Time's Battleland: When the machine world attacks

Coming to a theater near them

Interesting WAPO piece today on advances in drone technology, the basic line being, we're not all that far from drones doing their killing on their own. Story leads with a description of a successful test wherein drones communicate with each other and zero in on a colored object. You can easily do the extrapolation to face-recognition technology . . .

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Time's Battleland: If US wants to steer global rules on drones, it needs to dominate global sales

Financial Times story last week (US urged to rethink export controls on drones) re: Paris Air Show cites multiple US defense corporate sources complaining that unless the US Government lifts some of the restrictions, the world's "insatiable appetite" for drones will be exploited by other nations' military-industrial complexes . . . 

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Unbelievably nice new feature on PPT 2011

New feature allows you to visualize and access any and all layers in a slide.  For most people, not necessary, but I often have 60-100 layers in one slide, so accessing something for editing can be a nightmare (literally pulling aside all the layers to find the one way down you're looking for).  Now I can just bring to front, fix, and then stick back wherever I want, as the animation order in unaffected.

Brilliant!

USA Today Snapshots: failed futurist predictions

That little weird chart the paper always has on the front page, lower left corner.

On 10 Feb it was "Failed futurist predictions?"

As teens, what innovation adults thought would happen by the time they turned 65:

Flying cars was #1 at 28%, then human robots (bit harder, eh?), then living on other planets (ditto) and the rest.

Well, as soon as I read that I remember Terrafugia's street-legal "driving plane" (as I would call it) point being the flying car was a backasswards concept.  Far easier to get a small plane to drive on the road than to get a car to fly.

So there!  The wait is over!

Alt Fuels not necessarily the way forward for military, says RAND

Can't say I'm surprised by the report.  I've always felt the whole argument about what-it-takes-to-bring-a-gallon-of-gas-to-the-battlefield-somehow-being-obviated-by-alternative-fuels promised too much, in part because you still needed to bring whatever was necessary for the on-the-spot brewing of fuel, plus you now just have a different sort of depot to guard.  But yeah, you will cut down on the sheer volume to be moved over the long haul. On the electricity generation, I could get that.  Go solar and you're not humping the additional fuel-case closed. I just didn't see why the military should lead any efforts there.  Better to simply take what the private sector had and adapt.  I've also sort of understood the aircraft fuel argument, although there you're often talking sites not that hard to supply (e.g., a big base may be within flying range of the theater but not actually in it).  

Anyway, the whole argument just seemed like it was being driven a bit too much by the isolation-of-Afghanistan notion and all of a sudden here we're talking about the Pentagon's budget becoming this leading force for energy innovation in the economy (the old Internet argument, noted here).

There has been that tendency in the post-Cold War era:  you can't get your pet gov-sponsored R&D bit anywhere in the Feb budget, so you declare it a national security issue and stuff it in there. And you had to feel that some of that was going on.

In the NYT piece, the Navy does complain that their programs weren't adequately surveyed, and you have to pause there, because you think of past Navy efforts with small nuclear power plants.   Plus, that's a need that's global and rather unchanging, so if a cheaper, better alternative is to be had, then definitely the Navy should go for it.

I don't think the report will be enough for all these programs to be discontinued, but it probably will stop some additional piling on of new ones, which is probably good.

The military is such a microcosm of so many other problems in our economy/society, with spiraling health costs, a hard-to-sustain pension plan, energy costs too much and so on, and with the military's huge budget and reputation for innovation, there's the temptation to think answers can always be had from within. The problem is, of course, that the more non-combat stuff that gets stuffed into the budget, the less it's about the actual fighting and operations and the more it becomes this giant venture capital pool.

So it's good to see some skepticism from the think tanks.

Two I've been waiting on: UAVs poised to explode across civilian sector and China's preference for boys eroding

WSJ story up first.  Dovetails very nicely with the "Six Degrees of Integration" entry we had in the sample Wikistrat "CoreGap Bulletin."

