SUPPOSIN' A LOOK AT PROGRESS, Part 4

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

Exponential information and knowledge, and even remarkable new technologies, are certainly not going to cure all the cultural, economic, or moral ills of our present world. The awareness updating, however, of our phenomenal and almost unbelievable current progress is stark testimony to the fact that things are not all as bad as we are sometimes led to believe. It is actually quite a wonderful and exciting time to be alive.

Earlier, I briefly mentioned my frustration with our problem of oil dependence . . . notice; I did not say oil scarcity. Deutsche Bank’s Joe La Vorgna points out that every $0.01 change in gasoline prices is worth $1 billion in the economy, and since the 2011 highs, there has been a decline in gas prices of more than $0.50.(1) Let’s take the next few paragraphs and look at our fuel and energy situation.

There are a number of factors playing out right now that could be major game changers. The US is awash in oil and gas. There is no scarcity. The political availability to the resources is a road with many potholes and devious curves. There is no universal plan of equality here for the government to make everybody better off. As history and economics would bear out, however, with a little time, potholes get filled and noisome curves get straightened out. My bet here is on change.

People are beginning to whisper about “Saudi America” because of our recent validations of oil and gas reserves. Even Maury Harris, a chief US economist was recently remarking that North Dakota could join OPEC. (2) The Williston, North Dakota oil fields are producing over one million barrels of oil a day and headed for two million. Even the US Energy Information Administration claims the boom will remain mostly steady into 2020 for oil and well beyond for natural gas. Employment of the US oil and gas operations has gained 64% vs. overall payroll growth since 2009.

Rob Wile, www. businessinsider.com/us-energy-boom-continues-to-surprise, continues to report on the bullish energy story in North Dakota. He quotes economist Ed Yardeni that the “fracking dividend,” much like the “peace dividend” that followed World War II, is about to take hold and lift the US economy:

The Fracking Dividend has already narrowed this US petroleum trade deficit from a recent peak of $359 billion during January 2012 to $182 billion during November 2013. The deficit could go to zero over the next couple years. That would provide a big dividend to real GDP growth, as well as more purchasing power for Americans. Building the infrastructure to export crude oil would be another benefit, especially for capital goods manufacturers.

Exporting our own oil, very recently, has helped cut the US trade deficit to a four-year low. Petroleum product exports climbed to an all-time high of $13.3 billion. Meanwhile, crude imports declined to $28.5 billion, the lowest since November 2010. The petroleum deficit thus shrank to $15.2 billion in November, the lowest since May 2009.

There is no oil or natural gas scarcity. Question: So, why aren’t we able to use our own inexpensive resources?

Sometimes it takes a while, but over time, economics has a way of trumping politics. If the oil industry is thwarted in utilizing our own products within our own country and are forced to export crude oil and natural gas in order to shrink the trade deficit, then, more than likely, those economic entrepreneurs of business will tap into the cache of exponential information and knowledge that we have been building and construct a detour around the problem created by politics.

Oil giant, Exxon Mobile announced in 2010 that they were committing $600 million over the next six years to developing a whole new generation of biofuels. Most of us remember earlier unsuccessful attempts by industry to create ethanol-gasoline out of corn. That didn’t work so well. But Exxon Mobile intends to spend its $600 million on creating new concepts in biofuels, as well as lots of other products.

Exxon Mobile made an interesting move. They teamed up with super scientist, Craig Venter, the inventor who decided the US Department of Energy was moving too slowly and spending too much money on their DNA project to sequence three billion base pairs for the human genome project. Some folks thought the project was impossible, some believed it couldn’t be accomplished in less than fifty years. The US government set aside $10 billion for the project. At the late date of 2000, Venter decided to join the race with his own company Celera. The US spent $1.5 billion successfully sequencing the human genome. Venter tied their completion date and spent only $100 million to accomplish the task.

Dr. Venter and Exxon are determined to manufacture super inexpensive fuels. Instead of extracting oil from holes drilled in the earth they are growing a new type of algae that can take carbon dioxide and plentiful ocean water and create oil or any other kind of fuel that would please the market. Venter has sailed his Sorcerer II yacht around the world gathering samples of algae to process through his new DNA sequencing apparatus. He now has built a library of over forty million different genes that he can presently use to successfully design a large variation of biofuels for the future. “We only need sunlight, CO2, and seawater.” The designer algae will manufacture the bio oil that is produced. You never harvest the cells, only the oils they excrete.

Exponential knowledge and information growth in such areas as biotechnology makes it possible to develop manageable methods to harness the information as well as the resources. I personally, have to keep reminding myself that it was Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt who stated that from the beginning of time until the year 2003, humankind created five exabytes of digital information. An Exabyte is one billion gigabytes. By the year 2010 the human race was generating five exabytes every few days. In the near future the number is expected to be five exabytes produced every few minutes.

