Quote of the Day

"Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."
-Milton Friedman

Dragonfly Wings Inspire Micro Wind Turbine Design

"The way a dragonfly remains stable in flight is being mimicked to develop micro wind turbines that can withstand gale-force winds.

Micro wind turbines have to work well in light winds but must avoid spinning too fast when a storm hits, otherwise their generator is overwhelmed. To get round this problem, large turbines use either specially designed blades that stall at high speeds or computerised systems that sense wind speed and adjust the angle of the blade in response. This technology is too expensive for use with micro-scale turbines, though, because they don't produce enough electricity to offset the cost. That's where dragonflies come in.

As air flows past a dragonfly's thin wings, tiny peaks on their surface create a series of swirling vortices. To find out how these vortices affect the dragonfly's aerodynamics, aerospace engineer Akira Obata of Nippon Bunri University in Oita, Japan, filmed a model dragonfly wing as it moved through a large tank of water laced with aluminium powder. He noticed that the water flowed smoothly around the vortices like a belt running over spinning wheels, with little drag at low speeds.

Obata found that the flow of water around the dragonfly wing is the same at varying low current speeds, but, unlike an aircraft wing, its aerodynamic performance falls drastically as either water speed or the wing's size increases. As air flow behaves in the same way as water, this would explain the insect's stability at low speeds, Obata says.

Obata and his colleagues have used this finding to develop a low-cost model of a micro wind turbine whose 25-centimetre-long paper blades incorporate bumps like a dragonfly's wing. In trials in which the wind speed over the blades rose from 24 to 145 kilometres per hour, the flexible blades bent into a cone instead of spinning faster. The prototype generates less than 10 watts of electricity, which would be enough to recharge cellphones or light LEDs, the researchers say."

-More Here

The Holy Grail of Brain Training

"The holy grail of brain training is something that does transfer, and here there are three good candidates. The first is physical exercise. Simple aerobic exercise, such as walking 45 minutes a day three times a week, improves episodic memory and executive-control functions by about 20 percent, finds Art Kramer of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His studies have mostly been done in older adults, so it’s possible the results apply only to people whose brain physiology has begun to deteriorate—except that that happens starting in our 20s. Exercise gooses the creation of new neurons in the region of the hippocampus that files away experiences and new knowledge. It also stimulates the production of neuron fertilizers such as BDNF, as well as of the neurotransmitters that carry brain signals, and of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. Exercise stimulates the production of new synapses, the connections that constitute functional circuits and whose capacity and efficiency underlie superior intelligence. Kramer finds that a year of exercise can give a 70-year-old the connectivity of a 30-year-old, improving memory, planning, dealing with ambiguity, and multitasking. “You can think of fitness training as changing the molecular and cellular building blocks that underlie many cognitive skills,” he says. “It thus provides more generalizable benefits than specifically training memory or decision making.”

The second form of overall mental training is meditation, which can increase the thickness of regions that control attention and process sensory signals from the outside world. In a program that neuroscientist Amishi Jha of the University of Miami calls mindfulness-based mind-fitness training, participants build concentration by focusing on one object, such as a particular body sensation. The training, she says, has shown success in enhancing mental agility and attention “by changing brain structure and function so that brain processes are more efficient,” the quality associated with higher intelligence.

Finally, some videogames might improve general mental agility. Stern has trained older adults to play a complex computer-based action game called Space Fortress, which requires players to shoot missiles and destroy the fortress while protecting their spaceship against missiles and mines. “It requires motor control, visual search, working memory, long-term memory, and decision making,” he says. It also requires that elixir of neuroplasticity: attention, specifically the ability to control and switch attention among different tasks. “People get better on tests of memory, motor speed, visual-spatial skills, and tasks requiring cognitive flexibility,” says Stern. Kramer, too, finds that the strategy-heavy videogame Rise of Nations improves executive-control functions such as task switching, working memory, visual short-term memory, and reasoning in older adults."
-Sharon Begley

The 25 Countries Whose Governments Could Get Crushed By Food Price

In addition to Tunisia (#18) and Egypt (#6), yes India (#21) and China (#22) are also on the list - complete list here (via here)

Hubris of Search Technology

What I've been Reading

The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being by Derek Bok - Recommended by David Brooks in one of his columns:

"If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).

The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.

The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions. Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones.

This may be changing. There is a rash of compelling books — including “The Hidden Wealth of Nations” by David Halpern and “The Politics of Happiness” by Derek Bok — that argue that public institutions should pay attention to well-being and not just material growth narrowly conceived."

