Christine Peterson, co-founder and president of The Foresight Institute, a public interest group seeking to educate the community on forthcoming technological advances, emphasized the increasingly prominent role that nanotechnology has come to play.

Peterson noted that nanotechnology has the potential to create new materials and make vast advances without the side effects, such as pollution, that would currently ensue. She allowed, however, that the near-invisible and highly sensitive technology might enable intrusions on privacy.

“We need to know what data is collected,” Peterson said, “how it is used and how long it is retained. We have those rights.”

Peterson highlighted the medical benefits of nanotechnology, noting, “The ability to control atoms and molecules would mean that there really isn’t a physical illness [that] we wouldn’t be able to address.”

The report quotes the moderator of the panel, author Piero Scaruffi, as stating that the four panelists were picked because “They discussed life as in the future, rather than life as in the past.” We can certainly expect that life after advanced nanotechnology has been developed will be fundamentally different from life up until that point.

Hope to see you there!  —Christine Peterson, President, Foresight Institute

“Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute based in Palo Alto, California, warns that without safeguards, the data we gather about each other might one day be used to undermine rather than to protect our freedom. ‘We are moving to a new level of data collection that our society is not accustomed to,’ she says.” …

“‘We need to look urgently at who is getting the data, what they are doing with it, what it does to our freedoms and whether the information can be abused,’ she says. ‘And we need to think about these things now.’”

Establishing standards now for current and near future widespread sensing based upon smart phones owned by individual members of the public will set precedence for considering the future in which MEMS and nanotechnology will make truly ubiquitous and thorough sensing inexpensive.

Dr. Long Que, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Louisiana Tech University, has reported success in designing and fabricating a device that allows microscale electronic devices to harvest their own wasted energy.

… this technology uses a cantilever made out of piezoelectric material — material capable of converting distortions to itself into electrical energy — and is coated with a carbon nanotube film on one side. When the film absorbs light and/or thermal energy, it causes the cantilever to bend back and forth repeatedly, which causes the piezoelectric material to generate power as long as the light and/or heat source is active. …

“The greatest significance of this work is that it offers us a new option to continuously harvest both solar and thermal energy on a single chip, given the self-reciprocating characteristics of the device upon exposure to light and/or thermal radiation,” said Que. “This characteristic might enable us to make perpetual micro/nano devices and micro/nanosystems, and could significantly impact the wireless sensory network.”

…Que believes that, in the future, the device could be used to power a number of different nano and microsystems such as implanted biomedical devices or remotely located sensors and communication nodes.

Enabling microsensors and microcomputers to harvest power from their environments should advance the advent of global networks of sensing and surveillance devices. Those interested in the looming conflict between those using sensors to collect data and those whose data is being collected should take a look at Foresight Institute’s “Open Source Sensing Initiative“.

Journal Reference (courtesy of ScienceDaily):
Venu Kotipalli, Zhongcheng Gong, Pushparaj Pathak, Tianhua Zhang, Yuan He, Shashi Yadav, Long Que. Light and thermal energy cell based on carbon nanotube films. Applied Physics Letters, 2010; 97 (12): 124102; 10.1063/1.3491843

With terrorism back in the news, so, too, is a curious footnote: Of the hundreds of individuals involved in political violence, nearly half of those with degrees have been engineers. This finding, first published in 2008, has been substantiated by two years of additional research by Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta and political scientist Steffen Hertog, of the London School of Economics. Host Steven Cherry talks with Hertog about why terrorists seem to have a knack for engineering.

I have not listened to this, but the obvious answer would seem to be that many people might wish to be effective terrorists, but only the more technical ones have the needed skills to carry out an action that causes significant harm.  (I have often been thankful that the superb technical people I know appear to have no leanings in that direction.)

See also Open-Source Warfare and Extremist Engineers.

