Smart Economy

Smart Sustainability Showcase for Toronto and Canada

From: Walter Derzko

Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 12:19 AM

To: undisclosed list

Subject: re Smart Sustainability ShowCase for Toronto and Canada.

Importance: High

Dear Colleagues

I’d like to plant an idea with you – after speaking with a number of designers and vendors, I’m exploring the idea for a sustainability showcase that would feature theme based exhibits with smart technologies from Canadian and international sources-the best from Ontario, nationally and from around the world.

The launch would be 2010, The timing for this seems right.  The target audience would be Canadian business, consumers and school children

I’m writing a book on smart technologies and this would be a logical extension of the concept.

Two years ago I talked to Samantha Sannella and Poala Polletto at the Design Exchange (DX) in Toronto and with several people at the Ont Science Center.  Both groups expressed interest but said that we would need to find sponsors for the project

My business model for this would be three pronged -vendor based revenue, corporate based sponsor revenue and municipality based sponsorship ie city of Toronto or Mississauga and possibly the province of Ontario who may wish to promote sustainable manufacturing.

This concept would be a Canadian, in fact a North American first.

I have a list of 150 potential vendors, and designers from around the world who are working on smart technologies that we can start to approach.

The exhibits would be theme based, --the sustainable kitchen, the sustainable office, the sustainable retail shelf, the sustainable workspace, the sustainable community, the sustainable city etc and would be updated with new technologies every 3-5 years and have a 1-5 year forward focus. (what's commercially available now or in the very near future.

For other exhibits, there can be a regional or national focus ie smart sustainable technology from the UK, Finland, Germany (Fraunhofer Inst), China, Ukraine, Russia, or Singapore, Hong Kong etc

Corporate sponsors might include: Walmart, Rona, Home Deport, Canadian Tire, Loblaws, Sears, Imperial Oil, the banks (RBC, TD, RBC BMO) etc.

The Sustainability Showcase could be housed in a physical location, or it could tour from location to location around the city or province or be mobile ( on a bus the way the Japanese and Korean do- a display bus turned into a demo center that tours from school to school or to fairs and exhibitions.

OCAD students and staff and Beal senior fellows could play a hand in designing exhibit spaces and sourcing new vendors and sustainable technologies.

Several other revenue opportunities could spin off from this as well

Here’s just a few examples of what can be showcased

1) Environmentally sensible packaging such as Mercury-Absorbant NanoSponge packaging for broken compact fluorescent lamps (CFL's) http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2008/06/mercury-absorba.html

2) Concrete Wood (from the example I mentioned June 2 at OCAD, when Bob Logan was bemoaning the lack of durability of pressboard shelving from Ikea.  See Concrete Wood from lodgepole pine trees destroyed by pine beetles (kills two birds with one stone) http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2007/11/concrete-wood.html

3) End of Traditional Heating and Air conditioning Thin-film version of Active Building Envelope (ABE) systems could make conventional air conditioning and heating equipment obsolete http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2006/07/thinfilm_versio.html

4) OLEDs New High efficiency flat light source OLEDs > Almost any surface in a home, whether flat or curved, could become a light source: walls, curtains, ceilings, cabinets, shelves or tables.  Http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2006/04/new_high_effici.html

Lots more like these

For anyone who is interested in exploring the idea of a Smart Sustainability Showcase for Toronto, we are having a meeting on Tuesday July 22 at 11 am at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, room 600, 6th floor , 100 McCaul St, Toronto just south of the Ont Art Gallery.

Please RSVP, so we know how many people are coming

I have had some positive feedback from several organizations, & I’d like to push the concept forward

I'm sending this nationally and internationally in  case you are aware of any designers, vendors, manufacturers or research centers who have interesting cutting edge smart sustainable technology to showcase.

Contact me by email

----Walter  Derzko; Senior Fellow Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, OCAD 

© 2005-2008 Walter Derzko -"Changing the world, one idea at a time"©

Expert, Consultant, Keynote Speaker and Lecturer on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy

The Smart Technology Blog: The Smart Economy -- Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

To arrange for an in house presentation or briefing on smart technology see here

To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me or explore how we can work together

First ever execution of a quantum calculation 08-012

Researchers from the University of Queensland's Centre for Quantum Computer Technology together with colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada have made the first ever execution of a quantum calculation, a major step towards building more complex quantum computers.  By manipulating quantum mechanically entangled photons - the fundamental particles of light - the prime factors of the number 15 were calculated.

Ben Lanyon, UQ doctoral student and the research paper's first author, said calculating the prime factors of 15 was a crucial step towards calculating much larger numbers, which could be used to crack cryptographic codes that are unbreakable using conventional computers.

