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‘’Education = outdated’’ is becoming an easy topic to argue in favor of. As a consequence, ‘’the future of education’’ is gaining value as a hot topic to speculate about. So what might this future look like? I propose to go through the anticipated shift in education as a shift from product based business model over to ecosystem sustaining model that works as a two-sided network of students on the demand side and companies on the supply side.

 

What have been the Western education model since Harvard establishment in 1636? General education same as subject specific undergraduate or so called ‘’liberal arts’’ education is a product aggregation – a bundle of different ‘’kinds of knowledge’’ of your choice – theoretical mixed with practical knowledge of general application. You would protest: ‘’How practical is it? Seems we are thought things we nearly do not use when later at work.” Some would argue that theorists shall go study in academic institutions – universities to get their under/graduate ‘’degrees’’ that solemnly put them in ranks of Bachelors, Masters or Doctors in their chosen field. Practitioners, on the other side, would go get professional education that should prepare them to tackle real tasks at their working place. However, even this group evidently overlooks some ‘’skills’’ when learning and under-looks others – one education program cannot evenly serve the needs of its differently interested students.

 

Hence, we have a problem at hand that entrepreneurial spirit shall inspire to resolve. How do we approach such an issue? By creating a more efficient market for matching demands with suppliers. Who are those actors here and what is the market? Those are digital education platforms like Coursera, KhanAcademy, EdX or Udacity, where many of the forward looking educational institutions like Harvard, MIT or Delft university upload online courses for their physically available courses or specially designed courses. Cool stuff and can work well, however, some reports show that student turnover is very high – portion of students who start the course but do not proceed with even 20% of it. Engagement and attachment to ‘’physical here and now’’ of the class is lacking that in turn negatively affects the motivation of the digital students. Do not rush from ”Place to Space” that fast, rather adapt the ”Place to Splace” strategy – explained later in the post.

 

Now, what is more important is the ‘’means and ends’’ dilemma of both digital and physical education as we have known it so far. The ‘’why’’ I learn and ‘’where’’ directly will I apply it, is still lacking as education is at best only the replica of real life problem solving process. Here is where the tech hub based education comes in. Essentially, it is founded on ‘’learn by doing’’ philosophy where companies/start-ups are physically aggregated in their office co-working co-living space (tech hub) – the supply side of the market. The demand side is represented by the students who came to the tech hub to meet their potential future employers and commit assignments for them while attending some of their informative workshops where they can learn about the company. This is combined with the previously discussed digital education that shall enable those students to learn the fundamentals and the underlying theory for approaching some of their assignments. An example for a ”Place to Splace” shift.

 

Such a two-sided market is argued to be more efficient – it can better satisfy the need of ‘’long-tail’’ tastes of students – providing more specific learning by doing in contrast to more generic education at the university that is designed to be of more use for any student on average but still lack a lot of specificity/realism when applied in the world. Positive cross-side networking effects are not only evident here but are rather one of the requirements for such a market to function. It is important that different tastes of students are well satisfied by good supply of companies and there is a match for all of them, otherwise demand side will shrink – ruining the whole market.

 

It is interesting to argue here on who should be the money or the subsidized side. In my opinion the demand side will enter the market only when there will be enough suppliers (companies) present to satisfy their varying needs. Thus, companies shall be subsidized. Which also makes logic sense, as for a company there are human resource – training costs involved as well as operational risks and uncertainty in the effort/capabilities of students.

 

All in all, the shift and realization of such a market will take place only when there will be enough ‘’adopters’’ who pose a question – ‘’Why am I going to university?’’ before actually going there. When the majority answers ‘’To better realize my ideas at work’’, their choice for the tech hub – learning by doing education shall become evident. Where else can you better be prepared to realize your ideas at work if not by doing that work at the real company?

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There are 2 million people in the world who require kidney dialysis every week to clean their blood. This is a time-consuming and cumbersome process, without which the patient dies.

A team at the University of California, San Francisco, has developed the first implantable artificial kidney, a coffee-cup-sized box containing silicon filters and live kidney cells grown in a bioreactor that can be connected to the patient’s circulatory system and bladder to clean the blood 24 hours a day. (Solon, 2018)

These two advanced technologies will make up a small biocompatible device that attaches to the circulatory system and removes toxins to the bladder as waste.

The artificial kidney will allow patients to live untethered from dialysis machines eat and drink more normally and live their lives more freely. In addition to giving patients freedom to roam during dialysis, it would also address the shortfall of donated organs. Only one in six people waiting for a kidney received one in 2016.

