STEM Education: The Future of the U.S. Economy NOT Universal Income

Uber-entrepreneur and genius Elon Musk shocked many last week by declaring that “there is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation.” Vanity Fair puts together a nice profile on where Musk is coming from… last Christmas, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jessica Livingston announced the founding of OpenAI, a nonprofit research venture aimed at developing “digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity.” Well done and innovators AND educators should focus on empowering and training knowledge workers and students. In mobility fields, for example, PPI states that AppEconomy jobs doubled to nearly 1.7M this year from 2013. TechoPedia frames the AppEconomy as a mobility phenomenon stemming from the range of economic activity surrounding mobile applications . VentureBeat forecast that the AppEconomy market will rise to over $100B by 2020. But STEM education is much more than delivering knowledge to users at any point of delivery – structure will have to come from the setting and the silos for delivery to (what HBR calls) frontline workers in context.

Gary Shapiro of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) gets the importance of STEM, but sadly politicizes it. in a CES post in November 2014, he points out that STEM should be an important and constructive element of immigration reform: “U.S. global competitiveness is being threatened by our outdated legal immigration policies, costing our economy hundreds of thousands of jobs a year. We urge the White House and the next Congress to work together toward a legislative solution that decouples bipartisan, high-skilled immigration reform from overall reform efforts.” He does, recently, also try to address the inevitable job displacement in advance of the annual ultra-popular CES extravaganza,”The most common complaint I hear from our more than 2,200 consumer technology member companies is that they need many more qualified graduates with technical and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) backgrounds – the supply does not meet our expanding demand. ”

BI Intelligence offers their analysis of each area that could offer elements of a STEM curriculum in a business school setting:

• Apps and Platforms
• Digital Media
• Payments
• Internet of Things
• E-Commerce
• Fintech

In order to take STEM education to the next level, the deployment of self-service, cloud-based business intelligence tools that is underway must also occur in educational institutions, training programs and in sponsored programmatic competitions such as the wonderful NASA Space Race. Gartner offers a roadmap for the digitalization of education here. Rita Sallam, Research Vice President at Gartner Group elaborated in PC Magazine, “The BI&A market is in the final stages of a multiyear shift from IT-led, system-of-record reporting to pervasive, business-led, self-service analytics. Organizations will continue to transition to easy-to-use, fast, agile, and trusted modern BI&A platforms deployed across the enterprise to create business value from deeper insights into diverse data sources.” The 2016 Gartner Critical Capabilities report is a definitive guide to understanding which BI and analytics vendors offer the best products (the report is free for download here).

Picture Credit: NASA Space Race

Corporations are driving spending on cloud-based BI technology which is growing 4.5x faster than spending for on-premises solutions. Dan Vesset, IDC‘s Program Vice President for Business Analytics and Big Data, projected that spending on self-service visual discovery and data preparation tools will grow 2.5x faster in 2016 than traditional IT-controlled tools, and said it will necessitate a fundamental IT culture change. “Responding to the demand for self-service BI technology will necessitate a reassessment of current centralized IT practices,” said Vesset. “IT will need to recognize the full range of different [BI&A] needs and ensure that the full technology stack or services are available to address the self-service needs of user group.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that STEM occupations  will grow to more than nine million between 2012 and 2022 – an increase of about one million jobs over 2012 levels. Remember our “frontline workers”? A Rice University research paper studied how creativity affected customers’ perception of customer service. HBR reports,

The researchers found that the creativity of front-line service employees (which they called “service creativity”) directly affected customer services ratings. “Service creativity allows employees to delight customers in unusual ways or solve problems that existing protocol falls short of addressing,” said Jing Zhou, a co-author on the study and professor of management at Rice University. “The findings suggest that service creativity is a powerful avenue through which customer satisfaction can be achieved.”

Apply the same approach to STEM education and we will have a much happier and engaged population of life-long learning students in our communities.

Picture Credit: Julian Kalic’s Wisdom Tower

 

Exciting New Solar Roofing Solution from Tesla/Solar City – How Much?