The first prediction was an easy one for anybody who's worked for the military as long as I have:  UAVs will become a part of everyday life, just like the Internet and GPS before them.  When you work with the military, you simply come to accept these fantastic advances as routine, especially when you have years to get used to them mentally before they're unleashed upon the public.  I didn't come along early enough to catch arpanet (DARPA's original Internet; DARPA being the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), but I had years of exposure to GPS prior to its release into the wild, and it wasn't hard to imagine that it would change things--always being able to track exactly where you are. 

So with the UAVs getting smaller and smaller, the difference between them and what model plane enthusiasts have long toyed with gets less and less, meaning the latter enter the game. Already, as the piece points out, there's this gray area of regulation known as "recreational use of drones."  As one former CIA counterterror guy who now works for a drone company puts it, "The only thing you're bounded by is your imagination--and the FAA in the United States."

I used to predict that UAVs would be all over by now, because I could see the trajectory unfolding a decade ago, like with GPS, but then 9/11 kind of chilled that feeling, because all of a sudden, everybody was scanning the skies for dangerous objects. But with the Long War providing such a strong and persistent requirement, things got quickly back up to speed. 

And when you think about it, helicopters are actually pretty hard things to fly and so they come with plenty of crashes, so unless carrying bodies is a requirement, why not switch over to drones everything else.  Think of all the traffic and weather copter work. Then there's the paparazzi stalkings of celebrities or using helos to scout disaster zones.  None of that requires a body in the vehicle--just the video feed.

I know, I know.  Politicians looking for photo ops will suffer, but so will celebrities seeking to avoid them.

Great line from the piece from a divorce attorney:  "If the Israelis can use them to find terrorists, certainly a husband is going to be able to track a wife who goes out at 11 o'clock at night and follow her."

Safety issues galore.  Wait until the first murder happens in a civilian context.  Privacy issues too, of course. Bullying will follow, as will scams.  It'll be a new way to sneak into ball games or to virtually attend exclusive events ("Look, there's the President!"). And, of course, terrorists will use them successfully.

And many journalists will write "Pandora box" pieces, but life will go on, becoming that much more interesting/complex/weird and ultimately routine enough on this score.

Second one I've been waiting on and it's apropos of my Chinese daughter's birthday this week:  FT story on how property bubble is latest bit to erode Chinese preference for sons.  

The one-child policy came faster than urbanization could change age-old norms, so we soon got the dearth-of-females issue that a few demographers have beat to death as a cause for future wars ("Horny guys of the Middle Kingdom--unite and let's conquer . . . oh hell, let's just hop a plane to Vietnam and get a bride this weekend  I'm buying the first round!").  But when we were there adopting Vonne Mei, I remember all these young women seeing me hold her:  they'd bring over their boyfriends, point at me, and then punch them in the shoulder, spewing a few sharp lines.  Guy would look stunned and embarrassed, rub his shoulder while staring at me, shake his head a bit, and then meekly follow the young woman away.  You could just imagine what she said. 

But the vibe was really two fold:  "See!  Americans like girl babies!" and "See, that's how a Western man helps his wife by taking care of the child!"

You could see both norms beginning to take hold in the minds of young women who were getting better educations, were no longer trapped in the village, and were looking at urban careers in their future.  All these things combine to delay pregnancy, but they also shift the preference from boys to girls.  You need boys if working the fields is the big thing, but if you're going to age in urban settings, it's the girl who's far more likely to take care of you in your old age in an interpersonal sense (the Chinese adage of "A daughter is a warm jacket for a mother"), and if she's going to have a career now, then the difference between her and the moneymaking son erodes further, especially since the daughter doesn't cost as much as the son when it comes to marrying them off.  Custom in China has it that parents must buy the son a flat before he can marry.  

