Jump The Curve Archives: 07/2008

Reverse Your Thinking

Dear Readers:

After thoughtful contemplation, I have decided to enter the U.S. Senate race in my home state of Minnesota. The future, as I have written so many times before on this website, is going to be radically different than most politicians realize. We need a new generation of leaders who are willing to bring fresh and truly innovative solutions to the vexing problems facing this country and the world. In short, we need leaders who can “jump the curve.” I believe I am such a leader.

I invite you to watch my opening announcement:

Jack Uldrich Do The Impossible ‘08 from DoTheImpossible08 on Vimeo.

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DARPA Jumps the Curve

The Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA) is now trying to create aircraft that will stay aloft for as long as five years. According to the manager of the program, Daniel Newman, “We want to completely change the paradigm of how we think about aircraft.”

It is a wonderful example of jumping the curve. If one understands the advances occurring in fields such as nanotechnology and hydrogen fuel cells, it is easy to envision how we might soon have aircraft which can stay afloat for five years at a time. (One immediate application is that the U.S. military might be able to patrol areas in Afghanistan easily and relatively inexpensively.)

Related posts by Jack Uldrich

The Future of the Airline Industry

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Jump the Curve with Living Legos

Imagine a diabetic being able to grow pancreatic tissue in order produce their own insulin again. Or envision a dialysis patient growing a new kidney from their own cells. Such things are impossible today, but they could soon become a reality thanks to advances researchers at Harvard Medical School are making in the field of tissue engineering. To this end, I’d invite you to read this informative article on “living legos”—or self-assembling tissues—from Technology Review. If successful, the treatment of diabetes and kidney failure will never be the same.

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Jump the Curve by Boiling Water Faster

EcoGeek has an interesting article explaining how advances in nanotechnology can lead to the creation of a kettle that boils faster. The advance is significant not just because it could help consumers and business save money and time by bringing water to a boil faster, but because it suggests that other products—such as solar cells and catalysts—might also become radically more effective.

Of course, before many of these advances can be adopted people will need to unlearn the idea that a “watched pot never boils.”

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Pharmaceutical Industry Needs to Jump the Curve to Nanotech

In 2003, I wrote the book, ”The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business.” In it, I outlined the many ways in which nanotechnology will impact the pharmaceutical industry in the near future. Recently, researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston have uncovered a method of reviving a once-promising cancer drug, TNP-470—which was cancelled in the mid-1990’s due to concerns over toxicity.

The problem of toxicity is not a new one to the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, it is a big reason why so many early stage drugs fail to make it to market.

This vexing problem may soon be partially alleviated due to advances in nanotechnology. One advantage of reformulating drugs at the nanoscale is that they are water soluble and, as such, don’t require the solvents which so often cause nasty side-effects in patients.

Another application being employed from the nanotechnology bag of tricks is to use nanoscale platforms such as micelles and dendrimers to prevent drugs from crossing the blood-brain barrier. In this fashion, older drugs may be reformulated so as to prevent certain drugs from wreaking havoc on the human brain. (This was one of the problems with TNP-470).

The pharmaceutical industry has invested billions of dollars developing promising drugs. Unfortunately, most developmental drugs end being shelved when it is found they cause some unintended consequence. Nanotechnology holds the promise that a handful of older drugs may now be revisited. Some may even find their way to the commercial marketplace.

With a single drug’s ability to add billions of dollars to a pharmaceutical company’s bottom-line, it is time many of them begin turning their attention to nanotechnology. It’s a small technology, but it could pay big dividends.

Related Posts by Jack Uldrich

A Thousand Reasons for the Pharmaceutical Industry to Rethink Its Business
The Future is about to Get Personal
Does the Pharmaceutical Industry Also Need to Unlearn
The Coming Health Care Revolution

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Practice Your Unlearning Game

On December 30, 1936, over 17,000 fans packed into the old Madison Square Garden to watch Long Island University, the country’s top-ranked basketball team, take on Stanford. It was slated to be a great game. Long Island was putting up its 43-game winning streak up against the reigning Pacific Coast Conference champions.

More than that, though, people were there to watch Hank Luisetti, Stanford’s 6 foot 2 inch star sophomore. He was the only player known for shooting the ball with one hand while jumping up in the air. At the time, every other player shot with two-hands or took hook shots.