I don’t know if I can really comprehend all that. But I am beginning to comprehend how for the first time in history our knowledge base and technology is beginning to catch up with our dreams and ambitions.

In my research on all the progress taking place and the good things that are happening today in our world, I ran across an ambitious endeavor that virtually leaves me breathless and in awe. The bright minds of the industry are now getting serious about the unique addressability of things. I have run out of space in this posting to flesh out this incredible concept. So, I am going to give you my research starting points and let you investigate to your heart’s desire.

As far back as 1999 Billy Joy talked about D2D (Device to Device) communication. By 2009 Kevin Ashton wrote an article in the RFID Journal about the Internet of Things. In the article he stated,

. . . today's information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so. (Kevin Ashton, 'That 'Internet of Things' Thing', RFID Journal, July 22, 2009)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is based on the idea that if all objects in daily life were equipped with identifiers, they could be followed, managed, and inventoried by computers. Assigning to all objects in the world a minuscule identifying device or machine-readable identifier could transform daily life. For example, reorders would be created and activated automatically and your business would no longer run out of stock. Maintenance tasks could be identified and performed as a machine part communicated through a network of sensors and receptors and ordered its own repair.

The Internet of Things is already in operation. Estimates project that more than 30 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the Internet of Things by 2020.

Another important player in IoT is Vint Cerf, a real-honest-to-goodness father of the internet. At MCI he engineered and managed the first commercial email service. He was also employed by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) where he was chairman of the web’s US governance department for oversight. Let’s say the world’s population was nine billion individuals and each person had somewhere between one to five thousand items or things that needed to be identified, it would take forty-five thousand billion IP addresses on the Internet of Things to handle the communication network.

Vint Cerf has now been assigned to design a new program called Ipv6. It will have protocols to handle 340 trillion, trillion, trillion, unique addresses, which figures out to be about 50,000 trillion, trillion unique addresses per individual. No longer would it be possible for “Junior” to lose his laptop computer with his homework assignment on it. You wouldn’t lose anything. I suppose, come to think of it . . . no one could steal his laptop either!

Dr. Cerf says that the Ipv6 Internet of Things . . . “holds the promise for reinventing almost every industry. How we manufacture, how we control our environment, and how we distribute, use and recycle resources.”

Next Week: A Look at Progress, Part 5

    (Research ideas from Dr. Jackson's new writing project on Cultural Economics)

© Dr. James W. Jackson  

Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House

www.drjameswjackson.com

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com

SUPPOSIN' A LOOK AT PROGRESS Part 3

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

I keep thinking back about the reoccurring apparition that dances around in my mind in my waking hours. I can hear, “I designed the earth with sufficiency enough to take care of everything and everyone I ever allowed to live here.” We don’t have a shortage of water. Seventy percent of the earth’s surface is covered with water . . . real deep puddles of water. We don’t have a shortage of electricity. We don’t have a shortage of food. Global scarcity has never been the issue. Global accessibility to resources has been the issue. Selfish control and manipulation have been issues. The politics of scarcity and fear, and wars and killings over perceived scarcity have been issues.

I don’t believe that God is angry when we discover some of his designs and intelligence. I believe it puts a smile on his face when we pay enough attention to the insights and wisdom that he has already shared with us in order to set into motion the seeds of exponential knowledge and information. The more we learn, the more we are able to learn. We honor and worship him when we desire to pursue his thoughts. Future possibilities and triumphs continue to await us. There is enormous bounty through specialized innovation and creativity.

Let’s look at some exciting advances in the area of water. For the past twenty-five years I fulfilled a civic duty by encouraging the constituents to elect me to a water and sanitation board here in Colorado. I don’t know that I had much to offer, but I certainly learned a lot about water. I learned that the ski areas could use the river water to make artificial snow, but the constituents were rationed to two nights a week to water their summer flowers and grass. I learned that the municipalities in Colorado were stopped from access to mountain snow runoff, but places like California, Las Vegas, and New Mexico could use the same water to mist large downtown areas to keep them pleasantly cool for their customers. I learned that districts could arbitrarily ration water usage on a short time basis, and then enhance their revenues by raising the permanent rates because they were not selling as many gallons of water during the rationed periods. Oh, there was so much to learn about water, water rights, and usage!

During that period of time, however, I was exposed to some very positive and exciting water issues. There is a gifted inventor named Dean Kamen, who was perplexed that it was so difficult to access pure enough water for IV (inner venous) injections without pretreatment osmosis membranes, pipelines, and installation permits. He was also motivated by over 900 million people worldwide without safe drinking water, and some 3.5 million people dying annually because of diseases brought on by drinking unsafe water.

