throughout all of time.

There were a few moments in the preview where excitement and interest threatened to make an appearance. Julio Montaner, Director of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, and Karen Bakker, a Canada Research Chair in Political Ecology at the University of  British Columbia, spoke with passion and fervour about their areas of expertise and for a few moments the room buzzed quietly. Happily, they will be both speaking at the AAAS 2012 meeting next month.

There was one other frisson of excitement. Richard Lee, MLA (member of the legislative assembly of British Columbia) for Burnaby North and a physicist, talked about the 200 students from schools in British Columbia (BC) who received a free pass for the meeting and a membership to the AAAS courtesy of the BC Innovation Council (BCIC) and the government of BC.

Otherwise, the preview was a bit lacklustre. They kept mentioning that Canada is world leader in some research areas without mentioning anything much other than health, specifically Montaner’s work. I was somewhat perturbed by the lack of specifics. Canada is not a world leader in many areas of science so why not mention them?

I was speaking to someone afterwards and noted that research in nanocellulose (specifically, nanocrystalline cellulose [NCC}) is an area where we shine (for now). His response was something along these lines “Not all the special interests can be mentioned.” Again, Canada doesn’t have that many research areas where it leads so, why not mention them? Of course, he’s a physicist and that area of research, nanocellulose, is more biology/chemistry.

Basically, I’m a little disappointed they didn’t use a little more imagination and creativity to produce this press event. I appreciate that the politicians and other officials need to be given their moment but something as silly as having that professor at the University of British Columbia who dresses up and performs as Charles Darwin make an appearance would have livened the proceedings.

I hope this preview is not a harbinger of the entire 2012 meeting experience. There is one ray of imagination, Meet the Scientists! events (Family Science Days), which will take place over two days. For example, there will be The Real Science of Alien Worlds, Indigenous Mathematics, Biodiversity Game: The Phylo Project, etc. (I got this information from a handout that was made available at the press conference.)

The meeting sessions themselves promise to be quite exciting because the AAAS does provide a broad exposure to all kinds of scientific research. By comparison, most scientific meetings are organized around a specialty, e. g., chemistry. (If you’re curious about the AAAS 2012 sessions, you can go here to browse the programme.)

The Vancouver Aquarium hosted this morning’s event and for that, I thank them. I got to touch a sea jelly (formerly, jelly fish) and talk to a few folks about the Arctic, the animals that live in the sea and/or on the ice, and the politics of the situation. It was, all in all, an unexpected treat.

ETA Jan. 22, 2012: I have added links to webpages for the AAAS 2012 meeting, Julio Montaner, and Karen Bakker. I also included a sentence stating where I received the information about the events for families.

Robert Hooke and Sir Isaac Newton; scientists and a three-century old feud

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When I first came across the story, the writer was unequivocal. Sir Isaac Newton had done everything in his power to remove a rival from the history books in a campaign that persisted over years and Newton was somewhat successful.

On the recent unveiling of a Robert Hooke (Newton’s rival) portrait, the latest materials I’ve found on this topic have taken a more measured approach to Newton’s role. From the Jan. 13, 2012 news item on Science Daily,

Chroniclers of his time called him ‘despicable’, ‘mistrustful’ and ‘jealous’, and a rivalrous Isaac Newton might have had the only surviving portrait of him burnt, but, three centuries on, Robert Hooke is now regarded as one of the great Enlightenment scientists.

It was Hooke’s dispute with Isaac Newton over credit for Newton’s work on gravity that tainted more than two hundred years of historical writing about Hooke, as it is chronicled that he fought for greater credit than Newton offered for the guiding principles which were later detailed in Newton’s Principia

Hooke’s name was so thoroughly muddied his tercentenary passed unmarked. (In the UK, that’s a major affront. From what I can tell, they celebrate all historical events and important persons. Missing some of Hooke’s importance would seem unthinkable and yet, it happened.)

