Part II: Speed
Article2 The CNN 10: Ideas
Warm up
Where do good ideas come from?
Some say they're the result of collaboration between people whose collective wisdom is greater than that of any individual. Others believe the best ideas happen when a brilliant mind pursues a singular vision that hasn't been watered down by groupthink.
Either way, bold ideas are the currency of our knowledge economy and the lifeblood of our advancement as a culture. We don't always grasp the importance of one when we see it for the first time, but we recognize them in hindsight. (How did we ever carry our bags before someone invented wheeled luggage?)
As part of our focus on innovation, CNN is honoring 10 emerging ideas in technology and related fields. These are concepts with big potential to change the world: to make us healthier, to keep us safer on the highways, to protect the coastline during storms, to help our computers think for themselves, to literally reinvent the wheel.
Many of these ideas are already gaining traction. Some may never take flight. But all are sparking dialogue among thought leaders in their fields, which is never a bad thing. We believe they're all worth pondering.
May we present the CNN 10: Ideas. [200]
Time2
Going with the flow
For centuries, the conventional wisdom about protecting shorelines from storm surges has been to build a seawall. And if that fails, build a bigger wall.
But in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, which devastated much of the New Jersey-New York coastline in 2012, that rigid line of thinking is being tossed on its ear. Instead of erecting ever-bigger barriers – which when breached can trap floodwater, as in a bathtub -- civic planners are embracing bold new ideas that would redesign shorelines to accommodate some managed flooding and minimize destruction.
"The challenge for us over the next several decades is how we learn to live with water and not fight against it," said Samuel Carter, an associate director at the Rockefeller Foundation, which is helping fund a new project to reinvent the coastline of New York and New Jersey.
The project, Rebuild by Design, brings together many of the world's top engineers, architects and others to create innovative ways to minimize flooding and protect shorelines. Among their ideas: building a series of protective breakwaters in New York Harbor that slow the force of waves while serving as living reefs to rebuild the dwindling oyster population; designing "hyperabsorbent" streets and sidewalks that would mitigate storm runoff; digging channels along streets to divert stormwater; and creating buildings that are designed to flood without being damaged.
Ten of the best ideas have been chosen by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan to be further developed into formal designs. These may be eligible for federal Sandy-relief funding and eventually be implemented across New York and New Jersey while serving as a model for flood-protection efforts in other parts of the world.
With sea levels expected to inch higher in coming decades, these kinds of projects will only become more crucial, especially in urban areas.
The idea, Rebuild by Design's planners say, is to come up with collaborative, flexible new solutions tailored to each community instead of just rebuilding and inviting history to repeat itself.
"It's a normal thing for human beings all around the world: When something (bad) happens, they want to go back to where they were (before). But when it comes to Superstorm Sandy, that would be a total failure," said Henk Ovink, co-chairman of the Rebuild by Design jury and a senior adviser for the federal Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force.
"Water can be a threat, but it's also a necessity and a resource," Ovink said. "You can embrace water. Working against nature is not a solution." [417]
Time3
Crowdfunding's showbiz revolution
Spike Lee has an Emmy and two Academy Award nominations. Zach Braff starred in the sitcom "Scrubs," and his film "Garden State" brought praise from critics as well bringing in more than $35 million.
And in 2013, both chose the Internet, instead of Hollywood, to fund their new movies.
By fast-twitch Internet standards, online fundraising is nothing new. More than 5 million people have helped fund over 53,000 projects since Kickstarter launched in 2009. (Rival IndieGogo was launched at the Sundance Film Festival several months earlier). Both have helped launch artistic endeavors that may have never happened otherwise
But now established entertainers are using the platforms to appeal directly to fans to help fund new projects.
In May, Braff scored $3.1 million on Kickstarter for "Wish I Was Here,"which, like "Garden State" he wrote and plans to star in and direct. Lee followed in August, bringing in $1.4 million for "The Sweet Blood of Jesus," known during the campaign only as "The Newest, Hottest Spike Lee Joint."
But they were both swamped by a project to make a movie wrapping up the long-since canceled cable series "Veronica Mars." That one earned $5.7 million -- the third-highest total in Kickstarter history -- and may have done as much as any other project to usher in a new phase in crowdfunding.
"After I saw how the amazing "Veronica Mars" fans rallied around that project in a mind-blowing way, I couldn't help but think , like so many others, maybe this could be a new paradigm for filmmakers who want to make smaller, personal films without having to sign away any of their artistic freedom," Braff said in a video promoting his campaign.
In the end, $5 million isn't exactly blockbuster money. But we wouldn't be surprised if bigger, more expensive, efforts get funded in the next few years.
"It takes the ability to decide what you see, what happens, from the privileged few to the crowd," author Neil Gaiman, whose short story "The Price" is set to become a 3D, animated short film thanks to a successful 2010 campaign, told CNN at the time. "I can't wait until the first $50 million movie is funded through Kickstarter." [365]
Time4
Yes, we can turn back time
There's a way to end seasonal clock confusion and eliminate jet lag.
All it would take is doing away with daylight saving and splitting the continental United States in two time zones: East and West, an hour apart.
