7 ms·

Longitude Prize – £10 million fund to help solve the greatest issues of our time

48 points by dazbradbury 12y ago

exratione 12y ago
The same old blind spot in place with respect to aging I see. The cause of two thirds of all deaths worldwide, more than 90% of all deaths in the first world, and the largest share of suffering and medical expensive, all of which falls most heavily on the poor of course. But actually do something about it in this age of biotechnology and rapid progress in medicine? No, never. The organizers point to age-related dementia as one of the potential items, but strangely not to attempt or incentivize any work to fix the problem at all through medical research. They treat dementia as a result of aging as a given, something set in stone, a thing to be made marginally better with palliative treatments and accommodations, not fought with medical science in search of cures. Craziness. The world drowns and dies in this blind spot related to aging and age-related conditions.
ars 12y ago
I was expecting trite problems, but only one of them (flight) was, the others are real, and difficult. Although two of them (water, food) are not problems in discovery but in execution. Enough money or attention? Problem solved. This means there will be no one to award the prize to. Plus food is actually just a subset of water. That leaves 3, and all of them are medical, which is interesting if you are thinking about what to learn in school. (Flight is silly to include because if you want to stop pollution (of all types) stop China from burning coal, you can eliminate flight completely and it wouldn't make a dent.)
- Tarang 12y ago
  There was a BBC Horizon episode that went into each in depth to show that each is not as trivial as they seem. Money and Attention wouldn't really be able to solve what they're aiming for. The example they used of why this prize was a good idea was how it helped sailors centuries ago with the ordinary watch/timepiece. It was not possible to find one's position while at sea quite long ago without accurate time. Money couldn't solve this one, no matter how they tried they couldn't accurately know where they were at sea. There were people with the resources to solve it and they did try many things but were not able to. A prize like this for a working way to find someone's position at sea accurately got someone involved in making a unconventional timepiece that would be accurate at sea. This simple breakthrough probably saved many thousands of ships & probably pushed civilization ahead a few hundred years.
- netcan 12y ago
  The importance of the Flight challenge is debatable, I suppose but it is defined well. That's important. "If Flight wins the vote, the challenge for Longitude Prize 2014 will be set to design and build a zero or close-to-zero-carbon aeroplane that is capable of flying from London to Edinburgh, at comparable speed to today’s aircraft." If you don't think its environmentally valuable, at least it's valuable as an engineering challenge. The definition of the Food challenge is much poorer: "If Food wins the vote, the challenge for Longitude Prize 2014 will be set to invent the next big food innovation, helping ensure a future where everyone has enough nutritious, affordable and environmentally sustainable food that people want to eat. A successful solution will demonstrate benefit at a small scale now and show projections of the potential environmental and social impact of scaling up to provide for millions of people." If no one had seen a potato before, growing a field of them could presumably win this challenge. It would be easy to demonstrate on a small scale and make the case for scaling up. The whole problem is scaling up with all the political & economic hair that goes with it. We're pretty good at cheap calories. I disagree about Water: "creating a cheap, environmentally sustainable desalination technology." Clearly defined and would have many high value implementations including many humanitarian ones. The only knock on it is that I think there is sufficient economic incentive that a £10m prize won't make much difference. I could be wrong though.
- ivan_gammel 12y ago
  The flight problem isn't really a FLIGHT problem: it's about energy. Is it possible to create a zero-carbon source of energy, or, maybe, an accumulator good enough to power the flight of commercial aircraft? We've already seen that for cars it is possible (Tesla), so now it's time for the next step.
Thiz 12y ago
Surprised not to see liberty in that list. Liberty is the greatest issue of all times.
- ivan_gammel 12y ago
  Is it possible to "liberate" women of Saudi Arabia, Sudanese refugees in Kenya or political prisoners in Russia? The answer is generally "No". Unprepared society will not maintain the necessary institutions and any political changes enforced by foreign military will receive proportional resistance. There's no "silver bullet" ideology or religious prophet who can turn entire population of a country to the different path. This means that for liberating the world you need to do some boring work by educating the ruling class and directing it to the reforms that drive the economic growth to the point, when growing educated middle class will demand the liberties inside the country. Definitely, it's a political and organizational challenge, not the scientific one.