The FT piece points out that the tide has already turned in major metros like Beijing, going back almost 15 years.  China went majority urban a few years back and will urbanize at a stunning rate going forward.  Hence, the big sex imbalance fear, like most demographic issues, is already finding solution by the time we discover its outlines.  Doesn't mean there won't be a single generation significantly impacted; just means the problem is a lot more temporally bounded than realized.

And when you talk about that one generation being impacted, remember that a lot of these guys, if unable to find wives at home, will either travel for them or emigrate on that basis.  My favorite historical example of such willful flexibility:  Chinese male "coolies" come to America in the 1800s and end up building big chunks of the frontier West as manual laborers--like the RRs. They can't bring their women along and many are never able to return.  So who are one of their prime targets for inter-racial marriages? Irish Catholic widows, showing that where there's a will, there's a way.

In the end, China's "unique" problem goes away like it does everywhere else, because modernization tends to erase such "unique" values (that weren't really unique in the first place but simply represented a people trapped in time). Now, you could say Chinese couples are "time traveling"--a concept I want to explore in the Wikistrat globalization model: when change comes so quickly that it makes people feel like time is being compressed and thus they're rocketing forward in time in some domain. Think about it here:  thousands of years of custom altered in roughly one generation. That, my friends, is real time travel.  And it's social revolution.  China's rise has this impact at home--and abroad.

Israel plays start-up to China's big firm

Tweeted this one earlier this week, but want to post as well.

WSJ technology columnist Peter Stein noting how Israeli private equity firm is specializing in marketing intellectual property from small local high-tech companies to big Chinese manufacturing firms.

You read Baumol et. al's "Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism," and you come away with the argument that the best mix is to have big go-to-market firms surrounded by a sea of small, innovative high-tech firms that feed the beasts. The authors claimed that America was basically there, in terms of that evolution, having added the high-tech small firms with the IT revolution energizing our innovation base in a number of industries.  Their addition evolved our economy past the big-firm era that marked the post-WWII decades through the difficult 1970s.  The authors also argued that big-firm China was trying to make a similar evolution happen and was succeeding somewhat.

Now with the Great Recession, we get two counter-arguments coming to the fore:  1) globalization is slowly robbing America of its industrial base through off-shoring of manufacturing and losing the proximity between innovation and manufacturing is making us less competitive; and 2) China's increasing reliance on/championing of national flagship companies signals a retreat from further marketization.

My sense is always that linear projections usually fail, so waxing and waning is the norm.  You go too fast down one path, so you pull your foot off the pedal for a period.  I think some American companies in some sectors are recognizing the need to more closely tie innovation with manufacturing.  But in others, like automotive, you don't have a whole lot of choice given the market expansion going on in Asia and Latin America.  

In general, I'm a big believer in IBM CEO Sam Palmisano's notion of a globally-integrated enterprise that sources local, R&Ds local, hires local, manufactures local and sells local--just all over the world.  It's the truly globalized or truly distributed version of the old multinational.  I think companies that do that will fare best over the long haul, understanding that, as countries "rise," they're naturally going to want to carve out space in their expanding domestic market for national flagship companies.  To me, this is China's path right now, along with a firm desire to lock-in access to raw materials around the world through their state-run extractive industries and farm land leasing/purchases.  I think that mindset is a bit 20th century (supply risk oriented versus price risk oriented), but there you have it when a single-party state remains in power.  

Now how China seeks to extend its evolution toward that big firm/small firm mix is to force foreign companies who seek entry into its expanding domestic market to turn over their technologies in joint ventures, something that's naturally going to create a lot of friction.

Less friction filled is what this Israeli private-equity firm is doing. Infinity Group is simply treating China like one giant big firm to which new technologies can be sold, with it playing matchmaker. The process reminds some of when Silicon Valley did the same for Taiwan way back when. Like Taiwan, China wants--nay, NEEDS--to move up the food chain rapidly in order to bring similar development to its better-than-a-half-billion interior rural pool that it has to-date achieved with the urbanized coastal provinces. Then there's China's demographic clock ticking, reflected in the long-term loss of 100m workers by 2050 and the piling up of 400m-plus elders by then.

