What potato starch really did to my gut

As suspected, there was a glitch in my latest uBiome results. Apparently a server hiccupped, so the scientists there recomputed my sample and sure enough, the new data is much more believable. Here is the single chart summary of all four of the uBiome tests results I’ve received so far:

You can see a number of changes, but what’s exciting about this one is that it’s the first sample where I was deliberately trying to test something: the effect on my gut of taking potato starch to hack my sleep.

A few details about this sample: 

1. Taken on Jan 19th, almost exactly 3 months after my Oct 17th sample.
2. During the 94 days between samples, I had 31 days where I took a dose of potato starch, a total of about 80 tablespoons.
3. I had been taking 1 T daily, an hour before bedtime, for a week before this sample.

To analyze my results, I first popped into my publicly-available uBiome utilities, using the data I had already downloaded from the site. If you want to follow along at home, here are some of the commands I typed.

To answer the question: Which new species appeared in January?

head(uBiome_sample_unique(jan,oct),topN)

##    missing.count_norm                   missing.tax_name
## 1                1257                 Arthrobacter albus
## 2                 573         Bacillus amyloliquefaciens
## 3                 530                Enorma massiliensis
## 4                 376              Ruminococcus lactaris
## 5                 188          Subdoligranulum variabile
## 6                 163        Adlercreutzia equolifaciens
## 7                 145                Oligella urethralis
## 8                 137         Clostridium sp. NML 04A032
## 9                 137 Desulfovibrio sp. oral clone BB161
## 10                111              Streptococcus rubneri

and which went extinct (are no longer in January sample?)

head(uBiome_sample_unique(oct,jan),topN)

##    missing.count_norm                                missing.tax_name
## 1                5929                          bacterium NLAE-zl-H436
## 2                 114                        Dialister micraerophilus
## 3                 101                      Peptoclostridium difficile
## 4                  88            Dehalogenimonas lykanthroporepellens
## 5                  76                     Bifidobacterium catenulatum
## 6                  51                      unidentified bacterium ZF5
## 7                  51 Veillonellaceae bacterium canine oral taxon 211
## 8                  51                           Ruminococcus sp. 25F8
## 9                  51                              Clostridium leptum
## 10                 38                      Peptoniphilus sp. gpac018A

Here’s the overall picture of what changed between Oct and Jan:

Positive numbers indicate something that is more plentiful in January than October:

tail(octVsJan,topN)

##                               tax_name count_change
## 24              Bifidobacterium longum         7713
## 39         Clostridium clostridioforme         8958
## 78                 Ruminococcus bromii        10663
## 20               Bacteroides uniformis        11036
## 23            Bifidobacterium animalis        13578
## 69 Peptostreptococcaceae bacterium TM5        14151
## 47            Coprococcus sp. DJF_CR49        19000
## 36                 Clostridium baratii        24955
## 76                Roseburia sp. 11SE38        35712
## 57        Faecalibacterium prausnitzii        89592

head(octVsJan,topN)

##                              tax_name count_change
## 17               Bacteroides plebeius       -90998
## 30 butyrate-producing bacterium A1-86       -88414
## 38          Clostridium chartatabidum       -41972
## 11             bacterium NLAE-zl-P430       -23659
## 22       Bifidobacterium adolescentis       -18334
## 10              bacterium NLAE-zl-H54        -9970
## 62              Lactobacillus rogosae        -8575
## 27                     Blautia faecis        -7693
## 56                Eubacterium siraeum        -6040
## 5               Alistipes onderdonkii        -5878

See the difference?

Let’s look at the genus level:

(again, positive numbers are more plentiful in January)

tail(octVsJan,topN)

##              tax_name count_change
## 27              Dorea         3396
## 42     Parasutterella         3473
## 48 Pseudobutyrivibrio         5523
## 34        Lachnospira         5895
## 14            Blautia         6612
## 12    Bifidobacterium         7769
## 7        Anaerostipes         8565
## 23        Coprococcus        18317
## 52          Roseburia        34957
## 29   Faecalibacterium       135557

head(octVsJan,topN)

##           tax_name count_change
## 10     Bacteroides       -87903
## 3        Alistipes       -12141
## 41 Parabacteroides        -9820
## 53    Ruminococcus        -9685
## 35   Lactobacillus        -8601
## 28     Eubacterium        -5785
## 21     Clostridium        -5212
## 11     Barnesiella        -3809
## 17   Butyricimonas        -2702
## 26       Dialister        -2410

Summary

Organism	May	Jun	Oct	Jan	Rank
Faecalibacterium prausnitzii	99571	62316	5790	95382	species
Roseburia	13554	11157	7825	42782	genus
Christensenellaceae	82585	39713	40290	40977	family
Christensenella	269	NA	38	17	genus
Akkermansia	30960	19654	7648	6269	genus
Bifidobacteria Longum	32	NA	1858	9571	species
Bifidobacterium	8473	6532	58747	66516	genus
B. Longum as % of total Bifido	0.38%	NA	3.16%	14.39%
Clostridium	35012	41679	71326	66114	genus
C. botulinum	NA	25	x	128	species
C. clostridioforme	28902	35372	15170	24128	species
C. baratii	1223	NA	5588	30543	species

The units are all uBiome’s “count_norm” field, which you can think of as, roughly, a percentage (a fraction of one million). Items in italics are “good”.