Luisetti’s “jump-shot” was so radical that it caused Nat Holman, the legendary coach of City College of New York—and a man known as “Mr. Basketball” – to remark, “That’s not basketball! If my boys ever shot one-handed, I’d quit coaching.”

Stanford went on to crush Long Island University and, two years, later, Luisetti became the first college player ever to score 50 points in a game. Today, it is impossible to find a single player at either the collegiate or professional level who shoots two-handed.

It took a long time for basketball players to unlearn the two-handed shot, but the story serves as a good reminder that unlearning is not easy and that—like most sports—it is something which must be practiced continuously.

In fact, the sporting world is an excellent place to study the practice of unlearning. On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister unlearned the “four-minute mile” barrier when he circled the track at Oxford in a then record of 3:59.6. Dick Fosbury similarly unlearned the traditional straddle method of high-jumping when he invented the now famous “Fosbury Flop.”

Alas, unlearning is not so easy. In the insightful book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, recounted a study conducted by David Romer, an economist at Berkeley. In the study, Romer reviewed 1,100 first-quarter fourth-down plays where the teams would have been better off going for it. Instead, they kicked the ball 992 times. In blunter terms this means that in 90% of the cases, the team’s coaches were actively working against their team’s prospects of winning.

Is such insanity limited to the gridiron? No. In the book, Moneyball, Michael Lewis demonstrated how the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane unlearned his reliance on crusty old baseball scouts and instead turned to young, Ivy League educated “number crunchers” to help him spot the top prospects to draft. The book was published in 1999. To date, and in spite of the A’s consistently fielding one of the best teams with the lowest payroll, only one other team has adopted the strategy in a widespread manner—the Boston Red Sox.

Perhaps it is a coincidence—and a healthy payroll—but in case you haven’t been paying attention the Red Sox have won two of the past four World Series. It is also, however, possible that Boston has been practicing its unlearning skills. In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play in the Major Leagues. The Boston Red Sox were the last team to integrate—doing so only in 1957. During that time it won no American League pennants and, of course, no World Series.

Bottom-line: If you to want to win, practice unlearning.

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Robots Score! Do Humans Lose?

The other day I discussed why the field of robotics is advancing at an accelerating rate. To add some visual evidence to this thesis, I encourage you to watch this short, 15-second video demonstrating how a robot is now regularly beating the world’s best air-hockey players:

Undoubtedly, the idea of a robot beating a human at something as trivial as air hockey might elicit nothing more than a collective yawn from the masses, but I’d like to suggest that this is a serious issue that society needs to come to grips with now. If a robot can beat a human at air hockey, why can’t it also build a house or clear away garbage (ala the latest movie sensation, Wall-e)?

The answer is that robots will soon be able to do these tasks, as well as a variety of others, which were once considered the sole domain of humans. The resulting displacement of human labor is sure to cause a severe backlash among those put out of work. The time to begin thinking of how to retrain these workers for new careers in the 21st century is now.

Interested in some other future-related posts about robots? Check out these recent posts:

Learn from Robots
Meet Your Future, Shape-Shiting Robotic Butler
Hospitals Robotic Future
Will Robots Have Tails?
Is the Future of an ATV a Robot
The Robot Will See You Now

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Jump the Curve: Study Carneades

”I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the argument against my position better than the people who support it. I think only when I’ve reached that state am I qualified to speak.”

The above quote is from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man for more than 40 years, and it offers wonderful advice for anyone wishing to stay open to the importance of—as well as the need for—unlearning.

Munger’s practice of arguing opposite sides of an issue is a practice that dates back thousands of years. As Nassim Taleb recounts in his wonderful book, Fooled by Randomness, in 155 B.C. the Greek philosopher, Carneades, traveled to Rome to argue against a fine which had been levied upon the Athenians.

With unmatched eloquence, Carneades sang the praises of Roman justice and convincingly swayed his audience to the merits of his position. Alas, that was not the point he was trying to make. The very next day Carneades dissected his previous arguments and proceeded to persuasively convince the same audience that the opposite was true.