lazyjones 12y ago
You can tell by the lack of social issues that this is merely an initiative for discovering billion-dollar business opportunities.
- skrebbel 12y ago
  Which is pretty cool, right.
  - lazyjones 12y ago
    Maybe, but it's not "solving the world's greatest problems". One of these is poverty and distribution of wealth.
Gustomaximus 12y ago
One I would like to see is cheap/clean energy in a system that transports well. Arguably this would solve both food and water issues. IMO an affordable and acessable energy breakthrough could have more impact on the world than anything else on that list. Also I suspect a challenge like this is more open the the amateur hacker (like those gravity lamps) than most of these. This seems important if trying to crowd source solutions.
- acchow 12y ago
  Energy definitely solves water (thanks to desalination). Food is a (wealth) distribution problem. Very different. Clean energy would also obviously solve the polluting airplane problem...
  - mikeyouse 12y ago
    Part of the food problem is the lack of water for agriculture in many population-dense areas (but poor) areas. Providing extremely cheap water would enable livestock and crop growth in a significantly larger portion of the world.
alexholehouse 12y ago
As someone who works in dementia research (...), I can't help but notice the total absence of any well defined target for the challenge, which makes it, for a goal-oriented objective process, a poor choice. "If Dementia wins the vote, the challenge for Longitude Prize 2014 will be to develop intelligent, yet affordable technologies that revolutionise care for people with dementia enabling them to live truly independent lives." This reflects the fact that there's not an obvious solution to the dementia problem - yes, there are good big picture targets like this, I'm not sure how well this translates into day-to-day operations. Beyond this, should we be focussing resources/time/money on conditions which, fundamentally, are a byproduct of a high quality of life for a minority of the worlds population, or should we, perhaps, be focussing on ensuring clean drinking water for everyone, or developing antibiotics. I feel like dementia is somewhat incongruous with the other problems presented, but I suspect it might do well because it's so prevalent in the lives of the specific population voting for this.
gdewilde 12y ago
Just some thoughts... Dementia - Not a real solution but we force people to move often thereby erasing their associative memories. Houses could stay in the family so that one can grow up and grow old there, surrounded by objects triggering memories. (think of them like checksums)[0] Water - Use offshore wind turbines to throw water up in the air. Some vaporises into clouds, the rest goes back with the salt. [1][2] (there is some academic work on this that I cant find, it used a vertical axle turbine shaped like an egg beater, the water was carried up the arms by the centrifugal force) Flight - Use air evacuated maglev tubes.[3] Antibiotics - vibrate the body on the resonant frequency of the disease. If something has a fixed shape it has a resonant frequency. When matched it makes life unbearable for any single cell creature or virus. It cant dampen it's vibrations anymore.[4][5] (10 cents per patient kind of profits) Paralysis - I'm clueless about this one. Food - Permaculture includes A self-maintained agricultural systems modeled like natural ecosystems.[6][7] [0] - http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2005/02/suzuki.aspx http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2005/02/suzuki.aspx [1] - http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/12/every-silver-lining-has-a-cloud/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/12/every-silver-lining-ha... [2] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1251721/Pictured-The-stunning-micro-climate-sea-fog-created-Britains-windfarms.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1251721/Pictured-The... [3] - http://www.et3.com/ http://www.et3.com/ [4] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1658030/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1658030/ [5] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOXqXIG_WVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOXqXIG_WVM [6] - http://www.cultureofpermaculture.org/blog/ http://www.cultureofpermaculture.org/blog/ [7] - http://vimeo.com/19661805 http://vimeo.com/19661805
- Retric 12y ago
  Biofuel are actually a reasonable long term solution to the flight problem. Bulding a tube from NY to Hawaii is not.
  - gdewilde 12y ago
    Can you grow biofuel crops in the ocean?
    - 12y ago
phkahler 12y ago
Aircraft? It's funny they're worried about CO2 from aircraft when the water vapor the emit has a much larger and immediate effect.
lazyant 12y ago
I guess the name comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_prize , btw the little book "Longitude" http://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Dava-Sobel-ebook/dp/B003WUYE66/ http://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Dava-Sobel-ebook/dp/B003WUYE... is a fantastic read about that topic
nether 12y ago
Not listed: the next Angry Birds.