I'll have much more to say as I analyze this for a future post, but so far I'm thinking that no, potato starch didn't wreck my gut. The benefits in better sleep appear to come at little or no major cost to the rest of my gut flora. What do you think?

[book] The Rise of Superman

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler is mostly about extreme sports — the people behind really crazy activities like kayaking off a 56.7 meter waterfall or snowboarding off impossibly-high cliffs). If that part interests you, then you’ll hear insider accounts of the various legends you already know about. I’m not an extreme sport-watcher, but I came away with new respect for the people who do that stuff: they’re the modern day equivalents of great explorers past, like Magellan or Pizzaro. 

But the interesting part to me was the discussion of “flow", the mental state achieved by these people and by anyone working at peak performance.  Flow, also known as “being in the zone” or in religious contexts something like satori or enlightenment, is a place where every ounce of your being is fully alive, where you are “acting on all cylinders” and being the best you can be. Kotler dissects this state with scientists like Keith Sawyer and many others, including neuroscientists who study the phenomenon and divide it into these stages:

• Struggle: trying to amp up and get a handle on problem, focusing with all your might. Very nerve-wracking here.
• Release: the ‘aha’ moment
• Zone: now you’re in pure perfection
• Recovery: consolidate memories 

And these neurochemicals:

• dopamine (pleasure producer like cocaine)
• norepinephrine (like speed)
• endorphins (opiates more powerful than morphine)
• anandamide (“bliss”, inhibits ability to feel fear)
• serotonin (helps cope with distress)

 Flow is about focus and concentration, and it happens in groups too. Here are some of the key characteristics:

• serious concentration
• shared, clear goals
• good communication (immediate feedback)
• equal participation
• element of risk
• familiarity: the group has a common knowledge base
• blending egos
• sense of control
• close listening
• always say yes

There’s obviously much more to say about Flow, but I found many of the lessons were buried in anecdotes about extreme heroes, who if that’s your thing will be more interesting to you than it was to me. Still, I definitely want to learn more, especially about some of the Quantified Self devices mentioned, like BrainSport from SenseLabs (formerly Neurotopia) and of course the Flow Genome Project.

Interestingly, Kotler is also co-author with Singularity University and X-Prize Peter Diamondis of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, a book I’ll have to add to my reading list.

Personalized genetic analysis

The biggest problem with all the great new self-measuring tools is the torrent of data they produce. You could devote your life to analyzing your results and not come close to understanding what it all means.

You’d think this would be a nice business opportunity for a wave of consultants and advice-givers who will take your data and supply meaningful, actionable summaries, but the FDA’s recent clampdown on 23andme makes this harder than it needs to be. Although automated tools like Promethease make it a bit easier for the rest of us to do it ourselves,  I’m glad that a few brave companies are stepping into the void — they’re at the cutting edge of something that I think will be commonplace, even routine.

 XRGenemics will send you “the world’s most accurate fitness DNA” kit for £150 (about $250), promising results in about a month.

Genetrainer sells a lifetime for $80: give them your 23andme results and they’ll give you a personalized fitness summary, which they’ll keep up-to-date as more science becomes available.

There are also services that specialize in helping would-be parents figure out the likelihood of potential birth defects. Counsyl charges $1000, but with many insurance policies the cost can be closer to $300.

I haven’t tried these services yet — I fortunately don’t have any serious health issues that I want to analyze that deeply — but I’m glad these companies are out there, and I’m looking forward to more new ones in the future.

What else driverless cars will change

When, in the near future, robots can reliably move people and stuff, our lives will change in more ways than just the obvious “Now I don’t have to drive”.  Here’s my partial list of some other ways the world will be different:

• Employment: many occupations will cease to exist (cab drivers, truck drivers)
• Car ownership: why bother owning a car if you can reliably summon one to/from wherever you want to be
• Mass transit: big transportation projects (light rail, monorail, high speed rail) won’t make as much sense.
• underground tunnels can turn into highways.
• Why build that big rail project, when caravans of cars can be more efficient?
• Parking: why waste space — the car can drive away when you don’t need it.
• Garages: if you don’t own car (or as many of them), then why waste space that way?
• Cities can be even more dense. Even a place like Manhattan, which is already pretty compact, can lose its area devoted to parking.
• Robot cars can stack themselves to be even more efficient at parking
• Fewer fatalities: the number of driving deaths will plummet, becoming an insignificant cause of death.
• Car design changes
• If there are fewer collisions, then why not let up on some of the safety features?  (e.g. why make people face forward in the car instead of facing each other?)
• Do we need seat belts?
• Do we need cars made of metal exteriors?  Can we make a wider view, perhaps lots more glass

This is just the beginning. Unfortunately, the most substantive changes will take at least a generation to work themselves through the system, so it will be my grandchildren who really get the brunt of this.

