Nanoscience and Nanosociety

Educating Scientists and Engineers About Social and Ethical Implications of their Research

2011-11-20T22:38:00.000-08:00

The Congress on Teaching the Social and Ethical Implications of Research was held in Tempe, AZ on November 10-11, 2011. Approximately 120 educators from universities and science museums met on the campus of Arizona State University to share innovative ideas for educating scientists and engineers to think critically about the social impacts of their research. About half the group were involved in nanoscience education, as the conference was scheduled immediately following the annual meeting of S.Net: the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies.

Presenters discussed the benefits and challenges of various approaches to science ethics training, in formats such as traditional classrooms, online training programs, virtual worlds, service projects in developing countries, and international engineering contests.

Several young scientists also discussed student-led efforts to promote ethics training and action through organizations such as Student Pugwash and the Graduation Pledge Alliance. Museum-based informal science educators from the NISE Network (Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network) were on hand to discuss Nano Days and showed several videos and hands-on exercises used to engage the public in

What became clear from the two days of discussions was the difficulty of integrating ethics education modules into highly structured science and engineering programs, particularly at the graduate level. In an environment where productivity is measured by number of publications and patents, having students take time away from their lab work to think about the societal impacts of their work can be seen as something that is at best a nuisance, at worst an impediment to achieving their own and their lab's goals. Even those faculty and students who are enthusiastic about participating in societal impacts education programs can face difficulties justifying their participation to peers and superiors in the University. So one takeaway from the conference is that if universities care about producing ethically responsible nanocience graduates, they need to restructure their incentive systems to recognize and encourage the importance of this training.

Another takeaway from the meeting was the point made by several speakers that language counts. Talking about "ethics" or "ELSI"(ethical, legal, and social implications) education sounds abstract to science students and their faculty mentors, and can be a turnoff. Some conference participants noted that framing these issues as being "policy"-related was a more effective way of getting attention. As much university-based research is government-funded, scientists and engineers are attuned to the importance of understanding the policy process and are willing to learn more about it.

Overall, the Congress was a stimulating two days spent in the company of people who care passionately about the roles played by science and technology in bettering social relations and the quality of life. Their dedication to helping the next generation of researchers use their knowledge and skills to advance the societal welfare was inspiring.

Long-Term Energy Generation Costs: Calculating Risk

2011-03-15T04:15:00.000-07:00

The multiple-reactor accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station following its catastrophic earthquake and tsunami on March 12, which may turn out to be one of the most damaging nuclear plant accidents in history once again tragically highlights the hidden (that is, uncalculated) costs of differing energy technologies. The difficulty of calculating certain ancillary costs of power production, such as potential risk and long-term environmental cleanup and recovery leaves both government and industry partially in the dark when making important decisions regarding power generation investment and policy.

The simplified formulas used to calculate total lifetime cost of power plants, because they generally leave out longer-term and risk-based costs, dis proportionally effect perception of solar and wind energy solutions. These technologies are generally more expensive than coal, oil, and natural gas to install initially, but contain far fewer long-term environmental costs. However, because these costs are precisely the ones omitted from projections, the result is a skewed picture of solar costs via-a-vis other technologies.

Coal plant costs are perhaps the easiest to calculate because their design is relatively stable and standardized, and coal supply is domestic in the U.S. and also relatively stable; however, such calculations rarely (if ever) include the potentially massive costs of future environmental cleanup or mitigation. Though we know that these costs (coal is a significant contributor to global climate change) are enormous, they are notoriously difficult to quantify, and thus official projections of long term cost rarely contain a numerical indication of costs beyond construction, materials, and regulatory fees. Oil, natural gas, and nuclear power plants all pose similar potential environmental costs that aren’t included in cost projections—due not only to the direct difficulty of quantification, but also to the difficulty of projecting risk probabilities of accidents. The 2010 Gulf Oil spill will cost at least $30 billion in the long run, but none of these costs were figured into the development of BP’s fleet of wells and oil rigs in the Gulf Coast. Neither were the costs of containment and environmental cleanup factored into the construction of the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima Daiichi power plants. Such accidents are extremely rare, but their costs can exceed the lifetime construction and operating costs of a plant by many orders of magnitude, and clearly should be factored in to overall projections of lifetime costs.

Researchers are the Argonne National Laboratory, run by the U.S. Department of Energy, have begun to address this problem with the formulation of a new model for calculating solar’s Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE). Their formula is essentially an extension of one developed by industry that utilizes a Monte Carlo simulation to statistically select from probability distributions to account for uncertainty in a number of variables. These are precisely the variables that would otherwise drop out of the equation or be replaced by arbitrary constants. Thus this work provides a concrete methodology to extend LCOE calculations to complex, uncertain features of long-term energy cost. While this is enormously helpful for anyone calculating costs of solar energy generation, similar models need to be developed for other industries for an accurate comparison of costs to be possible. Still, a publicly-funded (and thus not serving any particular segment of industry) effort of this sort in an enormous step in the right direction: by highlighting the problem with previous formulas and blazing a trail toward more accurate models that account for uncertainty, the Argonne researchers are helping to institutionalize a new, more accurate and complete form of energy cost calculation.

Their full paper was published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, here.

Evolution and Desire

2011-01-19T22:38:00.000-08:00

Watch the full episode. See more Botany of Desire.

"The Botany of Desire," a PBS documentary, directed by Michael Schwarz and based upon journalist Michael Pollan’s 2001 book of the same title, explores human-plant symbiosis and coevolution “from the plants’ point of view.” The documentary closely follows Pollan’s book, heavily featuring the author as he attempts to represent the history of four plants that have evolved to maximally appeal to humans: the apple (playing on the human desire for sweetness), the tulip (desire for beauty), cannabis (intoxication), and the potato (control). The film’s extensive macro cinematography and high production value perhaps tends to fetishize these plants as much as it anthropomorphizes them, yet is nonetheless curiously effective in its exploration of symbiosis as desire for the same reason. The history of each of these plants is indeed fascinating, and the film fully embraces their hybrid nature: as products of evolution within a “natural” environment, as social constructs, as the outcome of human genetic experimentation (breeding and genetic engineering) as economic entities (goods, services, objects of speculative bubbles) and as political objects.

Ultimately, it’s a story about innovation. Some plants come out winners (the virus-infected Semper Augustus tulip in 1630s Holland, “sexually frustrated” marijuana plants), others losers (sour apples after the temperance movement took root in America). Essentially, each of the plants explored here is the nexis of an innovation ecology that involves social, political, and biological actors. Structural effects, such as the vulnerability introduced by monocultures, are treated extensively. The Irish Potato famine stands in as the primary lesson here: it was the result of an extensive monoculture of “Lumpers.” Schwarz and Pollan are quick to note that “monocultures on the plate lead to monocultures on the land.” That is, innovation and cultivation cannot be considered outside of their social contexts. Ultimately, the film figures innovation as diversification and notes that most of our attempts at agricultural innovation currently consist of inventing ever more elaborate technological methods of protecting increasingly vulnerable monocultures, a losing game and evolutionary dead end.

Google's Innovation Pathway: Some Classical Ingredients

2010-12-19T07:19:00.000-08:00

Everyone acknowledges the role of "serendipity" in the progress of science and technology, where the term means "making desirable discoveries by accident." Picture it as Google co-founder Sergy Brin enjoying zero-gravity at left - a major breakthrough is often something you bump into while happily floating somewhere else.

Google has marched from a search algorithim developed by graduate students at Stanford to a search engine and into a dominant position in web advertizing and onward to a global information empire now encompassing the past as well as the future -- with a diplomacy wing being incorporated into Google Ideas. In spite of Google's ubiquity in the global information cloud, was its success in fact an accident?
The question arises in Charles Petersen's review in the New York Review of Books of business writer Ken Auletta's history of Google. Brin and his graduate program friend Larry Page began to work with Page's desire to understand every page of every site as the target of a set of links that arrived there from anywhere else in the web. They developed a method of mapping these backlinks which they called Backrub, and in a story that has been well-told before, particularly by Wired's John Batelle, they developed the PageRank algorithm that created a search engine that was better than any then available.

Page really did grasp something that has become a fairly common idea since: you will get less noise in your result if you supplement a search for a word or a word string with an evaluation of the other sites that have linked to it. He saw the web as a structure of citations, and mapping the citations introduced the judgements of hundreds, thousands, or millions of other people about the value of that site's use of the word or word string. Terms like "the wisdom of crowds" or "crowdsourcing" capture the idea of collective intelligence that Brin and Page used as the central principle of their search algorithm.

Except in fact there was no search algorithm when Page was thinking about graphing the web. In the 2009 Commencement speech he gave at his alma mater the University of Michigan, he said,

I had one of those [vivid] dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and... I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web -- he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn't even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born. When a really great dream shows up, grab it!

Page is identifying some classic ingredients of creative breakthroughs:

disconnection from specific goals: the "dream" is pure curiosity, unharnessed by any aspect of reality.
absence of a sense of useful application
discontinuity with the "mature" idea

Page's advisor Terry Winograd gave Brin and Page lots of rope to run with, Stanford gave them enormous bandwidth, and they came up with various tricks and wheedlings to obtain lots of cheap equipment. Thus a further classical element is

quasi-free resources - no strict cost-accounting

These are features that are more easily sustained in academic than in commercial environments. Highly creative commercial environments like the Eastman Kodak of Kenneth Mees, wartime Lockheed, monopoly-era Bell Labs, and perhaps like Google today, set up university-style environments with free space for playing around, daydreaming, and working obsessively on compelling ideas that look entirely marginal to the main business.

A later conceptual leap connected the mathematics of worldwide links to web searches. And then a further major breakthrough consisted of Brin and Page's response to their attempt to sell their algorithm to Yahoo! so they could go back to the important work of finishing their PhDs. Yahoo! didn't want their search engine, for a reason Auletta explains:

[The Yahoo founders] were impressed with [Google’s] search engine. Very impressed, actually; their concern was that it was too good…. The more relevant the results of a search were, the fewer [pages] users would experience before leaving Yahoo. Instead of ten pages, they might see just a couple, and that would deflate the number of page views Yahoo sold advertisers.

Brin and Page are sent away, and the crucial next step is their reaction to this defeat: they "disdained" the reasoning behind it (Petersen), and continued on their own path. That is to say that they disdained the core business model of the commercial Internet of the time: rather than following what the market seemed to say, they rejected it.

It is easy in retrospect to see this as an act of enormous courage or genius. Let's posit that it was both, and then define what genius and courage meant in such a context: a kind of perversity and youthful defiance ("screw you, Yahoo!"), and the confidence or simple stubbornness or persisting in spite of a lack of alternatives against the industry's conventional wisdom. Brin and page had in fact to reject the direct relevance of the business model as such to the development of an important idea: they "decided to continuing improving Google's search algorithms," on the tacit assumption that they would not be helped by following the market at least in the short run.

Petersen picks up the next phase:

It wasn’t until Google grew desperate for funding during the dot-com bust of the early 2000s that Page, Brin, and their colleagues began to see that the technical advantage they had gained over other search engines might translate into an economic advantage as well. Aside from page views, one of the few easily measured statistics on the early Web was “click-throughs,” the number of times visitors to a site found an ad displayed enticing enough to click on it, and then be taken to the advertiser’s own website, where the product or service in question might be purchased or used. Most websites, including those of other search engines, found that they could earn more by charging small amounts for each time an ad was seen (page views) rather than charging a larger amount for the far less frequent instances when a visitor clicked on an ad (click-throughs) and then visited the advertiser’s own website.

Google changed this. A conventional interpretation might be that financial necessity is the mother of invention. But Brin and Page had been desperate for money at most phases of the development, so financial necessity was nothing new. Instead, it's worth emphasizing again that some combination of their experience and their personal outlooks allowed them to accept that market potential is over the horizon w hen development was most important. This meant that in spite of the pressure at the time, they didn't take short cuts. This allowed a more recessive but important element of the innovation process to emerge. For the innovation to have its most important impact, the innovation has to change the business model that at the time controls the market. This is finally what "click-throughs" did.

None of this is to whitewash either the innovation process as it must be practiced under Silicon Valley rules, or to give a free pass to Google's current practices and impact. Petersen is especially concerned about privacy issues, and I am especially concerned about the free circulation of information under Google globalization. By making Internet advertizing massively more effective, Google made the commercialization of the Internet more pervasive, far more so than during the Netscape Era in which the founders started their doctorates. But even here Google offers a counterintuitive lesson, and it is built into the advertizing model itself.

With Google’s search engine advertising, the value of the ads comes less from their quantity (the number of times the ads appear, for which the company receives nothing) than from their quality (the number of times the ads match what users are looking for and attract purposeful clicks, for which Google receives fees).

Averse as I am to sponsored links, Petersen's description here is right. There's an open source idealism lurking in the business model Google finally hit on, one that makes unfake the often repeated assertion of the Google elders that "Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The idealism doesn't fit into its corporate embodiment, and yet the idealism is what make the company so successful, and made it's innovation possible.

A summary of the innovation elements would run like this:

the dream, disconnected from specific goals; pure curiosity
long absence of a sense of useful application; discontinuity with the "mature" idea
quasi-free resources - no strict cost-accounting during long "precommercial" phase
frame jumping (from graphs to web searches)
rejecting the dominant business model
changing the business model to fit the innovation, not fitting the innovation to the dominant model
pursuit of maximum social value, not just (internalizable) market value

All of these come with enough gaps to deter just about anyone - anyone except people that have overpowering interests untethered from markets of the time.

Competing with China's solar export subsidies: Push-Pull disparity

2010-11-13T16:53:00.000-08:00

As someone completely new to the subject, I’ve been reading up a bit on China’s government strategies regarding CleanTech exporters. These are my initial impressions and thoughts.

China’s solar and wind manufacturers benefit generally from conditions in China (low labor costs, faster and cheaper construction, expanding engineering base through universities), but also specifically from government aid targeted at their industry: land grants to companies, cheap state-supported loans (from government run banks), streamlined permitting, restrictions on rare-earth exports (raising costs for their foreign competitors), and currency manipulation (making their exports more economically favorable). Additionally, Chinese manufacturers have benefited from rapidly falling silicon prices. The Chinese market seems to be dominated by first generation solar technologies.

On one hand, the Chinese government seems to be doing everything right in promoting its manufacturing companies, which are growing rapidly (nearly doubling capacity each year). On the other hand, their practices may be hurting worldwide innovation.

The first thing to ask, regarding US companies, is whether the US government can replicate China’s success. Because some of China’s policies violate WTO and IMF rules, one response would be to claim that the US’s hands are tied in ways that China’s are not (because China is cheating). However true this may be, I think it is somewhat of a red herring. The US simply can’t compete with China in the “general” category. In the “targeted” category, the US government (federal, state, and local) could do so much more for solar startups before running afoul of WTO rules that China isn’t necessarily gaining an unfair advantage here. US solar startups are mostly filling domestic demand, whereas China’s companies are mostly filling foreign demand (95% of their solar panels are exported). The US could provide much better loan guarantees and tax breaks to CleanTech startups, replicating some of China’s success without running into the same export rules. Some of China’s policies are clearly anti-competitive, and US and European companies will benefit if they are successfully challenged.

One thing that is particularly disturbing about China’s policies is the disparity between their manufacturing subsidies and their consumer subsidies. They have done little to create demand for solar domestically, yet have poured massive resources into their manufacturers, feeding an export market. A significant factor in China’s solar export success, then, is deployment/use subsidies in the US and Europe. The US and Europe are providing the pull, and China is providing the push. The result is that US and European companies are being driven out of the market even while the market expands rapidly. This is clearly bad for innovation worldwide. Solar innovation depends on a push-pull ecology (of ideas, money, and products). The problem is two-fold: the US doesn’t support (and protect) its manufacturers, and China doesn’t support its citizens/consumers.

Another consideration is a technological disparity: most US solar startups are working with second and third generation solar technologies, while China’s companies seem to be focusing solely on first generation technology, presumably because it plays to their strengths: it is less encumbered by IP and can be manufactured in enormous quantities, benefiting from economy of scale. US companies, replying primarily on patent portfolios, cannot compete in the realm of manufacturing, unless their products are significantly cheaper or better than older-generation technologies (one of the promises of thin-film solar).

Here a potential solution presents itself: deployment subsidies in the US can be targeted more specifically at thin-film technologies, discriminating to a larger extent between different classes of solar technologies in order to correct the manufacturing imbalance. As long as all solar technologies are treated equal, China’s mass production of older technologies (combined with the current low cost of silicon) will prevail, leading to cheaper solar panels, but less innovation within the industry as a whole. Thus beyond emulating China’s strategies to some extent by supporting domestic solar manufacturing firms, the US government can indirectly help make those companies more profitable and competitive vis-a-vis China, and spur innovation at the same time, by creating larger deployment/use subsidies for thin-film and other advanced forms of solar.

The Mid-Term Effect on R&D Funding

2010-11-13T09:53:00.000-08:00

Now what for science and technology funding?

The situation was already rather mixed. Democrats failed to make a case for a major innovation boom based on a serious increase in public funding. They left public spending in the twilight zone of the last-resort safety net, and now a repositioning will come too late. The Financial Times reported that the Republican victory killed flagship elements of Obama’s innovation policy for at least for the next two years. In “Corporate America welcomes power shift" (print title), the FT observes that cap-and-trade and net neutrality are gone, to be replaced by coal-and-oil and the cable cartels. The same goes for defense conversion, which would have helped research-and-development funding of the kind conducted at universities. The New York Times' Frank Rich has pointed out that neither party offered a coherent storyline in which clear solutions follow well-described problems. In spite of its favorable stance towards science, the Obama Administration does not have a serious innovation policy that aims at supporting the creation of both knowledge and middle-class jobs. And neither party has a plan for supporting and expanding public universities.