To me, this is a next, natural phase for globalization, with smart small countries becoming more Israel-like and big, labor-filled developing countries emulating China's strategy, which, quite frankly, isn't unique whatsoever and really is just an updating of what Japan did (the Michael Pettis argument).  If China were to achieve the same per capita GDP growth that Japan did, it could grow rapidly for another quarter century, says Martin Wolf, but . . .

The most interestingly pessimistic view comes from Michael Pettis of Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. The characteristic of Chinese growth is that it is “unbalanced”, as Mr Wen notes: it is highly dependent on investment as a source of demand and driver of supply (see charts). It is, in a sense, the most “capitalist” economy ever.

Thus, between 1997 and 2009, gross investment rose from 32 per cent to 46 per cent of GDP, while household consumption fell from 45 per cent of GDP to a mere 36 per cent. This must be the lowest share of consumption in any significant economy ever. In a country with hundreds of millions of poor people, it is even shocking. Meanwhile, the rising investment rate has been the main driver of growth. In the early 2000s, “total factor productivity” – increases in output per unit of input – were also important. But the contribution of higher efficiency has been waning.

This, Prof Pettis argues, is a “souped-up version” of the Asian development model we saw in Japan and South Korea in earlier decades. The characteristics of this production-oriented approach are:

• transfers from households to manufacturing, via low interest rates on savings
• repressed wages and a depressed exchange rate
• very high investment
• rapid growth of exports; and 
• high external surpluses. 

China is “Japan plus”: its investment rate is higher, trade surpluses larger, rate of consumption lower and exchange rate intervention bigger.

This has been an extraordinarily successful development model, but, notes Prof Pettis, it eventually runs into the constraints of “massive over-investment and misallocated capital”. He continues: “In every case I can think of it has been very difficult to change the growth model because too much of the economy depends on hidden subsidies.” Moreover, China’s scale will shift the price of imports, particularly raw materials, against it, so accelerating the decline in profits.

In China, a rising rate of investment is needed to maintain a given rate of economic growth. At some point, investment will stop rising and growth will slow. China will then face the Japanese challenge: how to sustain demand as the required rate of investment collapses. If, for example, the gross investment needed to sustain a 10 per cent rate of growth is 50 per cent of GDP, then the rate of investment required to sustain 6 per cent growth might be just 30 per cent of GDP. With its massive dependence on investment as a source of demand, any decline in expected growth threatens a huge recession.

One answer would be another government-driven investment surge, however low the returns. The more attractive answer is faster growth of consumption. There is evidence of that during the past two years. But, as Prof Pettis notes, for consumption to grow consistently faster than GDP, household disposable income must also do so. Yet if this is to happen, income must be shifted from the corporate sector. That implies a squeeze on profits, through higher interest rates, higher real wages or a higher exchange rate. But that increases the risk of an investment collapse, with dire consequences for demand. As Prof Pettis argues, in China “growth is high ... because consumption is low”. Rebalancing the economy towards household consumption could undermine the ability to sustain growth itself. If so, China is on an investment treadmill.

Old story:  there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.  How China has grown makes it harder--with each passing year--to get off the investment treadmill. But that investment level, and the requirements of a trade surplus to feed it, creates it own negative feedback look, which China is just beginning to encounter.  Can it run a huge trade imbalance with the developing world like it did with the West, using renminbi this time around?  Pretty tall order considering its resource draw.  Pettis's point isn't that China can't rebalance, just that it won't be a smooth journey.