"Our goal is not to break these codes in practice, but to show that they can be broken, and motivate a move to a more secure system," Mr Lanyon said.

These codes form the basis of most banking and computer security and has implications of how we keep all data secure in the future.

"Classical computers use two-level systems called bits (binary digits) while quantum computers use two-level 'quantum-mechanical' systems called qubits (quantum bits)," he said.

"A qubit is like a coin that can be heads (on), tails (off) or simultaneously heads AND tails (on and off) or any possible combination in-between.

"This is impossible with normal bits but one qubit can be in two possible states, two qubits can be in four, three qubits in eight, and so on.  Quantum memory sizes grow exponentially with the number of qubits."

Functional large-scale quantum computers may be many years or decades away, but D-Wave, a Canadian company last year introduced the world's first working prototype quantum computer

See full story here

Canadians invent the world's first working quantum computer 07-052

I regularly track about half a dozen startups that have interesting breakthrough technologies.

One such candidate is D-Wave, a Canadian, Vancouver-based company, who had the good sense to turn to Ukrainian and Russian scientists (after the fall of the Soviet Union) for the core technology to help them invent the "quantum computer" an accomplishment that experts have predicted would not happen till 2020-2025.

ABC News is reporting that D-Wave, today will announce a working prototype of a quantum computer -the holy grail of next generation computing, obsolescing today's relatively slow silicon-based analog and digital computers.

The prototype is the size of a large freezer and super-cooled to near absolute zero, thanks to research and core technology developed at the Institute for Low Temperature Physics in Ukraine.

They are actually one year ahead of schedule -- they previously disclosed that a working prototype won't be available till 2008.

"There are certain classes of problems that can't be solved with digital computers," said Herb Martin, the firm's CEO,   "Digital computers are good at running programs; quantum computers are good at handling massive sets of variables."

D-Wave says it has built a quantum computer with 16 qubits - the quantum world's version of a digital bit, but which simultaneously encodes 1 and 0, so can carry more information and solve problems more quickly.

According to D-Wave CTO Dr Geordie Rose,  the firm's roadmap calls for the construction of a 1,000 qubit machine in 2008.

Rose goes on to explain

"The first application is a pattern matching application applied to searching databases of molecules.  This is an app that we developed internally at D-Wave.  This is an example of how to apply Orion to problems arising from association (or conflict) graphs."

"The second is a third-party planning/scheduling application for assigning people to seats subject to constraints.  Anyone who has tried to plan seating arrangements for a wedding should be familiar with this one.  This is an example of applying Orion to constraint satisfaction problems."

"One very cool thing that we're planning to do in Q2/2007 is to provide free access to one of these systems to people who want to either develop or port applications to it…so if you have an idea for an app that needs a fast NP-complete problem solver, start thinking about what you could do with some serious horsepower."

Future Applications of (1000 qubit or more )computers:

• climate change modeling
• energy modeling
• biological DNA computing
• logistics problems
• long term (6 month to one year) weather forecasting
• modeling and designing new genetically based drugs
• bioinformatics
• advanced cryptography, nano-forensics, and security / code-breaking
• post 9/11 security,, biometrics
• nano manufacturing
• other complex, dynamic systems

ETA: Now 2007 for early adopters, widespread and mainstream by 2017-2020?

Full story>> [...] and a story from the Register on the same topic ..thanks to Mike Kulyk for the heads up on the added information.

© 2005-2007

Walter Derzko

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

The Smart Technology Blog: The Smart Economy -- Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

To arrange for an in house presentation or briefing on smart technology see here

To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me or explore how we can work together

.....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"- old Japanese proverb

".......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." - H. Mumford Jones

"Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought."  A. Einstein

"Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are showstoppers..." Walter Derzko

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."  - Margaret Mead

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UK Government publishes Strategic Horizon Scans

The Horizon Scanning Centre has commissioned two complementary scans looking ahead up to 50 years : the Sigma Scan and the Delta Scan.

Initial versions of both scans have been published by the contractors who developed them : Sigma Scan by Outsights - Ipsos MORI and Delta Scan  by the Institute for the Future (IFTF).

The Sigma Scan is a broad synthesis of some of the world's best Horizon Scanning sources. It covers future issues and trends across the full public policy agenda. It is drawn from a range of sources including think tanks, academic publications, mainstream media, corporate foresight, expert/strategic thinkers, government sources, alternative journals, charities/NGOs, blogs, minority communities, and futurists.

The Delta Scan is an overview of future science and technology issues and trends, with contributions by over 200 science and technology experts from the worlds of government, business, academia and communication in the UKand US.

Develeped over 2005 and 2006 by a team of consultants and futurists,  the Scanning Framework has some novel methodologies and catagories. Each main issue is described as an Issue paper.

