"etech09" entries

ETech: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People

[Quinn managed to scoop me blogging about Tony Jebara's presentation! But after I chatted with her, we both agreed that I should continue with my blog post and see if I can augment her post a little.] Tony Jebara's presentation "Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People" really opened my eyes to what amazing things you can…

Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons

The first session I attended today was John Wilbanks' "Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons" presentation. John talked about the process of establishing the Science Commons and how creating a science oriented commons presented unique challenges. John first pointed out that Metcalfe's Law works for both networked computers and documents. But, he went on to extend…

Four short links: 11 Mar 2009

Four short links: 11 Mar 2009

Four ETech-related links, from your humble author who is following the action from afar:

  1. Criminals Are “Targeting Basic Blocks of the Internet” (Guardian) — writeup of Alex Stamos‘s talk. “Basic infrastructure failure is what we’re going to see over the next few years,” he said. “The most interesting research is either taking things that we thought were unexploitable and exploiting them, and also the breaking of the basic building blocks of the internet from the 1970s and 1980s.” For another “we’re all so boned” moment on Internet security, read Peter Gutmann‘s overview of the commercial malware industry.
  2. Phil Gyford’s ETech 09 Posts — Phil takes notes and attends a lot of the sessions I’d have wanted to be in, like Tim’s “Work on Stuff that Matters”.
  3. Mary Lou Jepsen’s Talk (Guardian) — interesting bit for me was a low powered television set that can display high definition video but can run without being plugged in. “We’ve had a lot of pull,” she said. “People want TV even if they don’t have power… an HDTV that’s under 10W and can be human-powered. We’ve figured out a way to do that.” Not that I’m in love with television, but the technology that gets mass-produced for cud-chewing couch-butts gets cheaper for the likes of you and me. See her new company, Pixel Qi.
  4. ETech on Hashtags — see the latest tweets tagged with “#etech”. E.g., @fortunebird‘s Rebecca Allegar: Don’t predict the future, design it., and @Technomadia‘s We just controlled a chocolate lab live via iPhone. Now.. we eat more chocolate! I like this presentation lots!

ETech: Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?

The second ETech session today I’d like to share with you was presented by a personal friend of mine, Jeremy Faludi. Jer started his session entitled “Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?” by pointing out that if we want to change the world, we ought to know what the most important issues are, right?

ETech: I Just Don't Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings

The “I Just Don’t Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings” presentation posited that the system for rating credit instruments is horribly broken. Right before Lehman Brothers crashed, Moody’s credit rating agency gave Lehman Brothers a AAA credit rating. Moodys immediately down-rated Lehman Brothers after they crashed — a little too late!

Etech Session Liveblogging: Real Hackers Program DNA (Ginkgo Bioworks)

GB is "Making the process of engineering biology easier." Synth bio is the idea that biology is a technology to engineer novel systems- say drugs, biofuels, other sexy sexy projects. This is to be a flavor of what engineering biology is all about. We will be installing a program into E coli to make it turn red, glow in the…