It's not a radical idea. In fact, changing how we view time is a natural part of progress in society. In the Civil War era, every city in the country had its own local time based on the position of the sun. That was too confusing for train schedules, so the country moved to four time zones in 1883.
But we've evolved since then to an even more connected world. Now we all watch the same television channels and trade on the same stock market. Our lives are more integrated, and a more unified time system makes sense.
Allison Schrager, an economist and writer in New York, made the case for a change in an essay she published before we turned the clocks back in November. Here's how Schrager's plan would work: Eastern Time jumps onto Central Time, and Pacific Time becomes Mountain Time. That would give east coast states brighter mornings and west coast states sunnier evenings.
Schrager told CNN she first thought about it when she commuted to Austin, Texas on a regular basis. She noticed everyone in the Southwest did everything at the same time as New Yorkers, they just called it a different time.
"The whole point of keeping time is coordination. The problem is, there's just so much confusion," she said.
That's only made more complex by daylight saving time, a practice that the United States adopted from Europe in 1918 to save energy. Clocks are set forward in summer to extend afternoon daylight.
However, the vast majority of the world doesn't do it, which makes it hard to coordinate the new, temporarily adjusted times between Asia, Europe and the United States. Plus, there's little proof daylight saving actually reduces energy usage.
Eliminating the practice would prevent the jarring feeling we all get in the fall when the clocks reset and it suddenly gets dark at 4:30 p.m.
The downside? It'll take some getting used to.
But it's less confusing than resetting your watch after a five-hour flight that, on paper, took eight hours one way and three hours the other.[400]
Time5
Touchscreens that fold like maps
The mobile revolution has been won, but the smartphones and tablets that launched it have remained pretty much the same throughout. Specs and design details aside, they're rectangles with rigid glass screens.
All that's about to change.
In 2013, we saw the emergence of flexible display screens as a viable option for personal electronics. And once the technology is perfected, the range of possibilities gets a whole lot broader.
"Foldable electronics, origami electronics like those old Transformers toys -- all kinds of ideas," said Nick Colaneri, director of the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University. "I'm not a design guy, but I've always said that once we made this capability available to the design community, who knows where they'll go with it?"
How about a T-shirt that plays YouTube videos? Or a 90-inch, high-def TV you can fold up and bring to a friend's house for the big game? All are starting to seem like real possibilities.
The breakthrough came as researchers like those at Colaneri's lab figured out how to build display panels onto paper-thin plastic "substrates" -- thin slices of material that act as semiconductors -- instead of glass.
"We've always said that flexible displays are sort of the beginning toward truly flexible electronics," he said. "The display in a conventional phone or laptop or tablet is the least flexible thing in there, since it's made out of a piece of rigid glass."
The first wave of consumer gadgets using that and similar technologies is under way, with more promised in the near future.
Korean gadget giants Samsung and LG have already rolled out phones with curved display screens. Apple has filed for a patent for an "electronic device with a wraparound display."
At Google, one of CNN's Thinkers, Mary Lou Jepsen, is a pioneer in the field of display screens. She's in the super-secretive Google X lab, so there's no telling what she and others are actually up to. But it's hard to imagine new displays aren't somewhere on the agenda.
"All of the names that you mentioned are certainly sniffing around (the idea)," Colaneri said. "I think all of the names that you've dropped are also among the top-10 list of most paranoid, secretive organizations known to man. They're certainly thinking about it." [378]
Time6
Teaching computers to think
There are things we humans just seem to know -- the simple bits of knowledge we pick up through observation or judgment. To us, this common sense is second nature.
But to a computer, the concept is incredibly tricky. Teaching common sense is one of the biggest challenges facing the development of artificial intelligence.
Now a team at Carnegie Mellon University is training a computer program to think for itself, starting with pictures.
The Never Ending Image Learner ("NEIL" to its friends) looks at millions of images on the Web, identifying and labeling them. For example, it might recognize a famous building, an animal's eye or a color. It then groups images together in categories, and automatically looks for associations between them, without human supervision.
"Images also include a lot of common-sense information about the world. People learn this by themselves and, with NEIL, we hope that computers will do so as well," said Abhinav Gupta, an assistant research professor at Carnegie Mellon.
The team decided that images were the best place to start their quest for common sense connections, in part because of the vast selection and variety of images available online.
"No one writes common-sense relationships, such as sheep are white or cars have wheels, and therefore it is hard to gather these relationships from sources such as text," Gupta told CNN.
Each examined image is another puzzle piece. Since July NEIL has analyzed more than 5 million images and come up with 3,000 relationships – a small percentage, but a start. The program might make connections between an object and a location, deducing for example that Ferris wheels are often found in amusement parks, or that a zebras are found on savannas.
The program, funded in part by Google, runs 24/7 on two clusters of computers that include 200 processing cores. Someday soon NEIL may begin analyzing video imagery as well.
"People don't always know how or what to teach computers," said Abhinav Shrivastava, a graduate student working on the project. "But humans are good at telling computers when they are wrong." [345]
Source:
http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2013/12/tech/cnn10-ideas/
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