Tag Archives: innovation

Why did China’s Scientific Innovation Stop?

Why did China’s scientific innovation, once so advanced, suddenly collapse

By the time Joseph Needham died in 1995, he had published 17 volumes of his Science and Civilisation in China series, including several that he wrote entirely on his own.

The Chinese began printing 600 years before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the technique in Germany. They built the first chain drive 700 years before the Europeans. And they made use of a magnetic compass at least a century before the first reference to it appeared elsewhere. So why, in the middle of the 15th century, did this advanced civilisation suddenly cease its spectacular progress?
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Needham never fully worked out why China’s inventiveness dried up. Other academics have made their own suggestions: the stultifying pursuit of bureaucratic rank in the Middle Kingdom and the absence of a mercantile class to foster competition and self-improvement; the sheer size of China compared with the smaller states of Europe whose fierce rivalries fostered technological competition; its totalitarianism.

Robotic Prosthetic Arms for People

Dean Kamen latest invention was funded by DARPA. Once again he is doing amazing stuff. It is great what engineers can do (many worked together to get the progress so far) when given the opportunity. We need many more such efforts.

Dean Kamen Lends a Hand, or Two (August 2007):

DARPA has spent almost $25 million funding two independent teams, Mr. Kamen’s DEKA Research & Development Corp. and a group at Johns Hopkins’ University in an effort they hope will ultimately lead to commercial prosthesis that can be controlled from the human brain.

The innovation in the DEKA arm lies in its ultra light weight carbon shell, giving the user an exoskeleton with which to gain the leverage necessary to do some of the extraordinary things the system makes possible, such as lifting a 40 lb. weight.

To make the system function, the DEKA engineers coated the inside of the shell with a mosaic of thin air bladders that can be individually filled with air to offer padding and rigidity necessary to make possible normally ordinary tasks such as operating a portable power drill. When the arm is not in use the system deflates, or can even alternately fill and empty to offer a massage effect, so that it is not painful to wear for long periods.

The DEKA system is controlled by a joystick that is moved by the remaining portion of the user’s arm and by a second control mechanism in the user’s shoe. Mr. Kamen said that despite the complexity of controlling an ensemble of motors and mechanical servo devices, a user can gain basic functional control in just one day.

Car Powered Using Compressed Air

car powered using compressed air

Jules Verne predicted cars would run on air. The Air Car (link broken, so it was removed) is making that a reality. The car is powered by compressed air which certainly seems like an interesting idea. Air car ready for production (link broken, so it was removed, sigh, when will site stop failing the web so badly?):

Refueling is simple and will only take a few minutes. That is, if you live nearby a gas station with custom air compressor units. The cost of a fill up is approximately $2.00. If a driver doesn’t have access to a compressor station, they will be able to plug into the electrical grid and use the car’s built-in compressor to refill the tank in about 4 hours.

The car is said to have a driving range of 125 miles so by my calculation it would cost about 1.6 cents per mile. A car that gets 31 mpg would use 4 gallons to go 124 miles. At $3 a gallon for gas, the cost is $12 for fuel or about 9.7 cents per mile. I didn’t notice anything about maintenance costs. I don’t see any reason why the Air Car would cost more to maintain than a normal car.

The air car was named one of Time magazine’s best inventions of the 2007.

Five-seat concept car runs on air

An engineer has promised that within a year he will start selling a car that runs on compressed air, producing no emissions at all in town. The OneCAT will be a five-seater with a fibre-glass body, weighing just 350kg and could cost just over Â£2,500.
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Tata is the only big firm he’ll license to sell the car – and they are limited to India. For the rest of the world he hopes to persuade hundreds of investors to set up their own factories, making the car from 80% locally-sourced materials.
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“Imagine we will be able to save all those components traveling the world and all those transporters.” He wants each local factory to sell its own cars to cut out the middle man and he aims for 1% of global sales – about 680,000 per year. Terry Spall from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers says: “I really hope he succeeds. It is a really brave experiment in producing a sustainable car.”

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Interview Webcast

This interview and audience question and answer took place last week at the end of the Google Zeitgeist conference. Some interesting notes from Sergey:

I like to see us not focus on maintaining Google’s culture but to improve it – continuous improvement (he specifically mentions how the infrastructure they have in place now allows them to experiment in ways that were not possible before – a reminder of Google’s focus on the scientific method and Experimenting Quickly and Often).
Google still follows their model of focusing 70% of the effort on core business (search) and 20% on related activities and 10% on “anything goes” (new business areas).

While not directly related to Google he is very interested in the innovation in nanotechnology and carbon nanotubes and the present time.
on moving toward universal power supplies – we are talking to some companies about solutions “but I gotta be honest with you it is a harder problem than I thought”

Larry:

focus on Google’s mission – to organize the world’s information
believes there is great potential in solar power and would love to see successful companies in that industry
improve power supply efficiency on servers

Both:

discussed poor web usability practices based on sites that adopt flashy technology that make it slower and more difficult for users – flash, excessive Ajax… Larry also mentioned doing testing on the user experience – no surprise for Google and no surprise that most poorly overly fancy sites care more about what a pointy haired boss might think on seeing the flash than on users experiences and testing.

Great Speech by Marissa Mayer on Innovation at Google

Marissa Mayer speech at Stanford on innovation at Google (23 minute speech, 26 minutes of question and answers). She leads the product management efforts on Google’s search products- web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Excellent speech. Highly recommended. Google top 9 ideas:

(inside these are Marissa’s thoughts) [inside these are my comments]

Ideas come from anywhere (engineers, customers, managers, executives, external companies – that Google acquires)
Share everything you can (very open culture)
Your Brilliant We’re Hiring [Google Hiring]
A license to pursue dreams (Google 20% time)
Innovation not instant perfection (iteration – experiment quickly and often)
Data is apolitical [Data Based Decision Making – common errors in interpreting data – read the related links too]
Creativity loves Constraints [process improvement and innovation]
Users not money (Google focuses on providing users what they want and believe it will work out)
Don’t kill projects morph them

So far every time I hear one of Google’s leaders speak I am happier that I own a bit of stock – this is another instance of that.

Strawjet: Invention of the Year, 2006

Invent Now 2006 Modern Marvel of the Year (links all broken by History Channel, so links were removed, – when will we finally have people in charge of websites that understand basic usability fundamentals?):

The Strawjet is a farm implement that processes straw (wheat, flax, sunflower, tobacco, hemp, etc.) in the field (after the plant has been harvested) into a mat, similar to a large bamboo window blind. This is used to construct composite building panels in much the same way as fiberglass or carbon fiber; however, the Strawjet uses a binder made from paper pulp, clay and cement rather than plastic resin.

Update, 2013: strawjet.com. Also I added this webcast from 2009

Read (except they broke all the links so you can’t) about more finalists in the History Channel and Invent Now Inventor contest:

Dr. David L. Cull, Hemoaccess Valve System
Kristin A. Hrabar, Illuminated Nutdriver
Dr. Sundaresan Jayaraman, Wearable Motherboard (Smart Shirt)
Robert C. Kelly, Resc-hue Lite Line

Related: Pay as You Go Solar in India – Appropriate Technology: Solar Water in Poor Cairo Neighborhoods – Lemelson-MIT 2010 Award for Sustainability – Play pumps had the idea of putting a merry-go-round on the site and letting children playing on it provide the energy… The solution does not appear to have been executed well.