Y-Combinator Sam Altman's Future Predictions

From this week's Econtalk podcast

Sam Altman, president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, mentions three interesting startup investment trends:  wearables (it's inevitable that we'll all have computing devices that we wear), bitcoin (which he views a bit pessimistically, except for the block chain idea), and this one:

Health care: That is an area I think we're seeing great development, after having been ignored for a long period of time. Most investors interestingly enough are still not paying a lot of attention. And probably in two years, when some of these health care companies get successful, there will be a true flood of investment into this space, and it will already be too late.

Before the emergence of cloud-based computing services (like AWS, Azure, Rackspace, etc.), operating a server farm was an expensive hurdle for any new internet business. Similarly, interesting health-related products need access to expensive wet labs in order to put together their inventions. But the cost of lab time is plummeting, thanks to super-cool bioinformatics software plus robots that can make the lab work much more efficient, and now there are new ways to borrow time from other labs:  Science Exchange, QB3, and soon many more.

Of course, regulatory hurdles make the health + biotech businesses tricker than plain ole software, but that will get easier too. Innovation finds a way.

Everyone an Emperor

Kevin Kelly asked via Twitter for people to offer, in 100 words, their vision for the future. Today he published the first 23 responses. I don’t have time right now to write my own short response, but here’s what I’m thinking:

In the future, everyone can choose and run their own private empire, commanding vast dominions of robotic serfs to do their bidding. Like emperors throughout history, some will devote themselves to travel and exploration, some to science, some to the arts. Each dabbles more or else in everything — there’s an empire to run, after all —  but ultimately they tend to specialize into a dynasty that is noteworthy for something, and that’s what you’ll be able to do.

Imagine if your ability to create or do anything was not constrained by your mastery of technique — computers can do that for you — but rather by your ability to imagine and then precisely articulate what you want instantiated.

You conceptualize something: a new product or service, perhaps, or a creative work like a novel or song. Imagine that the creation of that work is limited, not by your ability to build it yourself, but by your ability to describe it, or — perhaps — identify it.  "I’m not sure what I’m building, but I’ll know when I’m done.”

A lot of my ideas start out with “it’s kind of like X, only a little Y-er”. In the future, my robot minions will clamor for every clue I give them about my idea, offer proposed variations, then dutifully attempt to implement every  detail.

Computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith used to say “Reality is 80 million polygons”, and when machines can routinely give that to us, the ability to spend money on the physical world will matter less;  living and acting in the virtual world will matter more. When anyone can build a virtual empire, stocked with whatever science, art, products, — anything imaginable — then the value of “stuff” from the real world will change. The responses to Kevin Kelly’s question that involve “stuff” — environment, energy, health — that could all happen, but happen differently in each private, virtual empire.

It gets more interesting because we can each share bits and pieces of our empires. I can even take your empire and pretend it’s my own! In fact, the currency that will matter most — as it did to ancient emperors — will be the attention and respect of fellow empires. 

There’ll be a real world too, of course, and it’ll be much cleaner and wilder than it’s been in thousands of years. Physical property will have some value, but owning beachfront property or a private jet won’t have the relative prestige they did before everyone could get the bio-identical experience for free. Better to spend the land’s scarce resources on stuff to make the virtual world better: server farms, chip factories, biosensors.

That’s the basic idea, but every day that future gets closer.

​

[book] War! What Is It Good For? by Ian Morris

As with his seminal “Why the West Rules”, Stanford Professor Ian Morris’ new book makes you repeat “Aha!” as he explains the big picture of history with remarkable ease. Instead of simply telling a story, he gives the rules behind the story: how societies naturally evolve, almost inevitably, in fixed directions.  “Maps, not chaps”, as he summarizes it: geography matters more than great people in how history unfolds.

This time Morris presents the history of warfare, and how — bad as it is for the people involved at the time — normal people are better off when larger “Leviathan” states incorporate smaller, weaker political units. The Roman Empire, cruel as it was much of the time, provided law and order, secure trade routes, and long-term stability that ultimately brought more good than bad. The same goes, with rare exceptions, for all great empires, including the modern world’s Pax Americana.  The ironic paradox of history is how, the more swords you have, the more plowshares you get. When you’re strong enough that nobody can challenge you, generally nobody does, and the overall result is peace.

It leads to a cycle that, in Morris' telling, ultimately seems so predictable: for example, Britain’s role as globocop in the late 1800s slowly ended due to its own success in creating vigorous new markets, which later became rivals, especially Germany. Similarly, China’s rise — tied as it is with the US economy — can only weaken America’s undisputed globocop role, especially in strategic southeast Asia. How will it end?