For now, nanotechnologies are primarily being developed by people who are not likely to deploy them for terrorist purposes, but as time passes this will change.  It took about a century for airplanes to be used outside traditional warfare to do major harm; probably that sequence will be faster for nanotechnologies.  We will need to model both offenses and defenses so that “white hat” nanotechnologists stay ahead; this proposal came from Mark S. Miller.  See the Foresight Guidelines and Open Source Sensing for further thoughts.  —Chris Peterson

Topics include OpenPCR, DIY biology, open source hardware, brain preservation, synthetic biology, gene patents, open data, open access journals, reputation engines, crowd-funding and microfinance for science, citizen science, biohacking, open source biodefense, cure entrepreneurs, open source drug discovery, patent pools, tech transfer, and much more.

Here’s some advance media coverage:

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/07/07/the-open-science-shift/

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/07/diy-biotechnologists-go-looking-for-a-bigger-garage/59701/

If you can’t attend in person, watch the webcast live at:

http://fora.tv/live/open_science/open_science_summit_2010

Put it on your calendar now!  Or we’ll hope to see you in person, especially for the session where I’m speaking: “Safety and Security Concerns, Open Source Biodefense” at 5:15 PM on Friday.  –Chris Peterson

We’ll miss you, but you can watch the conference live at:

http://fora.tv/live/open_science/open_science_summit_2010

Put it on your calendar now!  Or we’ll hope to see you in person, especially for the session where I’m speaking: “Safety and Security Concerns, Open Source Biodefense” at 5:15 PM on Friday.  –Chris Peterson

Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0

July 29-31 International House Berkeley
http://opensciencesummit.com

Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for a truly free and open 21st century knowledge economy? Join us at the first Open Science Summit, an attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons to enable an new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity’s greatest challenges.

In the last ten years, a collection of burgeoning movements has begun the herculean task of overhauling the outmoded institutions and worldviews that make up our global scientific governance system. Proponents of the Access to Knowledge movement (A2K) have united around the principle that data and knowledge are “anti-rivalrous,” the value of information increases as it spreads.

Open Access Journals have demonstrated a new path for publishing that utilizes the power of the internet to instantly distribute ideas instead of imposing artificial scarcity to prop up old business models. “Health 2.0” entrepreneurs are seeking to apply the lessons of e-commerce to empower patients.

However, these different efforts are each working on a piece of a problem without a view of the whole. It is not sufficient or realistic to tweak one component of the innovation system (eg, patent policy) and assume the others stay static. Instead, dynamic, interactive, nonlinear change is unfolding.

The Open Science Summit is the first and only event to consider what happens throughout the entire innovation chain as reform in one area influences the prospects in others. In the best case scenario, a virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing shifts toward transparency and collaboration could unleash hitherto untapped reserves of human ingenuity.

Hope to see you there!  —Chris Peterson

It was thus somewhat surprising, yet gratifying, to find them submitting quite a strongly-worded critique of practices in climatology that echo some of the concerns I’ve mentioned here about the impact of the shennanigans on the credibility of science as a whole:

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.
…

6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the
e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific ‘self correction’, which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.

…
10. The scope of the UEA review is, not inappropriately, restricted to the allegations of scientific malpractice and evasion of the Freedom of Information Act at the CRU. However, most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other leading institutions involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. In so far as those scientists were complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices, there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field.

Thirty-five years ago, Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle developed an easy method for sending secure messages over insecure channels. With the advent of the Internet, their technology, called public key cryptography, is now used continuously everywhere in the world.

“When a lock icon appears at the bottom of your browser, it’s using public key cryptography. Your computer and the merchant’s computer can talk back and forth across an insecure channel and exchange credit card information in a way that someone listening in cannot get it,” said Hellman, Stanford professor emeritus of electrical engineering.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named Hellman, Diffie and Merkle the 2010 Richard W. Hamming Medalists. Hellman said he was especially happy that the award recognizes the contribution of Merkle, whose early work on public key encryption didn’t get the acknowledgement it deserved.

“Ralph really deserves equal credit with us. I am really glad to see him being recognized on this award,” Hellman said.

Read the whole article for the interesting details and politics behind the work, and a great photo of all three back in 1975 (lots of hair).  Congratulations!  —Chris Peterson