Space Startup Scorecard 2009 January 17, 2009
Posted by Brian Pfeifer in ARCA, Armadillo Aerospace, Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, Canadian Arrow, PlanetSpace, Rocketplane Kistler, Space Startups, SpaceDev, SpaceX, Starchaser, Tspace, UP Aerospace, X Class Orgs, XCOR.1 comment so far
The last time I did the scorecard was in 2007. Surprisingly, not a lot has changed. This was caused by two factors. First, not all of the companies are still pursuing private manned spaceflight. Instead Xcor and Planetspace are becoming engine and other parts suppliers to aerospace businesses. Others, like Transformational Space would like to be prime contractors and project managers rather than really hardware guys.
The second reason is that the milestones I have listed are extremely challenging. A few years ago, I don’t think most of us realized just how challenging they would be. ARCA, for example, has had multiple drop tests and balloon flights with various hardware configurations. They’ve also designed and test fired several engines and fuel combinations. They just haven’t fired a rocket after launching it on a balloon. They are progressing, but it’s painfully slow when viewed from the outside.
One other thing became clear as I read over company websites and profiles filling in the scorecards. Almost every one of these businesses submitted a proposal for NASA’s COTS program. We’ll dig a little deeper into that at a later date.
I’ve highlighted the few changes to the scorecard to make it easier to read.
Aerospace Startup Scorecard 2009
Houses of the Mind: Part II January 12, 2009
Posted by Brian Pfeifer in Future Development.add a comment
We are still in the very earliest stages of building digital environments, and we have little idea of what their long-term implications will be. Just as moving our activities from the field into buildings, so too will these new structures radically alter how we live and work. One change that is already upon us is an increased ability or need to multitask.
The other day, my wife was knitting. This in itself does not appear to be technology intensive activity, but she was sitting in front of her laptop as she whiled away the afternoon. Why was her laptop important? She was watching an instructional video by knitting legend Elizabeth Zimmermann while she worked. In fact she was following instructions in the video. Of course the knitting took longer than the instructions, so she would pause Mrs. Zimmermann, and switch over to an episode of “Private Practice” until she competed a section of the garment, and went back for more instructions. While switching between video sources, she would pause just long enough to check and possibly respond to emails. Let’s not forget about Facebook. She had to update her status and see what her friends were up to at the same time.
What’s amazing, is not how many things she was doing all at once, but rather how normal it all is. At work, we think nothing of checking the weather forecast between responding to our boss’s email and writing important documentation. As portable networked devices become ubiquitous, this will only accelerate. While waiting in line a Starbucks you’ll check sports scores while writing the next great American novel. At the same time your calendar reminds you of an old friend’s impending birthday.
Will this technology make our world better? It depends on how we employ them. Walls and roofs meant that we could continue to work even in bad weather, and provided a safe place to recover from illness, and store food. At the same time, walls can be built to control our movement, fracture societies, and limit our opportunities. We have it in us to determine the future of our newly constructed environments. But we must take control of them with knowledge and intention and wisdom.
Keeping our Kids Safe Online January 8, 2009
Posted by Brian Pfeifer in News and politics.add a comment
Usually when the media cover this topic it is from a place of either alarmist hysteria or vague theoretical suggestions. Statements like, “the internet is full of dangerous and potentially harmful individuals,” are just as unhelpful as, “parents should be engaged in their children’s online activities.” Parents need some simple, straightforward, and effective methods for dealing with the confusing challenges of raising children in this digital age.
When I was a child I was bombarded with numerous admonitions. Don’t play with knives. Don’t talk to strangers. Look both ways before you cross the street. Never get into a stranger’s car. Don’t eat the red berries. Of course my parents presented me with these truths whenever necessary, but I also received the same messages from Sesame Street, and the myriad of other children’s television programs, songs, and other media. This is what we need as a first step towards protecting our children in the Internet enhanced world we live in.
I don’t have all of the answers, but we could start with something like, “Ask your parents before giving out your address.” This one is good because it works in physical situations as well as digital ones. Maybe we could add, “introduce your parents to all new online friends.” This would give parents a chance to vet the people their children stumble across in online communities. This is not a complete list, but rather a starting point for the conversation. If we can put together a few effective messages, we can add them to the regular list of admonitions and safety bits included in the popular media or similar places.
That’s just my two bits.
Chasing the Meme January 4, 2009
Posted by Brian Pfeifer in History, Language.add a comment
How do we trace the spread of ideas around the world? With hard technologies this is relatively straightforward. If you find a bronze mirror in a tomb from 200 BC, then you can be certain they had access to bronze mirrors in that location at that time. What about more abstract concepts like time? Linguistics may point to a method for tracking some of these concepts. For what follows I must acknowledge Professor John McWhorter and his lecture series, “Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language.”
It has been demonstrated that there is link between the way we speak and the way we think in a several particular examples. I’m not talking about the classic Sapir-Worf hypothesis that grammar and vocabulary channel thought in a fairly gross way. Rather the Neo-Worfians have demonstrated less striking but more concrete links between some concepts and language. The two specific examples I know about are representations of time, and the gender of nouns.
To my knowledge the Neo-Worfians have not proven the causal link between the two. It could be that the thought processes dictate language development, or that the language dictates the thought process. They have, however, proven that there is a strong link between the two. For example, in English we have a tendency to talk about time in terms of length, as if you could measure it on a ruler. Spanish speakers, are more likely use terms of volume as if you could fill up a jar with time.
Daniel Cassanto conducted a series of experiments where he showed subjects a lengthening line or a jar filling with water as representations time measurements. The English speakers were much better at estimating the duration when using the line than the jar. The opposite held true for the Spanish speakers. Cassanto went on to confirm that this also holds true for Greek speakers who use length for time as well.
Our language clearly indicates how we think about this very abstract concept of measuring time. It is a theory that is easily testable for any language in the world, and I’m confident we will see it hold true in almost every case. Of course, we will probably find languages that use other methods for describing time, but that will only make the research richer.
Now, all of that was just background so we can get to the meat of this. A survey of the worlds languages can then be used to create a map of time measurement language, and therefore of thought. Who knows what patterns this exercise will reveal. More interestingly, this could be the start of discovering how these two (or more) concepts spread around the world.
Historical linguistics provides many tools for analyzing and reconstructing elements from our linguistic past, and even from dead languages. These could start to create a map of the movement of this idea through time. Thus leading us on the path to tracking down their origins in both time and space.
If this search yields an origin for these time concepts, and creates a distribution, then it will be valuable to research other words with a positive link between language and thought. What else could we look into? Perhaps the language of harvesting, or moving a boat, or anything we do that is more of a technique than a physical tool. For example, we pick fruit, and mow hay. Do our words indicate where we got these ideas from or how we think about the process? I don’t know, but the research tools exist. All we need to do is reach out and grab them.