One hint comes from the tectonic shifts identified in the National Intelligence Council Global Trends 2030:

• growth of the global middle class
• wider access to lethal and disruptive technologies
• shift of economic power toward the East and South
• unprecedented and widespread aging
• urbanization
• food and water pressures
• return of American energy independence

Combining these trends, he references Ramez Naam’s books, Nexus and Crux  as examples of how the merging of computers and people may have an affect on the future. We’ll be fine if the US maintains its globocop role till then; not so much otherwise.

Let's hope.

[podcast] The Second Machine Age

My favorite podcast, Econtalk, is always worth a listen. Here are my takeaways from this week’s interview with Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT and co-author of The Second Machine Age. His book has already been in my queue, and I’ll write more about it later.

[Sorry for the messy notes: I’m just putting the highlights here of some things I learned.  This deserves a much longer post]

• Driverless cars may take longer to be adopted in inner cities because they aren't allowed to "bend the rules", which is pretty much required if you're going to survive in those crowded, chaotic conditions.
  
• Measure the Consumer Surplus, which is about $300B/year. This metric, though difficult to measure, is arguably more relevant than GDP, because it more accurately reflects what really matters to people (how good is the "deal" I'm getting out of engaging in the economy?)
  • example: Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica
  Better to teach statistics to high schoolers, not calculus
  
• Voltaire: work addresses (1) boredom, (2) vice, and (3) need

Drivers of change

• skill-biased technical changes
  
• capital-biased technical changes
  
• superstar-biased technical change

You must, must, must learn to adapt to new technologies.

That last point, about the importance of adaptation, is easy to ignore for most people because it’s so hard. Technology changes so quickly that even those who think they’re on top of it, you can miss the trends and fall behind.

More rational optimism

I can’t help being an optimist about technology and the future. Some of my  favorite books are : The Rational Optimist- How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.). Or Ramez Naam’s The Infinite Resource- The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. So this summary from The Motley Fool is right up my alley. One excerpt:

In two generations, the average American gained a decade of life expectancy.

Do you know what can happen in a decade? A little more than 10 years ago, AOL dominated the Internet, oil cost $13 a barrel, Fortune magazine named Enron one of America's "most admired corporations," and Apple was a joke. Everything can change, in other words. You get an extra one of those now.

I remember what life was like a decade ago, and I wouldn’t go back. I can’t wait for the next one.

Sustainable online education

Anant Agarwal, the president of EdX, MIT and Harvard’s massive open online course (MOOC)provider thinks the future of education doesn’t need have to maximize revenue:

“It’s not at all clear to me that there’s a business here that will produce hundreds of millions of dollars ... but I can see enough -- as a MOOC provider -- for us that we can sustain ourselves,” Agarwal said. “Our ambitions are modest in terms of revenue, and that’s adequate.”

With something so basic, so closely resembling a public good, as education, it seems to me that there will be no shortage of philanthropists and others willing to subsidize schools of various kinds. We’re already seeing news outlets going this way (Pierre Omidyar, Jeff Bezos). The arts have long relied on patrons, benevolent backers who sponsor something out of passion rather than profit.  Seems to me that education could go the same way.

Why they failed: Zeo, Green Goose, 100Plus

Zeo was, for many of us, our favorite QS company: great, consumer-oriented low-cost hardware that measured something useful (sleep) to give insights we couldn't have had otherwise. After $20M+ in funding over the better part of a decade in existence, they went bankrupt, abruptly -- so quickly in fact that many customers couldn't even get their data off the machines.

In one of my favorite sessions at last week’s Quantified Self Conference in San Francisco, Zeo co-founder Ben Rubin joined a few other co-founders to discuss why their original dreams didn’t quite pan out.

Zeo’s biggest success factor, says Ben, was "persistence" -- to build a great product, get retail distribution in places like Best Buy, expand internationally to the UK, build a portable Bluetooth version -- but the same persistence was also the seeds of their undoing, when they continued to push sales- and marketing-wise even when it was clear that the mass market didn't want the headband they were selling. Sleep measurement alternatives popped up from the fitness band companies, and although they weren't nearly as precise, it became harder to explain the Zeo advantage. Zeo needed a similar passive solution (maybe something you attach to your bed, like Beddit), and they were working on it, but persistence takes a toll on founders -- one left in 2010, Ben left in 2011 -- and the professional management team that remained found themselves confronting the worst of all worlds: a market that said not "yes" or "no", but a dreadfully-ambiguous "maybe".

Ben’s advice to anybody thinking of a similar venture is to fit, somehow, into the lives that people live right now. You may be trying to change behavior (isn’t that the point of measuring it?) but the mass market wants a straight line from where they are right now. You can’t ask them to uproot existing habits to use your product.

So what happened to Zeo's assets?  Will the products ever be revived? Ben obviously has to be discreet when discussing confidential information, so all he would say is that it was an asset sale by “a medical company interested in sleep." So who knows.  He also, sadly, confirmed my worst fears, that he knows of no way  -- even through reverse-engineering -- to get your Zeo data. The company failed so quickly that the people in charge of maintaining the servers had no time to close things gracefully. It's gone.

