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Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Photo gallery of San Francisco Bay bridge

Pictures of the massive bridge over San Francisco waters   | July 24, 2013

Here is a photo gallery of the construction of the world's biggest self anchored construction bridge. It has taken quite a while since a portion of the bridge collapsed in the Pieta Loma earthquake.

See how massive the construction is.



Is technology available so that we can see like batman?

New ideas create wealth

Repost from NPR | July 28, 2013

Is technology available for echolocation?  Can we see like bats?

Lead scientist Ivan Dokmanic of Ecole Polytechnique  Federale of Switzerland started with the question and almost did that!  His team discovered an algorithm that could determine the size and shape of the room from echoes.

The applications have not been discovered yet though

Batman, the bats are wondrous animals though. 

Thursday, July 25, 2013

What is killing the bees?

Repost from Quartz | Todd Woody | July 24, 2013

The death of pollinating bees in Taiwan has been cause of concern for its fruit farmers. It is expensive and tedious to pollinate flowers of fruit trees because of massive decline in bee population in  a mysterious phenomenon known as  CCD (colony collapse disorder) or beemageddon.

Its cause is worse than previously thought, according to scientists.  Bees in a colony could just die suddenly and its cause has been attributed to combination of insecticide, fungicide and parasite Nosema cerenae.

The insecticide affected their ability to resist infection of the parasite.

The use of class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids has been banned because it has been linked directly to death of bees.

The bee population is low in US that 60% of the remaining bee population would be required to pollinate the whole of California

Is this a serious economic and agricultural problem?

Is is it just another bees and the bird problem?  An esoteric subject?

Innovation Week # 29

News feed on innovation management

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In today's rapidly evolving world the ability to create new value and the ability to be innovative is now more important to an organisations survival than at any other time in our history and the ability of organisations to assign the right level of resources in the right manner is a critical to creating a successful innovation practise. Innovation is much more than just a random amalgamation of people, processes and measurement methodologies. Innovation is the embodiment of human creativity...
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Innovation isn't a natural mindset for most leaders—or for the companies they work for—but the good news is that innovation can be learned. Innovator's Accelerator is a new online learning program created by the world's leading innovation experts—Clayton Christensen, Jeff Dyer, and Hal Gregersen—that gives emerging leaders the tools and techniques they need to become innovators. Razor-thin margins. Increased global competition. A roller-coaster economy...
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Crossed Signals: Things that Keep Us from Effective Collaborative Innovation

Crossed Signals: Things that Keep Us from Effective Collaborative Innovation

Sometimes we plan to go from point A to point B, but wind up at point C. What happens when point C turns out to be a dead end? In this article innovation architect Doug Collins explores the crossed signals that can occur when organizations attempt to advance their practice of collaborative innovation, but find themselves someplace less promising. A lilac tree grows outside our bedroom window. Over the years, the tree has reached a height where a family of birds will take nest...
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The Perfect Innovation Team

The Perfect Innovation Team

In my new book 'The Innovation Expedition' I love to refer in discussions on innovation teams to The Mayo Clinic's Center for Innovation. The Mayo Clinic is a best-practice organization, which was researched in APQC's Innovation: Putting Ideas into Action 2009 study. It favors a specific combination of personalities when it builds innovation teams. The Mayo Clinic strives to include the following nine personality types when composing innovation teams:...
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Why Innovate: The Link Between Strategy and Innovation

The "why" of innovation is simple: change is accelerating and we don't know what's coming in the future, which means that we must innovate to both prepare for change, and to make change. The why of innovation is brutally simple: change is accelerating. If things didn't change, then your company could keep on doing what it's always done, and there would be no need for innovation. If markets were stable, if customers were predictable, if competitors didn't come up with new products and services, ...
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Lo que las Empresas Visionarias Hacen Diferente

Lo que las Empresas Visionarias Hacen Diferente

Las compañías visionarias no sólo tratan de ver el futuro - crean el futuro. La historia de la innovación está repleta de ejemplos de errores de apreciación respecto a la dinámica de las nuevas tecnologías. Dos años antes de la quiebra de Polaroid, Morgan Stanley hizo la siguiente declaración: "Estamos actualizando a Polaroid para tener un mejor desempeño en los nuevos productos. Por supuesto, es mucho más fácil juzgar las predicciones fallidas en retrospectiva que hacer mejores evaluaciones...
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理解你的创新文化—来自瑞仕格的案例分析