Dean Kamen developed the “Slingshot” (named after the David and Goliath episode), a simple method to make sterile water available. It works from a concept of vapor compression distillation and requires no filters. The devise is about the size of a small apartment-sized refrigerator with a power cord, an intake hose, and an out flow hose, and produces 250 gallons of 100% pure water per day. That is enough pure water for the cooking, drinking, and hygiene needs for 100 people per day, and uses less than one kilowatt of power. Its power source is the Stirling engine, another invention of Kamen, designed to burn almost anything, including cow dung, and runs maintenance free for at least 5 years.

Dean Kamen designed the technology of his Slingshot with the transformation in mind of the 97% of the earth’s water that is undrinkable. His intention is to make the water pure so that it can be used and consumed on the spot, readily and inexpensively. Presently, the cost of the purifying apparatus is about $2,500, and the price of the Stirling engine, another $2,500. The price, however, when mass produced would be around $1,000 each.

Another inventor, Michael Pritchard, was repulsed by the way we handle clean water shortage in crisis situations by simply sending in loads and loads of bottled water. So, he decided to tap into the vast source of exponential information and knowledge, and he developed probably the best hand-pumped water filters on the market. Until Pritchard’s “Lifesaver” bottle came along, filters with membrane pores as tiny as 200 nanometers were the standard benchmark. Such filters can capture most bacteria, but the considerably smaller viruses still slipped through the filters.

Pritchard developed membranes with pores only 15 nanometers wide that removed everything, including bacteria, viruses, cysts, fungi, parasites, and any other water pathogens. One of Pritchard’s filters lasts long enough to clean over1500 gallons of water, and then it safely shuts itself down. A five gallon size container equipped with a proper filter can supply clean water for a family of four for three years, and it only costs a half a cent per day. The exponential knowledge and information has allowed a new era of molecular manufacturing that includes rearranging atoms. That results in developing entirely new physical properties.

It is that kind of molecular manufacturing based on recent information and knowledge that is necessary to be applied to the universal challenge of desalination of sea water. President Dwight Eisenhower would be very pleased to know that we are so close to solving the problem. Hydrogen and oxygen (H2O) are not in short supply, and many predict that it will not be that long until there are inexpensive methods to meet the pressing needs for safe and sustainable water. IBM and Central Glass, a Tokyo based company, have recently developed technology for removing both salt and arsenic from ocean and sea water.

While on the subject of water, let’s look at the area of sanitation. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 1.2 trillion gallons of water leak from U.S. homes each year. That is more than all the water used in the cities of Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago. If you were to dump a gallon of water each second, nonstop, it would take you 32,000 years (longer than all recorded history) to dump one trillion gallons. Toilets are the biggest waste. So it’s time to dump the toilet!

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation teamed up with Lowell Wood. Their conclusion is that you can burn the fecal portion of the waste and utilize that energy to return the urine back to fresh water. There is over a mega joule per day of energy to be derived from burning the feces. That is enough to do everything the toilets need to do, with plenty of energy left over to charge your cell phone and light your lights. Their goal now is to get the cost to operate the new method down to less than five cents per day. That would make it feasible for under developed countries to take advantage of the method. But just stop for a moment and consider how much we are presently paying for the fresh water that we now use for sanitation, to say nothing of the high cost of operating the sewer lines and plants everywhere.

There are so many good and astounding things happening right now in our lifetime. It is a good practice to recognize and be grateful for this adventure called life. Resist the peddlers of gloom and doom and open up to the generous abundance of potential and possibility.

Next Week: A Look at Progress, Part 4

(Research ideas from Dr. Jackson's new writing project on Cultural Economics)

 

© Dr. James W. Jackson  

Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House

www.drjameswjackson.com  

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com

SUPPOSIN': A LOOK AT PROGRESS Part 2

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

My international travels have included most of the oil cartel countries of the world. When I board an airplane to leave one of those countries, I never know whether to rejoice because of the positive results of the industrial revolution, or to feel sad because of what laborless luxuries have done to spoil the privileged of those countries. I am tempted to perceive that no great inventions, models of science, industries, economics, arts, literature, music, or civics seem to flow from those countries . . . just boatloads of oil. So, most often upon exiting, I simply find myself, , excitedly looking forward to a post-petroleum-based world economy and scratching my head wondering why we have remained so long in the pitiful position of oil dependency.