But I can't help thinking that the work of Infinity Group is a big plus on this score:  helping move China up for the production/labor wage chain by outsourcing the start-up function to a certain extent while it slowly builds that capacity at home.  Naturally, if you're already a big firm and have amassed a lot of IP, you don't want to hand it over to China as price of admission, but if you're a start-up high-tech firm who needs a go-to-market partner, I can see you being indifferent on the nationality, meaning I think we'll see this become a significant trend in the global economy.  Like Baumol et. al's preferred model, I think we'll see something similar in terms of small and large states.  In a globalized world, tech firms in small states have no choice but to go global because the domestic market is so small (why Israel is such a high-tech incubator).  

On that basis, I become even more convinced that the "clash of civilizations" will end up being a big nothing in retrospect, meaning merely a fraidy-cat capture of when globalization starting truly opening up previously-closed civilizations, triggering a totally natural uptick in cultural friction.  But you look at an Israel making this happen with China and you say to yourself, in a clash-of-civilization world, this shouldn't work--yes?  And yet it does, because Israel needs to do this and China needs to do this and that economic logic surmounts all.

You there! Innovate! Now!

Moscow Times op-ed by a biz strategist consultant (via WPR's Media Roundup).

Great rundown here that encapsulates a lot of Russian history:

Eminent Western speakers put forward seemingly logical ideas on modernization and what Russia needs to do to modernize at the Global Policy Forum, which was held in Yaroslavl on Thursday and Friday. But most of them were not Russia experts as such and were thus naively overoptimistic on the country’s willingness and ability to implement change.

Applying Western logic to Russia is a risky business since things here are often the opposite of how things happen in the West. Will this modernization effort be any different from numerous others in Russia’s history?

The problem has always been implementation. Russia has been modernizing on and off since Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703. Periodically aware of the huge developmental gap with the West, it has never caught up.

As Russian history has shown, Western-style reforms invariably get blown off course by exogenous or endogenous shocks that necessitate short-term crisis management. After that, a conservative reaction sets in because of the fear of losing power after reform attempts fail and are discredited by the people.

Most Russian reform efforts are reactive and short-term, rather than proactive and structural. The result is a country that for centuries has been scraping along the bottom and failing to fulfill its colossal potential.

The government’s strong modernization campaign is concentrating on high technology, and yet it has not even plucked the low-

hanging fruit that would do so much to improve the country’s low productivity, such as radically cutting the number of bureaucrats and amount of red tape.

The Kremlin also has a poor understanding of science, technology and innovation, hence its piecemeal policies on modernization. “Innovation by decree” is one of the least effective models for modernization.

Now try remembering that when it comes to China's much vaunted state capitalism.  The author ends the piece by noting that China's authoritarianism is much more flexible, but the point remains the same: you cannot innovate by decree and if you let real innovation happen, you cannot control it by decree either--and still reap its economic rewards.

A Chinese naval build-up that deeply impresses me

NYT story on Chinese making substantial if beginning effort on deep-sea exploration--naturally for mineral resources.

Seabed control!

It'll be interesting to see how hard the Chinese go after this in coming years.  I would expect a pretty strong push given the volume requirements.

As for military conflicts stemming from this?  Let's just say disrupting seabed control is probably a lot easier and cheaper than you think, so let's remember which economy in this equation is becoming the most resource-dependent on the planet.

Because it ain't America.

A general on this would seem to be:  the deeper you go, the more you rely on a peaceful international security environment.

Industry stewardship of the genetic code

Reuters @ Yahoo via my spouse, Vonne.

An interesting public-private partnership here:

Candy maker Mars Inc., computer company IBM Corp. and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have mapped the cacao genome in an effort to improve cocoa crop quality and sustain the world's supply of the key ingredient for chocolate.

The companies and the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) on Wednesday released the preliminary genome sequence for the cacao tree, which produces cocoa beans used to make chocolate.

The goal:

The results of this collaborative project -- delivered three years early due to Mars' scientific leadership, advances in genome technology and constant real-time collaboration -- marks a significant scientific milestone that is already starting to benefit millions of farmers, particularly in West Africa, where more than 70 percent of the world's cocoa crop is produced.