Brian Krejcarek, founder of Green Goose, had another exciting product that failed: $4 attachable "stickers" with embeddable sensors you can place throughout your house -- on your toothbrush, your bike, your dog. It was a brilliant idea, and they quickly attracted $1.3M of funding. But the direct-to-consumer company is super-tough – how do you get the word out? how do you handle the logistics? Meanwhile, technology marches brutally forward, and the wireless base station that originally made the stuff work at great (but elegant) engineering cost, is now available on Bluetooth 4.0 and your iPhone for next to nothing.

Chris Hogg, co-founder of personalized health prediction startup 100Plus, had a comparatively happy ending: his company was sold, to Practice Fusion (a $70M Series D funded medical records company). But Chris left when that happened, because he was always more interested in the “personal” side of health, not Big Enterprises, which is where the company ended up making its first money. In fact, that was one of his pieces of advice: “be careful where you get that first dollar, because that’s all next your investors will want to talk about.”

That’s the tension in every new business: on the one hand, you want to be flexible and listen to your customers; but on the other hand, you want to be true to your original mission.  When you find that consumers don’t bite, either because the product’s wrong or the technology has moved on or that enterprises turn out to be more interested, you may find that your original dream no longer applies.
All three entrepreneurs knew their original ideas were worthwhile and we’ll get there someday. But sometimes the future happens later than we’d like.

The Clover of Brewing Machines

Five years ago, the Clover Coffee Equipment company was hand-assembling high-tech, excellent automatic coffee-making machines for the super high-end market. At tens of thousands of dollars each, they were intended for sale to boutique coffee shops, like Trabant and others, who could sell wonderful, precision-made cups of coffee to people who can appreciate the quality interaction of specialty beans, brewing times and temperatures.

Clover’s “factory” was an ordinary-looking building in Seattle’s Fremont district (very close to today’s MakerHaus by the way) and the founders were people who had a passion for the intersection of (industrial) design and the precision coffee experience. Those of us who knew the company and its products thought it was a great idea, and eventually Starbucks agreed when it bought them out.

How would you build something like Clover today? Well, I just saw the perfect example on Kickstarter: the PycoBrew Zymatic beer brewing appliance. At a high level, the hardware reminds me of the Clover: pumps, temperature sensors, relays, heating. Otherwise, instead of coffee beans, it uses grain and malt.

But the really exciting difference is the fantastic new business model that’s been enabled by Kickstarter. Whereas Clover had to be financed through (some deep-pocketed) angels and other traditional investors, PycoBrew can get its startup capital through its first customers. Through a pledge of about $1,500, the people interested in the product can help the new company financially right now, when it has no revenues.

Like the Clover founders, the people of PycoBrew seem very serious: their web site documents their progress through multiple generations of functional prototypes. To manufacture something that complicated, and then ship and support it around the country is a very big deal – the kind of business that in the past would have required (tens of?) millions of dollars up-front.

Think of a bread machine, only instead of bread you get beer. The basic idea is straightforward, and I personally know dozens, maybe hundreds of engineers who are entirely capable of building such a thing – or zillions of other similarly-interesting or useful products. But a great idea is useless without a profitable business to carry it out. Kickstarter and the wonderful set of internet-enabled ideas that go behind it, is lowering the costs and upfront hassles of actually starting and running the business side of ideas.

I can’t wait to see what additional new products we’ll see thanks to the new, really cool business innovation behind this.

The future of college

College is such a critical part of modern life that sometimes we forget the difference between “college” and “education”.  Now that my children are closing in on that age, I’ve been thinking about it more.  How is college changing? How can I ensure my kids get the right education?

There are plenty of books (and seminars and consultants) that explain how to get into top colleges, but I don’t really want a how-to manual (maybe it’s my liberal arts education :-). This book, a well-written summary of the bigger and more important trends, was exactly what I needed. The author, Jeffrey Selingo, is a long-time editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, so his natural audience is people in the academic community, but I found it to be a good overview for interested parents too.

Higher education is in the midst of one of its biggest transformations ever.  Maybe you don’t need to worry just yet If you’re a tenured professor at a reasonably good school, but frankly if you’re just starting to consider a career in academia, you better think carefully because the reset that universities are undergoing will almost certainly make jobs in the Ivory Tower very different just a few years from now. Clay Christenson (The Innovator’s Dilemma) says the disruption is so big that in fifteen years half of universities will be bankrupt.

Technology is the immediate driver of urgency, but as Selingo notes, the problems in higher education are deeper and result from decades of societal attitudes and government policies that focus on the degree itself, as though no dollar amount is too much to justify additional spending on college.

It’s a vicious cycle.  See Bennett’s hypothesis:  “increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase”.  Academics will tell you the evidence for this is controversial, but to me it seems self-evident when you look at the rise of “resort colleges” with their expensive – but to immature 18-year-olds, appealing – amenities. When it can easily cost $200K to send a kid to a four-year college, there had better be a lot more value than free ice cream trucks (true story: Hill Point University in North Carolina uses that as one of its many gimmicks incentives  to persuade trick high school seniors into getting their parents to pay the outrageous tuition).

