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Product Feature: Nanosilver Wound Dressings
Nucryst Pharmaceuticals has developed medical coatings based on a proprietary method of applying a thin film of noble metal nanocrystals to base materials. This proprietary technique of depositing biocompatible metal to base materials produces sustained release of metal ions sufficient to produce an antimicrobial effect. The Company's antimicrobial barrier dressings, the first commercial product of this technology, use silver as an antimicrobial coating. Their silver nanocrystals are considerably smaller, ranging between 1 and 100 nanometers, than conventional silver crystals. The size and structure of these crystals result in enhanced solubility and sustained release allowing wound dressings to maintain a fast-acting release of silver ions for up to 7 days. The benefit to patients is that they require fewer, and less painful, dressing changes. Pain associated with serious wounds, such as those of burn victims, can be significant. Nucryst wound dressings last approxiamately a week and peel away without damaging the underlying wound bed. Burn centers across the globe are rapidly adopting the treatment.
 Source: Company Website
Nano-Oscillators, Crickets, and Fireflies
Thesis: The power of synchronization, which has been posited by some as the driving force behind order in the universe, can now be harnessed on the nanoscale.Ever wonder how crickets all chirp at the same time? Or how fireflies can flash on and off in sync? It's a pretty amazing thing when you think about it. An orchestra of intelligent humans requires a conductor to stay in time. In fact, some pieces are impossible without a conductor. So how in the world can groups of fireflies, stretching at times for miles upon miles, with specks for brains organize themselves to blink on and off simultaneously? There is no central conductor, and firefly A clearly cannot communicate with firefly Z three miles down the road, yet this striking phenomenon exists nonetheless. It turns out that oscillators are the magic behind it all. An oscillator is basically a mechanism that cycles repeatedly in time, and the timing of its cycles can be influenced by outside forces. Imagine, for example, two pendulums attached to the same wall. If you set them swinging at different times they will eventually begin to swing in time. This occurs as the vibrations through the wall push and tug against each other until the two pendulums are gradually brought into sychrony. This is also how crickets chirp in unison. They have a tiny oscillator in their brains that responds to the chirping of other crickets. Fireflies, similarly, have a tiny oscillator in their brain that responds to external light. One of the first researchers in this field released hundreds of them into a dark hotel room. He watched as patches, or networks, of the fireflies slowly synchronized. First, a set of three here, then six over there, then four over there, then suddenly the three back over there assimilated two neighbors into their ranks, and so forth, with one dominant group eventually enveloping the whole into a single flash pattern. This phenomenon can be seen everywhere. Your heart beats because its cells release pulses in sychrony; heart attacks occur when this rhythmic pulse is ruptured by failed or rogue cells suddenly falling out of pulse. Ever been walking next to somebody and you notice that you seem to be walking in step? This can happen on an even larger scale with groups of runners. The synchronization of women's periods have also been attributed to oscillators. Sleeping patterns, brain activity, interplanetary motions, quantum forces, financial markets, and human networks are a few of the areas to which this phenomenon has been ascribed as a major force. In fact, Steven Strogatz, a leading authority on the subject and the first to provide a mathematical proof that oscillators will always achieve synchrony under certain conditions, has written a book arguing that this may well be the mysterious force behind order in the universe, including life. He suggests that all "order from chaos" occurs through this process. Now we have finally tapped into this phenomenon on the nano scale. Nano-oscillators have the potential to provide wireless broadcasting (cellular technology relies on this process) on the nano and micro scale. The oscillators can generate powerful signals with a relatively small set of particles. The applications of this discovery remain to be seen, but it is an exciting development nonetheless. You can read more about it in this ScienceDaily article. 