So where did Carneades really stand on the issue? We don’t know. But that doesn’t matter because what he wanted to advocate was a doctrine of ‘uncertainty of knowledge.” Carneades, you see, was a “radical skeptic” and believed that all knowledge is impossible to know, except for the knowledge that all knowledge is impossible. Or, as Taleb writes, “[h]e stood all his life against arrogant dogma and belief in one sole truth.”

Carneades, though, recognized he lived in the real world and realized such a philosophy would not be readily accepted—or easily tolerated—by a society in need of rules and structure. He, therefore, advocated the idea that “probabilities of truth” could be established, and that these probabilities of truth might reasonably guide society.

The philosophy calls to mind a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald who once said: “The test of a first rate mind is the ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas at the same time and still function.”

The ability to deal with ambiguity is not, however, a luxury reserved only for ancient philosophers and poets. In 1988, a study by the American Management Association found that the leadership characteristic most essential for steering organizations through troubled and complex times was “the ability to deal with ambiguity.”

One strategy for preparing for such ambiguity is, like Carneades, to know the opposing side of an argument was well as the supporting arguments. In this way, whenever new—and perhaps contradictory information—becomes available, the holder of the opinion (or position) can assimilate that information into their decision-making process. This, in turn, might make it easier to reverse a position in spite of having voiced support for it in the past. Why might this be so? Because the previous work in understanding the opposite view will have tilled and loosened the soil in which unlearning may take place.

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Keep Your Mind’s Eye on Cybernetics

Imagine sitting in your home and being able to control a device in a different room, a different city or even a different country by thought alone. Sounds impossible doesn’t it? Well, accordingly to this fascinating article from Popular Mechanics, advances in the field of cybernetics are occurring so rapidly that such things may be possible in the not-too-distant future.

Consider this: a monkey in North Carolina can already send a signal to Japan (where it controls a robot) faster than it can send a message from its brain to its own muscles. One immediate practical application of this technology may occur in the field of surgery whereby a surgeon could control a small robotic device faster and more precisely than she could move her hand. In a field like brain surgery such a distinction could make a big difference.

It will be some time before other cybernetic devices move into the mainstream, but it is interesting to consider how such mind-machine devices may change how we perceive and interact with our environment in the future. For example, imagine being able to control a robot by thought alone. Forget to feed your dog this morning, just “think” your bot to do it. Forget to water the plants or turn off the iron? Not a problem. A solution is just a thought away.

Other potential uses, of course, go well beyond these pedantic applications; but it is worth thinking about these things because as the Popular Mechanics articles suggests “the big breaks [in the field of cybernetic] can come faster than expected.” And, as Louis Pasteur, famously said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” This will be especially true when the mind can control things better and faster than the body can react.

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Adopt a New Mind-Set

One of my favorite columnists, Janet Rae-Dupree, had an insightful article in her column in yesterday’s New York Times. In it, she explained the difference between people with a “fixed mind-set” and those with a “growth mind-set.”

The difference can be summed up in how a person views the issue of talent. People with a “fixed mind-set” view talent as innate. Those with a “growth” perspective see talent as something that can grow over time.

What I found interesting was this paragraph:

”People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”

In a sense, the former are less likely to unlearn; while the latter have a more open perspective and are receptive to the idea that yesterday’s knowledge or dogma is no longer sufficient to address the new challenges of today.

The distinction is especially critical in hiring decisions. If you want to position your organization to compete successfully in today’s ever-changing and ever-accelerating world, you would do well to look not necessarily for the most talented but instead for those who are willing to unlearn and grow.

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Robots Advance

Last week, I explained how humans might soon be learning things from robots. Today, I’d like to explain why robots might become a more integral part of life faster than most people expect.

Yesterday, Technology Review published an interesting article entitled: ”Robots Learns to Use Tools.” What is really intriguing about the article, which describes a new robot called the UMass Mobile Manipulator or UMan for short, is that the robot is employing sophisticated algorithms to teach itself how to deal with unfamiliar objects.

One of the major barriers to date with robotics is that programmers have had to write complicated software code to help robots deal with almost every contingency that it might encounter. For example, for a household robot to be effective, it needs to recognize every item that might conceivably be in someone house—everything from a pair of scissors to a flower vase. This is no easy chore.