Picture Credit: Solar City press photo

Leave it to Elon Musk and his engineers to being out another revolutionary product suite– solar roofing tiles that are attractive, efficient, can serve as snow melters and can be East-West mounted ! Very cool (Bloomberg video here) ! The solar roofing tiles are also complimented by SolarWall which provides residential standby power to combat outages. The tiles come in four configurations and consist of tempered glass, colored louver film and a high efficiency solar cell. ” Though geared to the residential market, SolarCity has scale: “SolarCity is the national leader in clean energy services and America’s #1 solar power provider. Our national scale, in-house experience and world-class technology are only a few of the solar energy advantages that make us the clean energy company of choice for small businesses, commercial companies, governments, schools, farms, water districts and more.”

SolarCity is operating as a de facto solar utility with the goal of making money on the financing. However, the economic payback periods are widely variable as “a 3 kW system starts at $25-$100 per month with an annual increase of 0-2.9% each year for 10-20 years, on approved credit,” according to SolarCity that will work with third party financing, though “our in-house team takes care of every part of your project, including financing, custom system engineering, installation and ongoing system maintenance and monitoring.” But, in addition to up-front costs, residential solar installations face the challenge of price distortions caused by net metering imposed from the local utility – you generate the power but they often take your WHOLE production onto the grid, charge you a distribution overhead, and then sell you back electricity from the grid ! Concerns about “cost shifting” have generated debates (like the NARUC “rate design”) with MIT Professor Richard Schmalensee claiming in a detailed report that it’s in solar’s “best interest” to do away with retail pricing in net metering policies, and to treat utility- and residential-scale solar “more or less the same.”  Several other reports have come to a similar conclusion, such as a recent report commissioned by the Louisiana Public Service Commission that drew ire from solar advocates. However, several more studies (including in Nevada, Vermont and Mississippi) have found just the opposite: that distributed solar does not impose a significant net cost to ratepayers, and in many cases produces a net benefit to all ratepayers, as reported in GreenTechMedia.

Picture Credit: Solar City

So regulation, financing and the variability of the subsidies plus cash flow problems at SolarCity are key elements of execution risk as SC has to build a geographic infrastructure to support this network. Some experts are concerned about the lifetime system cost, projected to be as high as $100,000 by Consumer Reports. The Buffalo News explains their calculation and quotes Nick Gilewski, owner of Go Green Electronically, an e-commerce store based in North Tonawanda that sells energy efficient consumer products and favors geothermal energy in the northern U.S. states. Brian Potts of Perkins Cole LLP also notes that , “companies like Elon Musk’s SolarCity have flooded the market with cheap home solar deals, relying heavily on federal and state subsidies and creative loan agreements to keep prices low.”

However, the SC approach might work for community solar as it offers utility-scale photovoltaic (PV), battery deployments and advanced grid services (for distribution systems). Mr. Potts explains,

Shared solar systems offer many advantages over home rooftop solar systems. Rooftop solar is much less efficient; generally speaking, if you take a rooftop solar panel and put it into a utility-scale, shared solar system, it will produce more power. This is primarily due to siting considerations to capture solar energy, whereas utilities can site solar farms in a manner that maximizes the amount of energy they produce. Utilities also do a better job of cleaning and maintaining the systems to optimize performance. In fact, according to a recent Brattle Group study, rooftop solar is about twice as expensive on a per kWh basis as utility-scale solar, mainly due to these inefficiencies and economies of scale.

Putting solar panels on your house is part of a non-utility, off the grid system  that allows you to use your whole production in situ, along with other elements, according to HomePower online.

Nonetheless, $11 billionaire Elon Musk is a remarkable innovator and, as Forbes acknowledges that he “is trying to redefine transportation on earth and in space. Through Tesla Motors he is aiming to bring fully-electric vehicles to the mass market; at SpaceX, he launches satellites and is working to send humans to other planets.” Musk make innovation appealing as his pitch at Universal Studios in Los Angeles offered an integrated view of Musk’s clean-energy ambitions, as Bloomberg crows: “The audience was able to step into a future powered entirely by Tesla: a house topped with sculpted Tuscan solar tiles, where night-time electricity is stored in two sleek wall-hung Powerwall batteries, and where a Model 3 prototype electric car sits parked out front within reach of the home’s car charger.”

Picture Credit: Tesla 3 Prototype

 

The Fight over Reusable Rockets

The Daily Mail, in its characteristic way, offers a picture-rich profile of the Bezos and Mush fight over reusable rockets.

