On of the Reuters Pictures of the Year for 2007 is this shot of an elephant demolishing a minibus:
An elephant destroys a minibus after throwing its rider and going on a rampage during Sri Lanka’s sixth annual elephant polo tournament in Galle February 15, 2007. Abey, a four-tonne eighteen-year-old elephant, threw off his mahout and American rider and went on a rampage destroying a vehicle before being subdued.
As I’ve already mentioned, in Serious Play, Michael Schrage, of the MIT Media Lab, examines how organizations use models, simulations, and prototypes to stimulate innovation.
One of the most important lessons is that it matters how we use those models, simulations, and prototypes:
At Royal Dutch/Shell, the world’s second-largest oil company, senior executives used to be urged to come up with three scenarios whenever they considered a strategic course of action. Each scenario was typically a small jewel of narrative analysis and foresight. But there was a catch. “The problem was we always chose the middle one,” Shell UK head Chris Fay told the Financial Times. “So now we only put forward two.”
Protein found to turn up metabolism in mice — and increase their average lifespan:
Tricking muscle tissue to burn rather than store fat has succeeded in increasing the average life span of mice and staved off some age-related diseases, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.Mice bred to make too much of a protein known as uncoupling protein 1 released food energy as heat instead of storing it as fat.
“What we’re uncoupling is the process of burning energy from storing energy,” said Dr. Clay Semenkovich of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri whose research appears in the journal Cell Metabolism.
“Normally when you metabolize food, you take the energy that comes from that food and you store it. In essence, you are coupling the energy in the food into a stored form,” Semenkovich said in a telephone interview.
Mice that overproduced this uncoupling protein in their muscle tissue weighed less and had less fat tissue, even though they ate the same amount as normal mice in the study.
“They lived about three months longer on average, which translates into six or seven years in human life, which is pretty good,” Semenkovich said.
The protein did not extend the maximum life span of the mice, but it did increase their average life span, perhaps because they were less prone to age-related diseases, Semenkovich said.
Mice in the study had a lower incidence of vascular disease, hypertension and lymphoma, a type of cancer.
Semenkovich said these same uncoupling proteins occur in humans, and genetic variations in the proteins have been linked with people weighing more or less.
“It may be possible to accelerate metabolism and find an alternative way of treating diseases,” he said.
On of the Reuters Pictures of the Year for 2007 is this shot of an elephant demolishing a minibus:
An elephant destroys a minibus after throwing its rider and going on a rampage during Sri Lanka’s sixth annual elephant polo tournament in Galle February 15, 2007. Abey, a four-tonne eighteen-year-old elephant, threw off his mahout and American rider and went on a rampage destroying a vehicle before being subdued.
A few years ago, I was in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, when they were holding their annual Musikfest — we have some old family friends who live there — and we heard this astonishing music, coming from an astonishing machine, played by an astonishing character, a sort of Phantom of the Opera, dressed in black and wearing a gold phoenix mask.
He was the Spirit of the Bells, and he was playing a carillon, one of the few left in existence:
In 1480, a musical instrument of cast bronze bells was created and became known as the carillon. It is played from a modified keyboard with the fists and feet. Located in lofty bell towers throughout the world, the instrument and its player were hidden from sight making the carillon one of the world’s best kept secrets. Thirty-five years ago, 35 bronze bells were placed on a mobile carillon frame by a Dutch Bell Foundry and sent to America. For the first time in history, the rarely-seen European art of carillon playing could be brought to audiences. Eventually, this carillon was purchased in 1992 by a gentleman who chooses to remain anonymous and given new life by Frank DellaPenna, Master-Carillonneur graduate of the French Carillon School. DellaPenna’s life long dream of sharing the beauty of the carillon by combining it with other musical instruments could finally be accomplished.The carillon was created in Flanders (an area of northern Europe now occupied by the Netherlands, Belgium and northern France) about five centuries ago to provide a musical voice to bell towers to raise the spirits of the residents. The bells (23 or more) are hung in a stationary manner and the clappers are connected to a mechanical keyboard played with fists and feet. Carillon playing requires musical dexterity, strength and endurance. Cast in Bronze is the first and only transportable carillon in the U.S. and the only full time musical act in the world which features the carillon.
