Life is cluttered with noise; from pop up banners to drivle. In between all of this nosie, are the signals that really matter. The ballet recital of my 3 year old. The conversation about public policy with my Dad. The moment of technical clarity on a new biomaterial.
The art of life is optomizing the signal to noise ratio.
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Posted by bendupont
The dictionary says friction is ‘a force resisting the motion of surfaces in contact’, but I think there is another type of friction – the friction between capital and great ideas. I think this latter kind of friction is key to economic growth and it’s about to undergo sigificant transformations.
In 1720, if you were bright and ambitious (and free), the only legal way to make money was to either to have rich parents or to spend a life toiling away - and if you were lucky you just might be able to provide for your family. The situation was so bleak that even Ben Franklin, about the brightest those times had to offer, found his best choice was to run away from home and apprenticeship. Fast forward 200 years, friction drops a little with the aid of low tax rates and democracy, and the industrial revolution takes ahold. 
In the 1990’s we saw the second drop – an even larger decrease in friction aided by the internet and a rich ecosystem of venture capital – that democratized entrepreneurship. No longer was a life of toil required first – and the world changed so much that a kid named Michael in his dorm room, revolutionized how computers were made and capital found its way to his door step – or students like Larry and Sergey changed how knowledge is indexed and shared. Now, these guys toiled plenty – but there was much less toil finding capital or customers – they toiled perfecting their business models. Ben Franklin would have loved this world.
I predict in 2010 we will see the 3rd, and largest drop, in the friction between capital and good ideas. What are the first signs?
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Posted by bendupont
A friend of mine forwarded an interesting article on China by Robert Fogel (U of Chicago economist). Here are the high spots:
▪ Higher education in China is rising dramatically; productivity, innovation, and adoption of technology are directly correlated with higher levels of education
▪ Chinese growth statistics may be underestimating improvements in output, particularly in the service sector; while the problem is not particular to China’s GDP calculations, the rapid growth of China’s service center exacerbates the issue
▪ In the “big” Chinese cities, the standard of living and per capita income “are at the levels the World Bank would deem ‘high middle income’”; don’t underestimate the Chinese propensity to consume
$123,000,000,000,000* - China’s estimated economy by the year 2040.
In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000. China’s per capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union, and also much higher than that of India and Japan. In other words, the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman when China goes from a poor country in 2000 to a superrich country in 2040.
Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth, according to my forecasts, China’s share of global GDP — 40 percent — will dwarf that of the United States (14 percent) and the European Union (5 percent) 30 years from now. This is what economic hegemony will look like.
* Patents – start filing them now in China. They will matter.
Full article is here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/123000000000000?page=0,0&%24Version=0&%24Path=%2F,%20%24Version%3D0&%24Domain=.foreignpolicy.com
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Posted by bendupont
It starts with privacy.
Kids are not as worried about it as we are. Today kids have no issue sharing private details on Facebook or with companies if they get some benefit. Want 100,000 Social Security numbers? Easy, just offer kids a chance to win a fee ipod. Want to know how much walking people do? Easy, create a free iPhone App that lets you monitor your friends real time and collect the data. Want to know just about anything, from any demographic. Just offer them some free benefit for recording it and sharing it.
The next generation does not care much about privacy. HIPPA does not matter to them, neither will purchase history or location or any of the other things that those of us in our 40’s to worry about. I think the line will be drawn at theft of $ or IP. Everything else? Fairgame.
A lot of data is being gathered, but it wont end there. The cable company knows what we watch. The credit card company knows what we purchase, what medicines we take. The GPS in our phone knows how far we drive and how much we walk. Google knows just about everything, and can even predict when we are likely to visit the hospital. So reams of data is gathered on each of us, but it is segmented in a variety of databases. I think governments will allow the data to be shared and mined, anonymized, if it’s for the public good – or if people dont opt out – for commercial benefit.
So, bear with me for one more step. Governments have recently made some progress on food labeling. What if that continued through the food supply chain, and there was true transparency. You could eat a hamburger and know where the meat came from, what growth hormones might have been used, and know what farm the wheat and yeast came from for the role, or where the seeds came from, etc.
To summarize, 1) Concerns about privacy reduce and reams of data are shared, 2) Transparency in our food supply chain are added and 3) Enterprising companies or universities start mining the data looking for patterns or trends – What could this mean?
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Posted by bendupont
What will the Large Hadron Collider reveal?
January 10, 2010I’m fascinated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the great discoveries that it will reveal. Ironically, I have heard very little about it in the technology community. How might these discoveries impact Open Innovation and Venture Capital? They might change the landscape of technology, making under appreciated technologies high value, and the inverse.
Below is the best article I’ve seen on the LHC, it is a reprint from LA Times written by Steve Giddings (a physics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara) – Ben duPont
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Despite all we have learned in physics — from properties of faraway galaxies to the deep internal structure of the protons and neutrons that make up an atomic nucleus — we still face vexing mysteries. The collider is poised to begin to unravel them. By colliding protons at ultra-high energies and allowing scientists to observe the outcome in its mammoth detectors, the LHC could open new frontiers in understanding space and time, the microstructure of matter and the laws of nature.
We know, for example, that all the types of matter we see, that constitute our ordinary existence, are a mere fraction — 20 percent — of the matter in the universe. The remaining 80 percent apparently is mysterious “dark matter”; though it is all around us, its existence is inferred only via its gravitational pull on visible matter. LHC collisions might produce dark-matter particles so we can study their properties directly and thereby unveil a totally new face of the universe.
The collider might also shed light on the more predominant “dark energy,” which is causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate. If the acceleration continues, the ultimate fate of the universe may be very, very cold, with all particles flying away from one another to infinite distances.
More widely anticipated is the discovery of the Higgs particle — sometimes inaptly called the God particle — whose existence is postulated to explain why some matter has mass. Were it not for the Higgs, or something like it, the electrons in our bodies would behave like light beams, shooting into space, and we would not exist.
If the Higgs is not discovered, its replacement may involve something as profound as another layer of substructure to matter. It might be that the most elementary known particles, like the quarks that make up a proton, are made from tinier things. This would be revolutionary — like discovering the substructure of the atom, but at a deeper level.
More profound still, the LHC may reveal extra dimensions of space, beyond the three that we see. The existence of a completely new type of dimension — what is called “supersymmetry” — means that all known particles have partner particles with related properties. Supersymmetry could be discovered by the LHC producing these “superpartners,” which would make characteristic splashes in its detectors. Superpartners may also make up dark matter — and two great discoveries would be made at once.
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