Is this what people voted for? There is no popular support for the abandonment of renewable energy, or for the economic inefficiencies of the inequality boom, or for a recovery limited to the top end of the financial industry, or for a recovery based on the Fed reinflating asset bubbles, or for tuition increases at double to quadruple the consumer price index. But the funding news is not good. The AAAS has a useful comment (scroll down to "Post-Election Outlook on Federal R&D Funding"). This table shows that energy research at the DOE would take a particular hit if the Republicans make good on their pledge.

Our ASU and CSPO colleague Dan Sarewitz has a good comment on the general issue, which is that funding levels get too much attention and social purposes not enough.

Boosting funds for basic research is also safer politics than actually tackling a national problem. . . . Doubling the NSF budget makes good politics. But what about good policy? Although few would question the value of a robust basic-science enterprise, we just don't know how marginal increases in basic-research funding affect a nation's capacity to solve social and economic problems. On the other hand, decades of research on the links between science and innovation in areas ranging from jet engines to medicines show that basic research best contributes to economic and social goals when targeted at areas that can directly benefit from additional fundamental knowledge.

If Congress wanted to allocate scarce new R&D resources wisely during a protracted period of budgetary austerity, it wouldn't adopt a doubling strategy, but would instead take a more surgical approach to set priorities. It would focus investments where links between science and application are well established, to deliver short- to medium-term benefits. Alternative energy, for example, offers many technological options where basic research can improve performance.

Sarewitz is here pitching "Pasteur's Quadrant" in vital areas rather than basic research. I think he hammers basic research mistakenly at the end ("I know that such an approach would be fiercely opposed by the leading voices of the scientific community, who will never abandon the long-falsified belief that basic research is most valuable to society as a bottom-up enterprise driven only by inherent scientific interest.") But I share his distress at the refusal of politicians -- and science policy leaders -- to articulate social goals and then fund R&D that addresses them.

The U.S. is the only major power where socially-beneficial tech development is hamstrung by a deep political phobia about industrial policy. Our lunch is being eaten in solar energy and other domains by the country with the most systematic industrial policy in the world - China. This is a bad time to push for science policy rooted in social development -- something only public agencies can do. But it is also even more urgent now than it was when Obama was elected two years ago.

Glowing trees, keeping the streets safe

2010-10-25T17:17:00.000-07:00

"Can street lights be replaced by trees? Taiwanese scientists believe that they can using gold nanoparticles to induce luminescence in leaves." (http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemTech/Volume/2010/11/leaves_glow.asp)

Far out! The first mental image this conjures up for me is pretty spectacular. Luminescent, tree lined suburban streets. But, the mental image that follows includes confused lightning bugs, trees in continual photosynthensis and other bizarre consequences for the entire tree ecosystem. Plus, what does this mean for backyard astronomers? Would it confuse airplane pilots? I'd like to see this trees-as-streetlights idea explored in a sci fi film, complete with stunning visual effects.

Missing Moonshots

2010-09-26T01:53:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting an energy moonshot for years, so it was a real pleasure to see Tom Friedman using his New York Times column this morning to say that other people have moonshots so why don't we? Of course it's China he's referring to (that's Tianjin's high-speed rail station at left, sometime next year). Friedman identifies the electric car industry as a moonshot the US needs to have. The twist is that it would be a joint moonshot between the US and China. This would involve levels of cooperation and information sharing that the world hasn't seen before. It would include the sharing of intellectual property at early stages of development.

The U.S. is internally divided about intellectual property. The business community generally wants uncrackable IP, in large part because empires have been built on secret formula that can't be imitated and made more cheaply in a process that undermines the originator's market. Think Microsoft DOS and Windows, Google's page rank algorithms, Apple, Coca-Cola, and so on. These companies support limited forms of "open innovation," largely where they help build their own product ecosystem. On the other hand, everyone knows that various firms competing for control of the best (and uninfringable) IP isn't nearly enough. Bill Gates, leading venture capitalist John Doerr, and others recently called for a tripling in federal funding for energy research. And yet Doerr sees development largely as a Darwinist competition for the fittest technology among a large number of firms, and in a competitive environment firms naturally rely on trade secrets, undisclosed licenses of patents, and every kind of leveraging of their IP. Top officials sometimes call for the suspension of IP in strategic or early-stage areas, as Energy Secretary Steven Chu did early in his term. How does this square with maximum commercial competition that generally seeks exclusive rights?

China now has a huge advantage over the U.S. in the sheer scale of public funding. I would argue it has also an imagination advantage as well -- the scale of its vision for new infrastructure and public devices outstrips anything now seen in the West. I believe it has a third advantage as well: the creation of massive de facto patent pools for the sake of collective goals that are simultaneously social and economic. The sheer scale of this coordination is necessary given the size of the challenge, and yet it is currently unimaginable in the United States. In spite of our faltering recovery, and the simply uncompetitive state of much of our infrastructure, American leaders seem to feel little urgency. The U.S. is not now leading the energy revolution, and unless we face reality and adapt our IP practices to support massively multi-user collaboration systems, we may soon not qualify as partners.

For concrete examples of next generation IP and technology transfer practices, see in particular the Gerald Barnett and Carol Mimura presentations posted on our Lyon Workshop page.

Nano for gamers

2010-08-18T11:46:00.000-07:00

There's a new kid on the nano education block - 'NanoMission' is a new science-based action-adventure video game designed to teach nano concepts and application areas. From the game's website, "The game's plot is to save the world from destruction by Dr.Nevil and his army of nano-machines and nano-materials, whilst the player stealthily learns about real world nanotechnology. The game hero (player) supported by Dr. Goodlove and his assistants use nano-imaging, create nano-machines, develop nano-materials, and utilise an extraordinary shrinking machine to shrink the player to the nanoscale to stop Dr. Nevil and save the world."

Sounds pretty fun. Not sure if a stereotyped professor (balding Caucasian man with white hair and beard) is the best way to inspire the gaming generation to think about a career in nano, as is the game's goal, but at least they traded the lab coat for a more modern look - latex gloves.

The developer, PlayGen, is working with a team of scientists to be sure to get the science right, including 'realistic physics' in the game environment, but probably more important from a gamer's point of view, the quality of the visual effects and interface is supposed to be up to the standards of current commercial games. The company aims to make the game free to all high schools and colleges - definitely a plus, although wouldn't it be great to see a science-based action-adventure game take off in popularity in its own right?

You can download some of the game modules from the website, www.nanomission.org. If you check them out leave a comment here about what you think.

How Much Has Changed for Science under Obama?

2010-07-13T04:30:00.000-07:00

President Obama has disappointed many of his supporters who focus on foreign policy or the economy by continuing many of the practices of the Bush administration with which he had promised to break. Science policy has seemed like an obvious exception, in which the Obama administration, unlike its predecessor, both respects science and is willing to pay for it. For example, in a keynote address to the European Research Council last year, AAAS president Alan Leshner claimed that American science "is back," and that the US will again be a reliable research partner for the rest of the world.

But there have been warning signs as well, including mixed signals on renewable energy research (as in boosting nuclear and offshore drilling at the same time). In the past several days, two stories have claimed that scientific data and argument remain at the mercy of politics and message control. A piece at the Huffington Post notes that the new rules to promote "scientific integrity throughout the executive branch" are a year late, and that a George Washington University survey found that "most government scientists interviewed did not view conditions at their agencies as having improved noticeably since the change in administration."

On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times ran a long article called "Scientists Expected the Obama Administration to be Friendler." It claimed that many "Scientists charge that the Obama administration is not doing enough to reverse a culture that they contend allowed officials to interfere with their work and limit their ability to speak out," and offered a number of examples.

The conflict between the open circulation of data and message control has been on parade for weeks in the BP gulf oil disaster. UC Santa Barbara scientist Ira Leifer, a member of the government's Flow Rate Technical Group, has reported on the difficulty his group has had getting access from BP to reliable data on oil flow, and on the contrast between BP's repeatedly inaccurate claims and their own findings.

Open access is crucial for both the assessment of social impacts and the advancement of research itself. Since the Obama administration has suffered enormous damage from its association with the BP spill, it should step up with rules protecting scientific integrity and enforce a much higher standard for access than we have seen in recent years.

Moonshot Sentiments

2010-07-05T00:04:00.000-07:00

Most people have thought I am a little nuts for wanting a moonshot on renewable energy research and development in the U.S. Nuts or not, the idea is for a flood of money on the scale created by John F. Kennedy's ten-year goal of a moon landing by the end of the 1960s. The current version could be an order-of-magnitude increase over a 2-3 year period for the full range of renewable energy research -- from say $300 million for photovoltaics in the current year, according to our forthcoming report, to $3 billion by 2013. By comparison, the full cost of the Apollo mission was recently estimated to be $170 billion (in 2005 dollars), or about $10-15 billion per year - around 50 times greater than photovoltaic research today.

The moonshot concept means much more money, and also more than money. It means infrastructural development, government procurement, patent pooling, and strong anti-trust enforcement to assure multiple sources for various energy components.

The energy moonshot would need to do many things that the Apollo moonshot did not. It would need to imagine multiple technology pathways, interact constantly with social demand, imagine future needs in an enriched sociocultural context, and be constructed bottom-up rather than top down. In these ways, it would need to be radically different from the Apollo mission.

A moonshot is the opposite of the incrementalism that is plaguing renewable energy research. We have long been getting small annual increases that neither accelerate research breakthroughs nor create interest among private investors. Energy R&D has also been plagued by political instability, as can be seen in this graphic from the Dooley DOE report linked above.

Oil price spikes in the 1970s lead to a spike in energy R&D, which then collapsed almost as quickly. Direct energy research has been a pitiful also-ran ever since.

Happily, commentators are increasingly fed up with this pattern. They are explicitly targeting instability and incrementalism as huge problems for energy progress. An organization of technology heavyweights, led by Microsoft's Bill Gates, has called for an immediate tripling of energy research to $16 billion per year (over all energy categories). In the introductory video clip for their American Innovation Energy Council, John Doerr notes that Americans spend more money on potato chips than they spend on energy research. In his own clip, he goes on to note that only 4 of the 30 leading companies in a few key energy sectors are in the U.S. The clip is pitched to scare policymakers into better funding with the prospect of U.S. economic decline in what Doerr calls the most important market of the 21st century.

And Bill Gates: "we're missing the basic innovation that would give us this whole new way of making energy."

Gates also stresses the need to draw in about ten times more bright minds into the research, which is "fun work."

In a similar vein, Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth blog recently had a particularly good post on the funding problem. It caught my attention because it linked energy breakthroughs back to quantum dots, a science domain dear to my heart. But Revkin carries on with a series of links and comments from various analysts on this theme:

One key to a sustained national energy quest, is greatly boosting direct federal support for basic research in relevant sciences. For decades, there’s been bipartisan disinterest in such a push. Current investment in this area is so modest that just a 2 cent rise in the federal gas tax would triple the activity.

Many useful arguments follow on the dangers of instability and incrementalism alike.

It's good that these arguments for moonshot funding are increasingly visible. Real funding change is going to take an outside catalyst greater than even the BP Gulf oil disaster has been so far - some major triggering event. The history is clear on this: Apollo is the son of Sputnik. The Soviet's satellite success spawned NASA as an agency and then its moonshot out of a sense of a Cold War military urgency. Sputnik had a similarly dramatic effect on US education. What kind of 2x4 upside the head will focus our attention this time?

The top picture is of Buzz Aldrin setting up a Solar Wind Collector on the moon. It's time for the follow up.

Nano in CBS program

2009-02-28T13:37:00.000-08:00

Those of you who are interested in nanotechnology and popular culture/risk perception might want to check out the most recent episode of the CBS program Eleventh Hour (title: "Electro"). The show features a scientist who works with the FBI to solve emerging health crises using scientific logic to find the source every week (think McGuyver meets CSI meets X-Files).

This past week's episode featured a slew of Massachusetts residents who were getting hit by lightening well above what we'd expect by chance alone. The source of the problem was traced to a fictional company working on "nanofilaments" that were found to be growing throughout people's skin and therefore making them more conductive. This is the most pronounced discussion I've seen on prime time thus far.

You can view the full episode here at the CBS web site.

Enjoy.

-David

Risk Perception Write-Up

2009-02-19T03:55:00.000-08:00

Here's a nice writeup of CNS director Barbara Harthorn's team's research on nano scale risk perception

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T09:54:00.000-08:00

Alternative energy businesses and their financing got completely hammered in the second half of 2008: the Wilderhill New Energy Global Innovation Index fell at almost twice the rate of the Dow (down nearly 34% for 2008). But there's some good news:

New Energy Finance's Newsletter for Dec 9-15, 2008 reports that thin-film PV module manufacturing costs are approaching the $1 / watt mark. This puts price pressure on crystalline silicon-based PV, which is bad for the industry right now. But it's good for research.

The nutty green jet guy isn't a nut after all. Air New Zealand just test-drove a 747 running on a mix of jet fuel and the jatropha plant.

A zero-carbon city is due to arise in 2009, not in the US or EU but in the UAE - with major funding from the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company.

Lots of bad 2008 trends will continue, but 2009 will be an interesting year for energy research. At it looks like this research will be more globally distributed and multi-polar than every before.

Solar on the Ground

2008-12-15T00:50:00.001-08:00

A nice example of what can call solar's policy slump appeared in the Baltimore Sun over the weekend. It's about a possible increase in tax credits for solar installations in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Note the very small numbers involved in the tax credits: "The tax credit would be for 50 percent of the cost of a system or $2,500, whichever is less," although the actual cost of an installation can be $30,000. The program's virtue in tough economic times is that almost no one uses it: "The current solar panel tax credit cost the county a little more than $11,000 in the past 18 months."

US solar is a patchwork of local efforts, and those continuing now have to compete head to head with "gap" payments to the staff of convalescent hospitals and the like. Nothing is more obvious than the need for a policy of national scope.

Renewable Energy Policy Moment

2008-12-07T06:21:00.000-08:00

Writing at Renewable Energy World, Scott Sklar offers a helpful summary of the market forces currently battering renewables - declining energy demand, postponed investments in response, and more subtly, the declining impact of tax credits as the recession reduces companies' existing tax obligations.

Mr. Sklar's main solution is greatly improved procurement policies. Given the fragmented, labyrinthian nature of the federal government's programs, plus of course those of the 50 states, he writes the following:

To reorient existing federal capital (loan, guarantee and bond programs) and existing procurement programs would requite a totally new approach by the Obama Administration. New procurement tools would need to be fashioned not only to accelerate procurements but aggregate procurements and leverage them regionally in concert with other state and local government procurement programs.

This would require White House coordination with mandatory participation by OMB, GSA, DOE's Federal Energy Management Program, and even DOD to insure these procurement and coordination tools could be realized

Nice understatement. Effective procurement requires a kind of revolution in the federal bureaucracy. It would be interesting to know if the upside of the Obama appointments' bias toward the thinking of the 1990s would be some capaciaty for massive consolidation and coordination - the Manhattan Project that energy needs.

There are some good ideas coming out of the transition team. For example, read the transition team co-chair John Podesta's piece on Green Recovery.

Mid-Level Innovation

2008-11-30T02:18:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has a good piece this morning about Amar Bhidé’s new book, The Venturesome Economy. His main argument is that the innovation that creates economic value comes not from basic research but from creative business applications. Those of us in innovation studies should think less about quantum dots and academic labs and more about Wal-Mart's brilliant logistics.

The piece is good because it also points out a key problem with this presentation:
The flaw in Mr. Bhidé’s thesis is that it amounts to a “false choice,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. Most of the economic gains from technology, Mr. Atkinson agrees, do come from its innovative use. “But that doesn’t mean that the basic research is not critical,” he said.

But my favorite quote is from Bhidé, who says value really comes from “all the various forms of knowledge generated by the massively multiplayer innovations game that sustains economic growth.”

This puts the question back where it belongs: not with an either-basic - or-applied question, but with the kinds of institutions that link them together in ways that are effective because they really do pool the multiple players by treating the players equitably.

BTW, for a good overview of the Obama campaign's use of their massively multiplayer online environment, listen to this "To the Point" episode (featuring Thomas Gensemer of Blue State Digital and John Palfrey, author of Born Digital, among others).

Info Problems

2008-11-27T13:37:00.000-08:00

Our group often talks about the difficulty with telling research from publicity in high-tech world in general. I first ran into this in the mid-1990s when reporters from Silicon Valley started to call me in Santa Barbara to talk about workplace conditions in famous SV companies whose employees wouldn't give them the time of day. They were upset that I didn't each in a business school.

Greentech has a kind of funny piece about the problem with compnay information - "Greentech's Top Eight Paranoid Companies." They actually understate the problem.

The Future of Science Literacy

2008-11-15T14:37:00.001-08:00

Here's a nice n depressing review of basic educational level stats. The author is right to wonder where we can go without a better base than this!

On a happier note, Chris Mooney, the author of The Republican War on Science, says the war on science is over and that science has won.

Solar "Panic"

2008-11-13T05:34:00.000-08:00

From Reuters, November 12:

Chinese solar cell maker JA Solar Holdings Co Ltd said on Wednesday the global economic slump had triggered a "panic" in the solar market, prompting it to slash its sales forecasts and sending its shares down more than 30 percent.

Sales of solar cells and panels have risen sharply in recent quarters as companies such as JA Solar ramped up production of the clean power source, but the global economic slowdown has caused that growth to slow, leading to a supply glut.

"At this moment the market reaction has been panic," Samuel Yang, chief executive officer, told a conference call.

The company, which posted a quarterly loss from its ties to defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers, said it had cut back on output of the cells that turn sunlight into electricity and would seek to renegotiate its polysilicon supply contracts.