From the Jan. 13, 2012 news item on the European Commission CORDIS news page,

But this was only part of the story and in recent years the scientific community has woken up to the fact that Hooke was in fact one of the great Enlightenment scientists. In an effort to further correct the skewed vision of history that proliferated for so long and give Hooke credit where credit is due, the Institute of Physics (IOP) in the United Kingdom has hung a new painting of the often forgotten scientist at its London headquarters.

The painting is the work of history artist Rita Greer who started her ‘Robert Hooke project’ in 2003. Her aim was to set the record straight by chronicling the life of the scientist.

Here’s an image of the painting,

Robert Hooke painted by Rita Greer

Here are more details about Hooke from the Institute of Physics (IOP) Jan. 12, 2012 news release,

Following Hooke’s death in the early 1700s, Newton was appointed President of the Royal Society and it was during his time in this capacity that, it is thought, the only portrait of Hooke was destroyed – it is unclear whether the portrait was destroyed on Newton’s command or simply left to perish.

With no visual sources for reference, Greer has used written sources – including the chronicles of both John Aubrey and Richard Waller – to create a likeness of Hooke with details fitting to his position in the history of science.

The image set to be hung at IOP shows Hooke holding a quill and a book in his right hand and a spring in his left. The spring represents one of Hooke’s defining successes – Hooke’s law of elasticity.

Hooke’s law states that the extension of a spring is in direct proportion to the load applied to it – a law which many materials obey and which culminated in the development of a balance spring.  Balance springs subsequently enabled the development of portable timepieces – the first watches.

The history artist Rita Greer says, “Robert Hooke, brilliant, ingenious seventeenth century scientist was brushed under the carpet of history by Sir Isaac Newton and his cronies. When he had his Tercentenary there wasn’t a single memorial to him anywhere. I thought it disgraceful as Hooke did many wonderful things for science.

…

Sir Arnold Wolfendale FRS, a former President of the IOP and former Astronomer Royal, says, “Robert Hooke was a brilliant man of many parts of which one was physics. He was also remarkable for many advances and discoveries for which he did not receive adequate credit.

“With her fine portraits of Hooke, Rita Greer is going some way towards redressing the balance and bringing Hooke’s image to a wider audience. I think that Hooke would have been pleased with her persistence, as we are at the IOP.”

Robert Hooke was a key part of the group that went on to form the Royal Society, becoming the first Curator of Experiments for the Society in 1662.

Hooke has many physics-related credits to his name, including the construction of the vacuum pumps used in Boyle’s gas law experiments, building some of the earliest Gregorian telescopes and observing the rotations of Mars and Jupiter, deducing the wave theory of light, and being the first to suggest that matter expands when heated and that air is made of small particles.

Whether or not he intended to destroy the last portrait of Hooke (I’m inclined to think that was his intention) Newton didn’t manage to remove Hooke from the history books entirely but it certainly seems that he enjoyed three very successful centuries until Rita Greer came along.

D-Wave Systems, a Vancouver (Canada) area company gets one step closer to quantum computing

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It takes a great deal of nerve to found a startup company for any emerging technology; I’m not sure what it takes to found a startup company that produces quantum computers.

D-Wave Systems: the quantum computing company (based in the Vancouver area) recently announced they were able to employ an 84-qubit calculation in a demonstration calculating what Dexter Johnson at the Nanoclast blog for the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) called ‘notoriously difficult’ Ramsey numbers.

Here’s a brief description of the demonstration (excerpted from the Jan. 12, 2012 article by Bob Yirka for phsyorg.com),

In the research at D-Wave, those involved worked to run a just recently discovered quantum algorithm on an actual quantum computer; in this case, to solve for a two-color Ramsey number, R(m,2), where m= 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, also known as the “Party Problem” because it’s use can be explained by posing a problem experienced by many party planners, i.e. how to invite the minimum number of guests where one group knows a certain number of others, and another group doesn’t, forcing just the right amount of mingling. Because increasing the number of different kinds of guests increases the difficulty of finding the answer, modern computers aren’t able to find R(5,5) much less anything higher. …

Quantum algorithms take advantage of such facilities [ability to take advantage of quantum mechanics capabilities which allow superconducting circuits to recognize 1 or 0 as current traveling in opposite directions or the existence of both states simultaneously] and allow for the execution of “instructions” far faster than conventional computers ever could. In the demonstration by the D-Wave team, the computer solved for a R(8,2) Ramsey number in just 270 milliseconds using 84 qubits, though just 28 of them were used in actual computation as the rest were delegated to correcting errors. Also, for those that are curious, the answer is 8.