It’s not just tuition prices that are going up, even beyond whatever Baumol’s cost disease predicts. There’s grade inflation of course (did you know that 91% of Harvard students graduate with honors?)  but also an inflation in degrees themselves: with so many low-quality college degrees, it’s getting to the point where you need a master’s degree to stand out, with almost 700K awarded in 2009.  As Selingo writes (p10), "The number of people with a master's degree is now about equal to those with at least a bachelor's degree in 1960...it's probably only a matter of time before the doctorate is the new master's degree".

But the same forces that disrupted the music industry, then journalism, are now coming to universities, and for a similar reason: much easier distribution of information. Some of that, obviously, is the rise of online learning (the book goes into details everything from Khan Academy to Coursera), but better information affects more than just the learning itself. 

For example, it’s much easier to find a good college using several amazing new online resources: Naviance, the excellent detailed database of colleges which most good high schools already subscribe to, and ConnectEDU, which uses a student’s academic record to predict the best fits for colleges and majors. I think resources like this are much more valuable than the newly-fashionable parent-child college tours, which are really more of a family bonding experience than an objective way to learn about colleges.  Who on earth would make a decision based on the impressions of a quick visit – many of which, Selingo notes, are now guided tours put together by the same people who plan experiences at Disneyland.

Information is causing another disruption, thanks to new transparency about the the true ROI for individual colleges and majors. Virginia law requires its colleges to to publish data about the salary earnings of their graduates. In other states, even when colleges don’t want that information published, the company Payscale ranks schools using their extensive data about starting as well as mid-career salaries of their alums. The results are not good news for many schools, and you can see why a shakeout is long overdue.

If you or your kid are one of the few (one out of five, according to psychologist William Damon) who knows what they want to do in life, the coming changes to higher education will seem natural and overdue. For other kids, though (and their parents), the information in this book is indispensible: see his suggestions about overseas study, time off before/during college, preparing better in high school.

My college education, as wonderful as it was for me, will seem quaint and largely irrelevant much faster than we think. This book is a great introduction to how it will change.

A humbling look at the future of Los Angeles

In 1988, the Los Angeles Times Magazine interviewed dozens of experts and published their predictions for what the city would be like in 2013.  Many of their predictions came true (computers everywhere, GPS in cars, video conferencing from home, interactive classrooms), but plenty of predictions were wrong (robots everywhere, ISDN video tellers instead of internet banking).
Futurists know that the easiest predictions relate to demographics, since people age in a linear way.  The article didn’t get it completely wrong, although some of the measures are pretty far off.

Prediction	Predicted	Actual
Population	18.3M	17.8M
Ethnicity	White (40%), Asian (9.3%), Latino (40%)	Non-hispanic white (28.7%), Asian (11.3%), Latino (48.5%)
Manufacturing Jobs	16.9%	10% (500K out of 5M)
Crime	Less than 7406 “index”	about 2800

Trying to guess the future twenty five years ago without knowing about the internet or cellphones makes the rest of the exercise not very useful. Also, not knowing about the rise of China (and thinking, as the article did, that Japan would remain strong) further clouds whatever tidbits of truth you might get.
Predicting the future is hard, and this guess is far better than many other attempts. Still, the more I see how actual predictions turned out, the more humbling it all seems.

(via Singularity Hub)

The inevitability of human enhancement

I watched a TED talk by Juan Enriquez (Will our kids be a different species?) that wasn’t particularly informative if you’re up to date on biology, but it got me thinking about how quickly some of these technologies are going to affect us.


Human enhancement technologies range all the way from tattoos to adding a new chromosome, and many of these are straightforward to implement to anybody with some basic knowledge of the field.



A generation ago, computer programming was a specialist skill that was mostly practiced by well-educated people employed by large institutions. Although it’s still true that most of the mainstream computer programming happens that way, there are millions of “amateurs” with no particular specialized education or access to expensive capital equipment, and those amateurs are doing as much heavy computing as the top experts thirty years ago.  You don’t see these people much because the mainstream experts are doing so much more, and the world has simply moved on to a stage where the bar for money and more is so much higher.



The same thing is becoming true for biology. An entry-level college biology lab now exposes students to the basics of recombinant DNA, and once learned, a fairly intelligent and curious person can do it on his own, without particular access to specialized equipment. There is already a large movement of DIYBIO people who find refurbished or underutilized biological instruments that they repurpose for amateur uses, with costs a fraction of what the mainstream people pay. And as much of biology moves into computers, the costs go even lower: you can design what you want and have a third party “print” manufacture it for truly citizen prices.



The amateur in America may have some interesting access, but this pales in comparison to professionals from other countries who using the state-of-the-art knowledge available to everyone on the internet, can make seriously interesting biological products with the help of a national-scale lab.