创新管理公司很高兴通过向大家展示一个全新的案例研究,来强调创建创新文化过程中所面临的挑战—支持新产品/服务开发计划、促进思想活动、调动员工的参与度以及提升商业价值。在这篇文章中,HYPE创新的战略咨询主管柯林·尼尔森通过深入研究瑞仕格公司的协作创新案例,来说明挑战是怎样鉴定、管理并成功克服的。当被问及参与企业协作创新时,公司的员工是怎样的反应? 当被问及参与企业协作创新时,公司的员工是怎样的反应?看到企业过去创新的失败,可能有一定程度的厌倦情绪?...
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Open Innovation Platforms: NineSigma

Founded in 2000, NineSigma is one of the most experienced and advanced Open
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it was an accepted management practice. Learn more

Consultant Services: Ernst & Young

Ernst & Young's Think Tank for Business Performance & Innovation, established in 2008,
continues to thrive. It has proven to be an excellent networking platform for competency
and sector insights and its collaborative environment is designed to stimulate innovation.
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Next Big Future - 6 new articles



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Next Big Future"Next Big Future" - 6 new articles

  1. Crowdfunding a plasma thruster for interplanetary cubesats
  2. Assuming the SkyCity Costs US$800 to 1.5 billion what are comparable projects in terms of costs elsewhere
  3. South China Morning Post and Other Coverage of the Start of Sky City construction
  4. More Pictures from the Start of Construction for the Sky City Skyscraper
  5. Currency appreciation is often ignored in relative projected sizes of economies in 2030
  6. Japan has given the LDP a landslide win. A win for nuclear restarts and economic restructuring
  7. More Recent Articles
  8. Search Next Big Future
  9. Prior Mailing Archive

Crowdfunding a plasma thruster for interplanetary cubesats

The CAT plasma thruster will propel a 5kg satellite into deep space, far beyond Earth orbit, at 1/1000th the cost of previous missions.

 
CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT) engine development: $200,000 Kickstarter. Has raised $42000 with 13 days to go
Funding from Kickstarter will be used to create a complete flight-qualified CubeSat with integrated CAT engine and tested as a final unit in the University of Michigan LVTF vacuum chamber.

Michigan University developers are working to complete and vacuum test a flight-qualified satellite with an integrated CAT. Through our existing partnerships with three NASA centers, the spacecraft will be launched into low Earth orbit and start its climb into deep space. The CAT engine is being developed at the University of Michigan's Plasmadynamics and Electric Propulsion Laboratory (PEPL). Our team also includes the state-of-the-art Michigan Exploration Laboratory (MXL), which has over six years of experience building and flying CubeSats.

Initial CAT engine testing will be performed in our lab on the ground and then in low Earth orbit (LEO) to validate the CAT engine's performance and physics models developed by our team. Once these tests are completed, we will perform a series of spiral-out flight maneuvers to climb to higher and higher altitudes in order to escape the Earth.

Plasma thrusters have been used on satellites for decades but they have been large, bulky devices that weigh up to 10 kg (20 lbs) or more, suitable only for large satellites. Some examples include ion engines (Deep Space 1 and DAWN), Hall thrusters (SMART1, GEO-COMM sats), resistojets, and arcjets. The CAT design scales down previously demonstrated technology (see Hall Thrusters, VASIMR) to make it practical for CubeSats, with a thruster and power supply weight of less than 0.5 kg (1 lb). Most of the thruster components have been built and have been tested individually. With your help through Kickstarter, we will be assembling everything into one compact thruster unit for testing the integrated components in the lab, then in Earth orbit, and then interplanetary space far away from the gravitational pull of the Earth



The Michigan team says its system could fit inside one 10-centimeter-wide module of a three-unit CubeSat, and propel it at speeds of up to 10 kilometers per second. That would be enough to push the satellite at least a million kilometers from Earth, out of the planet's gravitational grip.

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Assuming the SkyCity Costs US$800 to 1.5 billion what are comparable projects in terms of costs elsewhere

The 202 story Skycity skyscraper has begun construction in China and it should be completed in April to July 2014. It is projected to cost $800 million to 1.5 billion.