That effort to cut costs for polysilicon, the key material in its cells, was an attempt to offset an expected 20 percent price decline in the average selling prices of its products.

"Just recently the euro depreciated dramatically, more than 23 percent. So we have to adjust our ASP (average selling price) to support our customers," Yang said.

Europe is the largest market for photovoltaic solar equipment because of the subsidy programs set up by the German and Spanish governments.

JA Solar's stock plunged as much as 32 percent to $2.27 following the announcement, bringing its loss since the beginning of September to nearly 90 percent.

"We do not believe in the 'disaster scenario' implied by the stock's sharp drop during today's session," Raymond James analyst Pavel Molchanov said in a client note, noting that the stock was trading nearly 40 percent below its book value. "JA Solar's low cost structure and healthy balance sheet place it in a strong competitive position."

JA Solar said it would seek a 20 percent drop in the price it pays its suppliers for polysilicon in 2009, and that it had already won price concessions for 2008. The company would seek to push its contracted costs for silicon below the spot market price of about $200 to $220 per kilogram.

SALES TO SLOW

The company cut its 2008 revenue forecast to between $849.5 million to $878.9 million from the $1.05 billion to $1.17 billion it had forecast in October, and said its earnings per share would be near break-even.

It also cut its 2009 revenue forecast to $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion from the previously issued $2.0 billion to $2.2 billion.

Fourth quarter growth margins would drop to 5 to 7 percent, the company said, from 21.6 percent in the third quarter and 23.3 percent in the second quarter.

JA Solar said it lost a net $21.0 million, or 36 cents per American Depositary Receipt, in the third quarter. In the same quarter a year ago it earned $24.4 million, or 17 cents per ADS.

Excluding one-time items, the Hebei, China-based company reported earnings of 25 cents per share, just short of Wall Street analysts' average forecast of 26 cents per share, according to Reuters Estimates'

Total revenue rose to $312.3 million from $125.2 million, and beat estimates of $302.1 million, according to Reuters Estimates, as the company more than doubled its solar cell sales.

JA Solar posted a one-time loss of $100 million in investments it made with Lehman, a $7.3 million loss from the derivatives deals with the bank and a 1.1 million share dilution based on shares lent to the collapsed investment bank.

Renewable Energy - So Three-Months-Ago

2008-11-11T01:59:00.000-08:00

This piece from the Financial Times is one of a series of reports about falling investment in the renewable energy sector. The sector is getting squeezed between the crisis in the financial markets on the one hand, and falling oil prices on the other.

When a group of us spoke in June to physicist and 3rd-Generation solar photovoltaics researcher Alan Heeger, he said he thought much of the investor motivation was driven by the high price of gasoline and not by a sincere commitment to alternative energy development. I thought this was a bit cynical at the time, but he is turning out to be correct.

The test will be what happens when the global recession keeps oil prices weak as the credit markets stabilize. If alternative energy investment doesn't come back then - even when helped by large state investment in China and perhaps even in the US - then Prof. Heeger will be, to his great sorrow, proven correct.

I personally believe the last line of the piece below.

****
Clean energy investment falls sharply

By Fiona Harvey in London, Richard Waters in San Francisco and Sheila McNulty in Houston
Published: November 10 2008 18:08 Financial Ties

Investment in low-carbon technologies is suffering its first reversal after several years of record growth, as the financial crisis dims the sector’s prospects.

Worldwide investment in clean energy companies and new clean energy capacity fell sharply in the third quarter of 2008, compared with the previous quarter, according to New Energy Finance, a market analyst company.

Venture capital and private equity investment totalled $4.4bn in the third quarter, down 24 per cent from the $5.8bn in the second quarter of 2008.

Brent Goldman, partner at BDO Stoy Hayward, said: “We are seeing less activity across the whole market.

“There will be more and more businesses without enough funds, and they will struggle.”

Clean technology investment has soared in the past four years, on the back of high conventional energy prices and fears over climate change and energy security. The cost of renewables has come down and governments have increased their subsidies.

But many clean technology companies are at an early stage, and have found it more difficult to raise funds. Longer established companies have suffered less, but some have found it harder to find funds and credit for expansion.

Capital raising in the public markets was down in the third quarter, at about $2.6bn of new money raised – most of which came from convertible issues rather than flotations or rights issues – compared to $4.9bn in the second quarter.

The biggest public capital raising was by EDF Energies Nouvelles, the French renewable energy company, raising $734m through a secondary issue.

The biggest IPO recorded by New Energy Finance from July to September, at $87m, was Energy Recovery, a Californian energy efficiency specialist.

M&A activity among clean technology companies also fell, by 21 per cent to $2.9bn in the third quarter.

But the financing of new capacity in the clean energy market, such as the building of new wind farms, remained strong at $19bn in the third quarter, only marginally down on the $23bn in the second quarter of this year.

However, as clean technology investment remained relatively strong for the first half of this year, new investment in clean energy worldwide is likely to be only about 4 per cent lower in 2008 than last year, according to New Energy Finance.

Michael Liebreich, chief executive of New Energy Finance, predicted investment would return to its previous high levels next year.

He said: “There will be a hiatus of about six months, but then capital will return. The fundamentals of this business still look good.”

Obama Energy Policy

2008-11-06T23:51:00.000-08:00

Here's Obama the candidate offering a good short summary of his energy and innovation policies. It will be interesting to see how the program holds up.

Renewable Energy World's morning-after summary is pretty sensible.

Hope 1: "“President-elect Obama is the first national presidential candidate who has explicitly campaigned for renewable technologies and green jobs."
Hope 2: "Some renewable energy experts and analysts say that Obama may use the job-creating opportunity that the renewable energy industry holds as a way to usher in a stronger economy while bringing more solar and wind power into the energy mix."

On the latter point, the strongest, clearest advocate is Van Jones, whose organization and new book should be injected without dilution into the Obama administration.

Obama's Tech Team

2008-11-06T13:11:00.001-08:00

At least one technology member of Obama's transition team has been tentatively identified by the Washington Post: Julius Genachowski, a former counsel to the Democrat side of the FCC, a managing director of Rock Creek Ventures, and a friend of Obama's from law school. He seems connected, and draws comments like this:

"Julius is a true believer in the power of technology to change lives and I think that bodes well for the Obama administration that someone like him is part of the transition team," said Rick Whitt, Google's Washington telecom and media counsel.

But the web material on him is paper-thin - I'll try to find something more concrete.

A New Consensus on Innovation?

2008-11-03T03:12:00.000-08:00

This year, the journal Nature has been running monthly commentaries on the innovation process. In August, their editorial on the series claims that we have seen a paradigm shift in our understanding of innovation. We've dropped the "linear model" in which knowledge moves from bench to bedside, from basic research to marketplace, in exchange for bundled processes that are non-linear, interactive, multi-directional, discontinuous, and decentralized. Here's their formulation.

A more accurate picture is that of a nonlinear ‘ecosystem’, in which innovation is driven by multiple players, forces and feedback loops working simultaneously. Such an ecosystem cannot be managed — at least, not in the conventional sense of top-down control. But it can be cultivated, in the way that a gardener can try to create the right conditions for plants to grow, while accepting that unforeseen
elements ultimately dictate the outcome.

The explosive idea here is that the actual, non-linear ecosystem "cannot be managed." We do say this regularly, but do we practice it? Is cutting-edge science becoming more democratic, or at least more self-organized? Have our institutions changed to allow this?

I would answer no to all of these. We can see the next paradigm but we haven't moved there. Our practice is in between paradigms. And when we talk about gardeners, we can assume that our metaphors and implied models also have a way to go.

More on this topic soon.

Nano-Glue

2008-06-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

As I now add nano-products to my "impulse-buy" list at Home Depot, I decided to flip the extra money and get some new Nano-Glue. With childood memories of eating the thick tasty white goo between nap-times in kindergarten, picking up this tube of glue had quaint nostalgia with the "new-and-improved" force of American innovation behind it. Excited, I ran home to fix my sunglasses and enjoy a tastey nibble, only to find out the stuff just sucks. But I have found a valuable metaphor... just like glue, my nano research is globby, sticky, never goes where I want it to, and the more I play with it, the harder it is to get off.

"Lead or Leave"

2008-06-22T15:45:00.001-07:00

I don't get to say this too often, so I'll enjoy it while I can: Tom "Flat Earth" Friedman has an excellent column today on the dumbfounding stupidity of US energy policy. After pummeling George Bush for a while, he calls for a floor of $100 / barrel for oil and $4.50 for gasoline. It'll take more than that to get renewables moving at the speed we need, but it would help. And the anger might help us jump the tracks that lead to the cliff.

It reminded me of a report by Cambridge Energy Research Associates last month about construction costs for power plants, which have more than doubled since 2000. Even if we can afford the fossil fuels to put into the plants, it's not clear we can afford to build conventional plants anymore.

Unfortunately, wind turbines have also doubled in cost since 2005. It's that much more pressure on us to do far better with conservation and efficiencies at the consumption end.

Germany's Solar Valley

2008-05-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

While the entire Center for Nanotech nology in Society was having its site visit from our funders, the National Science Foundation, the New York Times published a piece about one of the solar companies our Innovation Group has been watching, Q-Cells of Thalheim, a town in the former East Germany. Q-Cells "surpassed Sharp last year to become the world's largest maker of photovoltaic solar cells." Some people are calling the area around Thalheim "Solar Valley." Germany gets 14% of its energy from renewable sources, has half of the worlds total PV installations, and is the third largest producer of PV modules (behind only China and Japan).

Why is solar doing so well in Germany? Q-Cells is a sample beneficiary of public support for renewable energy that is far better in Germany than what we have in the United States. One part of our lagging support is direct R&D investment. During my presentation yesterday I showed a chart from a paper of one of our partners, David Mowery, showing the literally invisible chunk of US federal R&D spending devoted to energy - about $3 billion a year in 2006, for all energy research, including under $70 million for carbon capture and sequestration. Less than one-tenth of the already small amount of $3 billion goes to all forms of renewable energy in the US.

But another piece of the story is procurement.

At the heart of the debate is the Renewable Energy Sources Act. It requires power companies to buy all the alternative energy produced by these systems, at a fixed above-market price, for 20 years.

This mechanism, known as a feed-in tariff, gives entrepreneurs a powerful incentive to install solar panels. With a locked-in customer base for their electricity, they can earn a reliable return on their investment. It has worked: homeowners rushed to clamp solar panels on their roofs and farmers planted them in fields where sheep once grazed.

The amount of electricity generated by these installations rose 60 percent in 2007 compared with 2006, faster than any other renewable energy (solar still generates just 0.6 percent of Germany’s total electricity, compared with 6.4 percent for wind).

Solar has been hurt for 25 years by "market failure" - the failure of markets to provide financial returns that support socially-desirable investment. Germany has overcome solar market failure as well as anyone. Even as the Merkel government proposes undoing this, the US should implement its own versions of feed-in tariffs that will support consumer switching.

Alternative Energy and Federal Credits

2008-05-02T07:47:00.000-07:00

So many people mentioned this Tom Friedman piece on upside-down energy policy that I had to link it. Friedman is right about how stupid it is for Congress to have continued credits for gas and oil and stopped those for solar and wind. It's also worth noticing the testimonies in the piece about how alternative energy in the US, especially wind, attracts investment capital only with tax deals to offer investors.

“It’s a disaster,” says Michael Polsky, founder of Invenergy, one of the biggest wind-power developers in America. “Wind is a very capital-intensive industry, and financial institutions are not ready to take ‘Congressional risk.’ They say if you don’t get the [production tax credit] we will not lend you the money to buy more turbines and build projects.”

Friedman's ending is painfully true: "The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way."

Building blocks: bringing nano and stem cells together

2008-04-04T09:04:00.001-07:00

In this article on a new nano & stem cell therapy for spinal cord injuries, the "nano gel" that enables stem cells to treat a spinal cord injury is referred to as a "building block" - I find this extremely interesting, given that stem cells have long been referred to as "building blocks" by numerous relevant communities (medical, media, publics). Despite stem cells' shady origins with embryos, the US public is generally very optimistic about their potential use as a medical treatment. Aligning nanotechnology with stem cells by using the most oft-associated metaphor of the "building block" is a smart move for those who want to positively shape nano's public image.

The "building block" image is used to explain how the nano-gel uses the process of self-assembly to support stem cell functions - again, this is pretty smooth, since the "self-assembly" image is one of the potentially problematic images of nano.

--Mary

Solar Mismatch

2008-04-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

Here's an article about a nice idea for getting solar into home use: seller financing. A company like Solar City buys the photovoltaic panels, designs the system, and installs it. The homeowner pays a monthly fee to the company that's a little like a mortgage.

But then you think about it for a minute and realize that these homeowners will spend fifteen years buying technology that, given the current rate of research, is likely to be obsolete fourteen years before they stop paying for it.

Solar needs a better procurement strategy than this. It needs to be one that can make markets for leading-edge technology and then also finance the installation of the next wave, and the next, and help the customer with upgrades.

***

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-solar3apr03,1,405880.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Firms seek to make solar power more affordable
Companies launch programs to cut the initial outlay for homeowners to as little as 10% of the total installation cost.
By Elizabeth Douglass
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

April 3, 2008

Turning the sun's rays into energy is an expensive endeavor, so solar companies are cooking up financial products that lower the upfront costs for homeowners and businesses.

Foster City, Calif.-based SolarCity is the latest to jump in, launching a lease program Wednesday that would slash the initial outlay for residential customers to as little as 10% of the total installation cost.

"One of the most common reasons that people are unable to go solar is because of the high upfront cost," said Chief Operating Officer Peter Rive, who founded SolarCity with his brother, Lyndon, the company's chief executive. "We're hoping that it revolutionizes the way people purchase electricity."

Rive said an average four-bedroom home would need a 4-kilowatt solar-electric system, which could cost about $25,000 for equipment and installation. That investment pays off financially, but it's a long wait.

"The payback time is long enough that you're effectively going to invest the money into your house and not expect to get it out for a while," said V. John White, executive director of the Sacramento-based Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies. Leasing arrangements like the one offered by SolarCity, he added, "allow people to add solar without as much money upfront, which makes it less of a rich man's game."

Under SolarCity's plan, the customer's only ongoing cost is the monthly lease payment. The homeowner gets the use of the solar power generated by the rooftop system and gets the bill credits when there is excess power that can be fed back into the power grid.

Companies such as Sun Run, SunPower Corp. and SunEdison take another route. They pay the equipment and installation costs, then sell the power at variable prices to the customer through a power purchase agreement.

SolarCity doesn't make the photovoltaic panels, but it specializes in designing and installing systems tailored to each site's needs. The panels are typically installed on rooftops, but they also can be set up on the ground.

Under the lease program, offered in California and soon in Arizona and Oregon, SolarCity would design and install a homeowner's solar-electric system, keeping ownership of the equipment and paying for maintenance and replacement parts.

SolarCity, with backing from Morgan Stanley, offers homeowners several lease options. A homeowner installing a 4-kilowatt solar system could opt for a low initial payment of $2,125, plus monthly payments of $200 for 15 years, the company said.

Homeowners focused on keeping monthly payments low could choose to pay $4,600 upfront, then pay $175 a month for 15 years. A seven-year lease would cost $6,650 down, then $215 a month. Customers who move can either transfer the lease or buy it out.

The switch generally pays off for homeowners who use enough electricity to push them into more expensive rate tiers, yielding monthly electric bills above $200, according to SolarCity. That benchmark could get easier to hit in the coming years, because all of the state's largest utilities have instituted or are pushing for large rate hikes.

elizabeth.douglass@latimes.com

How Do You Support Social Development?

2008-03-23T18:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote about the problem with supporting solar development last month; this has come back again in the form of municipal wireless service, which is floundering in the US and doing OK in other countries. The New York Times had a good piece on Philadelphia, San Francisco, and other cities after Earthlink (among others) decided they couldn't make money in their partnerships with cities on municipal wireless.

Municipal wireless is one of the most direct fixes of the digital divide, since poor folks can get wireless for free off the utility pole and not be excluded from the information world the rest of us take for granted. The benefits are obvious, from basic information like phone numbers so you can call ahead to see if your prescription is being filled at the pharmacy you think it is, to new services for housebound people, local niche businesses, and much more. The "network effects" of universal access are well-known. If wireless becomes a utility, whether low- or no-cost (most of the failed business models charged something), who knows what could happen?

One critic of the public-private partnership noted in so many words that the social benefits - or spillovers - greatly outweigh the capacity of any one company to retain profits, and therefore the companies miscalculated - by virtue of the model itself.

"The entire for-profit model is the reason for the collapse in all these projects,” said Sascha Meinrath, technology analyst at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit research organization in Washington.

Mr. Meinrath said that advocates wanted to see American cities catch up with places like Athens, Leipzig and Vienna, where free or inexpensive Wi-Fi already exists in many areas.

He said that true municipal networks, the ones that are owned and operated by municipalities, were far more sustainable because they could take into account benefits that help cities beyond private profit, including property-value increases, education benefits and quality-of-life improvements that come with offering residents free wireless access.

I would add that Earthlink, the biggest company among the withdrawers, had a chance to rescue itself from oblivion with a very cool and distinctive project that could eventually have make it a hero to millions. It could have improved its technological analysis (it underestimated the number of routers it needed to put on poles) and then gone coast-to-coast. Without municipal wireless, Earthlink will remain another leftover from the 90s dial-up services that counts on the millions' techno-backwardness to prolong its death.

Building on stories like this, and on the work of our research partner David Mowery on the central role of "procurement" in making markets for users that take a while to settle in, we should

get the Obama and Clinton campaigns to sign on to a federal role for national wireless from the east to west and north to south. (The "winner" technology is already picked here, I say to the industrial policy skeptics among us.) And
think more carefully about now to develop procurement strategies for major nanoscale outputs like solar panels.

