Scan Monthly No. 044October 2006 |
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Signals of Change
The Art and Science of Smell
SoC201
Smell and scents are finding their way into a wide range of market applications. Novel interfaces, health-care applications, retail environments, product development, branding, and advertising all are attempting to capture the power of smell.
IP Moves and Countermoves
SoC202
As the economic value of intellectual property continues to increase throughout the world, the cultural, legal, technical, and scientific conventions for monetizing, protecting, or compromising intellectual-property positions are evolving at a rapid pace. Nationally sponsored prior-art databases and open-community searches for prior art are just two examples.
Novel Data-Collection Approaches
SoC203
Data collection can be time-consuming, complicated, and expensive. People are developing innovative approaches to collecting data in order to surmount those hurdles.
Crowdsensing
SoC204
Crowdsensing is the use of the sensing abilities of large numbers of people or animals to perform monitoring functions that would otherwise require more expensive (and in some cases less reliable) digital sensing systems. Security and environmental-monitoring applications are just two areas where the concept is immediately applicable.
Unconventional Health-Care Fixes
SoC205
An increasing number of parties in the United States are realizing that the current health-care situation is financially untenable. A number of recent developments, particularly in the form of nontraditional business models and players, indicate that considerable opportunity exists for unconventional, low-tech and lower-cost approaches to address health care's challenges.
Virtual Reality versus Unreality
SoC206
As humans immerse themselves in increasingly realistic virtual worlds, the result may actually be the opposite of the results that some skeptics predict: people's losing touch with reality. Whereas television obscures the line between reality and unreality and distorts reality with its sensationalistic reporting, immersion in virtual worlds may increase individuals' awareness of, and appreciation for, the real world.
Insights
| Systems Biology: Initiatives and Prospects | View full summary |
| D06-2538 | Download this Insight |
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As medical science and the study of biology progress, the number of factors that contribute to the development and progression of diseases and the complexity of the interaction of those factors becomes increasingly apparent. New disease models representing complete or system-level understanding of disease pathogenesis will be necessary and will require the ability to integrate complementary molecular information in the form of haplotype, gene-expression, proteomic, and metabolomic data if they are to have clinical predictive utility. Systems biology provides the framework necessary for more integrative science and research and for the study of how component molecular parts function collectively as complex biological systems. This study describes the components of systems biology and lists some of the initiatives currently advancing the study of systems biology. Author: Andrew Broderick. 8 pages. |
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| Scan Meeting Digest: 20 September 2006 Meeting | View full summary |
| D06-2539 | Download this Insight |
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This document is a digest of the Scan abstract clusters that participants in the 20 September 2006 Scan meeting identified. The digest includes a description of the Scan process for people who have never attended a Scan meeting, a list of the clusters that meeting participants identified, and a one-page description of each cluster's premise and supporting abstracts. The document has active links that allow the reader to access the supporting abstracts for each cluster in Scan's online abstract database. The document also has links to previously published Scan documents relating to the particular cluster. Clusters of abstracts for this September meeting include automating science, fantasy island, next-generation learning model, automation moves up the value chain, understanding nutrition, light-green buildings, unsafe health care, the biofuel bandwagon, everyone's a cop, insurance and the environment, rethinking the music market, land for food or fuel, crowdsourcing trumps AI, bioprospecting and biopiracy, traditional products aren't safe, twisted by technology, lazier than ever, and hard times for workers. Compiler: Andrew Broderick. 40 pages. |
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Calendar
Scan Abstract Meetings
Scan abstract meetings (in which SRIC-BI [now SBI] staff participate in a free-form discussion of current Scan abstracts) are open for client observation/participation on:
- 24 January 2007 at 9:00 am
- 21 March 2007 at 9:00 am
- 23 May 2007 at 9:00 am
- 18 July 2007 at 9:00 am
- 19 September 2007 at 9:00 am
- 17 October 2007 at 9:00 am.