Today, many carillons have fallen into disrepair or are simply no longer played because of lack of funding or interest.
Those carillons that can still be heard are all funded by government agencies, institutions or through an endowment fund provided by a generous benefactor.
Cast in Bronze is the only musical act in history utilizing the carillon that sustains itself solely by live performances and recording sales. It receives no financial assistance from any other source.
The creator of Cast in Bronze hopes that his one man crusade will preserve an instrument and art form from extinction.
Duke scientists map ‘silenced genes’:
Usually, people inherit a copy of each gene from each parent and both copies are active, programmed to do their jobs whenever needed. If one copy of a gene becomes mutated and quits working properly, often the other copy can compensate.Genetic imprinting knocks out that backup. It means that for some genes, people inherit an active copy only from the mother or only from the father. Molecular signals tell, or “imprint,” the copy from the other parent to be silent.
Jirtle compared it to flying a two-engine airplane with one engine cut off. If the other engine quits, the plane crashes. In genetic terms, if one tumor-suppressing gene is silenced and the active one breaks down, a person is more susceptible to cancer.
Only animals that have live births have imprinted genes. It was not until 1991 that it was proved that humans had them. Until now, only about 40 human imprinted genes had been identified.
The Duke map verified those 40 and identified 156 more. Researchers fed DNA sequences into a computer program that decoded patterns pointing to the presence of imprinted genes instead of active ones.
Many of the newly found imprinted genes are in regions of chromosomes already linked to the development of obesity, diabetes, cancer and some other major diseases, the researchers reported. One, for example, appears to prevent bladder cancer. A second appears to play a role in causing various cancers and may affect epilepsy and bipolar disorder.
Scientists had thought imprinted genes would account for about 1 percent of the human genome. While scientists must double-check that the newly identified ones are truly silenced, the new map matches that tally.
I’m not at all surprised, but I’m always a bit sad when I hear stories like this. Technology Tesla Motors founder ousted:
Tesla Motors has left founder Martin Eberhard by the side of the road months before the Silicon Valley electric car company rolls its hotly-anticipated Roadster supercar off the production line and into the hands of celebrity customers like the Google founders and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.Eberhard, long the public face of Tesla, has stepped down as president of technology and left the board of directors in a move that is — depending on who’s talking — either part of a planned transition or a hit-and-run take-out of the founder following the appointment of a new chief executive last week.
[...]
In August, Eberhard, who started Tesla five years ago with the financial backing of PayPal alum Musk, relinquished his CEO spot so the San Carlos, Calif., startup could hire a top executive with experience in large-scale manufacturing. Former Flextronics chief Michael Marks took over as interim CEO, but Eberhard says he never expected to be booted from the company.“I truthfully thought I’d be spending quite a few more years at Tesla Motors,” says Eberhard before boarding a flight in Burbank to San Francisco. “The only surprise was that the board no longer wanted me as part of the company. There wasn’t any major disagreement going on, not that I know of anyway.”
As Eberhard recounts it, Musk told him about a month ago that he wanted him to leave at some unspecified future date. “I thought it was a strange notion to kick the founder out of the company anyway, where there wasn’t a big ideological difference on the board where we wanted to go,” Eberhad says. “For all Elon’s character and personality, he’s trying to solve same problem as I am. “
The end came suddenly last Tuesday. “Somebody in the company asked me if I would be leaving at a certain date and I said, `I don’t think so,’ but that turned out to be the case,” Eberhard says. On Wednesday, Tesla announced the replacement of Marks with a permanent CEO, tech veteran Ze’ev Drori, founder of chip company Monolithic Memories. Two days later Eberhard was packing up his office. “Elon did talk to me about leaving the company without having a [board] vote,” Eberhard says. “I left voluntarily when it was clear that I wasn’t going to win a vote anyway.” Eberhard, who will serve on a Tesla advisory board, says Musk explained why he was being ousted “only in the vaguest terms.”