Performative Nano-Fiction

2008-02-29T14:58:00.000-08:00

From the performance artists who brought you "POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy," there's "The Nano Medicine Revolution: NanoDocs ." NanoDocs is a website, set within a larger website of performative biotech art "RYT Hospital-Dwayne Medical Center." At NanoDocs, viewers may play around with the futuristic concept of nanoscale robots that perform medical functions.

NanoDocs was created as both a website and an art installation (2003) by Virgil Wong. Wong's own website is subtitled, "Experiments with Art, Medicine, and Technology."

Both NanoDocs and Wong's websites are interesting to poke around.

The Nanobots are Back

2008-02-24T08:40:00.000-08:00

The Business section of today's New York Times has an interesting article about IBM researchers who are "trying to put new zip into Moore's Law." Why interesting? Because:

1. Like most nano coverage in the NYT, it's not in the Science section but presented as business...which comports with my view that the NNI is not so much about science policy as it is industrial policy.

2. It points out, yet again, the key place that nanoelectronics has in the overall schema of nanotech.

3. For a historian (me) it's full of lots of references to the bugaboo of technological determinism - "Chips are almost ubiquitous and, where they're not, they probably will be soon."

4. Finally, at the articles end, it quotes a "professor of nanoelectronics" from SUNY-Albany who says that self-assembling nanotechnology (the focus of the article) will create better electronics as well as self-assembled "nanobots that can float in our bloodstreams, searching for cancerous cells that the bots will then eliminate."

Ah, the nanobots. No matter how hard government policy makers, scientists, and engineers try to distance themselves from the futuristic 1980s version of nanotech, it keeps coming back (like parachute pants). The shadow of Eric Drexler continues to loom large over all things nano. In order to understand public reactions, fears, and hopes for nano, this must be acknowledged, understood and, if not believed, then respected.

Energy and Innovation

2008-02-17T07:20:00.001-08:00

Pascal Zachary is the New York Times's man in Silicon Valley, and he's done a quick tour of SV companies working on solar. This is not Zachary above, however, but T.J. Rogers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor and also the head of its new solar company, SunPower Corporation.

Call me shallow, but I would feel less like this were less of a publicity stunt if Rogers weren't dressed like the missing member of a barber-shop quartet.

The article mentions a couple of promising tech areas - thin-film and the more original solar thermal. The technology is incredibly interesting.

The business statements are incredibly boring. I mean "boring" in the clinical sense of the experience that comes from disavowing a painful truth. Boring-but-true statements #1 and #2 are:

"Affordable solar development is also still dependent on government subsidies."
"so much of our effort is going into short-term victories that I worry our pipeline will go dry in 10 years."

There is nothing explicit at least in SV culture or the "California ideology" of high-tech entrepreneurship that supports the government subsidies - call them public investments - that allow for long-term victories. I juxtapose this to the organizational capacities of Asia and Europe, and I worry about us.

Most U.S. readers don't think this contrast between markets and government reflects reality. At least two generations of sociologists, B-school theorists and journalists have discovered the network, and consider it the crucial third term. High-tech business pulls people and resources from everywhere - government labs, universities, large corporations, start-ups, NGOs, and takes whatever it needs. In the U.S., networks are thought to make government direction obsolete, whether it's called investment, industrial policy, or something else.

A case in point is a good piece by Jason Owen-Smth and Woody Powell in the book Cluster Genesis, whose title starts making the book's core point that both research and development take place in clusters that combine disparate institutional forms and continuously and dynamically evolve. The authors look at "strategic alliance networks" in biotech in Boston and the Bay Area, identify five types of organizations and four kinds of connections among them (R&D, financial, licensing, and commercialization). The core point is that clusters and their geography form the infrastructure of biotech development. Although big firms tried to "cherry-pick" the best people and ideas, and everyone predicted biotech shake-outs and consolidation, this trend "faced significant obstacles imposed by deeply collaborative R&D efforts and a mobile scientific work force." As the sector evolved, "the pattern of dense inter-connection deepened, suggesting that the original motivation of exchanging complementary resources had shifted to a broader focus on mining innovation networks to explore new forms of collaboration and product development."

The network is thus more fundamental than financial markets or government planning, in this view, and in some sense the latter categories don't really make sense since they never operate as such. Owen-Smith and Powell find that Bay Area biotech has relied more on venture capital than Boston-area firms, which had more partnerships with academic and public-sector organizations. And yet although the Bay Area relied more on private capital, and Boston on public science, both regions did quite well, generating successful firms and valuable products.

But there are important differences in the innovation systems too. The "private" Bay Area system produced almost twice as many patents per firm as Boston's public. But another measure (variance in forward citations) is higher in Boston, suggesting that that region may engage in more "'exploratory' innovative research." In other words, the VC-fueled Bay Area folks may patent everything in sight, including incremental improvements as a defensive play.

Another important network indicator is "prior art" citations in patents, or backward citations. The "open" public-science structure of Boston-area biotech made 71 percent of its citations of prior art to non-biotech firms while that number was only 45 percent in the Bay Area. Owen-Smith and Powell interpret this to mean that the more commercially-driven, VC-based Bay Area cluster consisted of firms that were interested in their own research and that of their competitors, and less in research from outside their industry sector. When the authors compared a firm from each area that had developed competing therapies for the same condition (relapsing multiple sclerosis), they found this pattern replicated in the patent citation patterns of the respective firms.

The same pattern appears in a third indicator - product type. The Bay Area cluster produced more therapeutics more quickly - about twice as many. But the Boston cluster focused on treatments for rare diseases covered by "orphan designations" that offered "tax breaks and regulatory assistance to organizations that develop such medicines." There was a difference in strategy in the two cases, and although the authors don't use the term, Boston is closer to the outcomes one would expect of "public science" - addressing a clear need even when markets will offer modest or minimal rewards.

Thus "network" isn't so much a third term as a compound of the other two. Good empirical work redivides it into two familiar tendencies. The first cluster - the Bay Area's - is composed "largely of competitors and investors [who] are primarily concerned with speed and with commercial development, hence they pursue a more focused innovation process that relies heavily on internal R&D and attention to the efforts of direct competitors." On the other hand, there are "firms that are embedded in networks anchored by public research organizations and that lack strong investor involvement" and thus don't only "pursue immediate commercial returns." The latter, Boston model relies on external sources of knowledge and favors "more exploratory efforts at discovery." Governing ties in Bay Area firms tend to be more exclusively financial. Finally, the Bay Area model seems to be suffering some kind of lock-in, as the need for access to early capital sends firms back to the same small group of VC folks - with their same strategies, connections, and goals - again and again and again.

Even scholars dedicated to network theory with excellent data point out the constant danger of market failure and the rarity of a strong foundation of Boston-style public science.

There's also something about the sheer exteriority of this understanding of innovation - big and small companies, capital flows, people from famous corporations who start new ones. What about the invention process?

I happened to read this passage in a London Review of Books piece about a new book on gravitational waves.

Near the end of the 17th century, Edmond Halley examined records of medieval and ancient solar eclipses back to the time of Ptolemy. He discovered that when he used the position and trajectory of the Moon to determine retrospectively when solar eclipses should have occurred, the times calculated differed from the actual ones by up to an hour. Halley deduced that in the past the Moon must have moved across the sky from east to west more slowly than in his own time. This was a far-reaching, even heretical assertion. For the Moon to have changed its motion in such a way would imply that its course through the heavens did not repeat in periodic orbits. Such ‘secular’ changes in its orbit could eventually cause the system itself to disappear, and the Moon to fall into the Earth or escape into space. For many philosophers, to theorise that the cosmos could decay in this way was a slur on the Almighty, as it implied that God was such an unskilled craftsman as to have constructed a system of stars and planets that could fall into ruin and disorder. Nonetheless, Halley was right, as even the fundamentalists were eventually forced to concede. The question now became: what causes the secular acceleration of the Moon?

This passage amazed me. I can't imagine running these complicated hand calculations for days and weeks and maybe months, coming up with a one-hour difference over decades and centuries, and not thinking oh well, I screwed up a line of my math. How do we still find and nurture these people - the ones with the sheer courage, the mind-boggling stubbornness, to decide they are right, everyone else is wrong, there's a one-hour gap, then come up with a new theory, one that would not be bourne out for hundreds of years?

How do we remake a business system with enough space and time to allow this kind of research? How likely is it to happen in California?

Why I love Nano

2008-02-14T11:31:00.001-08:00

Though I purport to study nanotechnology with a critical scholarly eye, I must admit to (more often than not) being swept up in the nano-hope-hype. It's hard not to be drawn in when researchers like Zhong Lin Wang (materials science, GA Tech) propose nano-enabled clothes that can harness the energy from our normal day-to-day movements (see article brief here).

On this blog and in many other CNS-UCSB venues, we've had many discussions about the science fiction rhetorics associated with nanotechnology. I wonder how many us (the critical scholarly types, of course) find themselves seduced by the science fiction-like potential of nanoscience? And is this a bad thing, really?

Human 2.0

2008-02-13T09:32:00.000-08:00

Much of the nano & Society scholarship lacks a decent historical perspective coupled with analysis. Although it's not specifically geared toward nano, Michael Bess' article in the January issue of Technology and Culture provides an interesting historical perspective on the emerging technologies for human enhancement. Noting that how much human enhancement technologies sound like sci-fi, Bess argues that we have not connected the dots to see the total effects of these new technologies. Nonetheless, it is "ourselves who are being refashioned" with what he argues will be the defining technologies of the 21st century.

A Tight Grip Can Choke Creativity

2008-02-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

Check out New York Times business writer Joe Nocera's overview of copyright issues in relation to Harry Potter. Potter author JK Rowling gets to play the role previously reserved for Mickey Mouse grandmaster Disney, the evil Archemandite of copyright control from the heyday of Lawrence Lessig's crusade against endless copyright extension in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The piece has a strange, dated feeling - has there really been no change in the copyright battle lines for 10 years?

Basic Research at . . . Microsoft!

2008-02-03T23:39:00.001-08:00

The New York Times has a piece announcing that Microsoft will open its sixth "basic research" lab in July, this one headed by the mathematician Jennifer Tour Chayes (at left) and placed next door to MIT. Dr. Chayes will apparently "be one of the first women to direct a research lab run by an American corporation."

In the last couple of decades, industy has tended to close or spin-off its basic research labs, to rely on partnerships with academia, and to conduct what Intel calls "directed research" with two important features: 1) it is oriented toward short-term product development and 2) it maximizes its use of other people's research rather than developing everything in-house. Henry Chesbrough has dubbed this system "open innovation," and contrasts it with the in-house lab model. Is Microsoft partially reversing this trend?

The quick answer is no. Microsoft Research has 800 employees with doctorates. Google has 100. In its heyday, Bell Labs had well over a dozen major facilities, the largest of which, at Naperville-Lisle outside Chicago, had 11,000 employees.

Size isn't the only thing that matters. But we do know enough about the innovation process to know that randomness is a central variable - people get amazing data or have great insights at unexpected and unpredictable moments. Size does matter. Not in a linear way, where big = best, but in an unpredictable and yet semi-regular way. Throw in the fact that MSFT and GOOG are two of the wealthiest companies in history, and you are likely looking at an exception to the industry trend of oursourcing research rather than a trend that counters it.

And yet Microsoft Research is a tribute to the economic as well as the strategic value of basic research. As public university budgets are continuously squeezed, universities can afford less basic research. Given the country and the world's desperate research needs, this would be a good time for large companies - even those riding the revenue roller-coaster like Intel - to fund more basic than they are funding now.

P.S. I've avoided blogging on the Microsoft bid for Yahoo! because it makes me, well, sad. I started graduate school the same year that the IBM PC came out - 1981. As an academic I grew up with DOS, and snubbed Apple's graphical interface as kid stuff for almost 15 years. Now Microsoft and Windows are dated and stagnant, and Microsoft's amazing cash reserves (perhaps still as high as $30 billion before this offer) are a triumph of monopoly power over innovation. Joe Nocera at the New York Times sums all this up quite nicely.

Nano Roadmap

2008-01-29T10:09:00.000-08:00

Check out the new roadmaps for nanotechnology and the path to atomically-precise manufacturing. This link takes you to the Foresight Institute where copies can be accessed.

The Shock of the Old: A Review

2008-01-06T00:19:00.000-08:00

This book's full title is "The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900" (Oxford, 2007). Its author, David Edgerton, a historian at Imperial College, manages not to use the word "nanotechnology" a single time in 270 pages. Yet the book is directly relevant to nano-issues. In addition to insights about innovation that I discuss below, the analysis can be taken as an antidote to the pressure on all nanoscale fields to develop faster than any previous wave of technology.

Edgerton's title is obviously saying, "the old is important too." The book has a huge number of examples of old technology and low technology that continue to affect society long after they supposedly peaked. Hybrids spring from every page: there are the traditional Thai long boats joined to V-8 car engines - remember the flying-boat chase scenes in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies? Edgerton always stresses the overlooked efficiency of old tech in new situations. For example, he traces Rwanda's "spectacularly fast genocide" in 1994 in part to the machetes stockpiled in advance: "most victims were killed machetes (38 per cent), clubs (17 per cent) with firearms accounting for only 15 per cent of deaths."

Edgerton is right that we underestimate the role of the old. But his second and most important theme concerns why we do this. His explanation is that we make the mistake of centering our histories of technology on innovation rather than on use. We date advancement and progress from the moment a technology appears or is first applied, and downplay the long and winding road of adoption, imitation, diffusion, improvement, recycling and hybridization. And yet it is this long haul that decides the impact of a technology on society, and not its exciting first revelation.

Important things follow from retelling the history of technology as the history of use.

it changes technological time, slowing it down, stretching it out, and shifting its major impacts, usually to a much later date.

it allows us to follow the social uptake of technology, and tell the stories of its actual deployment.

For example, steam power "was not only absolutely but relatively more important in 1900 than in 1800." Similarly, "the world consumed more coal in 2000 than in 1950 or 1900." If we date steam power from its earlier appearances in Britain in the 1700s, we will identify it with the "dawn of the industrial revolution," see its importance as ended by other energy forms (oil, electricity), and miss steam's long and influential presence in later decades. If we do look at use rather than invention or first adoption, we can, to take another case, recognize the continuing importance of coal to China's current round of spectacular industrialization, and appreciate the extent to which it will "win" by using the old.

Seeing the power of the old doesn't mean we can ignore the new or the processes of innovation that create it. But we will redefine innovation when we keep the old in view.

Innovation begins to look different in Edgerton's chapter on nations. I will start a list of the core changes:

high levels of research and development (R&D) spending correlate with higher levels of national wealth and growth in gross domestic product (GDP).
high levels of R&D do NOT correlate with high levels of innovation OR with high levels of economic growth.

We should pause to think about these points, since they undermine the central justification for R&D spending, which is that this spending always boosts the national economy.

Edgerton offers some examples of his claims. "In the 1980s Italy overtook the United Kingdom in output per head . . . while spending much less on R&D than Britain did" (109). Similarly, "Spain was one of the most successful European economies in terms of rates of growth in the 1980s and 1990s, and yet this is a country which spends less than 1 per cent of GDP on R&D." Edgerton notes that the USSR spent as much or more of its GDP on R&D than did the US in the 1960s and 1970s, and yet is regarded as "having contributed practically nothing novel to modern industry" (110). Or take China vs. Japan. Japan has long had one of the highest rates of R&D spending in the world, but "while China has transformed itself and flooded the world with manufactures, the much more innovative Japanese economy has been, by comparison, stagnant" (109). This kind of data - which has been known by specialists since the 1960s - leads to further claims:

3. imitation as at least as important as innovation to economic growth.

4. "global innovation my be the main determinant of global economic growth, but it does not follow that this is the case for particular nation states" (113).

We can restate (3) to make it more compatible with Edgerton and with the work that we're doing here at the CNS:

3a. uptake and use of technology are more important than innovation as such to economic growth.

Innovation has not been demoted here so much as it has been yoked to diffusion, spillovers, transfer, and technology sharing. Technological innovation has meaning (and economic value) only as a social process.

This general principle does not help explain a central mystery in this book: why the US has been the great exception to the rule that innovation and growth do not go hand-in-hand? "By mid-century . . the USA was a clear leader in industrial research and innovation by any standard: it dominated both world production and world innovation. As such it was wholly atypical" (112).

Edgerton is disappointingly unwilling to dig more deeply into the American Anomaly. We must explain it, though, because the belief that effective R&D leads to greater economic growth continues to drive technology policy. Policymakers could accept points 3a and 4 above, and respond as follows: R&D certainly does improve economic growth (4), and the problem is with freeriders who take your great new stuff without paying you properly. Thus (3a) just means that we need stronger intellectual property protections, including international agreements like TRIPS, to prevent countries like Italy and Spain and China from borrowing - i.e. stealing - their way to the top.

Edgerton would reject this interpretation, since he rejects the "linear model" that lies behind it (see below): he would deny that most innovation comes from official R&D lab sources, that imitation is so different from invention, and that use is theft. I'm getting ahead of myself here, but I mention this now to suggest that the stakes are very high, and that it is not enough for historians to say the linear model (in which R&D leads to growth) isn't always true or generally true. They must also do more to spell out a non-linear model that will encourage policymakers to do more than just patch the linear model with stronger IP - which is where most policy rests right now.