Billionaire space battle takes to Twitter: Jeff Bezos takes aim at Elon Musk by tweeting first images of model ‘megarocket’ – just hours after SpaceX founder showed off Mars rocket engine

• ‘New Glenn’ is a reusable launcher that will focus on space tourism
• Blue Origin announced there are two stages of the rocket
• ‘New Glenn 3-stage’ is 313ft tall and ‘New Glenn 2-stage’ is 270 feet tall
• Each stage lifts off with 3.85m pounds of thrust from seven BE-4 engines
• Set to launch by the end of the decade at Cape Canaveral, Florida

By Mark Prigg For Dailymail.com

Published: 15:09 EST, 26 September 2016 |

After years of secrecy, Blue Origin and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos finally unveiled their New Glenn ‘megarocket’ earlier this month. Now, Bezos has revealed the latest progress on the project with a series of wind tunnel pictures showing the ‘New Glenn’ in different configurations, taking a leaf out of Elon Musk’s book. Named after the first US astronaut to orbit Earth, the ‘New Glenn’ launcher is larger than SpaceX’s future Heavy rocket and is set to visit the final frontier by the end of the decade.

 The spacecraft come in two stages that are designed with half the power of Nasa’s Saturn V launcher, and will bring Blue Origin one-step closer to its goal of ‘millions of people living and working in space’. Bezos said the tests had validated the design. Bezos revealed the models have been in testing for three weeks, and have been a total success. ‘Exciting results from 3 weeks of wind tunnel testing of #NewGlenn at transonic & supersonic speeds. Validated our CFD.’ It came just hours after Elon Musk tweeted images of SpaceX’s latest rocket tests. The spacecraft come in two stages that are designed with half the power of Nasa’s Saturn V launcher, and will bring Blue Origin one-step closer to its goal of ‘millions of people living and working in space’. 

A second picture revealed the bottom of the rocket. Called ‘New Glenn’, this launcher comes in two stages that makes it larger than SpaceX’s future Heavy rocket.’New Glenn 3-stage’ is 23-feet in diameter and stands 313 feet tall.

Bezos, left and Musk, right are locked in a battle to create reusable rocket systems. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic performed the first test flight for its latest spacecraft last week, SpaceShipTwo, which will conduct public trips into space and charge customers a fee.

SpaceX propulsion just achieved first firing of the Raptor interplanetary transport engine pic.twitter.com/vRleyJvBkx

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 26 September 2016

However, in the same week, the world watched in horror when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 burst into flames on the Cape Canaveral launch pad during a routine check for its long awaited trip. But Bezos appears to be hopeful in today’s announcement – ‘our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step,’ he wrote in an email to the Washington Post (which Bezos owns and uses as his public media campaign).

BEZOS’ NEW ROCKETS

Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has unveiled a new rocket that will launch payloads and people into orbit. Called ‘New Glenn’, this launcher comes in two stages that makes it larger than SpaceX’s future Heavy rocket. ‘New Glenn 3-stage’ is 23-feet in diameter and stands 313 feet tall. And ‘New Glenn 2-stage’ is also 23-feet in diameter, but measures 270 feet tall. Each stage lifts off with 3.85 million pounds of thrust from seven BE-4 engines. A single vacuum-optimized BE-3 engine, burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, will power New Glenn’s third stage. However,the booster and the second stage are identical in both variants. Blue Origin plans to fly New Glenn by the end of the decade from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

It’s been years in the making and now, Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has unveiled a new rocket that will launch payloads and people into orbit. The ‘New Glenn’ rockets are larger than SpaceX’s future Heavy rockets and will fly by the end of the decade. Blue Origin has always aimed at moving its vehicles into the space tourism market and the New Glenn, named in honor of astronaut John Glenn, are key players for this plan. Both stages are 23-feet in diameter, but the ‘New Glenn 3-stage’ is 313 feet tall, whereas ‘New Glenn 2-stage measures 270-feet. And each stage lifts off with 3.85 million pounds of thrust from seven BE-4 engines. A single vacuum-optimized BE-3 engine, burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, will power New Glenn’s third stage, according to Bezos. However,the booster and the second stage are identical in both variants.’New Glenn is designed to launch commercial satellites and to fly humans into space,’ Bezos wrote.