When I reach Musk on his cell phone and put the question to him, he pauses and laughs a bit nervously. “I don’t know what to say without being negative,” says Musk, whose other post-PayPal ventures include rocket company SpaceX and solar systems installer Solar City. “It did not make sense for him to be at the company. Of course, if the board thought if it would be better for him to stay he would still be there.”
“I don’t think its ideological, it was more operational, I suppose,” he adds. “There wasn’t an obvious role for Martin.”
That rankles some at Tesla, acknowledges Darryl Siry, the company’s vice president of sales, marketing and service. “I think for a lot of people who have identified with Martin for many years and who are emotionally connected to Martin as a leader at Tesla, this transition is a bit jarring,” he says. “But we have to all adapt and move on.”
This sounds like science fiction. Bad science fiction. That doesn’t mean I don’t love it though. Killer robots from Silicon Valley could replace soldiers:
Robotex is the brainchild of Terry Izumi, a reclusive filmmaker who comes from a long line of samurai warriors, has trained Secret Service agents, and worked both at DreamWorks and in Disney’s Imagineering division.When Izumi decided to build a better war robot in 2005, he recruited Nathan Gettings, a former PayPal software engineer and founder of Palantir Technologies, who brought in his brother Adam as well as a fourth (silent) partner who hails from both PayPal and YouTube. They had a prototype in no time. But they needed a weapon, and that’s how Jerry Baber, his revolutionary shotgun, and a pilotless mini-helicopter come into the picture.
Samurai, Secret Service, Disney Imagineering, Palantir Technologies? And a pilotless mini-copter? Can it get any better? Yes:
With that meeting, he turned a promising little robot into something both multifunctional and truly scary. His company’s $8,000 Atchisson Assault-12 shotgun was fresh off the assembly line after a dozen years in development. It’s made of aircraft-grade stainless steel, never needs lubrication or cleaning, and won’t rust. Pour sand through it and it won’t clog. It doesn’t recoil, so it’s accurate even when it’s firing in automatic mode, which it does at a rate of 300 rounds per minute.“It delivers the lead equivalent of 132 M16s,” says Baber. “When they start firing from every direction, it’s all over.”
And the AA-12 is versatile. Along with firing ridiculously powerful FRAG-12 ammo — a straight-out-of-Terminator shell that contains a whirling miniature grenade — the AA-12 can handle non-lethal Tasers and even bullets that are deadly up to 120 feet but fall harmlessly by 800 feet.
Limited-range bullets are important in urban combat situations, Baber explains, because once an insurgent gets between the robot and a soldier operating it on the ground, the bot is rendered useless – unless the soldier wants to shoot at himself.
Baber has paired the AH and its smaller sibling, the MH, with a remote-control mini-helicopter called the AutoCopter, which holds two AA-12s and can carry the bots into battle. His plan is to buy the robots from Robotex and the helicopter from Neural Robotics in Huntsville, Ala. Then he’s going to arm them, resell the systems, and split the profits.
Of course, anyone who’s piloted a remote-control helicopter should take pause at the notion of mounting “the lead equivalent of 132 M16s” on one.
Anyway, check out the CGI video.
Duke scientists map ‘silenced genes’:
Usually, people inherit a copy of each gene from each parent and both copies are active, programmed to do their jobs whenever needed. If one copy of a gene becomes mutated and quits working properly, often the other copy can compensate.Genetic imprinting knocks out that backup. It means that for some genes, people inherit an active copy only from the mother or only from the father. Molecular signals tell, or “imprint,” the copy from the other parent to be silent.