48 points by dazbradbury 12y ago

The same old blind spot in place with respect to aging I see. The cause of two thirds of all deaths worldwide, more than 90% of all deaths in the first world, and the largest share of suffering and medical expensive, all of which falls most heavily on the poor of course. But actually do something about it in this age of biotechnology and rapid progress in medicine? No, never. The organizers point to age-related dementia as one of the potential items, but strangely not to attempt or incentivize any work to fix the problem at all through medical research. They treat dementia as a result of aging as a given, something set in stone, a thing to be made marginally better with palliative treatments and accommodations, not fought with medical science in search of cures. Craziness. The world drowns and dies in this blind spot related to aging and age-related conditions.

ars 12y ago

I was expecting trite problems, but only one of them (flight) was, the others are real, and difficult. Although two of them (water, food) are not problems in discovery but in execution. Enough money or attention? Problem solved. This means there will be no one to award the prize to. Plus food is actually just a subset of water. That leaves 3, and all of them are medical, which is interesting if you are thinking about what to learn in school. (Flight is silly to include because if you want to stop pollution (of all types) stop China from burning coal, you can eliminate flight completely and it wouldn't make a dent.)

Tarang 12y ago
There was a BBC Horizon episode that went into each in depth to show that each is not as trivial as they seem. Money and Attention wouldn't really be able to solve what they're aiming for. The example they used of why this prize was a good idea was how it helped sailors centuries ago with the ordinary watch/timepiece. It was not possible to find one's position while at sea quite long ago without accurate time. Money couldn't solve this one, no matter how they tried they couldn't accurately know where they were at sea. There were people with the resources to solve it and they did try many things but were not able to. A prize like this for a working way to find someone's position at sea accurately got someone involved in making a unconventional timepiece that would be accurate at sea. This simple breakthrough probably saved many thousands of ships & probably pushed civilization ahead a few hundred years.
netcan 12y ago
The importance of the Flight challenge is debatable, I suppose but it is defined well. That's important. "If Flight wins the vote, the challenge for Longitude Prize 2014 will be set to design and build a zero or close-to-zero-carbon aeroplane that is capable of flying from London to Edinburgh, at comparable speed to today’s aircraft." If you don't think its environmentally valuable, at least it's valuable as an engineering challenge. The definition of the Food challenge is much poorer: "If Food wins the vote, the challenge for Longitude Prize 2014 will be set to invent the next big food innovation, helping ensure a future where everyone has enough nutritious, affordable and environmentally sustainable food that people want to eat. A successful solution will demonstrate benefit at a small scale now and show projections of the potential environmental and social impact of scaling up to provide for millions of people." If no one had seen a potato before, growing a field of them could presumably win this challenge. It would be easy to demonstrate on a small scale and make the case for scaling up. The whole problem is scaling up with all the political & economic hair that goes with it. We're pretty good at cheap calories. I disagree about Water: "creating a cheap, environmentally sustainable desalination technology." Clearly defined and would have many high value implementations including many humanitarian ones. The only knock on it is that I think there is sufficient economic incentive that a £10m prize won't make much difference. I could be wrong though.
ivan_gammel 12y ago
The flight problem isn't really a FLIGHT problem: it's about energy. Is it possible to create a zero-carbon source of energy, or, maybe, an accumulator good enough to power the flight of commercial aircraft? We've already seen that for cars it is possible (Tesla), so now it's time for the next step.