The main text of the Issue Papers themselves is divided into a number of different sections:


Headline: Headlines provide a brief description of the future eventuality discussed a pithy note on the main themes contained within the paper.


Keywords: Keywords summarise the coverage of the issue and suggest related issues, domains or topics.


Summary: The summary provides first an Abstract of the Issue (delimited by asterisks) for a quick overview of the whole paper, followed by a description of the trend, event or theme and the debates it raises. This is generally a presentation of the data/evidence in this field, linked where necessary to sources (with no fixed view on likely outcomes).


Implications: this contains a range of possible outcomes that could flow from the Issue as described in the Summary. These incorporate a number of factors where appropriate, including social values, habitat/environment, new technologies, knock-on and perverse effects. Early Indicators: This aspect of the Paper suggests possible early warning signs and precursors that should be looked for to indicate that the Issue may indeed be developing as described in the Paper.

Drivers and Inhibitors: Factors, people, institutions or events which will either fuel (Drivers) or act as a barrier (Inhibitors) to the emergence of this Issue.


Parallels and Precedents: Historical, international or cross-cultural examples of
somewhat similar instances which may shed some light either on the evolution of the Issue or the likely success of different strategies in response.


Sources: The list of sources consulted in writing the Paper, with web links, documents and location information where applicable.


Related links: a list of websites that may be of further interest to the reader relating to the topic


Sigma Scan basics: Issue Markers

Each issue has been further labelled with a number of Markers, which provide highly indicative (i.e. not predictive) information about the possible likelihood, impact,
distribution, severity and development time of each Issue:


Impact: This marker is designed to reflect the potential of this issue to create pervasive and/or serious change in the world at large: a development which in cultural, technological, environmental, economic or political terms alters the way we live or perceive the world. Impact is divided into:

• ****Extreme: Intense, deep-seated, pervasive or long-lasting in its effects. An event/development which profoundly affects the planet for example, an asteroid strike.
• ***High: A great event in human history, something that shapes human history and leaves longstanding cultural residues for example, the moon landings, the establishment of the United Nations, a major pandemic.
• **Medium: A defining aspect of a particular generation or nation's experience of the world. An important footnote in world history, such as the implementation of the Euro, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
• *Low: A development whose scope to instigate change is subtle or in some way restrained by conditions, medium, force, locality or likely responses. Something that captures the news agenda for months or years, but eventually fades into the cultural memory for example, the cultural changes of the 1960s.
• ?Unknown: There is no consensus within the literature about how best to interpret this issue.

Likelihood: The likelihood that this issue will evolve to become a central theme/development - in some way - in future society within its projected life span. The likelihood markers are:

• ***High: 75+% confidence that the events discussed will come to pass.
• **Medium: An equivocal 50/50 call.
• *Low: 25% or less probability.
• ?Unknown: No consensus about the likelihood.
  
  

Controversy: The level of consensus amongst experts, commentators and other observers holds that the Issue will unfold in the way described in the Paper and/or assume a greater significance in acting as an instigator of change. The controversy markers are:

• ***High: Very few experts pay the issue serious attention, and there is very little consensus about the extent to which this issue is likely to emerge. There is very little known evidence for this issue, and what there is highly unconventional, or propounded by alternative sources.
• **Medium: Whilst there is some kind of conventional consensus, futurists and/or alternative sources dispute whether this issue is likely to be a central development in future. Evidence is somewhat equivocal or open to scrutiny, even within expert audiences.
• *Low: The majority of experts, as well as a large volume of authoritative evidence, point to this issue emerging as a central theme over the next 50 years.
• ?Unknown: No known consensus on how to apply this marker.

When: The expected timeframe for this issue to influence C.21st life to the degree ascribed to it under "Impact". Divided into:

• 0-2 years: This impact of this issue is already being felt or will be in the immediate future
• 3-10 years: Likely to be under way but perhaps not well distributed. Wider effects felt over the near horizon
• 11-20 years: Mid horizon effects
• 21-50 years: Mid to far horizon effects
• 50+ years: Far horizon effects ?Unknown: High level of uncertainty as to when this impact could be felt

Where: The geographical spread of the Issues impact. Divided into:

• Domestic/national Largely restricted to particular nation states (e.g. UK)
• Regional Largely restricted to major global regions/continental areas (e.g. EU, Latin America)
• Global Potential to be experienced anywhere/everywhere on a global scale
• ?Unknown

How fast: How quickly the events and potential impacts described in the Paper could be
experienced:

• Instant in a matter of moments
• Days over the course of days
• Months over months
• Years over years
• Unknown

Sigma Scan basics: Issue Genres


As well as the markers, each paper is also classified into a number of different Genres. This is identified at the start of the Summary in capital letters and is supplied as an at-a-glance way for users to decide what sort of critical thinking they should apply to their reading of the paper. (e.g. in the same way that we would apply different critical faculties for reading a work of science fiction than we would for reading todays
newspaper).