Artificial Intelligence and Self-organizing Structures
Thesis: Unlike the AI systems and computer technologies we rely on today, the most powerful AI systems of the future will adapt, learn, self-organize and emerge as intelligent, much like the intelligent systems we observe in nature.In a recent post, I talked about the differences between wisdom and intelligence as they apply to the human intellect. Next I would like to discuss the implications for technology, more specifically artificial intelligence. Many leading authorities believe that true artificial intelligence, as seen in the quality of the human intellect, will require impeccably simple, beautiful algorithms capable of advanced pattern-recognition and learning, rather than the fully-programmed, detailed designs often used for modern applications. These algorithms will result in emergent intelligence. Pattern Recognition in A.I.: Seeing Shakespeare?Although we have created computer systems that use pattern recognition, they are built for very specific purposes. For instance, I'm sure your familiar with the SAT. The College Board recently added a writing section to the SAT, similar to sections that appear on their graduate school tests . Believe it or not, test taker's essays are graded by a computer. Both a human and a computer grade the essay, and in the rare case that the computer-generated grade differs from the human grade, a second human grader acts as the tie-breaker. The system works on pattern recognition. The computer compares a given essay to an extensive database of good, mediocre, and bad essays for vocabulary, grammar, style, and content. By identifying the previously graded essays that most-closely resemble the candidate essay, the computer almost always yields a score within one increment of a human grader. Really, the computer is doing just what the human is doing when they blow through 100 essays a day, using the gut instinct and intuition developed from grading thousands of essays to quickly assign a without an in-depth analysis. This program, while impressive, is limited to a handful of applications. We have developed programs for recognizing faces, text, sounds, and other things, but never a single, unified system that relies on the same architecture and programming to recognize and interact with the plethora of objects humans encounter. Check Mate? In tasks less fuzzy than grading essays, with clearly defined rules and goals, brute processing has been used to overcome the cognitive abilities of humans. A few years ago, IBM developed the first computer (Deep Blue) to defeat the reigning international chess champion. Deep Blue calculates an exhaustive number of potential scenarios, looking as many moves as possible into the future, and using sophisticated rules to prune away the scenarios that are less relevant. For each and every one of these scenarios, Deep Blue is thinking through each move. When Gary Kasperov plays chess (the champion) he does not consciously think through billions of individual moves. He relies mostly on experience and intuition to recognize patterns that guide him to his next move. Kasperov's style might be described as more "creative" than that of Deep Blue. And in reality, human situations require more creativity than the black-and-white rule book of chess. Raw computing power used for the calculation of scenarios won't write an endearing, Shakespearan love note or reproduce the human penchant for good irony and laughter. While some of the A.I. systems to-date are impressive, on an individual basis, they cannot begin to compare to humans in their adaptability and versatility. Decentralized, Self-organizing StructuresThe physical differences between humans and today's computers explains a lot. The brain does not do the type of thinking Deep Blue does. Computers rely on the precise calculations of a single processor, a Ferarri of computing; whereas the brain relies on billions of less-powerful processors working in parallel to arrive at a sometimes imprecise but often more-brilliant result. This works by synapses, or the processors, in your brain constantly firing and sensing others around it firing in a complicated network. This is decentralized processing. The value of the brain's decentralized processing power can be seen in other less mysterious examples, like the efficiency of markets and the intelligent behavior of ant colonies. In much the same way your brain synapses work in concert, there are hundreds of millions of people participating in the public markets, each registering their knowledge and processing power through the buying and selling of securities. For everybody buying a security, there's some other guy who thinks it's time to sell, yet despite this messy system of seemingly incompetent and imperfect individuals, we have a fairly efficient market driven by Adam Smith's "magic hand." Similarly, ant colonies build extremely complex structures, including bridges, despite the individual ants knowing nothing about the global system and each following only a few simple rules on a local basis. Systems such as these, including the human brain, are often referred to as emergent intelligences. Just think about relative failure of centrally planned communist economies to capitalism-based economies and the concept of emergent intelligence opens up a whole new realm of philosophical debate. Now, lets discuss how its possible to achieve self-organized intelligence. This type of intelligence is by definition emergent, and I would argue can only occur as such (just as no one human has the intellectual capacity to devise the computer program I discussed above). Think about the delicate and complicated nature of the human brain. Right now you are a sensible person who functions compatibly with society (I hope) as a result of the billions of molecules in your brain being positioned and interacting exactly as they are currently. Now, if I expose you to a couple weeks of Chinese water torture (forcing you to endure constant, evenly-tempoed dripping on your face), you will in theory go insane. How much did the physical structure of your brain change?--not much, probably less than 1%, and yet you are no longer an "intelligent" being capable of functioning in society. Similarly, over time markets have self-organized from a primitive barter economy into an extremely complex and efficient capitalist structure that is reflective of an intelligent civilization. This structure has hundreds of thousands of different companies and billions of entities, all with different roles, each relying on thousands of processes and channels of communication to operate together in an intelligent manner. No one man is entirely essential to the whole, and can be replaced by another similarly trained individual, much like no one cell is essential to the brain (in fact every 7 years on average all the cells in your body is replaced through natural processes; its the structure that matters). But if you were to change just a few things, like all the pass codes for wire transfers, records of security ownership, and redistribute anybody who knows anything about running the Federal Reserve to basket weaving in Peru, the system would literally go haywire. The point is, there's practically an infinite number of wrong combinations of how to organize billions of brain molecules (or billions of people in a civilization) for every right way that achieves intelligence and compatibility with an environment, and consequently, a truly intelligent computer system will have to learn and develop naturally from its environment in some capacity, and then perhaps be copied. Thus, human-like artificial intelligence will require design that centers on pattern recognition and learning. This all may sound like bad news for AI, but I think it bodes well. It means that an extremely complex, intelligent system can develop from the infancy of a few brilliant algorithms designed to achieve perpetual, adaptive self-organization through learning. We just need a few brilliant minds to discern the nascent self-organizing automata that underlie "intelligence."