 
Some people make a big deal about the construction of skyscrapers happening just before an economic crisis. They pick 11 such skyscrapers, yet thousands of skyscrapers have been built.

A recent study by Barr, Mizrach and Mundra (2011), entitled "Skyscraper Height and the Business Cycle: International Time Series Evidence" aims to see if there is, in fact, a correlation between skyscraper height and economic growth. The study looks at two types of data. First the paper looks at the announcement and completion dates of the world's tallest buildings and the peaks and troughs of the United States business cycle, as measured by the National Bureau of Economic Research. They find that there is virtually no relationship between the timing of record breaking buildings and the business cycle. Second, the authors investigate height and economic growth using the times series techniques of vector autoregression and cointegration tests. They investigate the time series relationship between the tallest building completed each year and the level of per capita GDP, for the United States, Canada, China and Hong Kong. The authors find that the two series are co-integrated, which means that they move together over time. That is to say, the tallest building completed each year in these countries does not systematically move away from the underlying income of the country, which provides evidence that, in general, skyscraper height is not fundamentally based on height competition among builders. Finally, the vector autoregression methods allow the authors to see if skyscraper height can predict changes in gross domestic product (GDP) (i.e., if height predict recessions). The authors find that height cannot, in fact, be used to predict changes in GDP. However, GDP can be used to predict changes in height. In other words, the study finds that extreme height is driven by rapid economic growth, but that height can not be used as an indicator of recessions.

The Central Subway is an extension of the Muni Metro light rail system in San Francisco, California, from the Caltrain commuter rail depot at 4th and King streets to Chinatown, with stops in South of Market (SoMa) and Union Square.

The budget to complete the Central Subway is $1.578 billion. The project is funded primarily through the Federal Transit Administration's New Starts program. In October 2012, the FTA approved a Full Funding Grant Agreement, the federal commitment of funding through New Starts, for the Central Subway for a total amount of $942.2 million. The Central Subway is also funded by the State of California, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and the City and County of San Francisco.

Ground was broken for the Central Subway on February 9, 2010. It is expected to open to the public by 2019.

Due to the capital cost ($1.578 billion for the 1.7 mile light rail line), the Central Subway project has come under criticism from transit activists for what they consider to be poor cost-effectiveness. In particular, they note that Muni's own estimates show that the project would increase Muni ridership by less than 1% and yet by 2030 be adding $15.2 million a year to Muni's annual operating deficit.

With an average weekday ridership of 173,500 passengers as of 2012, Muni Metro is the United States' third-busiest light rail system after those of Boston and Los Angeles. The new Central Subway might increase ridership by 1700 passengers per day if Muni's own projections are correct.

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South China Morning Post and Other Coverage of the Start of Sky City construction

A groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday for the world's tallest building in Changsha was greeted with praise from some mainland architects - and brickbats from others.

 
Some held serious safety concerns about the skyscraper, but others hailed it as a revolutionary work of prefabricated urban landscape.

The more than 200-storey structure will tower 838 metres above the Hunan provincial capital and be made entirely of factory-made modules that will be assembled by workers in seven months.

Yin Zhi , a professor of architecture at Tsinghua University and a senior adviser to the central government on urban planning, said that while "prefab" houses were common, a prefab skyscraper was "insane".

His biggest worry was safety. "What about wind? Or earthquakes? Or a fire?" he asked.

Broad Group, the developer, has been tight-lipped about the building, saying its structure was a trade secret, Yin said.

Broad released a 15-page presentation of the project on Saturday, saying that the building's structure had been tested in three wind tunnels on the mainland.


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More Pictures from the Start of Construction for the Sky City Skyscraper

The Skyscrapercity forum has pictures from the China Broad Group 202 story building site. Site preparation has started and the actual assembly of the world's tallest building will take 7 months.

(H/T to readers Anthony Scalzi and phamnuwen for the additional information)

Chinese urban per capita area of about 500 square meters
Sky City Urban per capita area of only 4 square meters (including buildings surrounding land)
• construction area of 1.05 million square meters
The base is 9,000 square meters, floor Covering rate of 1%, significantly reducing construction
Building area

In the past, high-rise building energy consumption was much higher than conventional buildings but the Sky City will be the opposite. It will use a lot less energy
• 20 cm wall insulation (walls 70% decrease heat loss)
• quadruple glazing (windows 60% decrease heat loss)
• window shade (located at the outer glass inside, isolated heat)
• New air heat recovery (reducing ventilation heat loss 80%)
• CCHP (equal to the cooling and heating without energy)
• HVAC annual energy 90kWh/m2 (9 liters of oil equivalent)

More than 30 buildings have been built using the factory mass production (can be built) Broad Group method.