The implication is that even if the United States or Western countries try to ban or regulate something, it will be possible for motivated people in other countries to do it anyway – and the competitive pressures will be enormous. Imagine a gene modification that makes for slightly better math performance. What responsible parent would ignore a technology like that, especially if they feel other parents are doing it?



Even if the United States tries to make that illegal, the motivation is too strong to stop it internationally. Once a Chinese lab, or company, starts offering the service, people from everywhere will travel there to get the procedure done for themselves. This will be very hard to stop.

(FlickR photo by jacob earl )

The coming wave of sensors

I want my mobile device to have a ton more sensors. The iPhone’s GPS, compass, gyroscope, and accelerometer are just the beginning. How about some additional built-ins like:

• Temperature, barometric pressure, altitude, humidity(obvious)
• Near-field communications (already rumored)
• Particulates (to measure air pollution)
• Electromagnetic software radio (to detect and decode short-wave, TV, and anything else in the broadcast spectrum)

Better yet, give me a standardized interface so I can add my own sensors. A big part of the cost of specialized sensing devices is the electronics necessary to make them useful: a CPU/GPU, display, power supply. But my iPhone has all of that already.  Let me plug whatever I want with an easy-to-use, USB-like plug that enables options like:

• Medical: Blood pressure, glucose, fever
• Sleep device (like the Zeo)
• Spectrometer
• Geiger counter (radioactivity)
• Weather (wind speed)
• Radar/sonar/ultrasound
• Light and optics, for microscopes, telescopes, infrared sensors, etc.

For each of these, the core electronics are cheap and easy-to-manufacture. Of course, more sophisticated and higher-quality industrial grade sensors are also possible at the high end, but think of what happens when millions of people are using them, and there’s a market for great apps to help analyze and aggregate the results.

That’s when things get especially interesting: combine with the rest of what’s on the device.  Now the sensing can happen in the background, as you’re going about your day. With the right privacy protections in place, we can build a map of everyone’s sensing information, updated automatically in real-time.

Remember that the iPhone and Twitter didn’t even exist five years ago, so something like the above revolutions are easy to imagine within the next five years. I can't wait!

Unexpected future history

Most -- maybe all -- of the interesting changes that happen in history are completely unexpected. Well, maybe not completely, and there will always be people after the fact who will claim they knew such-and-such was coming, but history is only interesting to the degree that it marks events you didn't expect.

Twenty-five years is not such a long time.  The mid-1980s is about 25 years ago, yet think of some stunning ways the world is now different:

• The Soviet Union, Cold War, and all its consequences, not to mention a newly reformed China that was barely alive.
• Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Microsoft were around but who really knew or cared?
• Technology: Internet, mobile phones, personal computers, cordless phones, VCRs, digital cameras, home theatre
• Venture capital, hedge funds, and other forms of finance that now seem routine were much more specialized and rare.

If anything, we'll look back on the early 2010s with just as much amazement over the huge changes.  Here are some examples of things that are nearly certain to happen in the next 25 years:

• End of the Cuban Embargo (and surge in development and tourism).  Same with North Korea.
• A major earthquake significantly incapacitates Tokyo.
• Nuclear terrorism
• A Chinese recession (3+ quarters of negative growth) and resulting political shakeup
• Major disease epidemic kills millions of people worldwide

But even without specific events like the above, imagine a world 25 years from now where the following are true:

• Post-petroleum world that makes the Middle East (and other oil-exporting countries) economically irrelevant
• Developing countries no longer suffer major casualties from common infectious diseases like malaria and AIDS.
• Major news organizations like The New York Times or CNN are no longer significant information sources, either because they're out of business or because they're entirely eclipsed by something new.
• Enrollment in "traditional" colleges and universities plummets as the process of higher education is replaced by something else.
• The United States no longer has military bases in Japan, Korea, Europe, or the Middle East.
• A new type of finance (microloans? e-bartering?) is mainstream and common.

I'm deliberately trying to offer examples that are entirely plausible and would seem inevitable in hindsight.  Can you think of others?

Alvin Toffler predicts China's impact on the future

CNReview summarizes the China implications from Alvin Toffler's 40 predictions for the next 40 years.

Prediction No. 2

Nation-state power around the globe will be increasingly ‘multi-polar’ in terms of who wields it and where

• The economies of Brazil, China and India will become less US and EU centric.
• Foreign Direct Investments will shift toward developing economies.

Prediction No. 25

China will continue to position itself as a long-term economic power-player around the globe

• China teams with other emerging countries (Brazil, India and China) to influence currency utilization.
• China partners with other countries (Venezuela and Africa) to meet energy needs and to import a wide range of raw materials.

Prediction No. 37

China’s monopoly control of the world’s rare earth metals market will have a significant impact on US national security and the economy

• The seventeen elements that make up a group known as rare earth metals will remain critical to the performance of hundreds of products and technologies.
• The US will be reliant on China’s metals to produce such things as high-performance weapons components, internal guidance systems, microwave communications systems, radars, the motors and generators that power aircraft and ships, wind turbines, high-performance batteries, hybrid cars, superconductors, computer chips and digital displays.