But back to the book: Edgerton does say that the US enjoyed high rates of growth in earlier periods because it applied itself to borrowing and adapting technology first developed in Europe: this continued, and may explain the "golden age" growth of the 30 years following World War II. Historians of US technology would also suggest that the US benefited from massive Cold War military investment and from its long experience with the highly skilled coordination of large-scale engineering projects. The most famous of these was the Manhattan Project (actually the "Manhattan Engineering District") that produced the atomic bomb during World War II. As Edgerton points out, this "builds on decades of experience in large-scale research and development" (199). Technology sharing and ambitious, well-coordinated projects are a major part of the US economic story, and they lead to a further point.

5. technological and economic development depend on advanced infrastructure and coordination, which historically arise more from sophisticated institutions than from markets.

Evidence of this last point comes in the form of Edgerton's stress on the role of very large firms in the innovation process. Major advances have continuously come from companies like BASF, Hoechst, Bayer, AGFA, General Electric, AT&T, IBM, Du Pont and Eastman Kodak: "all these firms were already very large, innovative in 'science-based' technologies, and employed an abundance of scientists and engineers" (193). They created internal R&D operations, and these generally remained productive for decades at a time. "At least fifteen out of the twenty-three firms listed as the top R&D spenders in 1997 (and 2003) were formed before 1914" (194).

Taking points 1-5 together reminds us that there has never been such a thing as "closed innovation," in which development took place inside one institution. Analysts like AnnaLee Saxenian (Regional Advantage), Clayton Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma) and Henry Chesbrough (Open Innovation) have made much of the new dependence on innovation networks that no company or even nation can control. The history of technology shows that there is nothing new about the sheer dispersal, the boundary-crossing, the institutional mixing and sharing, or the global scale of invention. A whole range of motives, participants, organizations, and sectors are always involved in any major technological wave. And this insight leads to a further major point:

6. "Most invention has taken place in the world of use (including many radical inventions) and furthermore has been under the direct control of users" (187).

This is a fantastically important idea. It puts practitioners of every kind at the center of innovation throughout history. It puts use at the center of invention. It puts the street and the shop next to the state-of-the-art academic lab. It puts imitation at the heart of invention. It truly displaces the "linear model" (from bench to bedside, from lab to market, from specialist to customer, from agent to recipient, from producer to consumer, from smart to dumb). It discredits the basic categorical distinctions on which that model generally rests.

Once technological development is defined through use, we can push Edgerton's point for heuristic purposes and say:

7. The history of technology is the history of everybody. That is, of everybody's uses of it.

which implies:
7a. the importance of laboratories to technology has been greatly overrated.

or more precisely and helpfully:

7b. There is no "downstream" (public) to try to push "upstream" (scientific laboratories), because in the history of technology, there is no "upstream." In other words, at different points in a technology's history, everyone is upstream.

or:

7c: technology develops variously all over a global field, one that mixes technique, infrastructure, know-how, facilities, social frameworks, and social needs. Tech development must be studied this broadly.

This means that the study of the history of technology must become as radically interdisciplinary as technology itself. Economists and historians need to work together regularly. Institutional sociologists need to be there too. So do specialists in cultural and artistic change, which are part of the same process. The intellectual task needs to be seen in all its profound difficulty before it can be resized and broken down enough for progress to be made on its parts, correctly interrelated to one another.

Our innovation group at CNS is particularly interested in the institutional capacities that link research and use. We seek to develop the non-linear development model. Edgerton's book confirms and extends our existing thinking. It teaches a few other things about innovation in general:

"the twentieth century was awash with inventions and innovations, so that most had to fail. Recognising this will have a liberating effect. We need no longer worry about being resistant to innovation . . . Living in an inventive age requires us to reject the majority that are on offer" (210).
"we are free to oppose technologies we do not like."
we are free "to research, develop, innovate, even in areas which are considered out of date by those stuck in passe futuristic ways of thinking."
while our technology has been highly innovative, our technology policies have not.

Though the non-linear model does not emerge here, Edgerton does build pieces of the foundation for more innovative policies about innovation. Ironically this means seeing innovation as not-so-central to technological change, seeing innovation as common, and seeing the rejection of innovation as essential to sustaining it.

It also means seeing that innovation is often opposed to innovation. In my favorite single sentence in the book, Edgerton says, "calling for innovation is, paradoxically, a common way of avoiding change when change is not wanted" (210). Edgerton is thinking of climate change: perhaps we call for new technology as an alternative to creating the new social arrangements that would truly renew the impacts of technology.

Any valid non-linear model will need to consider the function of publicly funded basic science in government and university laboratories. The issue is given additional urgency by the fact that the American research university system has been the key element in creating the American Anomaly mentioned above, in which the US translated innovation into greater economic gain than did other countries. As Edgerton's work implies, the difference probably does not flow from a linear tech transfer system in which academic research results are rapidly transferred to product developers in the private sector. The decades of high economic growth preceded the modern university-industry tech transfer system, and decades of work in research economics have shown the importance of the public funding of basic research to economic development. The research university mostly likely helped the economy by staying apart from it, and concentrating on basic research aimed at the far horizon, whose payoffs would arrive in 20-50 years.

The Internet is a classic example of the long development process for a transformative technology, which was underway in government and university labs at four decades before its commercial emergence. Nano is another example: as the work of CNS researchers Patrick McCray and Cyrus Mody - among others - has shown, key nanoscale techniques, concepts, goals, and materials have been in development since the 1970s, if not before.

If Edgerton's first theme is the power of the old, and his second is putting use before invention, his third is that innovation is the frequent enemy of progress. Innovation today occurs during "the expansion of a new kind of poor world, a world which has been almost continuously at war, and in which millions have been killed and tortured" (211-12). Technology has done well by war and killing (the titles of two of Edgerton's chapters on R&D). Edgerton adds on the book's final page, "Technology . . . has been responsible for keeping things the same as much as [for] changing them."

The social and cultural study of science doesn't say that the third theme dominates the first two. But it does reject their segregation, and tries to "see technology whole" in its relations to the world overall. It asks us to interpret technology through its social and well as economic effects. Finally, it says to all of us in the nanoenterprise: history will refuse to made any exceptions for nano.

Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist

2007-12-28T12:28:00.000-08:00

Iain Banks drinks from the same spring of maniacal invention as Neal Stephenson, and swims in the same kind of infinite fountain of words. But he relegates nano to almost nothing in this major SF novel from 2005. Nano plays the role of some crappy surveillance dust that is found out in time for Fassin our lead to save himself. Let's just say that nano is NOT a "general-purpose technology."

The Algebraist's system is extremely advanced, but the extremely small has a walk-on as a variable component in an agent of control.

There are all sorts of great things about this book, which sometime you absolutely must read! Among others, there are elements of a theory of technology:

1. the most powerful is the most embedded. The species that has the highest-tech has also integrated it so completely into its cultural systems that it is most of the time literally invisible.

2. the best takes the longest. My late friend Freddie Payne used to say Thinking Takes Time. So does technology. We think of technology as the accelerator, or at least the fast. In the Algebraist, advanced technology takes forever. More to the point, it is the realm of the Slow.

3. good use is decentralized. Successful defense technology is entirely off the social grid and is controlled by unknown members of the Slow species who consult no one. But oddly it a different, highly structured social system that is despotic - the Mercatoria, which stratifies and maps everything and is oriented towards control. Something about the Slow species - trust, history, cultural telepathy, who knows - allows this completely diffused authority to work. It is the only kind of authority that does.

Good tech in this book comes from some new mixtures of social organization that we have hardly started to imagine. We can at least ask the concept - the inspiration - of nano to help with that.

Or as Banks puts it, describing the stories told by the Slow: "in all that flux of chaos, propaganda, drivel and weirdness, there were nuggets of actuality, seams of facts, frozen rivers of long-forgotten history, whole volumes of exobiography and skeins and tissues of truth."

Shrink-Wrapped Bucky Balls?

2007-12-13T11:43:00.000-08:00

While looking through Sandia's homepage, I came across a recent discovery by one of their researchers. Jianyu Huang claims to have been the first to collect in situ experimental observations of a fullerene being formed. By heating single atom-thick layers of carbon so they bend into nanobowls, the carbon atoms continue to pile on until a "mega-fullerene" is formed. Contnued heat "shrink-wraps" this strucutre into a more stable C60 atom. Sandia theorizes that this may pave the way for a way to mass produce fullerenes. Of curious note is the life story of Huang, being raised in a rural Chinese villiage: http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/buckyball.html

Ongoing R&D Debate

2007-11-29T07:22:00.000-08:00

The Financial Times has run a piece by a senior analyst at the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts. He says that while the US has appeared "to be attracting the world's next generation of scientists and engineers . . . there was one country whose citizens did not find the US attractive enough to pursue a career in science and engineering: the US itself." The author, Sami Mahroum, offers the familiar statistic that one-third of SE doctorates in the US go to foreign-born students.

That stat isn't as stale as it sounds, and needs better interpretation. But Mahorum goes on to say something more surprising about Europe. Not only does Europe have higher rates of SE enrollments than the US (27 percent get SE degrees, vs 24 percent in Japan and 16 percent in the US), but its businesses invest more than their American counterparts on research and development - $232,000 vs. $180,000. And although the US spends a higher proportion of its GDP on R&D (2.5 percent vs. 1.8 percent for the EU), the 12 core EU countries have higher rates "when measured against the size of their workforce."

As the US "brain gain" ebbs, it will have a harder time even staying in place. The obvious solution - reinvestment in SE human resources - should not be delayed by the coming recession.

Another Good Article

2007-11-28T17:37:00.000-08:00

Nice to see some more activity here. For those interested in the nano -- sci-fi connection, look at Daniel Patrick Thurs's piece in the September 2007 issue of Science Communication. Entitled "Tiny Tech, Transcendent tech," it offers an excellent look at the various ways sci-fi has been used by various communities to promote (and sometimes oppose) nanotech. It also has some trenchant points about how science communication with the public, especially when it comes to trying to make science noteworthy, now often relies on sci-fi imagery despite the problems this may pose.

Good Article- "The challenge of regulating nanomaterials"

2007-11-26T15:04:00.000-08:00

The online version of the journal Environmental Science and Technology has a great article on regulation of nano-enabled products.

"The challenge of regulating nanomaterials" by Rhitu Chatterjee

You can view the article here with a current subscription to ACS journals

Risky Business

2007-11-25T08:52:00.000-08:00

The November 24, 2007 issue of The Economist has a very good article about the current state of discussions in the U.K. and the U.S. about the risks posed by nanoparticles. Some thoughts.
- One might conclude that some people are feathering their own nests...Do people at universities with research centers devoted to nanotoxicology (as well as NGOs which tout the associated uncertainty of this risk) have a vested interest in calling for more research on the subject?
- How will nanoparticles be regulated, measured, accounted for? This seems especially important if, as the article claims, the average person breathes in some 10 million of these a minute.
- Why, after nearly a decade of formal government funding, is there no clear international agreement on what nanotech is, as The Economist, claims, work is being done at the International Standard's Organization in Geneva but when will this be completed?
- Does anyone else see the problem in having the NNI both promote nanotechnology as well as the funding to mitigate its risks. I'm struck by a historical analogy with the early days of the nuclear power industry when the Atomic Energy Commission was tasked with both advancing and regulating nuclear power. And we all know how well that worked...

Show Me the Data

2007-11-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

One thought for a research project - track the number of undergraduate and graduate courses at research universities that deal with nanotech. As one of the premises of the NNI is that it will help foster a revolution (yes, one of those) in interdisciplinary research, this should be testable. And one of the signs of this should be an increasing number of nanaoscience/nanotech classes which are cross-listed. If nothing else, it would be interesting and useful to survey the pedagogical basis of these courses...what is being taught, what texts are used, how is nano presented?

Any takers?

Nanosonatas

2007-11-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

I came across the below article today. It made me think about how nanotechnology while still in its nascent stage of scientific and technological development has had such a wide influence on the imagination of individuals across disciplines.

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Pianist blends nanotechnology with music

(Nanowerk News) If the hard science of nanotechnology took on the soft curves of classical music, what would it sound like? The two will come together at a concert Friday, under the nimble fingers of pianist Milton Schlosser, a University of Alberta music professor.

Schlosser, based at the U of A's Augustana Faculty in Camrose, is premiering a series of 'nanosonatas' written specifically for him by American composer Frederic Rzewski. The work, entitled Nanosonatas, Volume 1, was commissioned by Schlosser through the U of A's Humanities, Fine Arts and Social Sciences Research grant program.

The composition reflects Rzewski's interest in biomolecular nanomachines. He essentially compresses the form of 20- to 40-minute, 19th-century sonatas into seven three-minute segments which challenge music-lovers in exciting new ways, Schlosser said.

Read complete article

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Doing a little more research I found some actual music clips of a pianist Michael Kirkendoll playing the Nanosonatas. Take a listen, they have a pretty interesting avante-garde sound remembering that the sound is a composer's interpretation of what nano-machines sound like. Note too the incorporation of the Book of Genesis - very interesting given our conversation last week.

Gray Goo on the Big Screen

2007-11-13T17:32:00.000-08:00

An interesting article came out today on Wired.com entitled Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: The Singularity. In the article, Ray Kurzweil discusses the plot of his upcoming docudrama concerning the future of rapidly accelerating technology and its inevitable impact on human beings (based on his book The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About The Future). According to journalist Eliza Strickland, "As a result of the exponential progress of technology, Kurzweil believes, we're racing towards a day when the power of the artificially intelligent machines we create will exceed human brainpower."

As this relates to nanotechnology, Eric Drexler and Bill Joy will make an appearance in the movie. Furthermore, the underlying narrative of the movie will be based on a "gray goo" attack with which the main character, Ramona the avatar, will have to confront. (see the following excerpts from the article)

Wired News: What's in the documentary part?

Kurzweil: It contains footage of myself, and also me interviewing 20 big thinkers, talking about their ideas, and their ideas about my ideas. We have people like Eric Drexler, one of the founders of nanotech; Aubrey de Grey, a theorist about radical life extension; Bill Joy.

Wired News: So in the movie's narrative, Ramona the avatar is the main character?

Kurzweil: It's a Pinocchio story. She detects a "gray goo" attack, an attack of self-replicating nanobots. The Department of Homeland Security is oblivious to this, and won't listen to her, so she gets her other avatar friends to work on this. But she breaks some homeland security protocols in the process. She's arrested -- and there's a discussion about how you can arrest a virtual person...

It is important to note that Kurzweil has some interesting connections to the nanotech discourse. Some of his viewpoints and affiliations are highlighted on his Wikipedia page.

For more information about the movie, visit the IMDb site.

Visit Kurzweil's website and talk to Ramona here.

Nano and Second Life

2007-11-09T12:20:00.000-08:00

Given our discussion yesterday about the messianic nature of nano pre-history when I came across the below news tidbit I stopped and thought how strange nano is across so many dimemsions. First of all the "creation myth" surrounding nano with Feynman's role and Drexler's proselytizing makes for a good story and I'm sure when someone options the movie script it will be an instant science-fiction classic. Add to this surreal story a virtual online dimension and you have the makings for a real mind-bender a la the Matrix.

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Nanotechnology in Second Life

(Nanowerk News) You might have heard of Second Life, an Internet-based virtual world that has received quite a bit of media attention over the past year. A downloadable client program called the Second Life Viewer enables its users, called "Residents", to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another. Companies and other organizations have set up a virtual presence in Second Life; Sweden has even opened an embassy.

Now there is a nanotechnology presence as well – Nanotechnology Island has launched in Second Life with the goal to establish a place for the Nano Science and Technology communities to come together and to bring key ideas and research into public discussion.

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NanoLands the group behind the creation of Nanotechnology Island in Second Life (SL) has created a contest reminiscent of Feyman called the NanoLands Challenge encouraging Second Life users to imagine and build an virtual exhibit about nanoscience or nanotechnology within SL. Winners could receive up to $700 "real" US dollars. For more on the contest see: http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=3174.php

Nano Origami

2007-11-08T23:08:00.000-08:00

After today's talk in Patrick's class, I was curious to find who should claim the credit for the creative metaphors of nanotechnology... I came across this TED talk from Paul Rothemund who fancies himself a "magician with DNA" who folds nanoparticles much like origami. Also of note is that at a website that claims to hold the top one-thousand thinkers, Hod Lipson of self-replicating fame and the nano-visionary Ray Kurzweil are featured.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/183

Nanoscience and Hope

2007-11-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

Friday's LA Times featured a front-page story on John Kanzius, the man who developed a system to kill cancer tumors using radio waves and nanoparticles. Two things stand out in this inspiring narrative. First, Kanizius is an engineer who worked in television and radio broadcasting with no experience in the medical field. He had been developing the radio transmitter himself while undergoing chemotherapy. He later collaborated with Richard Smalley, including nanoparticles that attach themselves to cancer cells. The system essentially heats up the nanoparticles, killing the cancer cells while leaving the healthy tissue unaffected. In other words, chemotherapy would be a thing of the past. Second, the article points to at least one other potential use for Kanzius' invention -- distilling hydrogen from salt water for use in fuel cells.

When reading this article, you can't help but be hopeful about the future of nanotechnologies and nanoscience. The article clearly gives the impression that these miraculous inventions are just around the corner. What effect will these hopeful media frames have on public opinion? Does the hopeful frame of the nano-related medical stories transfer to the larger issue of nanotechnologies and nanoscience?

Nano news from ACS

2007-11-01T15:12:00.000-07:00

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has a new website for the nanoscience community, Nanotation
(link here)

There is also an article in the C&E News "Challenges Of Risk-Based Nanotech Research"

Notes from the Nano-Road

2007-10-31T16:50:00.000-07:00

I'm about 2 weeks into an 18 day trip. I started in DC where I gave a presentation on the history of the space elevator to the Society for the History of Technology. The theme was that of reconverging technologies in the guise of the space elevator and the talk drew upon research Mary and I have did.