Jirtle compared it to flying a two-engine airplane with one engine cut off. If the other engine quits, the plane crashes. In genetic terms, if one tumor-suppressing gene is silenced and the active one breaks down, a person is more susceptible to cancer.
Only animals that have live births have imprinted genes. It was not until 1991 that it was proved that humans had them. Until now, only about 40 human imprinted genes had been identified.
The Duke map verified those 40 and identified 156 more. Researchers fed DNA sequences into a computer program that decoded patterns pointing to the presence of imprinted genes instead of active ones.
Many of the newly found imprinted genes are in regions of chromosomes already linked to the development of obesity, diabetes, cancer and some other major diseases, the researchers reported. One, for example, appears to prevent bladder cancer. A second appears to play a role in causing various cancers and may affect epilepsy and bipolar disorder.
Scientists had thought imprinted genes would account for about 1 percent of the human genome. While scientists must double-check that the newly identified ones are truly silenced, the new map matches that tally.
Kris Axtman of the Christian Science Monitor notes that the terror threat at home is often overlooked:
Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.“Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal,” says Daniel Levitas, author of The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right.
But outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown. In the past nine months, there have been two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.
Experts say the case highlights the increased cooperation and quicker response by US agencies since Sept. 11. But others say it points up just how political the terror war is. “There is no value for the Bush administration to highlighting domestic terrorism right now,” says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. “But there are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists, especially when trying to whip up support for war.”
As I’ve already mentioned, in Serious Play, Michael Schrage, of the MIT Media Lab, examines how organizations use models, simulations, and prototypes to stimulate innovation.
One of the most important tools for serious play is the spreadsheet — which may not seem particularly playful for those outside the world of finance:
“Spreadsheets totally changed the financial business,” observes George Gould, a cofounder of the Donaldson, Lufkin, Jenrette investment-banking firm and undersecretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. “Certainly, spreadsheets made CFOs more powerful than they used to be — a fact that is reflected in their pay scales.”Low-cost spreadsheet software effectively launched the largest and most significant experiment in rapid prototyping and simulation in the history of business. [...] Financial models that had once cost thousands of dollars to design and build now cost thousands of pennies. [...] Within five years of the 1979 introduction of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet for personal computers, over 1 million software spreadsheets were being sold annually.
Here’s where things get interesting:
Operationally, Gould asserts, spreadsheet affected every significant facet of finance. “They were the great leveraged-buyout tool of that [1980s] era,” he notes. “They turned what had been a traditional financial analysis into a blueprint of how to run the business to maximize cash flow. Mergers and acquisitions once driven by long-term investment-banking relationships were now being driven by aggressive young bankers with even more aggressive spreadsheet models. But they were seen as credible models, so boards of directors were legally obligated to take them seriously.”
Spreadsheets turned financial analysis into a blueprint for running the company. But that’s not the main reason they caught on, at least not initially:
Dan Bricklin, the Harvard Business School student who created VisiCalc with MIT’s Bob Frankston, attributes the success of his software to the speed with which it paid for itself. Bricklin observes that well-heeled Wall Street analysts — thoroughly sick and tired of recalculating spreadsheet after spreadsheet on paper — would cheerfully shell out over $2,500 to buy VisiCalc and an Apple II personal computer simply to be able to reduce the time and tedium associated with the manual approach. “For most of these guys,” Bricklin recalls, “the payback for their investment was under a week.”
I’ve already mentioned that Berkshire Hathaway’s Charles Munger gave a speech at UCSB in 2003 that was chock-full of thought-provoking bits. Here’s an amusing but apocryphal story about Max Planck, the famous physicist:
After he won his prize, he was invited to lecture everywhere, and he had this chauffeur that drove him around to give public lectures all through Germany. And the chauffeur memorized the lecture, and so one day he said, “Gee Professor Planck, why don’t you let me try it as we switch places?” And so he got up and gave the lecture. At the end of it some physicist stood up and posed a question of extreme difficulty. But the chauffeur was up to it. “Well,” he said, “I’m surprised that a citizen of an advanced city like Munich is asking so elementary a question, so I’m going to ask my chauffeur to respond.”