While Yirka goes on to applaud the accomplishment, he notes that it may not be very useful. I think that’s always an issue with the early stages of an emerging technology; it may not prove to have any practical applications now or in the future.

Dexter in his Jan. 12, 2012 blog posting about D-Wave Systems and their recent announcement speaks as someone with lengthy experience dealing with emerging technologies (he provides a little history first [I have removed links from the excerpt, please see the posting for those]),

After erring on the side of caution—if not doubt—when IEEE Spectrum [magazine] cited D-Wave Systems as one of its “Big Losers” two years ago,  it seems that there was a reversal of opinion within this publication back in June of last year when Spectrum covered D-Wave’s first big sale of a quantum computer with an article and then a podcast interview of the company’s CTO.

In the job of covering nanotechnology, one develops—sometimes—a bit more hopeful perspective on the potential of emerging technologies. Basic research that may lead to applications such as quantum computers get more easily pushed up in the development cycle than perhaps they should. So, I have been following the developments of D-Wave for at least the last seven years with a bit more credence than Spectrum had offered the company earlier.

…

While it may seem that D-Wave is on irreversible upward technological slope, one problem indicated … is that capital may be beginning to dry up.

If so, it would seem almost ironic that after years of not selling anything and attracting a lot of capital, D-Wave would make a $10-million sale and then not be able to get any more funding.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview that Brian Wang had with Geordie Rose, D-Wave’s Chief Technical Officer, for The Next Big Future blog (mentioned in Dexter’s piece) which brings the conundrum Dexter notes into high relief (from Wang’s Dec. 29, 2011 post),

The next 18 months will be a critical period for Dwave systems [sic]. Raising private money has become far more difficult in the current economic conditions. If Dwave were profitable, then they could IPO. If Dwave were not able to become profitable and IPO and could not raise private capital, then there would be the risk of having to shutdown.

According to Wang’s post, D-Wave managed the feat with the Ramsey number two years ago. There was no mention of what they are currently managing to do with their quantum computer.

This is the piece I mentioned yesterday (Jan. 18, 2012) in my posting about the recently released report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012, from the US National Science Board (NSB) in the context of the government initiative, Startup America, and what I thought was a failure to address the issue of a startup trying to become profitable.

ETA Jan. 22, 2012: Dexter Johnson, Nanoclast blog at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) mentions the problem in a different context of a recent US initiative to support startup companies through a public/private partnership consortium called the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), from his Jan. 20, 2012 posting,

My concern is that a small company that has spun itself out from a university, developed some advanced prototypes, lined up their market, and picked their management group still need by some estimates somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 to $30 million to scale up to being an industrial manufacturer of a product.

Dexter’s concern is that AMP funds available for disbursement will only support a limited number of companies as they scale up.

This contrasts with the Canadian situation where it almost none of our smaller companies can get sufficient funds to scale up when they most need it, e.g., D-Wave System’s current situation.

 

Who’s the global leader in supporting science and technology research?

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According to a US government report, the US has a very narrow lead in supporting science and technology (S & T) research. From the Jan. 18, 2012 news item on physorg.com,

“This information clearly shows we must re-examine long-held assumptions about the global dominance of the American science and technology enterprise,” said NSF (US National Science Foundation) Director Subra Suresh of the findings in the Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 released today. “And we must take seriously new strategies for education, workforce development and innovation in order for the United States to retain its international leadership position,” he said.