In the near future, however, robots need not necessarily know how to handle every object; they merely need to learn how to deal with that object in an
appropriate fashion. Using the scissors as example, UMan can study the device and then can tinker with the blades until it understands how they are connected and how the object operates. Presumably, the robot will then know that it would be inappropriate to “run with scissors.”

The implications of self-learning robots could be quite profound—especially if they can learn faster than humans. For instance, if they can recognize and learn how things operate, they might be finally able to practical household servants—ala Rosie the Robot in the Jetson’s. They could also become more practical instruments in the agricultural industry if they can determine between which fruit or vegetable is ready to be picked or whether it needs to stay on the vine a little longer. Similarly, robots will become more effective warriors in battlefield situations if they can rapidly adapt to the enemy’s changing behavior; and there is no reason why they can’t soon be used in a variety of other fields, including the construction industry and the health care industry.

Interested in some other future-related posts about robots? Check out these recent posts:

Learn from Robots
Meet Your Future, Shape-Shiting Robotic Butler
Hospitals Robotic Future
Will Robots Have Tails?
Is the Future of an ATV a Robot
The Robot Will See You Now

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A Million, a Billion, and a Trillion Reasons to Care About Genomics

I speak to a great many student groups and I am often struck by how few of them appreciate the difference between one million, one billion and one trillion. (In the name of fairness, the same is true of many adults). Perhaps, it is because the three figures are all large numbers that most people don’t think there is an appreciable difference. Perhaps, it is because the words—million, billion, and trillion—the rhyme; or maybe it’s just because they’re dumb—or have had poor teachers. I really don’t know.

One way I have tried to convey the difference between the numbers is by explaining the figures in a different way. To wit:

One million seconds was 12 days ago;
One billion seconds was roughly 30 years ago;
One trillion seconds was approximately 30,000 years ago—28,000 B.C.!

My point with the analogy is that one trillion of anything is a really BIG number, and it is much, much different than one billion.

This analogy is important because on January 17, 2006 the Wellcome Sanger Institute announced it had archived it’s one billionth DNA sequence. It was an impressive accomplishment.

Well, today, Wired magazine reported that the prominent genetics institute sequenced its trillionth base of DNA. This is a one thousand-fold improvement in just over two years.

In my most recent book, Jump the Curve, I asked my readers to think of the first billion DNA sequences like a book that could shed some light on how genetic information might help deliver better health outcomes for all of society. Today, we have an additional 1000such “books.”

My broader point is that society is still in the early stages of understanding all of this genetic information; but as researchers, scientists and entrepreneurs continues to sequence an ever larger amount of genetic information it is a reasonable to expect that some of this information may just revolutionize how we diagnose, treat and, ultimately, cure a wide range of diseases.

Related Posts

The Future is About to Get Personal
You’ll Look and Feel Good in Genes in the Future
The Coming Health Care Revolution

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Unlearning Untruths

This past Sunday, the New York Times had an interesting editorial entitled ”Your Brain Lies to You,” which was written by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt. Amazingly, 18% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth and another 10% believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

According to the article, one of the causes of people holding on to blatant untruths is something called “source amnesia.” As your brain recalls information—even if it is incorrect—it is reprocessed by the brain and over time the information is separated from the context in which that information was first gathered.

One implication is that “source amnesia” can cause even intelligent individuals to “forget” that certain statements were originally propogated by discredible sources. The problem becomes more serious when “untruths” accord with people’s pre-existing worldview.

In other words, people tend to believe information that fits within their existing belief system. For example, in the case of believing Barack Obama is a Muslim, many people may already tend to believe that anyone with a middle name of Hussein “must be” a Muslim.

The article goes on to offer a couple of helpful hints for people interested in helping others unlearn. For instance, for individuals attempting to counter untruths, the authors suggest that repeating false rumors may be a counter-productive strategy. Using the case of Obama again, supporters should not emphasize that he is “not a Muslim;” rather, they should play up Obama’s Christian credentials.

The article also recommends that people be asked to imagine their reaction if evidence runs counter to a conclusion opposite of what they are expecting. Apparently, the simple act of asking people to consider an opposite interpretation causes them to be more open minded.

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