"The collaboration with Mars and the USDA-ARS leverages more than a decade of IBM Research's experience in computational biology, as well as the power of the Blue Gene supercomputer," said Ajay Royyuru, senior manager, IBM Computational Biology Center.

The kicker:

The results of the research will be made available to the public with permanent access via the Cacao Genome Database www.cacaogenomedb.org.

To me, that's a counter-intuitive choice by Mars, a privately held company.  I'll be curious to see if this precedent encourages other private sector gifts of this size to the scientific community, because, in my opinion, this is what sustainable resource utilization is all about.

A much bigger global middle class will want to consumer a whole lot more chocolate.  Mars will logically seek to capture as much of that growing market as possible, but it took the time and effort here to make this downpayment on our collective future.

And I admire that.

The sheer discovery that is simply analyzing all this new connectivity

Cool Economist piece on the social web in its Technology Quarterly, but it's really about business intelligence, a field that is skyrocketing in its ability to monitor, analyze and create new marketing strategies from the wealth of info that is naturally captured by online behavior.  Similar thing is coming down the pike in the healthcare industry with the advent of electronic medical records--huge bonanza.

In the first instance, a lot of biz intell used to simply keep existing customers by making them happier.  The most sophisticated stuff will be used to sniff our fraud and criminal behavior.

A classic example of an old concept of mine--actually the heart and soul of the "new map":  with connectivity comes circumscribed behavior because each connection reveals you to others, but in return you are offered fabulous access and efficiencies and the more tailored meeting of your desires.  It is a transaction: the more you reveal, the more respondents can predict your needs and wants and behaviors--both good and bad.

And the mapping technology (like my wonderful Google maps on my Motorola Droid) only kicks that process into high gear.

An amazing amount of new rules to work out on all of this--a fascinating process to witness in coming years.

The internet as trade pact

Great line from Economist "Leaders" bit on the web's "new walls":

 The internet is as much a trade pact as an invention.

Actually, until it became a trade pact, it was an interesting bit of technology and not much else--a fantasy of a back-up comms net once the bombs started dropping ("Can you read this?  Oh my God!  At least the two of us survived!  Now what?").

So the web really only works when people see commercial value, and when that commerce rears its beautiful head, barriers naturally arise.  Governments want to fence off its value proposition for national firms (far more than they care to keep out "bad" content).  Companies want to create "walled gardens" for their proprietary offerings.  Some net providers want sites to pay for premier promotion.

These are all unremarkable developments.  The web is certainly a generation or two beyond the telephone, but why it was supposed to be some everything-is-free nirvana is beyond me, any more than phones were going to change everything before and the telegraph before that.

These are the three types of walls cited by the Economist: national, company, and the possible downfall of the net-neutrality vision.  So Wired says the net is dead--that goes too far says The Economist.

It has been my proposition going back to the mid-1990s, that everybody wants the connectivity, but everyone also wants to control the content--to their tastes, to their fears, and--most definitely--to their advantage.

The fencing off of the web is not all that different from the fencing off of the American West.  If you want something to be truly tended, and not suffer the fate of the commons, people will need to own it and care about it.

But the free trade point made by the mag is equally valid; it just won't be the commons we imagined it to be.

And so it will need to go through the same negotiations--bilateral, multilateral, global, that regular trade goes through.

I'm not worried about the web.  I see this as a natural evolution.

Cybersecurity: the paradigm shifts

Intel wants to be inside of everything, so sayeth Bloomberg Businessweek.  The PC market for chips is only so big and it's slowing, which the market for embedded chips, while smaller for now, will grow dramatically.

So Intel's purchase of MacAfee, the software security firm, is viewed as a shot across the IT's industry's bow, suggesting that cybersecurity concerns are going to move far beyond the world of computers and the internet to something far more pervasive. Thus devices with embedded chips will need embedded software on those chips and embedded security software within that software. 