All the international political folks have been wringing their hands and whining that we are in such a precarious position of oil scarcity, yet all the while, the constant drumbeat of exponential information and technology has continued. In my opinion, it has never been an issue of global scarcity, but of global accessibility to resources.

Technology has had to keep on the stretch to try to stay up with the exponential growth of knowledge and information. On average, technologies are doubling in power every eighteen months, in an effort to stay up with the exponential supply of knowledge and information. The prices for those technologies are also being slashed in half every eighteen months. Affordability continues to drive the growth. Inventions based on today’s technologies are usually outdated by the time they get to the market. That’s a marvelous thing.

Gordon Moore’s famed tech trend of trying to cram more and more components onto integrated circuits has paid off handsomely. Circuits on a computer chip have exponentially doubled every year since 1958 and the invention of the integrated circuit.

Today, exciting things are happening in the areas of sand and silicon. IBM is developing new breakthrough approaches in chip technologies by integrating electrical and optical devices on the same silicon chip. Instead of the old electrical signals, the new chips communicate with signals of light. That eliminates the historical problems of generating heat that has always limited the speed and required vast amounts of energy for cooling. Using light eliminates both problems.

Conservative estimates figure that IBM’s new chip design could increase a supercomputer’s ability a thousand fold. It should take the present 2.6 petaflops to a full exaflop that would provide some quintillion operations per second. Simply speaking, that is one hundred times faster than the human brain functions . . . and we used to marvel that the old horse-and-buggy computers could actually beat the Russian chess champion on a regular basis.

Our locally grounded and linearly acclimated brains have a tough time comprehending what is really going on in the progress of our world. Incredible miracles are taking place every day and we hardly notice. Just what are the implications of three billion new individuals coming on line presently by computers and smart phones? Three billion individuals who can learn, dream, invent, and experiment. They are now allowed by technology to open the treasure chests of information, knowledge, and contacts. Ignorance and scarcity brings poverty; abundance and access to that abundance brings opportunity for freedom.

In January, 1994, I took Anna Marie with me to Nairobi, Kenya. It was her first trip to Africa. From Nairobi we traveled to the majestic Rift Valley, to Begonia Game Park, and on to Nakuru. The large district hospital was located in Nakuru. Project C.U.R.E. was involved in donating hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of greatly needed medical goods to the hospital.

We were invited to visit the Tendress Coffee Plantation outside Nakuru. Alfred, the plantation foreman, wanted to show us the plantation school, as well as their small clinic. As we drove into the schoolyard, we saw the pupils still out playing soccer or huddled together talking. The teachers were standing outside near the entrance to the school. Alfred was kind enough to introduce us to the headmaster and the teachers.

Since it was about midmorning, Anna Marie, who has her PhD in education and communication, asked the headmaster if all the pupils were out together for recess. He explained that the people had not yet come by to give the teachers the lessons they were to use to teach the kids that day, but that they should be along very soon.

Inside the classrooms there was one chalkboard on the front wall of each room, and crude writing desks and chairs enough to handle up to forty-five students per room. In talking to the teachers, we discovered that they had never had textbooks, curriculum, or reference books at the large school. The headmaster would receive everyday what the teachers would be teaching to the classes.

We asked some of the students if they were given homework assignments. They informed us that they were responsible for their own pen or pencil and their own paper for their assignments. When we asked where they went to get their supplies, they told us that, since they had no money for such things, they would walk along the fencerows on their way to and from school and collect the windblown paper scraps on which they would figure out their math assignments.

Anna Marie began working with the school, and upon the return to her school in Evergreen, Colorado, she organized students and parents and ended up sending thousands of pounds of encyclopedias, non-cultural library books, maps, and school supplies to the plantation school. We later found out that when the encyclopedias arrived, the teachers began taking them home and reading them completely by the light of their cooking fires at night.

Now, multiply that thirst for information and knowledge over the continent of Africa that is large enough to contain all of the United States, Europe, China, the sub-continent if India, and more. That was in 1994. Today, those students aren’t waiting for the headmaster to receive the teaching material every morning. This morning the teachers aren’t even waiting for some encyclopedias to arrive along with some medical goods from Evergreen, Colorado. They now have wireless access to information that was not even available to Harvard University or the president of the United States just a few years ago!

Three billion new individuals are coming on line via computers and smart phones, who have never had access to a world community of information, knowledge, and contacts. They are not only going to be recipients of the exponential intelligence, but also they will enter onto the freeway of communication, and be able for the very first time to contribute to the discussions, the discoveries, and inventions of the future. Now that’s progress!

Next Week: Supposin’: A Look at Progress, Part 3

(Research ideas from Dr. Jackson’s new writing project on Cultural Economics)

© Dr. James W. Jackson  

Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson. 

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com