Weak signal: A primarily descriptive Paper attempting to shed light on a relatively little known, weakly felt or poorly distributed phenomenon a possible baby trend at the relative margins of current knowledge. The Implications of this style of paper tend to be limited to explaining what is already starting to happen, and the Drivers / Inhibitors are important in deciding whether it will grow into a Key Driver or dwindle into nothing. The aim of Weak Signal papers is to inform readers about trends or
potential events that might slip under the radar.

Forecast: An Issue for which there is a relatively high degree of certainty, at least in terms of its likely presence as a force for change, based as it is on robust quantitative data and relatively stable variables. Forecast papers are based upon well-grounded and
authoritative sources, drawing on models or statistics to draw conclusions.

Key driver: These Papers describe a relatively more mainstream and better-known trend or development. Something that would probably on the radar of most policymakers or strategy thinkers. Key Driver papers provide a top-level review of the trend for the uninitiated, and aim to stretch the more informed reader with some wider Implications Parallels / Precedents beyond the usual inferences and certainties.

Scenario: A Paper which takes as its evidence base published scenario work from other sources. It therefore discusses the range of uncertainties and drivers that have been discussed in developing these scenarios and compares the assumptions in them. Rather than describing a possible driver of future change, it therefore examines the feasibility and possible implications of a particular hypothetical future.

Wildcard: An Issue with the potential to emerge unexpectedly but with potentially major impacts. Often, these papers deal with a radical discontinuity, as compared to other, more continuous and/or gradual trends.

Scientists discover link between matter and anti-matter -the B-sub-s meson, which switches between matter and antimatter 3 trillion times a second. Preamble to quantum computing?

IT MIGHT BE…IT COULD BE…IT IS!!!

Fermilab's CDF scientists make it official: They have discovered the quick-change behavior of the B-sub-s meson, which switches between matter and antimatter 3 trillion times a second.

BATAVIA, Illinois - Scientists of the CDF collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today that they have met the exacting standard to claim discovery of astonishingly rapid transitions between matter and antimatter: 3 trillion oscillations per second.

Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy, congratulated the CDF collaboration on the result.

"This remarkable tour de force details with exquisite precision how the antiworld is tied to our everyday realm," Dr. Orbach said.  "It is a beautiful example of how, using increasingly sophisticated analysis, one can extract discovery from data from which much less was expected.  It is a triumph for Fermilab."

Significance

The CDF discovery of the oscillation rate, marking the final chapter in a 20-year search, is immediately significant for two major reasons: reinforcing the validity of the Standard Model, which governs physicists' understanding of the fundamental particles and forces; and narrowing down the possible forms of supersymmetry, a theory proposing that each known particle has its own more massive "super" partner particle.

see full press release here >> [...]

....so does that mean that there is a "me" and an "anti-matter me" every 3 trillionth of a second?

Being able to "see and measure" effects at this unimaginable rate is important, if we want to think about and understand what the next age of computing could be. Many predict it will involve quantum computing.

It's worth remembering the predictions of two fellows....David Darling and Michio Kaku.

British astronomer David Darling wrote convincingly in his 2005 book, "Teleportation - The Impossible Leap," that we are close to being able to teleport individual atoms and molecules - the first step toward human movement.  Next would come the teleportation of macromolecules and microbes, which would eventually lead into the teleportation of humans.

How possible is this? 

"If you recall, in 2005, researchers had successfully teleported beams of light across a laboratory bench, and the quantum structure of a trapped calcium ion to a second calcium ion had been teleported.  Networked quantum computers are the key.  They are more complex than today's commonplace, bit-oriented computers, and will be able to accomplish more complex tasks.  They use quantum mechanical aspects such as "entanglement" and "superposition" to perform operations on data."

"Teleportation is going to play a major role in all our futures," Darling writes.  "It will be a fundamental process at the heart of quantum computers, which will themselves radically change the world."  He adds that replication of inanimate objects will also be developed through the same scientific developments.  He says it is "a question of simply overcoming technical challenges," and adds that quantum computing is the "factor that changes the rules of what is and isn't possible."

Michio Kaku, the co-founder of String Field Theory, predicts this:

"The nation which dominates the world economy may be the one which masters the nano world of atomic and quantum computing.  Then quantum events … will be the source of the world's wealth.  The Silicon Age is coming to a close.  Welcome to the Quantum Age, where even button-down bankers will have to learn the mysteries of the multiverse."