Initiating Coverage: ACCL, FEIC, VECO
Companies: Accelrys *ACCL*, FEI Company *FEIC*, Veeco *VECO*Initiated: ACCL: 7/22/05, FEIC: 7/22/05, VECO: 9/30/05 Price upon Initiation: ACCL: $5.55, FEIC: $23.09, VECO: $16.04 Descriptions:Accelrys: Accelrys, Inc., formerly Pharmacopeia, Inc. develops and commercializes scientific software and technology that accelerates and improves drug discovery and chemical development. The Company's molecular modeling, simulation, informatics, workflow and data pipelining software support both the life sciences and materials research markets. -Yahoo Veeco: Veeco Instruments Inc. designs, manufactures, markets and services a line of equipment primarily used by manufacturers in the data storage,semiconductor, compound semiconductor/wireless and high-brightness lightemitting diode industries. Veeco's line of products allows customers to improve time-to-market of their products. The Company offers two principal product lines: process equipment and metrology. -Yahoo FEIC: FEI Company (FEI) designs, manufactures, markets and services products and systems that are used in research, development and manufacturing of very small objects, primarily by providing an understanding of their three-dimensional shape. The majority of the Company's customers work in fields that are classified as nanotechnology. FEI's products are based largely on focused charged particle beam technology. -Yahoo Investment Thesis: Be it selling jeans to gold diggers or genetic sequencing tools to biotech companies, where ever there's a boom, there's somebody making a killing off of the greedy money. As the only major vendords of nano-enabled microscopes and molecular modeling software, these companies have dominant market positions to capitalize on the sale of tools to research labs and companies specializing in nanotechnology. As funding grows for nanotechnology, so will the market for tool providers. Veeco sells well over 50% of the atomic force microscopes in the United States. FEIC generates most of its revenue from nanotechnology as the principle provider of STMs (scanning tunneling microscopes) and is exiting the semiconductor test business. Accelrys dominates the molecular modeling market, but is mostly focused on materials modeling. I believe these three companies show promise as long-term nanotech plays.
The Future I, a Discussion with Paul Saffo
Thesis: The need for understanding the future of technology is becoming increasingly important but the task of doing so is growing in difficulty. A talk with Paul Saffo provides some insight into what to expect in the next two decades.This post marks the first in a series discussing the future. I know it's a fairly broad topic, "the future," but I think it deserves some consideration. The advent of nanotechnology is not the only aspect of change that will affect our lives in the coming decades, and a thoughtful assessment of all of the various factors, and how they might interact, may result in some worthy insight. In the past, some very perceptive thinkers competently predicted certain technological developments and their affect on society at large, while some technologies have remained elusive until only a short time prior to widespread adoption. I believe two competing forces are affecting our ability to forecast the future as time elapses—increasing awareness and accelerating returns. On the side of clarity, we are better able to forecast the future because more people have acknowledged the paramount role of technological change in society. The realization that humanity is at an inflection point is generally accepted, and thinkers recognize the implications of rapid technological advancement. In other words, awareness is up, even if it’s just an average Joe watching The Matrix. There's more technology enthusiasts, Science Fiction authors, and general speculation than there was fifty years ago. But, on the other hand--on the side of uncertainty--technological change isn’t just rapid, it’s accelerating. We can expect to see as much change in the next few decades as we did in the last century. That means that it’s as difficult for Michael Crichton to predict thirty years forward as it was for Jules Vearn to predict a century forward. Based on this principle, imagine the difficulty of predicting the future a hundred years from today; it would be like asking Leonardo Di Vinci to aptly predict the world as it exists in the present day, multiple centuries ahead of his time. So what can we expect from the “future?” Paul Saffo, the director of the Institute for the Future, spoke to the Stanford Business School. Here’s a brief bio: Paul is Director of the Institute for the Future, Chairman of the Samsung Science Board, and serves on a variety of other boards and advisory panels, including the Stanford Advisory Council on Science, Technology and Society, and the Long Now Foundation, as well as the boards of several public and pre-public companies located the United States and abroad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and has served as an advisor and Forum Fellow to the World Economic Forum, which in the late 1990s named Paul one of its "100 Global Leaders For Tomorrow." Paul really had a lot more to say than could be reasonably packed into an hour, but I think the theme of his talk was apparent: as internet and wireless technologies mature, they will bring about a revolution of ubiquitous personal media. Interaction with such media will occur with smart devices he describes as “sentient.” These devices will be seamlessly embedded in buildings, rooms, public spaces, vehicles, clothes etc… and will provide users with constant personalized interaction. Blogs, podcasts, etc… have already created a personal media outlet, and online mega-corporations such as Amazon and Google use personal preferences to customize our online experience. Saffo stressed the importance of wireless in making computing ubiquitous, seamless and all present to bring this media experience to us at anytime. Already chips are in your microwave, refrigerator, computer, car, etc… Eventually computing will be extended to lesser devices as well as your clothing and furniture. Devices in clothing could monitor medical conditions, regulate temperature and provide visual effects. In general, computing will become increasingly aware and in control of our environment. In terms of gaining access to the media, traditionally non-media products may become secondary and payment structures radically different. Imagine, for example, a world in which cars are sold to you at under-cost (like cell phones today), and profit is eventually achieved by charging for all of the various media services available to the vehicle, such as GPS, satellite radio, movies, on-star, internet connectivity, etc… We may well be “subscribing” to our vehicles in the future. Saffo also spoke about biometrics and body enhancing surgeries. Just under 10% of pitchers in the MLB have had an elbow surgery that markedly improves their pitching speed, China recently hosted the first beauty competition in which only enhanced contestants could enter. I will discuss more radical notions of the future in a later post. ,
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