Technology Topics

• Knowledge economy and spatial clustering: The Role of Knowledge-Intensive Business Services and Venture Capital Firms in the Innovation System - Modern economies are innovation-driven economies. Science, technology and innovation increasingly determine the performance of such economies and the competitiveness of industries. Modern economies are also to large extent city-based economies. "New economy" industries such as ICT, software, telecom, biotech, business services and venture capital firms, are typically clustered in larger cities or urban areas. Learning and "creative forgetting" is vital in such economies since knowledge ages, and likewise important is efficient sharing and transferring of knowledge. Both Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and Venture Capital Firms (VCF) play an important role in these learning and transaction processes.
• From Vision to the Implementation of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative - All natural and living systems are governed by atomic and molecular behavior at the nanoscale. Research is now seeking systematic approaches to create revolutionary new products and technologies by control of matter at the same scale. Fundamental discoveries and potential implications of nanotechnology to wealth, health and peace have captured the imagination of scientists, industry and government experts. The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) has become a top national priority in science and technology in U.S. for fiscal year 2001, with a Federal nanotechnology investment portfolio of $422 million. Nanotechnology is expected to have a profound impact on our economy and society in the earlier 21st century. The vision, research and development strategy, and timeline of the nanotechnology initiative are presented by using several recent scientific discoveries and results from industry.
• Open-Source Biology And Its Impact on Industry - In 50 years, you may be reading IEEE Spectrum on a leaf. The page will not actually look like a leaf, but it will be grown like a leaf. It will be designed for its function, and it will be alive. The leaf will be the product of intentional biological design and manufacturing.
  Rather than being constantly green, the cells on its surface will contain pigments controlled by the action of something akin to a nervous system. Like the skin of a cuttlefish, the cells will turn color to form words and images as directed by a connection to the Internet of the day. Given the speed with which the cuttlefish changes its pigment, these pages may not change fast enough to display moving images, but they will be fine for the written word. Each page will be slightly thicker than the paper Spectrum is now printed on, making room for control elements (the nervous system) and circulation of nutrients. When a page ages, or is damaged, it will be easily recycled. It will be fueled by sugar and light.
• Intentional Biology Homepage - By Intentional Biology we mean a rational and, as possible, controlled human interaction with the living world. This requires an ability to observe what is happening in biological systems, an ability to understand what we observe, and an ability to affect biological systems based upon our understanding. An intentional biology will allow humans to leverage the existing molecular infrastructure and cellular architecture to produce food, energy, and materials with greater efficiency than is currently possible.
• Nanotechnology - Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make diamond. If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can make computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we can make potatoes. Today's manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It's like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really snap them together the way you'd like. In the future, nanotechnology will let us take off the boxing gloves. We'll be able to snap together the fundamental building blocks of nature easily, inexpensively and in almost any arrangement that we desire. This will be essential if we are to continue the revolution in computer hardware beyond about the next decade, and will also let us fabricate an entire new generation of products that are cleaner, stronger, lighter, and more precise.
• Eye On The Future: Nanotechnology - How does one encode self-assembly? One does not have to look very far. In biology, the manufacturing of proteins, for example, occurs by expressing the DNA code into a precise assembly of amino acids through a series of enzymatic reactions. Growth of inorganic crystals on certain facets and patterns is also a form of coded assembly of atoms, although perhaps not as precise as biology. Production requires one to direct the coded self-assembly of nanostructures using optical lithography and thus form a hybrid manufacturing technique. Many novel techniques have been developed for this purpose, but there is none that can be called a technology yet. Much work remains to be done.
• Intentional Biology: Intentional Biology Topics - Intentional Biology is about the use of biology as technology. Humans have explicitly herded, farmed, and bred plants and animals for thousands of years, and now this effort is moving to the molecular level. Biology is a medium for creation. But because we don't yet know enough to manipulate biological systems with either certainty or safety, IB is also about the science we need to do to get to that point. The portrayal of current genetic "engineering" as precise and well defined is inappropriate today. Few genes are known quantities and the process of introducing a foreign gene into an organism produces uncertainty about both the gene's function and the function of the DNA into which it is inserted. Genetic engineering techniques are abysmally primitive, akin to swapping random parts between random cars to produce a better car. Yet this ignorance will fade. To be clear: the portrayal of future efforts as "intentional" is not meant as disrespect to the biologists on whose shoulders the future stands. However, progress in understanding the molecular details of biological systems and making use of that knowledge will require new experimental techniques and, more importantly, new ways of thinking about what measurements to make and how to interpret the results. When we can successfully predict the behavior of even simple biological systems, then building new things is the next step. Therefore, to begin, the scientific foundation of an Intentional Biology is a Predictive Biology, and improving human health, resource usage, and human interaction with the world around us will be but the initial benefits of this endeavor.
• MegaTrends in Interactive Information Technology - Within the next few years, hundreds of interactive technologies will emerge. Which ones will become commercially successful and popular? A key task for executives and decision makers will be to sort out all these technologies and determine which markets to go after, which information products to develop, and which alliances to form. Seven basic technology megatrends will influence everything related to information flow and usage: digital, interactive, integrated, networked, object-oriented, portable and multimedia to virtual reality. These megtrends inevitably enable I3 concepts that will come much sooner than many think.
• Digital Paper from Anoto - If (this) network rolls out as scheduled, within a year you'll be able to make a check mark beside a magazine ad to receive information about a product, or even to buy it. Visualize ecommerce without the click-and-wait: Browsing through a printed catalog, you'll purchase items - software, a subwoofer, or a trip to Paris - by ticking them off with a pen. Circling your destination on a city map will display, on your PalmPilot or mobile phone, the quickest route from here to there, movie showtimes, or tonight's menu at the best bistros in the area.