…

According to the new Indicators 2012, the largest global S&T gains occurred in the so-called “Asia-10”–China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand–as those countries integrate S&T into economic growth. Between 1999 and 2009, for example, the U.S. share of global research and development (R&D) dropped from 38 percent to 31 percent, whereas it grew from 24 percent to 35 percent in the Asia region during the same time.

In China alone, R&D growth increased a stunning 28 percent in a single year (2008-2009), propelling it past Japan and into second place behind the United States.

There has been mounting concern in the US about its eroding leadership position. In fact, Barack Obama’s administration released in 2009 a document, Strategy for American Innovation, to address this situation. The administration recently released a new (2012?) Strategy for American Innovation document to update and enhance the previous document. Here are the new initiatives that have been added (from the executive summary for the new Strategy for American Innovation),

Key Administration priorities will improve America’s economic growth and competitiveness on many critical dimensions.

  • The Administration’s proposed Wireless Initiative will help businesses reach 98% of Americans with high-speed wireless access within five years and also facilitate the creation of a nationwide interoperable public safety network.  The Initiative will substantially expand the development of new wireless spectrum available for wireless broadband, by freeing up 500 MHz over 10 years.  Expanding new commercial spectrum is necessary to avoid “spectrum crunch” and facilitate the rapidly growing wireless technology revolution.  The initiative will support advances in security, reliability, and other critical wireless features; accelerate wireless innovations in health, education, transportation, and other application areas; and engage community participation in generating and demonstrating next generation wireless applications.
  • The patent reform agenda is essential to reducing the enormous backlog of patent applications at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO).  By stalling the delivery of innovative goods and services to market, this backlog impedes economic growth and the creation of high-paying jobs.  The patent reform legislative agenda will enable the USPTO to adequately fund its operations through user fees and allow the agency to implement new initiatives to improve patent quality while reducing the average delay in patent processing times from 35 months to 20 months.  Once implemented, the USPTO’s proposed three-track model will allow applicants to prioritize applications, enabling the most valuable patents to come to market within 12 months.
  • The Administration is developing new initiatives to improve K-12 education with an emphasis on graduating every student from high school ready for college and a career.  The Administration’s FY 2012 Budget will launch the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Education (ARPA-ED) to support research on breakthrough technologies to enhance learning.  The Budget also supports continuation of the historic Race to the Top, with an expanded focus on school districts prepared to implement and sustain comprehensive reforms.  Working with a coalition of private sector leaders called Change the Equation, the Administration is encouraging public-private partnerships that inspire more students – including girls and other currently underrepresented groups – to excel in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).  The Administration will also work to prepare 100,000 STEM teachers over the next decade with a down payment in the FY 2012 Budget to recruit STEM teachers and improve teacher training.
  • To accelerate the development of clean energy technologies, the President has proposed a Clean Energy Standard that will help us reach a goal of delivering 80% of the nation’s electricity from clean sources by 2035.  The Administration’s FY 2012 Budget proposes to expand the funding to date for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) and to create three new Energy Innovations Hubs to solve challenges in critical areas.  The Budget also proposes a reauthorization of the Clean Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit and provides funding for research, development, and deployment to help the U.S. reach the goal of one million advanced technology vehicles on the road by 2015.
  • The Startup America initiative will facilitate entrepreneurship across the country, increasing the success of high-growth startups that create broad economic growth and quality jobs.  The Administration launched the Startup America initiative with new agency efforts that accelerate the transfer of research breakthroughs from university labs; create two $1 billion initiatives for impact investing and early-stage seed financing, among other incentives to invest in high-growth startups; improve the regulatory environment for starting and growing new businesses; and increase connections between entrepreneurs and high-quality business mentors.  Responding to the President’s call to action around the national importance of entrepreneurship, private-sector leaders are independently committing significant new resources to catalyze and develop entrepreneurial ecosystems across the country.

There are two initiatives that are particularly interesting to me, the first one being patent reform. The wording on this one suggests the big problem is a backlog but clearing the backlog won’t solve all the problems with patents. As I noted in my Patents as weapons and obstacles post of Oct. 31, 2011 companies routinely use patents as a means of inhibiting competition and innovation. How is giving the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) more funding for staff positions going to address that problem?