Blue Origin’s announcement comes at a crucial time for the commercial space industry. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic performed the first test flight for its latest spacecraft last week, SpaceShipTwo 9pictured), which will conduct public trips into space

THE RACE TO BUILD REUSABLE ROCKETS

Reusable rockets would cut costs and waste in the space industry, which currently loses millions of dollars in jettisoned machinery after each launch. Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency are also developing similar technology and are in testing stages. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and owner of The Washington Post newspaper, said last month that Blue Origin expects to begin crewed test flights of the New Shepard, the company’s flagship rocket, next year and begin flying paying passengers as early as 2018. SpaceX has managed to land four rockets from space back on Earth, three on sea and one on land, while Blue Origin’s New Shepard successfully completed a third launch and vertical landing in April this year. The Indian space agency also hopes to develop its own frugal shuttle, as it seeks to cash in on a huge and lucrative demand from other countries to send up their satellites, after a successful test launch last month.

 The New Glenn rockets will also be designed similar to Blue Origin’s New Shepard (pictured) in that it will also be reusable, which Bezos says will cut costs for space travel.’The three-stage variant—with its high specific impulse hydrogen upper stage—is capable of flying demanding beyond-LEO missions.’ Just like Blue Origin’s smaller BE-3 engine and New Shepard Propulsion module, both of the new rockets and their engines are reusable. Bezos sees this method as a way to lower the costs of space travel. And he hopes to make space travel as routine as airplane flights.

SpaceX has test fired its a prototype of its new Raptor engine (pictured). The rocket engine is three times more powerful than those used in the company’s Falcon 9 rockets. The new engines also use methane rather than kerosene. Blue Origin plans to fly New Glenn by the end of the decade from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. And will use these rockets solely to launch commercial satellites and fly humans into space, Bezos writes.’Our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step,’ he shares.’It won’t be the last of course. Up next on our drawing board: New Armstrong. But that’s a story for the future.’

THE WORLD WATCHED IN HORROR: SPACEX EXPLODES

This is the dramatic moment the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket suffered a catastrophic explosion on the Cape Canaveral launch pad during a routine pre-launch check on September 1. The blast, which shook buildings and windows miles away, occurred shortly after 9am and destroyed Facebook’s $200million Amos-6 satellite that was set to launch on Saturday morning aboard the reusable rocket. Billionaire SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the cause of the massive blast – which caused no injuries – is still unknown as the accident throws into question the future of his program of subcontracting his ‘reusable’ and ‘recycled’ rockets to NASA. The satellite would have opened up free internet to more than 14 countries in Africa to serve the most populated areas more efficiently. No additional details were provided. It wasn’t clear whether the rocket caused the problem or something else on the pad. The pad is normally cleared of workers before test firings. Dark smoke filled the overcast sky, and a half-hour later, a black cloud hung low across the eastern horizon. It’s the same kind of SpaceX rocket used to launch space station supplies for NASA. NASA – SpaceX’s major customer – said the explosion occurred at Launch Complex 40 at the Air Force station, and Kennedy emergency staff was on standby.

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Free Energy and Anti Gravity Space Vehicles (and tracking the development of 70 year old programs)

 

Picture credit: Afflictor.com

In looking into advanced energy propulsion systems, IAI finds it surprising that commercial free energy programs have not really emerged – maybe excepting what we know about Elon Musk’s Mars Mission and Jeff Bezos’ planet settlement programs. Musk, the CEO of SpaceX  (and Tesla Motors), has said he wants to “live and die on Mars, just not on impact” and SpaceX won a contract from NASA to carry U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station as soon as next year. CNN points out that Musk started “SpaceX with a Mars mission in mind, and he has forecast that the company will achieve its first unmanned mission to Mars within two years, and its first manned mission by 2025.” One examination of “private spaceflight” quipped that Bezos won a trip to Marshall Space Flight Center by writing an essay on the “microgravity of flies” and has talked enthusiastically about space colonization on par with physicist Gerard O’Neill. Bezos’ Blue Origin space tourism company was founded in 2000 in a Kent, WA NASA parts facility and is promising to launch private spaceflights in 2017 and is building engines for other launch firms to reduce reliance on Russian-supplied engines.