Next was the Nano-Image meeting in Columbia, South Carolina. This meeting brought together scientists, nano & society people, and art historians to talk (in excruciating detail) about the various uses and types of images at the nano-scale. What I took away from the meeting was that even among people who purportedly study nano, understanding of the topic is often lacking.

I'm now in Princeton where I'm looking at the papers of a physicist who Eric Drexler worked with in the 1970s. Tomorrow it's on to DC(again) for the History of Science Society meeting and then back to California. Whew.

Space Elevator Games

2007-10-21T18:53:00.000-07:00

Patrick and Mary should take note of the Space Elevator Games, a competetion that will test some of the early designs for a vehicle capable of steadily ascending a long cable. In this case, that cable was made of steel rather than carbon nanotubes. While some may be skeptical about these activities, or call them exercises in playing make believe, I think that they are a fantastic way to stimulate innovation. A lot of people struck out with their designs for flying machines before the Wright Brothers took off.

How Nano is different from Fuel Cells...

2007-10-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

Chris Toumey, in his 4S talk, "Dialogues on Nanotech," reported findings based on USC's Citizens School of Nanotechnology. One set of comments that struck me as particularly interesting addressed the difference between public perceptions of nanotechnologies and fuel cell technologies. Overall, participants could envision a future with fuel cell technologies more easily than they could a future with nanotechnology: compared to fuel cells, nano has ambiguous outcomes, is not well-focused, and seems to be part of a far distant future whereas fuel cells are more clearly framed in terms of goals and definitions and have been effectively billed as a near-term technology. Thus, participants could see fuel cells as a means for their own personal prosperity - or at least for the prosperity of their local communities.

Read more on USC's Citizens School of Nanotechnology here and here.

Nanobreakfast anyone?

2007-10-15T10:10:00.000-07:00

Given this week's discussion of historical analogy generally and the vital need for context and depth specifically, it seemed pretty fair to say the analogy between Nanotechnologies and GMOs in food was being deployed frequently and carelessly.

The specific realm of nanotechnology-driven food may be one arena where the analogy is more apt; though if most applications were to be niche-marketed, to say dieters or non-cooks, as opposed to food supply wide, this could reduce the volume or scope, if not the voracity, of scrutiny directed towards nanofoods.

In terms of public perceptions of nanotechnology, is it an asset or disadvantage to have public discussions about the merits and risks of nanotechnology-enhanced food?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6334613.stm

Live from Montreal at the 4S

2007-10-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

I'm here at the 4S (Society for the Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting) in Montreal. I've enjoyed a number of nano-related talks thus far.

Brigitte Nerlich, from the University of Nottingham, gave an interesting talk earlier today on images of the nanobot. Her answer to the question, "why is the image of the nanobot perpetuated in popular culture?" is that there are numerous images of nanobot to choose from -- meaning that when media outlets want to publish some kind of nano-image, they often license an image from an image firm. Well, if the firm has a preponderance of nanobot images, it follows that media outlets will be more likely to select them, right? Though the supply-and-demand argument was not the focus of Nerlich's talk, it is the taken for granted assumption behind it.

Nerlich did more of a content analysis (using both quantitative and qualitative methods) of nano-related images available for license at Science Photo Library (www.sciencephoto.com), a leading science image firm. She found that of 363 nano images, 128 were of nanobots. Of those 128, most were fantasy and artistic renderings. Click here to see what comes up at Science Photo Library for the search term nanobot.

Some of Nerlich's findings include:
1- most images are positive and/or utopian while very few are negative and/or dsytopian.
2- many nanobots had some kind of pincer, claw, or hand.
3- backgrounds of renderings tended to reflect blood, space, or the sea.

-Mary

Going Nano makes it better...

2007-10-11T17:13:00.000-07:00

I came across this new nanotechnology from Japan, the NANOEGG, a new drug delivery mechanism for the treatment of sun-damaged skin (hyperpigmentation, wrinkles etc.) with trans-retinoic acid.
Also known as Retin-A and RENOVA in the U.S., trans-retinoic acid is approved by the FDA as a treatment to give smoother, less pigmented skin but it usually causes skin inflammation and skin irritation as well. Studies using the NANOEGG show no skin irritation, less wrinkles and reversal of hyper pigmentation-overall a better treatment. (Yamaguchi, Y. et. al. J. Control. Release 2005, 104, 29-40)

In light of our research at CNS, two questions come to mind.
1.) Would this nano-enhanced product be more readily accepted than others because of the current obsession with looking younger?
2.) How does the cultural environment influence public acceptance of the nanotechnology?
I can't find any indication that the product is being commercialized in the U.S., but the NANOEGG website shows a picture of their product (shown) which promises in French to "restructure and alleviate your skin."

Nanotech and the iPod

2007-10-10T18:17:00.000-07:00

When I began to search for news articles about the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in Phyics to Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg, I came across a multitude of articles with references to the "iPod" in the title. This made me think that the media attention surrounding the discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR) might actually be creating more public confusion over what nanotechnology actually is, particularly when many people already associate nanotechnology with devices such as the iPod.

A quick online poll of news headlines reveals the following:

Nobel prize for men who made iPod possible

iPods, Better laptops Stemmed from Nobel Prize Discovery

Physics of the iPod awarded Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize for magnetism experts who helped spawn the iPod

and my personal favorite:
Like your iPod? Thank this year's physics Nobelists

Nano-Nobel

2007-10-09T06:12:00.000-07:00

I will be deliriously curious to see how nano-advocates react to the news today of the 2007 Nobel prize in physics...unlike quotidian applications of nanosize particles (which seems to be all DC policy makers and pundits can think of).

As NPR reported this morning:
France's Albert Fert and German Peter Grunberg will share the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics for a discovery that has allowed a radical reduction in the size and increase in the capacity of computer hard drives.The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation on Tuesday the technology was "one of the first real applications of the promising field of nanotechnology," which deals with extremely small devices." Applications of this phenomenon have revolutionized techniques for retrieving data from hard disks," the prize citation said. "The discovery also plays a major role in various magnetic sensors as well as for the development of a new generation of electronics."

Fert and Gruenberg are two central characters in an article and series of talks I gave on the history of spintronics. "Spintonicists" see their work as marking the beginning of the field.

Nano Images

2007-10-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

Following up on Joe's post about Toumey's article...there was an interesting piece (sometimes Claudia Driefus actually manages to put together a useful interview...) in the NYT Science section today on digital forensics. It noted that for one journal in the cell biology field, something like 25% of images have been altered using some software program. It got me wondering what the number might be for nano-images. Because nano-images are completely artificial (in the sense that they are produced via some software program and instrumentation...no one can actually see a quantum well or buckyball), this seems like an especially thorny issue. I will be attending a three-day meeting at the University of South Carolina which is all about nano and images...I'll report back.

Resource driven nanotechnology

2007-10-01T16:21:00.000-07:00

This article reminded me of the quote Patrick mentioned in class last Thursday regarding driving faster so that we can use up fossil fuels in order to move on to another source of energy. Seems that Mazada is motivated to use nanotechnology to cut heavy metal usage and thus reduce their overhead. Interesting. I can't remember if we put parsimonious down on the p-list of all things nanotechnology.

Mazda develops catalyst to slash precious metal use

From Reuters UK: http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKT8936520071001

TOKYO, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Japan's Mazda Motor Corp said on Monday it has developed the world's first catalyst for cars that employs single-nanotechnology to create a material structure that slashes platinum and palladium use by 70 to 90 percent.

The reduction results in no change in the performance of the automotive catalyst, which uses platinum, rhodium and palladium to trigger a chemical reaction with polluting nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons to clean tailpipe emissions.

Domestic rival Nissan Motor Co in July also said it had developed a catalyst for gasoline cars that uses nanotechnology to prevent clustering of the catalyst's fine metal particles under high temperature conditions. That would halve the use of precious metal components, it had said.

Single-nanotechnology can control smaller particles than nanotechnology.

Automakers have been burdened with higher-than-expected commodity prices, and are looking for ways to reduce material use to save costs.

A Mazda spokesman said the company had not decided yet when it would first employ the technology on a production model. It also has no plan for now to share the technology with controlling shareholder Ford Motor Co.

The Condition of Nano-dernity

2007-10-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

Chris Toumey’s new article, “Cubism at the Nanoscale,” (2007) looks to the Cubist movement of the early twentieth century to provide cues for how to go about representing nanoscale structures today. Because nanoscale materials are too small to be photographed, the images that we see representing them are the product of a “multistage process that begins with touching the nanoscale, not seeing it, and converting tactile sensations into data, which are later converted into visual sensations” (587). For Toumey, this threatens a problem of credibility should the public discover that representations of nanoscale materials do not have the same “optical veracity” as photographs. To address this (and setting aside the question of the veracity of photographs), Toumey looks to Cubist approaches to representation, particularly their attempts to simultaneously represent multiple dimensions of an object. Drawing on cubist techniques, Toumey poses three suggestions for creators of representations of nanoscale structures: add a temporal dimension through the use of multiple, sequential images; add color(s); add a tactile dimension that permits deeper engagement of the viewer with the nanoscale representation.

While these suggestions are fine and no doubt useful for those concerned with promoting certain public perceptions of nanotechnology, Toumey’s adoption of Cubist techniques runs contrary to their Cubist intent. Cubists, unlike Toumey (c.f. 587), had no interest in improving the correspondence between an image and reality. Indeed, Cubism marked a tremendous social upheaval, manifested in a variety of social domains, and which centered on a crisis in traditional conceptions of reality and knowledge. Concern for the veracity of a representation is a preoccupation that Cubists directly questioned. Through the abandonment of classic techniques of painting, including representations of Euclidean space, and the refusal to view painting merely as a tool for the representation of nature, Cubism rejected enlightenment rationality. In turn, Cubism sought multiple modes of representation, resulting in fragmented objects unrecognizable to those who thought that painting should replicate nature. This constituted a profound loss of faith in the connection between knowledge and progress; between signified and signifier; between rationality and an objective reality.

Toumey hails Cubism to take us in the opposite direction: to better represent the empirical nature of nanoscale materials. This divergence is made clear by Toumey’s characterization of the goals of Cubists to enlarge “the viewer’s knowledge of the reality of the object in a picture.” I argue that the goal for Cubists was rather to challenge the very possibility knowledge as coherent and singular. This challenge and crisis manifest in the Cubist movement is forgotten in Toumey’s characterization. His application of Cubist aesthetics to representations of nanoscale structures is thus remarkably un-Cubist to the degree that it seeks to “add to our empirical knowledge of the objects that exist at the nanoscale” (589).

Thinking about representation at the nanoscale, however, does raise some interesting questions. What Cubism and Toumey’s invocation of it in the context of nanotechnology are grappling with are the limitations of representation in the context of shifting relationships between space and time. Following Harvey (1989), if cultural modernism sprang from a “radical readjustment in the sense of time and space in economic, political and cultural life” (260-1) then by analogy, we might see the problem of representation at the nanoscale as a similar readjustment of our sense of time and space – a radical continuation of time-space compression. If, as the forecasters suggest, we are on the front end of a major readjustment to the world economy and to our many manners of living as a result of nanotechnological innovation, perhaps Toumey is out front by hinting at a similar crisis in representation to that which began after the middle of the 19th century. As the commercialization of nanotechnology floods our lives with events, practices, and produts that may be undetected by human sensory organs, whose risks or benefits are frequently invisible, the understanding and expression of social meanings takes on new dimensions. How will we represent those aspects of human experience that are invisible, un-touchable, un-smellable but powerful, potentially dangerous, and highly profitable?

Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Toumey, Chris. 2007. "Cubism at the Nanoscale." Nature/Nanotechnology 2:587-9 (October).

New Voices

2007-09-28T20:34:00.000-07:00

This quarter, I'm teaching a course for graduate students at UCSB called "Studying Emerging (Nano)Technologies. I've encouraged students from the class to post occasional postings on the CNS blog...in our first class, we dealt with issues like "what is technology?" and "what characteristics do emerging technologies have?" So maybe these sorts of questions will expand the range of discussion here.

More Nano-chips...

2007-09-19T17:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Intel gave the first public demonstration of new chip technology. Based on 45 nm architecture, the new chips presage the next generation of chips with 32 nm features, due out in 2009. As one Intel rep said, "Smaller is better, smaller is cheaper."

Private Enterprise Leads the Way to Clean Water

2007-09-14T10:25:00.001-07:00

Here's one current nano-enabled invention that could do the world a lot of good: a water-purifier with a filtration system capable of screening out particles as small as 15 nm - small enough to filter out viruses.

I find it fairly interesting that the Lifesaver's website features a soldier. I have nothing against soldiers getting their clean water. But I hope that these water filter systems also find their way to others who desperately need clean drinking water.

Mary

The Architecture of Nano-Memory

2007-09-11T15:26:00.001-07:00

The Business Section of today's New York Times has a lengthy feature article by John Markoff on research being done to increase data storage technology. It focuses on the work of Stuart Parkin, an IBM researcher I tried (unsuccessfully) to interview for my research on the history of spintronics. So it goes...it's an interesting article anyway.

Two points stand out - first, this article was in the Business section, not the Science Times. Of course, the Science Times is increasingly the "Medical Times."

Second, nanotechnology or nanoscale engineering itself appears only in very stealthy form, in discussion about nanoscale wires and nanosecond access time. This on a day when I received two posts from a DC-based non-profit about nano in cosmetics and sunscreens. So, what does it mean when nano in consumer products that actually matter (i.e. they are a significant part of the economy and are used, whether we like it or not, in daily lives...when I last checked, no one was forcing me to slather nano-sunscreen on my nano-pants) isn't referenced as nanotechnology anymore?

Need for Nanoethics??

2007-09-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

The Summer 2007 issue of The New Atlantis has a lengthy letter written by Cyrus Mody, Jody Roberts, and myself. It responds to Adam Keiper's piece on the (lack of a) need for nano-ethics. The letter itself isn't available on TNA web site so I am appending it here. My apologies for the excessive length of this posting...and kudos to Cyrus and Jody for really doing the heavy lifting in writing this erudite reply.

Letter to the editor of The New Atlantis in response to Adam Keiper’s Nanoethics as a Discipline?

As historians of nanotechnology (incongruous as that sounds), we read with great interest Adam Keiper’s recent article “Nanoethics as a Discipline?” Keiper’s article raises some excellent correctives to sloppy or hasty thinking that has characterized some work thus far on the social, cultural, economic, and ethical dimensions of nanotechnology. We suggest, however, that Keiper comes perilously close to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We by no means speak for all people in this field, but we have been associated, for the past three+ years, with organizations that have been heavily involved in bringing social science and humanities perspectives to the nanotech policy debate. Through our involvement in that debate we have seen that there is both demand for and, increasingly, a supply of, high-quality research on nanotechnology’s complex relationship to our wider culture.

Let’s start by asking what discipline (or “discipline?” as Keiper might put it) is in question here. Keiper begins and ends his article by discussing “nanoethics,” but the bulk of the piece is more concerned with an interdisciplinary farrago of sociologists, historians, anthropologists, political scientists, rhetoricians, philosophers, comp. lit. scholars, economists, management researchers, science and technology studies scholars, etc. This potpourri, as Keiper notes, goes by a number of different names, but we would call it “social studies of nanotechnology” or “nano studies” – that is, a field similar in make-up and intention to mature research areas like “Russian studies” or “American studies.”

We definitely would not limit this field to questions of ethics, on the model (which Keiper upholds) of bioethics. This is not because, as Keiper suggests, practitioners of this field are uninterested in the “deeper questions” of “great social goods.” Rather, we advocate this broad-based, interdisciplinary approach precisely to get at the deeper questions Keiper refers to. His article states that “it is difficult, if not impossible, to have any discussion, let alone serious ethical reflection, if there is not some basic agreement about the facts at issue.” While Keiper suggests that the only facts that matter here are “purely” technical ones revolving around which nanotechnologies are or are not achievable, we suggest that the posing of more penetrating inquiries is impossible if it is uninformed by empirical data contributed by a broad array of social scientists and humanities scholars.

Keiper lists four areas that concern nanoethicists: safety; social justice; dramatic social change; and transhumanism. We have no quibble with research in these four areas, and we wholeheartedly agree with Keiper that such research needs to be more mindful of what mainstream scientists and engineers agree is technically achievable. However, we also believe there are several other necessary areas of scholarly inquiry that Keiper neglects.

Consider this example: A great deal of the National Nanotechnology Initiative’s (NNI) efforts are currently directed to reshaping the nature of the American science education system from kindergarten to Ph.D. One explicit goal of the NNI has been to establish institutions (such as university-based Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers) that will undo the quilt of disciplines present in most American universities and replace it with an almost completely unified, interdisciplinary mass. This means not just breaking down the barriers holding apart physicists, chemists, electrical engineers, and biologists, but even integrating those fields as fully as possible with sociology, economics, legal studies, etc.[1] At the same time, the NNI clearly aims to integrate universities in novel ways with more and more of the institutions of American society. These include business (through a plethora of Small Business Innovation Research grants and other incentives for professorial start-ups) and the K-12 education system (through public “Nano Days” for schoolchildren, through grade school classes taught by graduate students in various nano disciplines, and by encouraging high school science teachers to work in university nano labs over the summer).

Why should these activities be a concern for nanoethicists? Many of the most rancorous, divisive questions in American life are concerned with the training of future generations. School districts or university administrators across the country must continually deal with ideological tug-of-war that break out over new movements in pedagogy: in language training (phonics, ebonics, and language-of-instruction issues for immigrants’ children); in mathematics (student-centered learning); in history and social studies (how much revisionism is a good thing?); in literature; and in science (creationism and intelligent design).