  To do these things, you'll need an instrument like the Chatpen that contains technology developed by Anoto. (By 2003, other Anoto-enabled pens, including Pilot rollerballs and a characteristically elegant offering from Montblanc, will be available.) You'll also need a supply of the special paper that Anoto has christened digital paper. It won't be hard to find, and it won't cost much more than standard copy stock. Unlike Xerox PARC's electronic paper or MIT/E Ink's Immedia, Anoto's technology employs real paper and commonly available inks. By the time Chatpens appear in office-supply shops and mail-order catalogs this fall, digital paper sporting the Anoto logo will be turning up everywhere.
• Future Technology - Physics was the science of the 20th century, biology will be the science for the 21th century. The economic incentives for researching the possibilities in genetics is too great to be disregarded. Genetherapy, genetic engineering and cloning causes ethical challenges that might be overwhelming, but highly important. Gene Therapy is the ability to cut and paste the human genome, to remove genetically inherited diseases and augment genetic functions. Nanotechnology, the ability to structure molecules with mechanic precision will have critical consequences for medicine, manufacturing and industry. The potential of constructing nano size industrial plants able to produce every known substance is mind boggling. The Singularity will possibly create an artifical intelligence more able to adapt than humans, consider the increasing amount of speed and number of computers. The technological singularity implies a super organism that may evolve beyond humans the same way humans evolved beyond animals.
• Bioconvergence: Progenitor of the Nanotechnology Age - Global economic indices of valuation, by which the major sovereign nation states and trading cartel entities--which have been correlated with primary commodity assets such as energy, telecommunications, IT (information technology) resources and infrastructure--are in a stage of transition, toward the next global standard of valuation. Ultimately, entirely new classes of synthetically contrived organisms, which would not evolve under "natural" circumstances, can be conjured up as protein-sequence codes, mapped onto a chip, and cloned out on demand. Enter the era of artificially enhanced evolution, synthetic organisms, genetically derived and targeted pharmacopia, cellular cybernetics, intracellular "corrective chemistry" systems, and bioengineering on demand, as a commodity resource.
• Kurzweil on Nanotechnology
• Nanotechnology Industries - Sources of information on nanotechnology.
• Hello Nanotechnology, Bye, Bye Money! - Nanotechnology, the science of building structures (including cars, food, houses, and space ships) by the manipulation and placement of individual atoms and molecules, is coming. It will be a social and technological revolution exceeding in significance any before it, including the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions. The most fundamental social change nanotechnology will bring will be the elimination of all things economic. The "anything box", a device which will allow anyone to produce anything with freely available resources, designs, and energy, will be one of nanotechnology's gifts.
• Zyvex: Nanotechnology: what will it mean? - In a few decades, this emerging manufacturing technology will let us inexpensively arrange atoms and molecules in most of the ways permitted by physical law. It will let us make supercomputers that fit on the head of a pin and fleets of medical nanorobots smaller than a human cell able to eliminate cancer, infections, clogged arteries and even old age. People will look back on this era with the same feelings we have towards medieval times - when technology was primitive and almost everyone lived in poverty and died young. Besides computers billions of times more powerful than today's, and new medical capabilities that will heal and cure in cases that are now viewed as utterly hopeless, this new and very precise way of fabricating products will also eliminate the pollution from current manufacturing methods. Molecular manufacturing will make exactly what it is supposed to make, no more and no less, and therefore won't make pollutants.
• Focusing on advanced technologies: Java - For many, the missing link in information and application integration is the Java technology platform. The synergy that Java technology brings to information processing lets everyone -- from the plant floor to design engineering, from finance to the boardroom -- operate together in a "virtual" enterprise. Java technology helps corporate IT meet its need for an open computing model. It also allows companies to maintain their investments in legacy systems and control the operational risks attendant in the wholesale change-out of systems. It also gives plant engineers and facilities managers the flexibility to select solutions that fulfill both plant and corporate requirements, while furthering the integration of operations to function as a single entity.
• High Tech Activities and Regions - A large number of useful websites are listed and annotated.
• The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page - Even though information technology may well be the main driving force behind future economic growth, it's very unlikely that the information technology industry is ever going to be more than a fairly small share of the economy.
• High-Tech Industrial Zones - The established and emerging high-tech industrial zones in a number of countries and places are covered, though they may be known as technology park, hi-tech city, cybercity, software park, science park, silicon something, or technopark, etc. Selected books, magazine/newspaper articles and Internet sites which trace their developments are included.
• Technology Network
• Home Page of NanoTechnology Magazine
• Creating Ultracustomized Products
• Technological Competition and the Structure of the Computer Industry
• Small is Beautiful: a collection of nanotechnology links
• Brad Hein's Nanotechnology Site--Table of Contents
• Building Molecular Machine Systems
• A New Form of Life or Revenge of Machines?
• Social Implications of Nanotechnology
• The Collision Between Western Civilization and Advanced Science & Technology
• Unbounding the Future (Nanotechnology) - online book
• Technology creates virtual company
• High-Technology Implications For Manufacturing And Business
• Technological Innovation And Theories Of Regional Development
• High-Tech Activities and Regions
• The Nanotechnology Economy
• Biotechnology for the 21st Century: New Horizons
• Technology, Comparative Advantage, And Spatial Change

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