An interesting book was released in 2013 called”NASA at 50: Interviews with NASA’s Senior Leadership.” But, there are other sources “less scrubbed”…To put these efforts in an historical context, Dr. Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project has collected a large number of documents about the “secret” space program that emerged post World War II. Anyone interested in history knows about Operation Paperclip during which the U.S. military extracted a number of Nazi engineers including the famous Werner von Braun who led the NASA precursor to develop the heavy lift Saturn rocket which was the workhorse of the Apollo space program. But, wait, there was a LOT more:

The majority of the scientists, numbering almost 500, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, Fort Bliss, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missile and ballistic missile technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program. Much of the information surrounding Operation Paperclip is still classified.  Separate from Paperclip was an even-more-secret effort to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment and personnel (Operation Alsos)-started in fall 1943 as the precursor to The Manhattan Project). Another American project (Operation TICOM) gathered German experts in cryptography. The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946 (Operation LUSTY).

TICOM’s original documents have been usefully captured by Scribd. And, of course, another project critical to post-war aeronautics programs in the UK was spawned by Nazi scientists was called Operation Surgeon, declassified in 2006.

Andrew Johnson conducted a series of interviews in 2014 with advanced military engineer Edgar Fouche who work in the DOD and intelligence agencies from the early ’60s to mid ’90s at Edwards Air Force Base in California and Groom Lake, Nevada (aka Area 51) and other facilities as a project remedy lead. Johnson also includes an extended interview dating from 1998 in which Fouche discussed “quasi-crystals” – the power source behind the TR3B nuclear interstellar platform in 1998- 13 years before Dr. Dan Shechtman won the Nobel Prize in 2011 for “discovering” them. Dan Shechtman is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. In an April, 2013 education profile of the Technion, the New York Times detailed:

Conceived by the Zionist Congress in 1905, in part as a response to the exclusion of Jews from engineering studies in Europe, the Technion finally opened in 1923, when there were no Hebrew words for most of the technical terms needed to teach a basic engineering class. Since then, the university has come up with more than just translations for “aerodynamic” and “nuclear.” “I can say without exaggeration that Israel could not have been built without the Technion,” says Yossi Vardi, who has founded or helped build more than 60 companies in Israel and has five degrees from the Technion.

Credited with discovering them in 1982, materials science has been rocked by quasiperiodic crystals which are finally opening up opportunities for new applications including camouflage due to tunable photonic band gaps displayed by these crystals which are used in the Lockheed nuclear transatmospheric vehicles like the TR3B  (recent video) which was first reported in flight in Belgium in 1990 (Mach 9 speed, 600′ diameter, 60K rotations/min, 250K atmospheres, mercury plasma reduces mass by 89%):

Source: http://www.iycr2014.org/

Basically, a quasicrystal is a crystalline structure that breaks the periodicity (meaning it has translational symmetry, or the ability to shift the crystal one unit cell without changing the pattern) of a normal crystal for an ordered, yet aperiodic arrangement. This means that quasicrystalline patterns will fill all available space, but in such a way that the pattern of its atomic arrangement never repeats. (University of Michigan chemical engineers Sharon) Glotzer and (Michael) Engel recently managed to simulate the most complex quasicrystal ever, a discovery which may revolutionize the field of crystallography by blowing open the door for a whole host of applications that were previously inconceivable outside of science-fiction, like making yourself invisible or shape-shifting robots.

Shlectman teaches a popular course called “Technological Entrepreneurship” at the Technion and the link points to a nice Technology Innovation Management Review of the TE literature since the early 1970s literature.

Source: AZquotes.com

There’s a lot to explore here in future posts:

• Free energy (let’s start with the basics)
• Quasi-crystals (Professor Shechtman discusses them)
• X43A- Mach 10 vehicle (over 7000 mph)
• Private space travel (Bezo’s New Sheperd spacecraft featured)
• Moon “Far Side” bases and Mars bases  (In Mr. Cooper’s 1989 lecture and affidavit, he states that the U.S had first landed on Mars on May 22, 1962 and that, by the time the U.S./NASA public space program landed on the moon in 1969, the U.S. already had a moon base there, since the mid-1950s.)

And I welcome reader’s suggestions…