Given the nascency of happiness research, it's immensely difficult to get excited about these studies leave alone writing a book about it. But Derek Bok pull's it off splendidly. Given the precarious, contentious  and myopic nature of democratic politics, it's very difficult to focus on a long term vision. Each chapter is enlightening but it's naive to except the government (and citizens) to heed to these calls. Although, there is one recommendation which could reap immediate results suited for the myopic politics - government can do something to alleviate the chronic pain, sleep disorder and depression. All three are ubiquitous and their effects are abysmally underestimated.

The effects of media (read "cable news") on people's health and dismal levels of trust in the politicians is another important factor for deteriorating happiness.

Derek looks at the symbiosis of happiness and education at a different and important perspective - schools and colleges should teach kids on how to live a meaningful life. This is one factor not only ignites the intellectual spark at a very young age but also kicks of that most important metacognition cycle. 

"The question of how to spend one's life of what to care about and why, the question of which commitments, relations, projects, and pleasures are capable of giving a life purpose and value..., this question was taken more seriously by most of our colleges and universities in the middle years of the twentieth century than it is today. Increasingly few teachers of the humanities believe that they have either the competence or duty to offer their students an education in the meaning of life."
-Anthony Kronman, Yale Law Professor (very similar to Allan Bloom's anguish in the Closing of the American Mind)

A excellent piece on how innovative designs can help increase that GNH:

"Although the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index proposed by the government of Bhutan in the 70s has not gained international acceptance, a recent debate initiated by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz to revise metrics to include fundamental elements of the human condition is likely to have wider resonance. Such a move is unlikely to happen without the contribution of designers, who, even more so than philosophers, reflect the human condition. And if economists and econometrists begin to adopt design as a tool, we can be sure politicians will follow."

Quote of the Day

"There is no quality in human nature which causes more fatal errors in our conduct that that which leads us to prefer whatever is present to the distant and remote."
-David Hume

Planet of Weeds - David Quammen

Planet of Weeds by David Quammen, undoubtedly one of the most important essays of our time.

We shouldn't take comfort in assuming that at least Yellowstone National Park will still harbor grizzly bears in the year 2150, that at least Royal Chitwan in Nepal will still harbor tigers, that at least Serengeti in Tanzania and Gir in India will still harbor lions. Those predator populations, and other species down the cascade, are likely to disappear. "Wildness" will be a word applicable only to urban turmoil. Lions, tigers, and bears will exist in zoos, period. Nature won't come to and end, but it will look very different.

The most obvious differences will be those I've already mentioned: tropical forests and other terrestrial ecosystems will be drastically reduced in area, and the fragmented remnants will stand tiny and isolated. Because of those two factors, plus the cascading secondary effects, plus an additional dire factor I'll mention in a moment, much of Earth's biological diversity will be gone. How much? That's impossible to predict confidently, but the careful guesses of Robert May, Stuart Pimm, and other biologists suggest losses reaching half to two thirds of all species. In the oceans, deepwater fish and shellfish populations will be drastically depleted by overharvesting, if not to the point of extinction then at least enough to cause more cascading consequences. Coral reefs and other shallow-water ecosystems will be badly stressed, if not devastated, by erosion and chemical runoff from the land. The additional dire factor is invasive species, fifth of the five factors contributing to our current experiment in mass extinction

That factor, even more than habitat destruction and fragmentation, is a symptom of modernity. Maybe you haven't heard much about invasive species, but in coming years you will. The ecologist Daniel Simberloff takes it so seriously that he recently committed himself to founding an institute on invasive biology at the University of Tennessee, and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt sounded the alarm last April in a speech to a weed-management symposium in Denver. The spectacle of a cabinet secretary denouncing an alien plant called purple loosestrife struck some observers as droll, but it wasn't as silly as it seemed. Forty years ago, the British ecologist Charles Elton warned prophetically in a little book titled The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants that "we are living in a period of the world's history when the mingling of thousands of kinds of organisms from different parts of the world is setting up terrific dislocations in nature." Elton's word "dislocations" was nicely chosen to ring with a double meaning: species are being moved from one location to another, and as a result ecosystems are being thrown into disorder.
The problem dates back to when people began using ingenious new modes of conveyance (the horse, the camel, the canoe) to travel quickly across mountains, deserts and oceans, bringing with them rats, lice, disease microbes, burrs, dogs, pigs, goats, cats, cows, and other forms of parasitic, commensal, or domesticated creature. One immediate result of those travels was a wave of island-bird extinctions, claiming more than a thousand species, that followed oceangoing canoes across the Pacific and elsewhere. Having evolved in insular ecosystems free of predators, many of those species were flightless, unequipped to defend themselves or their eggs against ravenous mammals. Raphus cucullatus, a giant cousin of the pigeon lineage, endemic to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and better known as the dodo, was only the most easily caricatured representative of this much larger pattern. Dutch sailors killed and ate dodos during the seventeenth century, but probably what guaranteed the extinction of Raphus cucullatus is that the European ships put ashore rats, pigs, and Macaca fascicularis, an opportunistic species of Asian monkey. Although commonly known as the crab-eating macaque, M. fascicularis will eat almost anything. The monkeys are still pestilential on Mauritius, hungry and daring and always ready to grab what they can, including raw eggs. But the dodo hasn't been seen since 1662.