I’ve already mentioned that Berkshire Hathaway’s Charles Munger gave a speech at UCSB in 2003 that was chock-full of thought-provoking bits. Here’s an amusing but apocryphal story about Max Planck, the famous physicist:
After he won his prize, he was invited to lecture everywhere, and he had this chauffeur that drove him around to give public lectures all through Germany. And the chauffeur memorized the lecture, and so one day he said, “Gee Professor Planck, why don’t you let me try it as we switch places?” And so he got up and gave the lecture. At the end of it some physicist stood up and posed a question of extreme difficulty. But the chauffeur was up to it. “Well,” he said, “I’m surprised that a citizen of an advanced city like Munich is asking so elementary a question, so I’m going to ask my chauffeur to respond.”
Sticky molecule may hold key to nerve disorders:
A sticky molecule previously linked to inflammation also helps seal vital insulation around peripheral nerves, making it a potential target for new drugs against nerve disorders, scientists said on Thursday.The latest research suggests the molecule, known as JAM-C, could be a key player in regulating the way nerves work.
In genetically modified mice without the adhesion molecule, the myelin insulation sheath protecting nerves deteriorates and the animals experience faulty nerve firing, muscle weakness and a shortened stride, researchers reported in the journal Science.
The team also found that nerves of patients with certain peripheral nerve disorders had defective JAM-C.
How Yale Professors Lose Weight:
A Yale economics professor and a Yale law school professor are hoping that the next diet trend to take off is their own, which involves getting dieters to sign binding contracts committing to pay significant sums of money if they fail to meet their weight-loss goals.The economist, Dean Karlan, tested the method himself, promising to hand over $1,000 to a friend every week that he didn’t drop one pound. Soon enough, he lost 10 pounds, getting down to 170 pounds without paying a cent.
Now, Mr. Karlan and Ian Ayres, the law professor who also teaches at Yale’s school of management, are launching a company based on this strategy. StickK will officially open next month, just in time for New Years’ resolutions aimed at losing pounds gained at holiday parties and family feasts. The company will have a Web site offering individuals hoping to reach a goal — anything from sticking to a diet to learning to ride a unicycle — legally binding contracts where they will pay a set dollar amount to charity if they fail in their endeavor.
The author of the book “The Undercover Economist,” Tim Harford, is testing out StickK’s methodology. He has paid a $1,000 so-called contract bond to the company, and has promised to donate 10% of this deposit to charity if he fails to complete 200 push-ups and 200 sit-ups every week.
“When I signed up to do this, I thought to myself, the contract bond isn’t going to matter at all; what’s relevant is that I’ve made the psychological commitment to do these press-ups and sit-ups,” he said. “I was completely wrong. There’s absolutely no way I would have done these press-ups and sit-ups for the past six weeks had it not been for the commitment bond.”
In December, customers will be able to decide on an amount to put up as collateral if they fail in their goals, and will give StickK their credit card numbers, which will be charged if they miss their objectives. There will also be a verification system, such as a designated friend or gym that will chart customers’ progress.
StickK hopes to make money through selling advertising and through commissions on dieting products that will be sold on their Web site, Stickk.com. They are still choosing the charities they will include, and are focusing on ones that are not political or religious. Customers will not be free to choose their own charities, as this could lessen their motivations to achieve their goals. The name of the business comes from the idea of helping customers stick to their goals by using a “stick” as well as a carrot, the business’s founders said.
Mr. Ayres said he first used the system to lose some pounds, and he now has $500 a week at stake to maintain his weight. He calculates that he has put over $21,000 — or $500 a week for almost a year — at risk through this system. But it makes more sense than traditional weight loss systems, he said. “What’s interesting is that Weight Watchers costs you $500 a year and gives modest results. I put $500 at risk every week, but it’s cost me nothing because I’ve met my goals so far.”