The last one is a mistake out of Futurism 101: never project a "trend" from something that first appeared in headlines within the past five years.  Rare metals doesn't make the cut. Even something we think of as completely transformational, like Facebook or the iPhone, will change a lot and maybe disappear in forty years.  Already, just a few months after this headline appeared, a bunch of "new discoveries" are being made of new deposits and substitutions. If anything, the brief period rare metals appeared in the news will lessen China's long-term influence, as manufacturers wake up to the problems of being dependent on a single source for their supplies.

More generally, I think Toffler is summarizing too much of the accepted wisdom from the last few years, rather than look at China  -- and some other big trends -- in a longer term context. Sure, China is becoming more influential, and as a result, the relative power of the United States will fade. But one of the consequences of the much bigger globalization trend is that all countries -- in fact the very definition of "country" --  are becoming less relevant.  Neither China nor the US can make an iPhone without the other. There is a complex web of relationships among all the people who know how to make iPhones -- the designers and engineers, parts procurement specialists, factory assemblers, logistics experts, marketing and salespeople -- but none of those relationships is defined by nationality.  In forty years it will be obvious that the web of people not countries matters most.

Kindle Singles and the future of publishing

The print publishing industry thinks a lot has changed in the past 20 years,  but they haven't seen anything yet. The transformation from print to all-digital publishing will happen very quickly.  We are months and years, not decades, from when electronic distribution on Kindles and iPads becomes the mainstream format of choice.  The TED people just announced TEDBooks, available for about $3 each as Kindle Singles, and I can't wait to see many more.

Creating and then publishing to Kindle is  straightforward: create a document in Microsoft Word (though, curiously, they want you to save in the old .doc format, rather than the much more flexible and modern .docx format), test the formatting on Mobipocket Reader, and upload to Amazon.  Besides the odd prohibition against the .docx format, your text also must be free from special fonts or character formats like bullets. You can include .JPEG photos, but you need to be sure they look okay on the Kindle greyscale screen.

Kindle ebooks have several big advantages over internet web sites or blogs:

• The content is final.  It can be referenced later as a single, fixed work. There may be updates or corrections, just like there can be a new edition of a hardcover book, but the original stands as an unchanging point of reference.
• It can be viewed offline.
• Standardized display and viewing conventions.  It can be easily printed when necessary and it "makes sense" when printed because it has an clearly identifiable start and finish.

If the end user cost were 99 cents or lower, or if there were the equivalent of completely free content, then eBook publishing will be open to many more new applications:

• Class notes, published by the instructor or a motivated student note-taker
• Church or other non-profit organizational bulletins and newsletters.
• Company catalogs or detailed product descriptions
• Help and product manuals
• Christmas newsletters, either on behalf of an organization or a family
• Special reports.

In fact, to really take off we need the equivalent to print publishing of what podcasting is to audiobook publishing: free, easily publishable and discoverable content that's as easy to produce as it is to consume. As with audiobooks, there may be a lot of garbage there too, but eventually some quality brands will appear and the publishing world will never be the same.

(photo by John Blyberg)

It’s Twitter’s Turn

Every great new social phenomenon has a "fad" phase, where zillions of people join in because, well, because zillions of others are joining. A few years ago I suddenly reunited with my old friends at Apple Japan because suddenly it seemed like they all were on Orkut. That died down after a few months, and then (with Japan) it was Mixi, and a little later it resurfaced at Facebook. Now the same thing is happening on Twitter. It's fun! Every day somebody new is "following" me, and I hear snippets of updates in the lives of people who I enjoyed working closely with but for various reasons have moved on to other things and I don't keep up with as much as I wish I could.

Part of the fun is the newness of it all.  You reconnect with old friends who, unfortunately, life hasn’t permitted an easy way to stay in touch with.  And along the way you run into brand new people who are interesting and suddenly become

But we are all limited by a fundamental problem that humans can only develop so many relationships at a time.  People living in the wild usually travel in bands of 50 or so, with 150 being roughly the maximum size of the extended “band”.  Your “nation” may consist of a few hundred more than that, but it’s just not possible to be close to too many people, not at one time. Whatever you do on Twitter comes at the expense of what you do on Facebook and ultimately what you do in real life.  I’m a technology fan, so I don’t mind these other media having as much play as the real world, but still, I can only be in a few places at one time.

I’m not sure how long the Twitter phenomenon will last.  To me, it’s a basically a huge, open version of IRC or Instant Messenger—things that have been around forever and were looking for something like Twitter to take it to the next level.  I’m wondering when the commercials will hit it—you see hints of it already—and you start getting distracted from your friends by all the compelling and professionally-created content (like real-time news updates).

But meanwhile, go ahead and follow me:  http://twitter.com/sprague.  I’m there now, running Thwirl and Tweetdeck, having the time of my life sending and receiving 140-character updates to great friends I haven’t seen in ages.