Nanotechnology – whatever it turns out to be – will clearly both push and be dragged along with these national debates about pedagogy. Here, we think, is a prime example of a “deeper question” that many people value where nanotechnology offers both a distinct and broad case for exploring the ethics involved. We think there may, in fact, be ethical questions at stake if future generations learn that there is no use to distinguishing chemistry from physics from mechanical engineering and that these all are just nanotechnology. We think there are even more urgent and important ethical matters at stake if today’s students are trained to think of schools and universities as completely porous to industry or operating like any other for-profit business.

As individuals we may or may not agree with these changes. As historians[2], though, we strongly believe we and other nano studies practitioners can contribute empirical findings that should color ethical discussion of these shifts. Do enrollments in science go up as a result of nano-outreach? How does nano’s influence on the academy affect retention of women and minorities in science and engineering? How do graduate students and postdocs participate in the value chain extending from their professors’ labs to various companies? These are questions that need to be asked, and they are questions that historians, sociologists, economists, and other scholars can offer insights on.

Given, then, our commitment to a field of nano studies that is engaged with the “deeper questions,” we take some exception to Keiper’s characterizations of the field. First, we find very odd Keiper’s dismissive comparison (in his second paragraph) of nanoethics and bioethics. Bioethics, he claims, followed in the wake of biomedicine; nanoethics, prematurely, comes into being at the same time as nanotechnology. There are, we think, excellent reasons to be suspicions of comparisons between nano studies and bioethics, but this isn’t one of them. The constituent disciplines and industries of nanotechnology have been around for a very long time, as have many of the ethical issues today associated with nano.

Take, for instance, the microelectronics industry (one of our areas of research). The features of most commercial transistors are or very soon will be small enough that this entire industry will have to be categorized as part of nanotechnology. This is an industry that has been around for well over half a century, has spun off a very large proportion of the sub-fields and tools of academic nanotechnology, and contributes more than any other industry to US gross domestic product. It’s also an industry that pioneered out-sourcing and off-shoring, that was among the first to embrace the new business models of venture capital and the IPO, and is responsible for 29 (!) Superfund sites in Santa Clara county alone. Clearly, then, an industry where societal values and “deeper questions” point in lots of different directions, and where the ethical issues are particularly vexed. And yet, in those fifty years, no cohort of professional ethicists has stepped in to address and examine the material and cultural consequences, wonderful and not-so-great, of this giant industry. It is our urgent hope, then, that we can fold these broader existing issues into the purview of nano studies.

Keiper has a further litany of complaints about nano studies. It is, he says, the kind of field where every NGO and “liberal environmental group” has to pile in to have its say, whether they know anything or not. True, there are a lot of competing voices, some of them quite over-the-top – which can, we agree, be frustrating. On the other hand, we’d far rather that nano studies be the kind of field that keeps asking who the relevant constituencies are, rather than waiting fifty years to discover that our analysis is meaningless because we forgot to include some crucial perspectives.

Similarly, he complains that there is an endless succession of conferences and journals on societal issues in nano. We agree; in fact, one of us (Mody) recently organized just such a conference at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Here, several of the panelists expressed deep frustrations at the proliferation of such events. Yet we note that another panelist (Barbara Karn of the EPA) then asked the audience how many of them had never been to such an event before and felt their questions about nano had yet to be addressed – close to two-thirds (i.e. about 80 people) raised their hands. Too many conferences may just be something everyone involved in nanotechnology may have to endure for a while.

Keiper also protests that social scientists involved in nano use too much jargon, that they will probably just use government funding to test their own theories, and only talk to each other. True, these are real dangers – in any field. We can’t see any difference here between the natural sciences and the social sciences. The number of physicists and chemists using “nano” money just to test their own theories will always be orders of magnitude greater than the number of insular nano social scientists.

And, of course, every field uses jargon – though we are continually amazed by what, exactly, counts as jargon. At the same CHF conference one prominent chemist, in the course of a somewhat technical (one might even say jargon-y) talk, stated that she enjoyed working with social scientists but that they use off-putting terms like “social justice”. Social justice! If that constitutes jargon then it is surely (to borrow Morgan Phillips’ description of the British Labour Party) a term that “owes more to Methodism than to Marx” (and more to Martin Luther King than to Max Weber). We all use technical terms as shorthand. One challenge of nanotechnology will be to develop institutions that encourage us to point out each other’s opaque terminology and keep us from simply retreating to test our pet theories.

Keiper quite rightly, however, notices the self-absorbed, navel-gazing quality of much of today’s nano studies. Indeed. Our special pet peeve is the laboratory ethnography that ends up describing nothing other than the decision to allow the ethnographer to enter the laboratory. And yet, nano studies is trying to do something new and experimental. In any experiment, it pays to focus attention on your methods, to try and get the right process in place. Though Keiper upholds bioethics as a model for nano studies, we feel that bioethics probably could have used a great deal more methods-questioning early in its formation. As the call for papers of a recent conference on the “ethics of bioethics” puts it:

Professional standards guide the conduct of all healthcare professions – except bioethics. All healthcare professions have standards for addressing real or potential conflicts of interest – except bioethics. Critics from within and without the field have recently challenged the ethics and integrity of bioethicists, charging that these self-appointed watchdogs are little more than selfserving lapdogs.

We hope that by thinking carefully thinking about what nano studies is and how it should be done – and accepting that there are probably many different, useful answers to both questions – that we can mitigate such characterizations of our field in the future.

[1] Our thanks to Joe Bordogna, former COO of the National Science Foundation, for discussions on this topic.

[2] Actually, we are two materials scientists and a chemist who have all done both ethnographic and historical research.

2007-09-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

Self Assembly is critical for biological systems. Our understanding of how nature works its magic is leading to amazing new discoveries in development of materials and control at the nano-level. This looks like a great lecture which I hope gets repeated at UCSB.

Prof Matthew Tirrell University of California, Santa Barbara College of Engineering

Chemical Processing by Self-Assembly: Let's Take It Seriously
Plenary Lectures at ECCE-6
Danckwerts Lecture 2007: Matthew Tirrell
Presentation time: Wednesday 19, 09:40 to 10:30

Self-assembly is a route to processing of chemical products that relies on information content built into the process precursors. A challenge for engineers is to develop the practical routes to technologically important self-assembly processes. Self-assembly occurs frequently in biology but translating that bio-inspiration to controllable chemical processing presents many interesting problems. The complexity built into self-assembled products is at the level of supermolecular structure. Complexity, in the sense of development of emergent properties of an assembly that cannot readily be envisioned from the constituents, can arise spontaneously during self-assembly and often does, especially in biological systems. We are only beginning to develop sufficiently sophisticated synthetic assemblers to mimic biology in this way. Other routes to self-organization may also be of interest for nanotechnology. Prospects for success and current efforts in biomaterials, porous materials, molecular electronics and other areas will be discussed.

On Paying Intellectual Debts

2007-09-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

The latest edition of Scientific American Reports is entitled "The Rise of Nanotech." For those unfamiliar with the science and technology behind nano, this offers a good place to start reading. What follows are some comments from me about what is (and isn't) in the this special issue.

First, it bears noting that, since 1991, Scientific American has occasionally had an issue devoted to nanotech. For historical purposes, this present something of a "state of the nation" report on nano. Therefore, they are interesting and useful bellwethers as to what science popularizers think nano is about and how they wish to present the current status of nano-research.

The focus of this current issue is on, to a large degree, electronics. There is practically nothing at all on "faux nano" such as sunscreens, nanopants, and those other forms of quasi-nano which involve nothing more complex than nanosized particles. This is curious as the good deal of the handwringing inside the Beltway is about just this topic and how/who should regulate it.

This report from Sci Amer has articles on: nanofabrication; building nanostructures from proteins; nanofab using DNA; DNA-based computers; electronics using carbon nanotubes; plasmonics (more computers); and nanoelectronics. The final article is about the ubiquity of nano in science-fiction. This is the only place I have been able to find in the 88 page issue where Eric Drexler' s vision of nano is mentioned...and this was in connection to sci-fi. My, how the popularizers have been co-opted...

What I found most disappointing, though, was Michael Roukes' opening essay, in which the shibboleth of Richard Feynman is once again whispered, nay, shouted out. This serves the rhetorical purpose of tying current nano research to the "breadth of Feynman's vision" which Roukes calls "staggering," a product of the late Caltech physicist's "singular intellect." In other words - Ave Caesar...er...Feynman. Never mind that only a very few of today's active nanoscientists and engineers have any recollection at all of being inspired by Feynman. Forget the fact that the last nano-Nobelist, the late Richard Smalley, claimed (at least until 2003) that Engines of Creation was a major influence on him.

So...after more than a decade of real nanoscale research and some $8-10 billion of federal money, scientists and engineers still feel the need to tie their activities to an after-dinner speech Feynman made almost 50 years ago. Let it go, folks. And, for the sake of honesty, admit that a good deal of the initial popular and political interest in nano was stimulated by "visioneers, " people who promoted and popularized what nanotech might be able to do. Even if some of these dreams and thought experiments have not been realized or appear outlandish, own up to the fact that public policy and public imagination are closely linked.

Patent Legislation Passes House

2007-09-08T03:10:00.000-07:00

This overview tells most of the story. But the core of this legislation is to shift the US from a "first-to-invent" to a "first-to-file" system (like Europe's). Researchers and universities have generally opposed the change, fearing it would reward fast filers over good inventors (i.e. rich corporations over university lab investigators), and discourage publication and the circulation of information prior to patenting. The battle is far from over.

***
US moves to reform patent laws

By Patti Waldmeir in Washington

Published: September 7 2007 23:37

Big US technology companies won an important patent reform victory on Friday when the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill that would bring sweeping changes to the way America rewards innovation.

The bill, which could significantly shift the balance of power between US patent holders and their rivals, must still pass in the Senate, and its prospects of becoming law remain uncertain. But opponents and proponents alike say on Friday’s vote was a milestone, bringing years of congressional debate over patent reform to a climax.

Supporters of the bill, including companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Google, and many financial services firms, say it will improve patent quality and limit unnecessary litigation and excessive damages.

Jonathan Yarowsky of The Coalition for Patent Fairness, a lobby group of big technology companies, said after the vote: “The current patent system has become bogged down by delays, prolonged disputes and confusing jurisprudence. This comprehensive legislation...will help drive innovation.”

But opposition to the bill is widespread, ranging from pharmaceutical companies to big manufacturers like General Electric, 3M and Johnson & Johnson, small inventors, many venture capitalists, some small technology companies, labour unions and the White House.

The Bush administration said this week it opposed changes to the way patent damages were calculated, which would limit the discretion of judges in awarding damages to compensate patentholders whose patent rights are violated.

The bill would make it harder for inventors to win big damage awards against high technology companies whose products rely on hundreds of different innovations. It would make it more difficult for patentholders to win an award based on the total market value of the product – rather than on the value of one individual patented component.

The White House said: “Making this change to a reasonably well-functioning patent legal system is un warranted and risks reducing the rewards from innovation.” The Coalition for 21st Century Patent Reform, which includes companies like GE and 3M, criticised the bill, saying it “favours infringers over inventors”.

Stephen Maebius, a patent law expert at the law firm Foley & Lardner, said courts had already taken the initiative on patent reform, enacting several major changes, while legislation had been mired in debate. “Judicial developments have rendered portions of this legislation obsolete, because things have been happening so fast in the world of patent infringement case law,” he said.

He predicted a stiff battle to win passage in the Senate, but Emery Simon of the Business Software Alliance, one of the bill’s biggest backers, said on Friday’s vote “puts momentum into (congressional) patent reform”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

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Nanoelect News

2007-09-03T16:37:00.001-07:00

As reported by CNN and other venues, IBM recently announced two developments pertinent to the nanoelectronics realm. Big Blue's press release detailed work done at both its San Jose and Zurich site. For those of you just tuning in, this work catches my eye because instead of the usual "nano-for-pants-and sunscreen" news, this suggests research that has more far-reaching consumer implications and, IMHO, is far more representative of nanotech rather than what often seems to be vanilla materials science albeit done with tiny tiny passive nanoparticles.

Because images from science fiction really do help...

2007-09-02T11:48:00.000-07:00

Italian physics & engineering professor Nicola Pugno generates a lot of discussion (at least in blogosphere) for his scientific work and predictions on carbon nanotubes. Last year, he predicted that carbon nanotubes, even in all of their theorized glory, wouldn't be strong enough for a space elevator cable.

This year, he's more optimistic. No, the space elevator is still a no-go. But he does have high hopes for scaling walls Spiderman-style.

Why does Dr. Pugno catch my eye? His use of science fiction images is not likely to be an accident. When he writes about taking elevators into space or climbing up walls with special adhesive clothing, he invokes strong, myth-like, associations for a range of people- including many who probably don't spend lots of time trolling around peer-reviewed scientific journals.

--Mary

Questions of Returns

2007-08-30T02:43:00.001-07:00

Oak Ridge National Lab has announced an efficiency break- through in the use of phase- change materials for roof insulation. This hits one of the biggest energy issues in the US, which is the incredible waste produced by non-transportation sources like houses. This is a picture of Steve Glenn's Santa Monica house, reported to be the LEED rating system's first "platinum" house.

The predicted result of the Oak Ridge work, however, is an 8% savings in energy bills. This is either a worthy return for lots of good science, or a disappointing return in an age where venture capital and nano-style expectations look for exponential improvements, or at least a "Factor Four" kind of leap, or, rock-bottom, a doubling of performance. Should we make ourselves happier by lowering our expectations? Nice research in any case.

We often say the future belongs to brainworkers,. The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't agree. They say the big growth involves working with bedpans and brooms. But what about rapidly growing economies that simultaneously emphasize high-tech growth, like China's?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting item today about China capping growth in master's programs for the next five years because even the booming Chinese labor market can't absorb them.

High-tech's employment impacts, nano included, can be overrated.

2007-08-21T15:49:00.000-07:00

Our good friend (and CNS Fellow Alum), Aaron Rowe, has an interesting take on the global race to create a nanotechnology infrastructure here. ** His Wired blog entry also inspired some commentary at IEEE's blog, here, about how nanotechnology infrastructures won't bring about the "nanotech revolution."

While both Aaron and Dexter, the IEEE blogger, make some good points about government-supported research initiatives, I particularly support one of Dexter's secondary points, his take on nanotechnology as an enabling technology - meaning that nanoscale technological innovations are most likely going to be tools for other technologies.

Mary

** in reference to Aaron's blog entry: Interestingly, Biopolis (a huge science park in Singapore) was supposed to be the stem cell research center of the world by now...

Fun with Analogs

2007-08-04T10:31:00.000-07:00

darn hard to find the two syllables "nano" in the daily press especially while travelling. But I did read a couple of good columns about 1) the difficulty with innovation in games, especially if you don't really know what you mean by innovation, and 2) a very good short primer on the business world's mixed interest in Open Source, focusing here on Microsoft.

Two Views of Nano

2007-07-28T14:30:00.000-07:00

Chris Peterson's Nanodot blog has an interesting discussion about nano-assemblers...featured are comments from Ralph Merkle and Martin Moscovits...find it here.

Oprah-Nano

2007-07-23T01:53:00.000-07:00

Who says nano isn't accessible to the masses? Oprah Winfrey's website has an article called "Bedtime Essentials for a Good Night's Sleep." In addition to having "a calming paint color" and "the right light," Oprah's sleep specialist also recommends the following:

Ambient comfort pillows. This pillow can help increase oxygen levels in your body by up to 29 percent. "It uses a specific thing called nanotechnology, and what it does is it takes the ambient energy in the air and it pulls it in, and when you lie on it, it helps give it back to your skin which on your skin helps bring oxygen to it," he says. Ambient comfort pillows can be found in various department stores.

It's nice to see that "specific thing called nanotechnology" being put to helping America's 70 million insomniacs! This nano product is apparently fully compatible with its recommended companion products, the Indulgence Pillow, and Tempur-Pedic's Rhapsody Mattress.

Patents Useless?

2007-07-15T14:53:00.000-07:00

There was a short but interesting piece in the paper this morning about the value of patents. Are the rewards worth the cost of getting and protecting them? Cited prominently is IBM which of course factors large in the nano-biz...at least that part of it that isn't dealing solely with sunscreen and nanodust.

Nano in Russia

2007-07-11T00:33:00.000-07:00

Valerie found this interesting item on the Russian national legislature's formation of "a new Russian corporation of nanotechnologies (Rosnanotech)." (It comes with this indecipherable image - nano-symbolics without content.)

There are some odd things about Rosnanotech's structuring, and the article's author states that many people are worried that Rosnanotech will be used to launder money or just plain steal state funds. Probably. That's a time-honored Russian tradition, or actually, world tradition. There are different forms - sometimes the money just disappears and gets spent on villas and private helicopters for company officers, sometimes it just builds in large extra costs for services actually performed. Maybe Rosnanotech will be more the latter, and nano will move Russia towards a more Western-style corruption - unintended nano-societal consequences?

But the more immediate issues are:

Russia intends to spend about $7.75 billion over three years, or, in very round numbers, twice the annual expenditure of the U.S.
Russia doesn't have enough "men of science," as the piece puts it - their human capital problems will probably hold them back.
Rosnanotech will have monopoly control over nanoscale product areas.

The article assumes this last is a bad thing.

There is a problem that worries even scientists – the corporation is to form a monopoly in the nanotech field, which respectively limits opportunities of the free market to select the most competitive ideas. Today the Russian research centres work mostly on nano-materials, while such prospective and promising spheres as nano-biotechnologies and new nano-projects in the energy-producing industry are undersold.

The confusions in this passage are pretty common in Western coverage of nano. Say "Russia" and most people will still think "planned economy" and "total economic disaster." (Say "Japan" and the story of big government is much more complicated and positive.) So this author focuses on planning failure, ignoring the other big story of early-stage tech development, which is market failure. Lots of great tech innovation goes begging for a market, and there are dozens of good books about "crossing the chasm" from technology to product, which is very very hard.