The Startup America is the other initiative I found interesting as I don’t understand how this is going to help entrepreneurship in the US. It looks like more government money will be spent to fund startups, which is, no doubt, a good thing. What I find puzzling is that the wording of the initiative doesn’t indicate a grasp of any issue beyond that of getting people to create startups. The issue isn’t just funding at an early stage of development; it’s getting enough capitalization to launch the company into profitability. Tomorrow, I’ll publish a post with an example of a company (Canadian but I’m sure entrepreneurs from other countries will tell you the same thing happens there) facing that problem (ETA Jan. 22, 2012: my Jan.19, 2012 posting about D-Wave Systems).

Getting back to where I started originally, there is great concern in the US now (and for some years) about losing its leadership role in science and technology. While Canadians have not been in the position of losing leadership, it is fascinating to note the similarities.

There’s one more thing in the Jan. 18, 2012 news item (on physorg.com), the US National Science Foundation (NSF) revealed its initiatives to address innovation,

NSF has launched a number of new initiatives designed to better position the United States globally and at home by enhancing international collaborations, improving education and establishing new partnerships between NSF-supported researchers and those in industry, for example.

  • Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) fosters interaction among scientists, engineers and educators around the globe. Because S&T excellence exists in many parts of the world, scientific advances can be accelerated when scientists and engineers work together across international borders. The Wireless Innovation Between Finland and the United States, for instance, provides a platform for building long-term research and education collaborations between the U.S. and Finland-two world leaders in wireless technology-who have formed a virtual institute to study dynamic radio spectrum access. SAVI collaborations are also underway between U.S. teams and researchers in India, Brazil, France, Germany, Israel, Singapore and the United Kingdom.
  • The NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, a public-private partnership, will connect NSF-funded scientific research with the technological, entrepreneurial and business communities to help create a stronger national ecosystem for innovation. NSF, the Deshpande Foundation, and the Kauffman Foundation are founding members along with a national network of advisors and partnering institutions. Technology developers, business leaders, venture capitalists and others from private industry will provide critical expertise to help transform scientific and engineering results into potentially successful technologies.
  • NSF investment in advanced manufacturing holds great potential for significant short-term and long-term economic impact by promising entirely new classes and families of products that were previously unattainable, including emerging opportunities in cyber-physical systems, advanced robotics, nano-manufacturing, and sensor- and model-based smart manufacturing.
  • Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability, or (SEES), is a cross-disciplinary approach to sustainability science designed to spark innovations for tomorrow’s clean energy. It will also improve our capabilities for rapid response to extreme events.

The report first mentioned, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012, is not yet available in its entirety (full access Feb. 15, 2012) but you can access portions here. The speech by Dr. Subra Suresh for the FY2012 funding request for the National Science Foundation was supposed to be available by now, hopefully when you try it will be.

Clean your water with a tree

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You can’t actually use a tree to clean water but it may be possible soon to use the seeds of a ‘miracle’ tree which grows in equatorial regions. From the Jan. 18, 2012 news item on physorg.com,

 

A natural substance obtained from seeds of the “miracle tree” could purify and clarify water inexpensively and sustainably in the developing world, where more than 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water, scientists report. Research on the potential of a sustainable water-treatment process requiring only tree seeds and sand appears in ACS’ journal Langmuir.

Stephanie B. Velegol and colleagues explain that removing the disease-causing microbes and sediment from drinking water requires technology not always available in rural areas of developing countries. For an alternative approach, Velegol looked to Moringa oleifera, also called the “miracle tree,” a plant grown in equatorial regions for food, traditional medicine and biofuel. Past research showed that a protein in Moringa seeds can clean water, but using the approach was too expensive and complicated.