Creating an artificial implantable kidney would be an epic advance in medicine and could address a chronic shortage of donor kidneys needed for transplant. Researchers have been at this quest for the past 15 years and keep coming upon one extremely knotty problem: how to keep the blood flowing smoothly through the artificial device without clotting. In such devices, as blood platelets respond to mechanical forces, they have a natural tendency to clot, causing a device malfunction. (Pharm.ucsf.edu, 2018)

The researchers generated simulation and optimization results for two device designs that each channel blood through the artificial kidney filter system. One design distributes blood through parallel channels that pass across multiple layers of filtering membranes. The other channels blood back and forth through a single serpentine path.

Both designs met the researchers’ predetermined criteria for the uniform flow of blood through the devices and accumulation of shear stress forces on the platelets against the walls of the device flow channels. The Kidney Project have already received an abundance of applications for the human trials. Screenings will proceed once they receive approval from the board of ethics.

“If all goes well and funds are available, we could be on the market as early as 2020.”, Shuvo Roy, one of the study’s co-authors told back in March 2018. Completion of this ambitious project will profoundly improve the quality and length of life for patients with kidney failure as well as reduce the cost in personal toll of this devastating disease.

References:

Pharm.ucsf.edu. (2018). Home | The Kidney Project | UCSF. [online] Available at: https://pharm.ucsf.edu/kidney [Accessed 22 Oct. 2018].

Solon, O. (2018). Forget Juicero, here are the tech gadgets we can actually get excited about in 2018. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/28/tech-inventions-to-look-foward-2018 [Accessed 22 Oct. 2018].

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The music industry has been going through a rough patch for a number of years. That wasn’t always the case. A number of decades ago, before the information age known as the 21^st century, the music industry was flourishing. The arrival of the internet changed the game.

The slow and painful death of physical music:

The evolution of physical music has been an interesting story so far. For decades on end, vinyl dominated the playing field drawing flocks of consumers towards dedicated record shops, exchanging their hard-earned money for the right to listen to the newest hits in the comfort of your home, whenever they chose to. Eventually, new mediums, such as the cassette and the CD, found their way to the marketplace and lead to the gradual decrease of production costs as well as the associated retail prices.

The arrival of the internet, combined with the digitalization of music through the development of CDs, drastically changed the internet: Websites like Napster, Soulseek and Piratebay enabled consumers to skip music stores altogether and share music among each other over the web, free of charge. This constituted a turning point as it taught younger generations that music can be consumed for free. This caused a dramatic decline in profits across the industry and considerably

The Rise of the Platform

But things were about to get even worse. The emergence of platforms like YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music weakened the industry’s position even further. Under the premise of democratization of the music industry, streaming platforms have cut out several middlemen (resulting in the death of numerous music shops, labels, and distributors) and now leverage cross-side network effects to capture a ridiculously disproportionate share of the profits. The consequences of this shift are heterogeneous: While big mainstream stars such as Taylor Swift and Kanye West still earn outrageous amounts, the share of profits for new entrants declines by the day, driving new and promising artists out of the industry and stifling creativity.

 

Sources:

https://medium.com/resonatecoop/this-mind-map-of-the-music-industry-showed-me-the-damage-that-streaming-is-doing-to-it-7f7f3b405adb

https://festivalpeak.com/spotify-is-ruling-the-music-industry-but-is-it-also-ruining-it-69a864428a78

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianmorris/2014/11/17/technology-is-destroying-the-music-industry-which-is-great-for-the-next-taylor-swift/#5a4cbab4236b

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The newest development in the smartphones market are the introduction of ‘companion phones’. Whereas market leaders in the smartphone segment Apple, Samsung and Huawei have produced increasingly bigger smartphones over the last decade, the newest trend in smartphones could be extremely small phones. A newly launched phone, using the brand name Palm, is the size of a credit card and is only 5.5 millimetres thick. It offers most functionalities of a normal smartphone, including two cameras and making use of the 4g network.

 

The Palm phone is promoted as a ‘companion phone’, a small phone as a complement to your main smartphone. In its marketing, Palm claims that the companion phone enables people to take a break from their main phones, despite being a fully functioning mobile device of its own.

 

I think that companion phones actually have great potential, although I do believe it is promoted wrongly. I do not think people desire a second phone to carry around for the same purpose as their main phone. However, I do believe companion phones could disrupt the business phone segment. As many young professionals aim to keep up a strict distinction between life and work, they tend to keep separate phones for work and private use. However, having to carry around two separate phones brings along some inconvenience. Therefore, due to the small and thin design of Palm, ‘companion phones’ could be an excellent alternative as a business phone. Moreover, as business phones are mostly just used to call, they require less features than regular smartphones, increasing the potential of ‘companion phones’.

 

‘Companion phones’ could be a new opportunity in the saturated market of smartphones. Besides Palm’s version, other ‘companion phones’ are entering the market as well. NTT Docomo, Japan’s biggest telecoms firm, launched their own companion phone only a few days after the launch of Palm. And who knows, in a few months, we might just expect the launch of the ‘companion phones’ of Apple and Samsung.