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Currency appreciation is often ignored in relative projected sizes of economies in 2030

The Chinese currency Renminbi, or the yuan, has appreciated 34 percent against the U.S. dollar since the exchange rate reform began eight years ago. The yuan advanced some 20 percent against the euro during this period.

What seems likely to happen with the Chinese yuan versus the US dollar over the next 17 years and 27 years out to 2030 and 2040 ?

There was an analysis by Jonathan Anderson, an economist at UBS, a bank where he calculated the value added share of exports for China.

Headline figures show that China's exports surged from 20% of GDP in 2001 to almost 40% in 2007, which seems to suggest not only that exports are the main driver of growth, but also that China's economy would be hit much harder by an American downturn than it was during the previous recession in 2001.

Jonathan Anderson, an economist at UBS, a bank, has tried to estimate exports in value-added terms by stripping out imported components, and then converting the remaining domestic content into value-added terms by subtracting inputs purchased from other domestic sectors. At first glance, that second step seems odd: surely the materials which exporters buy from the rest of the economy should be included in any assessment of the importance of exports? But if purchases of domestic inputs were left in for exporters, the same thing would need to be done for all other sectors. That would make the denominator for the export ratio much bigger than GDP.

Once these adjustments are made, Mr Anderson reckons that the "true" export share is just under 10% of GDP (in 2007). That makes China slightly more exposed to exports than Japan, but nowhere near as export-led as Taiwan or Singapore.

Andy Rothman, China Macro Strategist for CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets wrote an analysis of China's economy.

Net exports accounted for 8.8 percent of China's GDP in 2007, but fell to only 4 percent in 2010.

In 2013, China could be done to about 2% of GDP in net exports.

In 1958, 86% of urban workers in China were employed by state-owned firms. Between 1995 and 2001, the Communist Party laid off 46 million state-sector workers — equal to sacking the entire combined workforces of France and Italy in six years. As a result, the state's share of urban employment fell to 28 percent in 2002, and now stands at 19 percent.

roughly 45 million of the 228 million workers employed in Chinese Industry work in the export sector.

That sounds like a lot, right? But there are 1.35 billion people in China, of which approximately 795 million are in the work force in some capacity. How do 45 million Chinese workers - manual laborers, for the most part, working in companies that operate on Foxconn's margins - produce $1 out of every $3 in China, as the share of GDP from export sales would indicate ? They don't.

Why? Because the export/GDP ratio didn't discount the imported materials ("churn"). It just lumps everything into "exports," regardless of where the materials actually came from. These "made in China" goods actually have very little in them that was made domestically in China.

China is shifting to ramping up domestic consumption. This will mean a stronger currency would be helpful.

China's shift to domestic consumption means that a stronger currency will mean citizens will be able to import oil and commodities at lower


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Japan has given the LDP a landslide win. A win for nuclear restarts and economic restructuring

Japan appears to be on the verge of giving the LDP a landslide victory.


This is a win for Abenomics and nuclear reactor restarts.

The Japanese prime minister's ruling coalition has won a solid majority in the country's upper house elections, gaining control of both chambers of parliament.

Shinzo Abe's decisive win is being seen as a mandate to press ahead with difficult economic reforms - an endorsement for the Liberal Democratic Party's 'Abenomics' programme, which has helped spark a tentative economic recovery in Japan.

The LDP and its new coalition partner Komeito now have 135 of the 242 seats in the upper house, after winning 76 of the 121 seats that were contested this time around.

The country's main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, has just 59.

Members serve six-year terms and elections are held for half of the seats every three years.

The landslide victory means both legislative chambers are now under government control until at least 2016, unblocking the bottleneck that has hampered legislation for the last six short-term leaders.

Fresh from his win in Sunday's polls, Mr Abe vowed to stay focused on reviving the stagnant economy during a news conference on Monday.

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