Is there a larger pattern to these invasions? What do fire ants, zebra mussels, Asian gypsy moths, tamarisk trees, maleleuca trees, kudzu, Mediterranean fruit flies, boll weevils and water hyacinths have in common with crab-eating macaques or Nile perch? Answer: They're weedy species, in the sense that animals as well as plants can be weedy. What that implies is a constellation of characteristics: They reproduce quickly, disperse widely when given a chance, tolerate a fairly broad range of habitat conditions, take hold in strange places, succeed especially in disturbed ecosystems, and resist eradication once they're established. They are scrappers, generalists, opportunists. They tend to thrive in human-dominated terrain because in crucial ways they resemble Homo sapiens: aggressive, versatile, prolific, and ready to travel.

Now we come to the question of human survival, a matter of some interest to many. We come to a certain fretful leap of logic that otherwise thoughtful observers seem willing, even eager to make: that the ultimate consequence will be the extinction of us. By seizing such a huge share of Earth's landscape, by imposing so wantonly on its providence and presuming so recklessly on its forgivingness, by killing off so many species, they say, we will doom our own species to extinction. This is a commonplace among the environmentally exercised. My quibbles with the idea are that it seems ecologically improbable and too optimistic. But it bears examining, because it's frequently offered as the ultimate argument against proceeding as we are.

Jablonski also has his doubts. Do you see Homo sapiens as a likely survivor, I ask him or as a casualty? "Oh, we've got to be one of the most bomb-proof species on the planet," he says. "We're geographically widespread, we have a pretty remarkable reproductive rate, we're incredibly good at co-opting and monopolizing resources. I think it would take really serious, concerted effort to wipe out the human species." The point he's making is one that has probably already dawned on you: Homo sapiens itself is the consummate weed. Why shouldn't we survive, then, on the Planet of Weeds?

In Search A Better Artificial Nose Via Dogs

"When a dog sniffs, Paterson explains, odorant-laden air passes through the nasal vestibule and then through a labyrinth of exquisite complexity. This is nature’s solution to packing a large surface area in a small volume—crucial for delivering odors to  millions of olfactory receptors, specialized proteins embedded in the olfactory epithelium. “Smelling” occurs when odorant molecules bind to these receptors and produce signals that are interpreted by the brain.

To get a closer look at the process, Brent Craven, then a graduate student in mechanical and nuclear engineering, and now an ARL research associate, created a computational fluid dynamics model based on the equations of fluid motion and high resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of an actual dog’s airway.

The model yielded some important insights, Paterson reports. “One key finding was an explanation of how odors were transported to the olfactory region within the nasal cavity. Our computer simulations showed that a single passageway, known as the dorsal meatus, was responsible.” In the olfactory region, the air flow over the mucous-coated receptors is remarkably smooth, “albeit pulsatile due to sniffing,” which presents a consistent signal to the receptors. “All of this maximizes efficient transport of odorants to the receptors, and sets up chemical deposition patterns that are interpreted by the brain,” Paterson says.

Partly as a result of this work, Paterson and colleagues were chosen this summer as one of three teams to participate in RealNose, a multi-institutional project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) whose object is to build a mechanical nose that closely simulates the entire canine olfactory system.

As Paterson explains, the RealNose project is a typical “DARPA-hard” program: high-risk, high-payoff.  Should marketable technology evolve from the research, however, it could be tailored to sniff out drugs, explosives, chemical and biological weapons, and even certain types of cancer."

-More Here

My oasis, Max's Olfactory @ works

Quote of the Day

""I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man."
-Thomas Jefferson