Here’s how the team used a protein from the Moringa seed and sand to purify water (from the abstract for the paper),

 

Currently, the main barrier to using Moringa seeds for producing potable water is that the seeds release other water-soluble proteins and organic matter, which increase the concentration of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in the water. The presence of this DOM supports the regrowth of pathogens in treated water, preventing its storage and later use. A new strategy has been established for retaining the MOCP protein and its ability to clarify and disinfect water while removing the excess organic matter. The MOCP is first adsorbed and immobilized onto sand granules, followed by a rinsing step wherein the excess organic matter is removed, thereby preventing later growth of bacteria in the purified water. Our hypotheses are that the protein remains adsorbed onto the sand after the functionalization treatment, and that the ability of the antimicrobial functionalized sand (f-sand) to clarify turbidity and kill bacteria, as MOCP does in bulk solution, is maintained. The data support these hypotheses, indicating that the f-sand removes silica microspheres and pathogens from water, renders adhered Escherichia coli bacteria nonviable, and reduces turbidity of a kaolin suspension.

If you are interested in reading the paper, here is the full citation,

 

Huda A. Jerri, Kristin J. Adolfsen, Lauren R. McCullough, Darrell Velegol, Stephanie B. Velegol. Antimicrobial Sand via Adsorption of Cationic Moringa oleifera Protein. Langmuir, 2011; 111222134253009 DOI: 10.1021/la2038262

 

It seems to me there’ve been a few more stories than usual about purifying water over the last 10 days or so. Serendipity or part of a communications strategy?

A natural substance obtained from seeds of the “miracle tree” could purify and clarify water inexpensively and sustainably in the developing world, where more than 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water, scientists report. Research on the potential of a sustainable water-treatment process requiring only tree seeds and sand appears in ACS’ journal Langmuir.

 

Stephanie B. Velegol and colleagues explain that removing the disease-causing microbes and sediment from drinking water requires technology not always available in rural areas of developing countries. For an alternative approach, Velegol looked to Moringa oleifera, also called the “miracle tree,” a plant grown in equatorial regions for food, traditional medicine and biofuel. Past research showed that a protein in Moringa seeds can clean water, but using the approach was too expensive and complicated.

Editorial positions available at scienceseeker.org

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Before you rush off to apply, here’s a little information about scienceseeker.org from the About page,

There are thousands of science blogs around the world, written by active scientists, journalists, professors, students, and interested laypeople. But until now, there hasn’t been a good way for readers to sort through all of them. There are dozens of blog collectives, many sites that organize some of the information in the blogs, but none that attempt to encompass the entire range of science reporting, analysis, and discussion taking place at an astonishing pace, worldwide.

ScienceSeeker is our effort to fill that void. We have collected hundreds of blogs in one place, and invite you to submit even more. Our goal is to be the world’s most comprehensive aggregator of science discussions, all organized by topic.

This is a science blog aggregator and after one year of operation where they’ve attracted 900 blogs, the data has become overwhelming for most people. To help you sort through the data, ScienceSeeker.org is looking for editors (excerpted from the news page),

The primary job of the new editors will be to share their favorite ScienceSeeker posts. They’ll select five posts a week from blogs covering their areas of expertise, and readers will be able to view those posts on our site or subscribe to a feed of just the recommended posts. We expect this to take just a few minutes each day.

Qualifications:

  • An active online presence on a blog and / or social networking sites like Twitter, Google+, and FaceBook
  • We don’t require that our editors have PhDs, but the candidates we select will have demonstrated expertise via their blogging or other publication record.
  • Enthusiasm for science

If you’re interested in the job, please email dsmunger@gmail.com with a paragraph or two about why you would like to be an editor, and provide a link to 2 or 3 of your own online posts about science that you feel are especially good. Link your social media feeds and other relevant sites, if any. You may attach or link to a curriculum vitae.

Editors will be permanently listed on ScienceSeeker.org, so this position will make a great addition to your CV. We will select the new editors by February 1, 2012.

I gather money will not be one of the benefits offered but you will have a permanent (?) addition to your curriculum vitae (CV). I assume they mean permanent in the sense that your name will be listed as long as there is a ScienceSeeker.org.