Lifeboat Foundation

Good for the environment and the economy.

A million and a half students, even very young ones, took to the streets Friday March 15th, in two thousand cities around the world, for the climate, responding to a Greta Thunberg’s call. Greta is a 16-year-old student in Stockholm: “I will not stop. Not until greenhouse gas emissions have fallen below the alarm level.” Considering the great support she had, it would seem that students were not waiting for anything else, with great outcry of the ecologists of various tendencies, who have for years repeated the same call, without being able to arouse mass movements of this magnitude.

There is no doubt that we are on the verge of great changes. The automotive industry — by far a leading industry in the world economy — is about to collapse, because it has not been able to innovate in time, and now it does not in fact have ready solutions, to satisfy a market that no longer intends to exchange mobility with health. Such imminent collapse will not do any good to economy. It will also offer vampire rulers new opportunities to increase the taxation, already exorbitant in many countries. And no one seems to realise that if producers die as a social category, consumers will soon die too, as they are the same people. There is no doubt, moreover, that the ruling politicians, more and more void of any basic culture, will find many ways to manage what Serge Latouche (in his essay on the so-called “happy de-growth”) called “inevitable social problems following de-growth”.

In mobiles, fridges, planes – transistors are everywhere. But they often operate only within a restricted current range. LMU physicists have now developed an organic transistor that functions perfectly under both low and high currents.

Transistors are semiconductor devices that control voltage and currents in electrical circuits. To reduce economic and environmental costs, electronic devices must become smaller and more effective. This applies above all to transistors. In the field of inorganic semiconductors, dimensions below 100 nanometers are already standard. In this respect, organic semiconductors have not been able to keep up. In addition, their performance with regard to charge-carrier transport is considerably worse. But organic structures offer other advantages. They can easily be printed on an industrial scale, the material costs are lower, and they can be transparently applied to flexible surfaces.

Thomas Weitz, a professor in LMU’s Faculty of Physics and a member of the Nanosystems Initiative Munich, and his team are working intensively on the optimization of organic transistors. In their latest publication in Nature Nanotechnology, they describe the fabrication of transistors with an unusual structure, which are tiny, powerful and above all versatile. By carefully tailoring a small set of parameters during the production process, they have been able to design nanoscale devices for high or low current densities. The primary innovation lies in the use of an atypical geometry, which also facilitates assembly of the nanoscopic transistors.

The last two decades have seen a great upswing in commercial space endeavors with hundreds of new companies formed and a few prominent billionaires entering the fray. This is all good, but it remains devilishly hard to make money in space without tapping into government space markets. Nevertheless, I’m a firm believer that the commercialization of space is absolutely essential for the growth of the space economy and achieving all of the goals we espouse for human activities in space.

So, what do I mean by commercial space? This has been a great topic of debate ever since NASA initiated the commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. There are many definitions and which is appropriate depends on the context. The real distinction is between the public sector and the private sector. Any given space activity can include a mixture of both elements. The purest form of commercial activity takes place entirely within the private sector. It is performed by private-sector companies for the benefit of private-sector customers using private-sector capital. Something like Direct TV would be an example.

At the other end of the spectrum is a pure public-sector activity where the activity is performed entirely by public-sector agencies using public-sector employees, entirely funded by public funds for a public purpose. An example would be SLS, but even it is not purely public as several private sector companies are employed. In between are all manner of hybrids involving a mix of investment funds, executing entities and customers.

Continue reading “Op-ed” »

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka speaks during his fifth state of the city address at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on March 12, 2019. (Karen Yi | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Cognitive computing (CC) technology revolves around making computers adept at mimicking the processes of the human brain, which is basically making them more intelligent. Even though the phrase cognitive computing is used synonymously with AI, the term is closely associated with IBM’s cognitive computer system, Watson. IBM Watson is a supercomputer that leverages AI-based disruptive technologies like machine learning (ML), real-time analysis, natural language processing, etc. to augment decision making and deliver superior outcomes.

My colleague Conor Sen recently made a bold prediction: Government will be the driver of the U.S. economy in coming decades. The era of Silicon Valley will end, supplanted by the imperatives of fighting climate change and competing with China.

This would be a momentous change. The biggest tech companies — Amazon.com, Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google (Alphabet Inc.) and (a bit surprisingly) Microsoft Corp. — have increasingly dominated both the headlines and the U.S. stock market:

That may not be fair to SpaceX, but it’s a good deal for taxpayers.

Explosive growth in emerging economies will help developing nations exceed America’s economic growth.