 

 

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Over the last 3 years, we’ve seen the stock of drones rise like rockets. Indeed, drones have transitioned from expensive toys comparable to radio-controlled helicopters to powerful tools capable of changing current and future business models. This post will elaborate on two novel applications of this exciting new technology.

Flying Cameras:

The technology’s impact on the photography industry has been nothing short of spectacular. In a sector that has long been dominated by professionals with large capitals, drones have played a role very similar to the one played by the introduction of the digital camera, which democratized photography by considerably cutting the entry price for cameras. This is where drones step in:

“Until just a few years ago, the pursuit of aerial photography was mostly limited to the military, dedicated hobbyists, and people with access to full-size aircraft.” – Time, 2018

Drone technology has slashed the entry barriers to aerial photography. While this is good news for video producers as it allows them to create high-quality aerial shots at a fraction of the price. This could prove to have a strong effect on the photography and film industry as hobby practitioners now possess the ability to rival bigger competitors. However, the implications for mainstream consumers are just as interesting: The availability of affordable drones empowers consumers and allows them to engage in an art form that until then had been reserved to professionals. As such hobby-photographers and YouTube content creators can considerably improve the quality of their art, thus providing society with increasingly qualitative and compelling content.

Healthcare:

In the field of healthcare, drones again have the potential to become a game-changing force. A drone’s ability to cover long distances without being interrupted by traffic leads many to believe that it represents the future of delivery and a few companies are already working on promising applications in the healthcare industry, where the fast delivery of emergency medical supplies can mean the difference between life and death.

Consequentially a number of companies have been trying to use this technology to save peoples’ lives: Zipline, a San-Francisco-based start-up has been using drones to deliver critical medical supplies to rural areas that were difficult to serve with traditional delivery methods.  TU Delft, on the other hand, studying the use of drones to deliver first aid equipment on the spot and that drones carrying defibrillators were able to arrive on location 16 minutes before emergency services, a number which in this context could very well save someone’s life!

 

 

Sources:

http://time.com/5281295/aerial-photography-history-drones/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paularmstrongtech/2018/09/03/why-you-should-be-investing-in-drone-technology-now-not-later/#cbab0423903e

http://www.flyzipline.com/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/13/defibrillator-carrying-drones-could-save-lives-research-suggests

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/10/592059175/medical-cargo-could-be-the-gateway-for-routine-drone-deliveries?t=1540219668639

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TL;DR! It’s profoundly ironic that our undoing isn’t the complexity of our time, but our inability to master even one moment of it.

I kept a distraction ticker while writing this post, and the outcome quite frankly frightened me. Writing these 460 words involved over 130 distractions and interruptions, spreading it over 5 sessions. Having rehabilitated from ADD already once in my life, this is not good. However, this is largely symptomatic of our times and habits. It’s a miracle anyone gets anything done anymore. The jury’s out on whether the next generations will be better at focusing, but from the echoes that we hear from teachers, a childhood filled with an endless, addictive stream of super-sensory stimuli doesn’t seem to do any favours either.

Prof. Cal Newport has made numerous painfully sharp realisations of our age of digital distractions. One of his main points is the need for what he calls deep work. This is work that happens in a prolonged state of concentration; it takes a long while to get started and can only happen uninterrupted. Newport describes this as the prerequisite of high-quality information work, and the ability to engage in it as one of the key criteria for a successful information worker – and organisation. Newport posits that the value created in a modern organisation is basically the integral of sustained attention over time (which he refers to as the Attention Capital Theory).

I didn’t really grasp how important – and refreshing deep work can be before I started working on projects with a level of complexity. I worked in an environment that was rich with geeky introverts where most tasks could be carried out with very little external input – and even most of that was handled with Slack messages to people within 10 meters.

In this kind of environment, work easily becomes sequential instead of semi-random multitasking. Things happen on schedule. Even interruptions happen mostly on schedule. No one else has the permission to make reservations in your calendar. Eventually you only stress constructively about solving the challenges at hand and wrangling the complexity on schedule. You cease stressing about having a dozens irrelevant but important things to do at once. Your productivity skyrockets, your blood pressure drops, and your ability to stretch your capabilities grows immensely.  

Instead of TL;DRs, executive summaries, gamification and super-sensory media, I’ve come to believe Newport’s digital minimalism is the antidote to the mental poison of our time. We need to realise that in a world of excess, we’re never going to get anything done if we don’t focus on one thing intensely at a time. And usually, those few things are what ca lead us to greatness

 

If you want to read more, Prof. Cal Newport also has a quirky blog with some pretty cool ideas.

http://calnewport.com/about/#ideas