How you think of cybersecurity in terms of firewalls in such a world is beyond me.  Cisco speaks more and more of "borderless security"--a trend that I think favors the horizontal systems of the world (like the United States) far more than the vertical ones (like China).  I mean, how can a society with low social trust prevail in such a world?

Personal data as a sellable asset

Our Bynamite heroesNYT story that I've been waiting a while to read:

On the Internet, users supply the raw material that helps generate billions of dollars a year in online advertising revenue. Search requests, individual profiles on social networks, Web browsing habits, posted pictures and many Internet messages are all mined to serve up targeted online ads.

All of this personal information turns out to be extremely valuable, collectively. So why should Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other ad businesses get all the rewards?

That is the question that animates Bynamite, a start-up company based in San Francisco. “There should be an economic opportunity on the consumer side,” said Ginsu Yoon, a co-founder of the company. “Nearly all the investment and technology is on the advertising side.”

Bynamite, to be sure, is another entry in the emerging market for online privacy products. The business interest in such products, of course, is being fed by worries about how much personal information marketers collect. Also playing a part are recent outcries after Facebook changed its privacy practices and Google introduced a social networking tool, Buzz, that initially shared information widely without users’ permission. Venture capital has been pouring into Web-based monitoring and privacy protection products like ReputationDefender and Abine, as well as services that help parents protect children’s privacy online, like SafetyWeb and SocialShield.

Bynamite brings a somewhat different perspective to the privacy market. “Our view is that it’s not about privacy protection but about giving users control over this valuable resource — their information,” Mr. Yoon said.

Both the protection and the value approaches to the privacy market could well pay off, says Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm. “What’s intriguing about Bynamite,” he said, “is its emphasis on privacy as revolving around choice and ownership of data, and ultimately a notion of an exchange of value.” (Kleiner Perkins is an investor in ReputationDefender but not in Bynamite.)

I think this is a great step forward toward an inevitable future. In my mind, the Googles of the world are largely ripping us off and achieving way too much power.  The backlash will come, but this is the right way to channel it.

Would you want to know your potential for longevity?

WSJ story on scientists claiming to be able to calculate longevity potential on the basis of studying very old people and discovering "a genetic signature of longevity."

Despite the great complexity of causality here, the lead researcher says "we can compute your specific predisposition to exceptional longevity."  The academic researchers (Boston U) say they have no plans to profit from or patent the technology, and that a test will be made available on the Internet sometime in late July.

People want predictability in all things except the length of their life, where the vast majority prefer ignorance that allows maximum anticipation of possibilities.

There is a distinct difference between those who will die on the low end of the longevity spectrum and the "wellderly" who make it safely to old age and then face the prospect of 2-3 decades more life.

One expert claimed that life insurance policies would be forever altered by such testing capacity, but for now, it requires a several-thousand-dollar layout to have your entire genome profiled.  I guess insurance companies would need to posit their savings to justify the costs either picked up by them and made mandatory for granted coverage or forced upon consumers similarly.

What intrigues me more is the potential for genetic manipulation to "fix" what is missing.  For example:

While a healthy lifestyle is paramount, such genetic factors appear to become more important the longer we live. Indeed, a variation in a single key gene called FOX03A can triple the chances a person may live past 100, researchers at the Pacific Health Research Institute in Hawaii recently reported.

How much would the average person be willing to pay to have FOX03A boosted?

Chart of the day: biotech best Moore's law

From The Economist.

Hard not to expect a serious revolution out of that trend. Economic revolutions follow those in science, and those in science follow those in measurement.

From the article:

The telescope revolutionized astronomy; the microscope, biology; and the spectroscope, chemistry.  The genomic revolution depends on two technological changes.  One, in computing power, is generic--though computer-makers are slavering at the amount of data biology 2.0 will need to process, and the amount of kit that will be needed to do the processing.  This torrent of data, however, is the result of the second technological change that is driving genomics, in the power of DNA sequencing.

