Innovation Blog

Recently everyone has a different application for RFID. But Professor Ken Sakamura has turned RFID upside down. His plan is to imbed RFID into all the objects that surround us and then we could use a portable reader to find our way by feedback from these objects. This is just one of several projects being proposed by Professor Sakamura's Ubiquitous ID Center. So what other technologies can benifit from being turned upside down. Innovation comes from looking at things that everyone has seen and thinking differently than everyone has thought. Are you thinking differently enough?

With local gas prices in Chicago at almost $2.60 per gallon everyone is worried about the cost of keep their vehicle in fuel. Well some engineers at the British gas company, BOC have been doing something about it. The Ech20 can travel 25,000 miles (roughly the distance around the world) on about 25 Watts (the equivalent of just under 2 gallons of gas). Their goal is to set a new fuel efficiency record at about 10,000 miles per gallon. They will be competing at the Shell Eco Marathon at the Rockingham Raceway in the UK. So think about that when you are pumping $50 worth of gas into your SUV.

How about burning no fuel at all? This week marks that start of the 2005 North American Solar Challenge. This week is qualifying and then the green flag drops on Sunday. There are 28 teams from around the US and Canada and they will be racing from Austin, Texas to Calgary, Canada. Below is a picture of our hometown team from Northwestern University here in Chicago. So keep up with the results and may the hotest team win.

“The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,” by Thomas L. Friedman, should be required reading for everyone but especially for your elected representatives. Everyone you meet who reads it will tell you about the all the changes that have resulted in the increase in competition around the world. What I am afraid people will overlook is the part about the education crisis in the US. For years the US has been slipping in math and the sciences. Now it has become a crisis! The success that the US has enjoyed in the world market has been built on the back of our innovation engine. That engine comes as a result of a great education system, investment in basic research and smart engineers and scientists (both US born and those who emigrate to the US). Now our primary and secondary educations system is producing students who rank near the bottom of the list of developed countries, our goverment continually cuts funding to research and our population of engineers and scientists is rapidly aging with most expected to retire in the next 10 to 15 years (and a much smaller number entering the work force in the same period). The US continues to produce a disproportional number of lawyers and far to few engineers and scientists and since 9-11 we have drastically cut back on the number of students from other countries we allow to come to the US to study (and hopefully to stay and add to the US pool of innovators). If we want our children to continue to prosper then we need to turn these trends around. The world is becoming an ever more competitive place. We cannot sit back we need to be running harder to catch up. Protectionism is not an answer, working harder and smarter is. Send a copy of Friedman's book to your elected representitives and ask them what they are doing about increasing the nations investment in basic research and programs to encourage students to study engineering and science.

If you do not know about TED you should. I am not talking about those repainted United Airlines planes that atempt to compete with Southwest Airlines by changing their color scheme and not much more. TED is a series of conferences that seeks to understand the cutting edge of Technology, Entertainment and Design and how it is affecting our world. Yesterday the first TED Global kicked off in Oxford, UK. The opening speaker was Professor Richard Dawkins (pictured below), author of “Selfish Gene” and renound Darwinist. He proposed the notion that our universe may be “too queer” to understand. That each species and even each individual lives in its own perceived reality which greatly influences how we understand our surroundings and how we deal with it. On that note the conference began. Other the four days there are over forty speakers addressing all aspects of the worldwide human condition and where it is going. The subject of the conference “Ideas Big Enough to Change the World”, is pretty challenging in it self but it sounds like they are off to a good start. Can't wait to here what else comes out of this program.

Ever wonder how hot the water is coming out of the faucet before you put your hand in it? I would dare say most of us have. I know that I have gotten a painful surprise more than once when the water was much warmer than I expected. Well Germany faucet manufacture HANSA has done something about it. They now have a line of faucets which use LEDs to cause the water to glow either red or blue to indicate the current temperture of the water. Why didn't I think of that?

But then three high school students proceeded to do it. Do what you ask? Well just design an air conditioner that makes use of the Peltier effect and thus eliminates the need for Freon. In the process they won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. A 1964 study by General Motors said this wasn't possible, but these students did it anyway. So what impossible problems do you have? Maybe you should give these guys a call or better yet remove the word impossible from your dictionary.

So you ask, are we talking about CAD for modeling the 4th dimension? No actually I am talking about 2-dimensional materials. Well actually materials which are only 1 molecule thick, so almost 2-dimensional. Researchers at the University of Manchester have discovered a structure of carbon, called graphene, which has allowed them to create a fabric just one molecule thick. This discovery has brought us one step closer to the creation of nano-computers. By reducing the thinkness of the materials a computer device is constructed from designers can reduce the distances that electrons must travel and sigificantly speed up their processes. So don't throw out your CAD system. But maybe someday your CAD system will use a processor that has components which can only be measured in 2-dimensions.