Pflogging ... in pursuit of accelerated value creation

Faith and hope are as much a part of political reality as they are in change programs within businesses. As I reflect on the daily political landscape that pretends to offer us information to make sense of the 'most important issue' in the upcoming election (the economy), I offer the following two articles for your consideration. I think these two articles are important to digest together. Both have the feel of the kind of unbiased analysis, reflective discourse, and unvarnished truth that must accompany any true reform in our national debate on such topics (a reform that is desparately needed).

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A number of years ago, I had the opportunity to attend an excellent lecture by Margaret Thatcher, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. In it, she indicated that the world was going to be changing radically as a result of those events, and that it was not clear what new direction it would take.

Below is a link to an excellent paper that was presented several weeks ago by Herbert Meyer at a Davos, Switzerland meeting which was attended by most of the CEOs from all the major international corporations. It provides a very good summary of what he considers to be today's key trends, and a number of interesting perspectives that one seldom sees in such analyses.  read more »

In the first five months of this year, American businesses and households have spent $49 billion more on gasoline than in the first five months of 2007, according to Cameron Hanover, in a recent New York Post article. Compared to early 2002, (the last time gas was around $2 a gallon) our bill is more like $122 billion more this year. These prices affect more than just gasoline; wholesale heating oil/diesel is up 93.3 percent, and natural gas is 45.3 percent higher than a year ago, and is at the the highest in three years. George Soros, who controls a $17b hedge fund, is predicting these levels are not sustainable, and thinks prices will crash soon. Of course, he's a guy that isn't afraid to manipulate things for his own personal benefit and beliefs.  read more »

Biomechatronics is an effort to recreate & integrate mechanical elements of the human body using a synthesis of multiple technologies. Research and development costs for breakthroughs in prosthetic devices are enormous, and few private companies have interested in pursing the challenges and risks inherent in such developments for such a comparatively small market; for example, in the United States, only about 6000 people require arm prostheses each year. Under normal economic conditions and market forces, there is thus little financial incentive for entrepreneurs or companies to pursue creating a new, next-generation prosthetic arm. However, with over 1600 soldiers returning from the latest Iraq conflict with at least one arm missing, there are new opportunities and funding sources for innovations in treating these wounded soldiers. An effort from the Defense Research Projects Agency is underway that could be leading to some real breakthroughs in this area.  read more »

For some time, one of the biggest enabling technology constraints with designing robots has been in producing an effective approach to locomotion. On the straight and level, they were ok, but on rough terrain, they have problems. The challenges involved in designing an effective solution- intelligent, concurrent control and feedback for each autonomous leg, rapid assessment of difficult terrain, recovering from stumbles - are all hard computing problems and must be tackled in combination with other design issues, like choosing the right actuator system (which must provide many more than [w:six degrees of freedom]), and developing a product that is a managable, yet useful, size.

Progress is being made. In the latest 'walking robot' from Boston Dynamics, 'Big Dog', the prototype can climb, run, jump, and even recover from slips. The prototype is noisy (a gasoline-powered generator is the power supply), which reinforces again how much improvements to portable power will become catalysts for subsequent innovations. But the progress that's been made in robot kinematics in just the last few years is phenomenal.  read more »