The East has fewer qualms about messing with nature

WAPO story on how loose and fast--by our standards--China explores the world of biotechnology.

Centuries after it led the world in technological prowess -- think gunpowder, irrigation and the printed word -- China has barged back into the ranks of the great powers in science. With the brashness of a teenager, in some cases literally, China's scientists and inventors are driving a resurgence in potentially world-changing research.

Unburdened by social and legal constraints common in the West, China's trailblazing scientists are also pushing the limits of ethics and principle as they create a new -- and to many, worrisome -- Wild West in the Far East.

I can't remember if it was captured in PNM or "Blueprint," but I explored this theme years ago in the brief when I'd tell the story of how a genetic therapy for cancer was invented in the U.S. but couldn't get tested for legal reasons. It was thereupon pursued in China, with its looser rule set on such things, and once it was proven out, the Chinese company came to the US to get a patent. That was an eye-opener for me.

Part of it is the difference in philosophy and religion: we have this one-life view of reality but the East is a lot fuzzier on that concept (Buddhism), so it's naturally more relaxed on the subject.

Another reality:  when you're on your way up, you have little regard for the environmental consequences.  In that sense, I've always delighted in Futurama's character of Leo Wong, whose attitude toward the environment is emblematic of a lot of Chinese industrialists right now.  Another good reference:  Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal of Daniel Plainview in "There will be blood."  Talk about a plain view!

China, with its hundreds of impoverished rural folk, will remain in this "conquering nature at all costs" mindset for a while--or until it gets too expensive. Yes, we'll hear about and see all sorts of efforts to go "green," but even there, you will see corner-cutting bravado that will frighten to no end. 

Chart(s) of the day: the "polio of agriculture" versus biotech ag

Trio of Economist articles/editorials on ag trends.

Stem rust is resurgent in Africa and heading northeast toward Central Asia and the Eurasian breadbasket states.  Once wheat's deadliest scourge, it hasn't been this strong since before the Green Revolution. Borlaug's original research and breakthroughs involved controlling stem rust.  Now reborn, it's centered in Africa's great lake states and features a footprint stretching from South Africa to Iran. Like a polio resurgent, the current generations of plants have little immune-system capacity to resist it, having gone decades without "infection."

The current version is known as Ug99 for Uganda 1999.

Meanwhile, biotech is beginning to take off in a serious way, having survived the financial crisis nicely, the technologies long pursued are now mature enough for full commercialization.  Moreover, "developing countries are emerging as major markets and sources of innovation for industrial biotech."

Oh, how the locus on competition has shifted

graphic here

WSJ story where the headline just made me laugh.

It read, “Carriers Go To Battle Over Faster Networks.”

When I first glanced at it, I thought it was a story about naval technology—you know, big decks!

Instead, it was about Google v Apple.

That tells you something about the world we live in, a world in which radical Islam pales in comparison to the rise of the global middle class—where all the real battles will take place and virtually none of them will involve any kinetics.

Today the rat's lung, tomorrow yours

WSJ story on latest in a series of “groundbreaking experiments in the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine,” involving the creation in a lab of lungs for a rat (and I mean a real rat and not some Wall Street banker!).

Described as a “small but tantalizing step,” you have to think that doing this for a rat can’t be all that different than for a human—scale yes, but complexity not so much.  When transplanted into the rates, the lungs exchanged oxygen for CO2 just like they’re supposed to do.

Impressive.

Other labs have already done livers and hearts, to varying degrees of success.

Right now over 100k Americans are on waiting lists for organ transplants (kidneys #1, then livers, then lungs). 

To me, this is the most crucial part of life-extending technologies—not so much the super-extension of a few but the rescuing of a lot of people cut down in the primes and thus allowed to live far longer lives than they otherwise would have been able to.