When you think about the history of information technology or biotech, you realize that the most reliable business model has been, well, think of Microsoft and Cisco, as opposed to say Seagate, and think of Amgen and Genentech as opposed to almost every single other bio tech company, all of which make very little money when they are not actively losing huge piles of it. (Remember Shaman Pharmaceuticals? No you don't, but I do, because it lost several thousand bucks of my just-tenured associate professor's salary back in the late-90s.) Think of the interest in California today in hitching nano to existing manufacturing platforms to avoid sinking those existing costs. The most reliable business model has been monopoly, though we have much nicer and more accurate terms for it, ones that reflect the need for ongoing flexibility and adaptation to protect a dominant market position.

So maybe Russia, with its large public investment; its great traditions in the physical sciences, engineering, and math; its history of successful public science (Vostok-1 beat Mercury 3 into manned orbit in April, 1961; its Soyuz series; and of course Sputnik, to which American public science owes its late-50s - early-60s 10x funding boost); and its monopoly goals - with all this, maybe Russia actually knows what it's doing. Given the troubles nanoscale research is currently having attracting enough private capital, why should we rule out a future Nano-gazprom?

Science Amateurs

2007-07-01T12:44:00.000-07:00

Perhaps there isn't much for amateur scientists to do in the nano-realm...that seems largely the province of well-funded professional scientists. However, today's NYT has a great article about the activities of amateurs and their interest in helping NASA develop new technologies. One of the projects these amateurs are working on is the hypothetical space elevator, the construction of which would supposedly be enabled by carbon nanotubes.

Also discussed in the article is the role of NASA's prizes in stimulating inventors and entrepreneurial activity. This reflects views put forth earlier this year by CNS-UCSB National Advisory Board chair Tim Kalil about the value of prizes in stimulating technological development.

On-Line Interview with CNS Researcher

2007-06-25T14:24:00.001-07:00

Check out this interesting on-line chat with Cyrus Mody, a historian at Rice University who is part of CNS's Working Group 1 ("Historical Context of Nanotechnologies"). Mody has written extensively about the history of nanotech, especially the development of nano-tools like the scanning tunneling microscope.

Spintech Meeting Notes

2007-06-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

I've just returned from the Spintech IV meeting in lovely Maui. I gave a short overview of the history of spintronics there. The focus of my talk asked "what are historically interesting questions about spintronics?" To this, I answered myself by citing four: What are the historical roots of spintronics? What sources of patronage have helped spintronics grow? How was spintronics used to help create political support for the NNI? And, last, how does the history of spintronics fit into the overall history of the microelectronics industry and Silicon Valley?

A few things caught my attention. One was the seeming hostility of the scientists there - mostly physicists - toward nanotechnology. I asked the group of about 200 people (students as well as senior faculty) how many considered the work they are doing to be "nanotechnology." Only a few raised their hands and these folks were mostly students. One senior researcher from UCLA even made a point of coming up to me after my talk and telling me that nano was a "hoax" which had been "hijacked" by other disciplines, especially chemistry. Another person felt obliged to comment - which simply echoed a point that I had made throughout my talk (weren't you listening??) - on the idea that much about nano wasn't new and that it was largely a re-branding phenomenon.

So...is spintronics nanotechnology?

Where's My Flying Car Part 22

2007-06-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

I read through the "D: All Things Digital" conversation between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, and watched much of the videocast available on iTunes's front page at the moment. This was no "battle of the bands" - they agreed on everything.

The reminiscences mostly revealed the power of the first movers: Jobs pointed out about the truest thing you can say about Microsoft: "Bill built the first software company in the industry before anybody really knew what a software company was."

I was bugged by the vision moment, where Walt Mossberg, the WSJ's tech columnist, asked Gates what he things his "principal device" will be in five years.

I don't think you'll have one device. I think you'll have a full-screen device that you can carry around, and you'll do dramatically more reading off of that.... I believe in the tablet form factor. I think you'll have voice. I think you'll have ink. You'll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. .... You'll have your living room, which is your 10-foot experience, and that's connected up to the Internet, and there you'll have gaming and entertainment, and there's a lot of experimentation in terms of what content looks like in that world. And then in your den, you'll have something a lot like you have at your desk at work. You know, the view is that every horizontal and vertical surface will have a projector so you can put information [on it]. Your desk can be a surface [where] you can sit and manipulate things.

A tablet with a voice? Actual ink? And a 10 foot screen in my living room? I could barely stay awake to the end of the paragraph. We've gone from flying cars and moon shots to a life of PDAs and Orwell-sized living-room screens.

These kinds of comments raise not only the issue of Gates's personal lack of imagination, but the cultural question of the extent to which information technology has been shaped by white kids from the 50s suburbs who liked carrying electronic junk in their pants. And who spent a lot of time in their rooms, and worked all the time. Maybe IT exists to preserve the father- knows-best tethering of home to office. (For a good memoir about the suburban culture of high-tech, see David Beers' book on growing up in early Silicon Valley.) Maybe IT has helped us stay stuck in a vanishing world rather than build ones.

What will help nano is offering some horizons beyond those of the boomer moguls of IT.

Good News from Philly

2007-06-07T20:17:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce that Mary Ingram-Waters, one of CNS's Graduate fellows, won a prize today at a conference organized by the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the Wharton School. Her award-winning poster showcased research underway at CNS on the intersection of groups advocating technologies such as nano, space exploration, and even cryonics during the 1970s and 1980s.

Patent Reform Reaches the Senate

2007-06-06T18:26:00.000-07:00

Today's Wall Street Journal published one of the better overviews of the current battle over proposed patent reforms. One of the major changes would be a shift from the "first-to-invent" basis for a successful patent application to "first-to-file." One of my jobs is to chair the University of California Senate's Committee on Planning and Budget, and we reviewed the proposed reform quite negatively. The concern was that first-to-file - though the rule everywhere outside the US - would favor big companies with big money, junk patenting, and opportunists over serious researchers. IP scholars that I respect, like Mark Lemley, don't agree, but it has seemed to UC's Office of the General Counsel and most faculty like the inventors will get screwed by the filers.

The context for this legislation is recent Supreme Court decision that some have called the most important patent case since the 1952 Patent Act - KSR. v. Teleflex decision decided by the Supreme Court April 30th. Among other things, the decision, written by Justice Kennedy, would make it harder to patent incremental improvements, and would try to reserve patents for greater forms of originality. For an overview see Linda Greenhouse's good piece. She pulls out Kennedy's interesting coinage, "ordinary innovation," which is something that does not deserve a patent. Some worry that all sorts of patents could be challenged on this basis. Greg Aharanonian, editor of PatNews, rails,

The KSR decision is semantic nonsense, introducing yet more undefined terms (e.g., “real innovation”, “extraordinary”, etc.) to a statute that is constitutionally meaningless given the lack of definition for its key term, “obvious”. What’s a “real innovation” - one that occurs in a flash to a genius? That’s right, the Supreme Court has mastered general relativity and built a legal time machine to send all of us back to the pre-1952s!!!!"

The IP world is confusing and stressful right now - that's one thing thing we know for sure.

Nano Patents

2007-06-05T06:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Harvard University was preparing to license more than 50 of its nanotech patents to a company called Nano-Terra. It could, the article said, transform the small company into the "one of nanotechnology's most closely watched start-ups." The patents largely cover the work by Harvard chemist and nano-advocate George Whitesides and his students. Nano-Terra is apparently not offering any actual products, just manufacturing and design information.

Sending Biotech to China: Nano to Follow?

2007-06-02T08:10:00.000-07:00

In some meetings in April, Tom Kalil, the chair of our Center's National Advisory Board, raised a policy issue that is on my mind all the time. He said that an issue that causes policymakers to lose sleep at night is where the next wave of middle-class jobs is going to come from.

In our context, will the commercialization of nanotechnologies support lots of well-paid knowledge workers? Will future nano-related revenues pay for good skilled and semi-skilled blue-collar jobs of the kind that not only make companies function well but that helped create the American middle-class?

An article in today's Los Angeles Times is one of a growing series of reports that brainwork is following manufacturing jobs to countries with lower wage costs - in this case, China. The example is a San Diego biotech firm called Ascenta, which is following the now widely-discussed strategy of "creating a new breed of biotech start-up that marries U.S. and Chinese scientific talent with China's cheap labor and resources." The key detail here is that China appears in both terms of the low-cost equation - not only as cheap labor but as high-tech labor as well.

Business and educational leaders try to interpret these moves through the "work of nations" paradigm, which was the title of a 1991 book by the man soon to become Clinton's Secretary of Labor, Harvard professor Robert B. Reich. Reich updated Ricardo's classical idea of "comparative advantage" in international trade, in which countries should make only what they have a special advantage in making and get everything else through trade. If Brazil has lower labor costs than Germany, then Germany should design Volkswagens in Wolfsburg, Germany, with Germany's unique engineering expertise, and manufacture the cars in Brazil, with that country's cheaper labor. Germany and the world get brilliantly designed and yet cheaper Volkswagens, and Brazil gets new manufacturing income, which it can use to build new schools to train its own engineers. Ricardo's idea was that through free trade of goods made with careful calculation of each country's comparative advantage, everybody is better off.

Reich's wrinkle was to assert that brainworkers, or "symbolic analysts" - people who manipulated information for a living like medical researchers and architects - would thrive by creating high value that would support their high wages. Even if blue-collar workers were screwed - as they clearly were by the early 1990s - they could recover by becoming white-collar workers, or by making sure their kids became white-collar workers. The high-end brain workers, in Reich's model, would be just fine. And the whole country would be just fine by steadily increasing the brainworker share of its population.

That is the theory. But the theory has three major problems.

One is that the demand for brainworkers is limited - the U.S. won't soon need 17,800,500 patent attorneys, thanks be to Baal.

Second, training brainworkers is expensive, and the U.S. has not shown itself interested in the public outlays that are required to make brainworkers in large numbers. We spend a lot of money training a fairly small elite - on a per capita basis it's not as small as France's or Germany's but is in the ballpark - but over the past three decades have steadily cut the share of national income that goes into mass higher education.

Third, poor countries produce brainworkers that are pound for pound as good as ours. We have been renting them for years - from Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, Turkey, etc etc. - but now more are staying put or going back. Now U.S. companies are sending work to them offshore, where labor and resource costs are indeed lower.

Reich and the Clinton Dems have wanted to reconcile Ricardian "free trade" with increasing wages. But fifteen years later, it's still not clear how this can work, since brainwork can be outsourced and cheapened too. It's also not clear how nanotechnologies would change that equation.

Intellectual property and professional protections do work to some extent - American doctors make vastly more money than their Indian counterparts because the latter can't dispense direct advice in the U.S. without passing American medical boards. But these sanctioned monopolies don't fit easily with the free-trade "work of nations" paradigm.

Nanotechnologies thus are going to require a rethinking of a range of scientific and social policies.

The picture is of IBM's China Research Laboratory, in operation since 1995.

Toasty Feet another Nano Product

2007-05-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

To show people what sorts of products can be improved by nanotechnology, educators often use stain resistant pants and tennis balls that retain their air longer. My mom called the toasty feet insoles to my attention. Blogger Marlene Bourne ranked them as one of the top ten consumer products that make use of nanoparticles.

From the aerogel website, "Aerogel, the advanced nonporous material in Toasty Feet, has the highest thermal insulation value of any solid material available today, allowing it to retain heat efficiently, while remaining light and thin enough to fit comfortably in almost any shoe or boot."

I would lean towards calling this a clever use of materials science rather than nanotechnology. The lines between those fields are often quite fuzzy. In any case, they look like some nice insoles.

Nanoethics a No-No?

2007-05-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

The most recent issue of the conservative-leaning magazine The New Atlantis has a very interesting article by editor Adam Keiper. Entitled "Nanoethics as a Discipline," it raises a number of provocative issues about the broader 'nano-and-society' undertaking.

While I don't agree with all of Keiper's comments, he does point out: the persistent confusion about what is nanotechnology; the divide between ho-hum nanoparticle research and more radical visions; the prevailing focus on EHS issue (partly as one of the few concrete areas where nanoethicists can get quick traction); and the rise of the nanoethicist.

It is perhaps on this latter point where Keiper is most harsh, referring to debates "awash in spin and misinformation" in which a recurring theme of "much of the social-science writing about nanotechnology is the importance of social -science writing about nanotechnology." Social scientists, he says citing researchers at CNS-ASU are full of self-pity and self-importance." Like I said, while I do not agree with all of his points, his observation that nanoethics (and here he seems to be conflating a wide range of methodological approaches and scholarly work) lacks humility and a "well-defined object of concern." If nothing else, this should give CNS folks something to think about.

Silicon Spin

2007-05-17T07:04:00.001-07:00

Today's issue of Nature has an article about the first demonstration of the transport and coherent manipulation of electron spin in silicon. Previously, researchers studying spin were limited to other semiconductor systems. This new discovery might enable spintronics to be seen as a more serious contender to take over CMOS reaches scaling limits as engineers have decades of experience working with silicon.

Nano on the News-Hour

2007-05-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

On tonight's PBS show The NewsHour, there was a thought-provoking segment about how engineers at companies like Intel are re-designing computer chips using variations of nanoelectronics technology to make chips faster and more powerful. This is essentially the technology that I blogged on here earlier with the use of exotic materials like hafnium to improve performance.

As with the New York Times piece from last week about IBM's chip improvements, nanotechnology per se wasn't given a major role in the story. Toward the end of the piece, Sir James Fraser Stoddart's work on molecular electronics and the possible use of molecules as transistors was featured. However, the NewsHour did not discuss other areas such as spintronics.

Technology by the Numbers

2007-05-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

Ida R. Hoos, a critic of assessing technology solely in quantitative terms, died in late April at age 94. Trained as a sociologist, Hoos resisted the "quantomania" that "prevails in the assessment of technologies" during the heyday of the OTA.

Have things returned to quantomania? The NSF is pursuing a new "science of science policy" initiative and there appears to be greater emphasis on the agency to quantify the output of its grants and awards. Within the nano-and-society sub-community, the focus also seems to be more heavily on quantitative social science with less attention to humanistic and qualitative research. Is this short-sighted? Is it an attempt to appear more scientific in the study of science and technology? Hoos, as one of her colleagues remembered, argued that for complex technological enterprises, one couldn't always rely solely on a systems-analysis approach.

The N-word

2007-05-04T06:27:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's New York times (p. C3), reporter John Markoff wrote about an advance announced by IBM (Almaden lab) to make faster and more energy efficient chips. I found it curious that, despite the article's reference to "atomic scale holes," "ultrathin wires," and the use of a "self-assembly" technique, the word nanotechnology never appeared.

Coincidence? Has the use of nano in electronics become so ubiquitous that it hardly bears mentioning? Or have companies like IBM ceded the n-word to the debaters about EHS issues while they continue to make advances in their nano products? Are they placing less value of labeling their technology as nano? Or was this simply a term Markoff decided not to use? What's going on?

Note: a follow up piece about the IBM announcement posted today by AP does make use of the magic n-word.

Good to know the musak is covered - now for those pesky nanotubes...

2007-04-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

Space elevator musak to feature Coolio, 50 Cent - TehMockeryz

This is just an interesting little piece about space elevator musak -- what I glean from it is that there are folks invested enough in the space elevator concept to go ahead with something a tad bit more frivolous... I'm not knocking their efforts - rather I'm commending them for doing something they can do.

notable: this piece is associated with University of Texas' NanoTech Institute.

What's The Nano Market?

2007-04-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

$1 trillion by 2015? $3 trillion by 2017? Sky's the limit, it seems according to an article by Michael Berger about the widely varying figures for the global market for nano products. Concluding that such estimates can be "an irritating, sensationalist and unfortunate" approach to estimating economic worth, Berger asks that these predictions include a dose of reality along with some explanation of how the figures are generated.

Single-Atom Thick Carbon

2007-04-10T06:45:00.000-07:00

Today's Science section in the New York Times has an article about the fabrication and properties of graphene, a carbon structure that is a single atomic layer thick. Especially interesting are the low-tech methods of fabricating it (adhesive tape is part of the process) and the interesting properties. Graphene exhibits the quantum Hall effect, for instance. Also of note was the reluctance one researcher recalled for the NSF to fund his early graphene work which was, later, supported by Intel.

Lots of Nanotechnology at the American Chemical Society Meeting

2007-03-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

I am currently attending the ACS National Meeting in Chicago. They have had dozens of nanotechnology themed sessions and posters for their new journal, ACS Nano, are near all of the rooms where materials science talks are held. There have been seminars with the following titles among others.

Nanoscience Fostered Advances in Sustainability
Unconventional Processes for Nanostructured and Microstructured Polymers and Emerging Frontiers in Polyolefins
Nanostructures from Block Copolymers and Supramolecular Polymers
Nanotechnology in Undergraduate Education
Ensuring the Effective Patent Protection of Innovative Molecular Technology
Nanoscience: Synthesis
One dimensional Nanomaterials
Nanoscale Inorganic Catalysis
Nanoscience: Characterization and Application
Nanotechnology and the Environment: Focus on Green Nanotechnology
Environmental Characterization, Impacts and Applications of Nanocarbons

We should be sending the social science fellows to this meeting twice a year. It would be worth every penny. They would learn a lot and have an opportunity to ask the top scientists great questions.

Nanoelectronics in China

2007-03-23T18:05:00.000-07:00

Intel and China were set today to announce plans to build the company's first 'fab' plant in China. Estimated to cost some $2.5 billion, the new plant will likely produce 90 nanometer feature chips with more sophisticated nanoscale electronics made elsewhere.