Thiz 12y ago

Surprised not to see liberty in that list. Liberty is the greatest issue of all times.

ivan_gammel 12y ago
Is it possible to "liberate" women of Saudi Arabia, Sudanese refugees in Kenya or political prisoners in Russia? The answer is generally "No". Unprepared society will not maintain the necessary institutions and any political changes enforced by foreign military will receive proportional resistance. There's no "silver bullet" ideology or religious prophet who can turn entire population of a country to the different path. This means that for liberating the world you need to do some boring work by educating the ruling class and directing it to the reforms that drive the economic growth to the point, when growing educated middle class will demand the liberties inside the country. Definitely, it's a political and organizational challenge, not the scientific one.

lazyjones 12y ago

You can tell by the lack of social issues that this is merely an initiative for discovering billion-dollar business opportunities.

skrebbel 12y ago
Which is pretty cool, right.
- lazyjones 12y ago
  Maybe, but it's not "solving the world's greatest problems". One of these is poverty and distribution of wealth.

Gustomaximus 12y ago

One I would like to see is cheap/clean energy in a system that transports well. Arguably this would solve both food and water issues. IMO an affordable and acessable energy breakthrough could have more impact on the world than anything else on that list. Also I suspect a challenge like this is more open the the amateur hacker (like those gravity lamps) than most of these. This seems important if trying to crowd source solutions.

acchow 12y ago
Energy definitely solves water (thanks to desalination). Food is a (wealth) distribution problem. Very different. Clean energy would also obviously solve the polluting airplane problem...
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  Part of the food problem is the lack of water for agriculture in many population-dense areas (but poor) areas. Providing extremely cheap water would enable livestock and crop growth in a significantly larger portion of the world.

alexholehouse 12y ago

As someone who works in dementia research (...), I can't help but notice the total absence of any well defined target for the challenge, which makes it, for a goal-oriented objective process, a poor choice. "If Dementia wins the vote, the challenge for Longitude Prize 2014 will be to develop intelligent, yet affordable technologies that revolutionise care for people with dementia enabling them to live truly independent lives." This reflects the fact that there's not an obvious solution to the dementia problem - yes, there are good big picture targets like this, I'm not sure how well this translates into day-to-day operations. Beyond this, should we be focussing resources/time/money on conditions which, fundamentally, are a byproduct of a high quality of life for a minority of the worlds population, or should we, perhaps, be focussing on ensuring clean drinking water for everyone, or developing antibiotics. I feel like dementia is somewhat incongruous with the other problems presented, but I suspect it might do well because it's so prevalent in the lives of the specific population voting for this.

gdewilde 12y ago

Just some thoughts... Dementia - Not a real solution but we force people to move often thereby erasing their associative memories. Houses could stay in the family so that one can grow up and grow old there, surrounded by objects triggering memories. (think of them like checksums)[0] Water - Use offshore wind turbines to throw water up in the air. Some vaporises into clouds, the rest goes back with the salt. [1][2] (there is some academic work on this that I cant find, it used a vertical axle turbine shaped like an egg beater, the water was carried up the arms by the centrifugal force) Flight - Use air evacuated maglev tubes.[3] Antibiotics - vibrate the body on the resonant frequency of the disease. If something has a fixed shape it has a resonant frequency. When matched it makes life unbearable for any single cell creature or virus. It cant dampen it's vibrations anymore.[4][5] (10 cents per patient kind of profits) Paralysis - I'm clueless about this one. Food - Permaculture includes A self-maintained agricultural systems modeled like natural ecosystems.[6][7] [0] - http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2005/02/suzuki.aspx http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2005/02/suzuki.aspx [1] - http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/12/every-silver-lining-has-a-cloud/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/12/every-silver-lining-ha... [2] - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1251721/Pictured-The-stunning-micro-climate-sea-fog-created-Britains-windfarms.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1251721/Pictured-The... [3] - http://www.et3.com/ http://www.et3.com/ [4] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1658030/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1658030/ [5] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOXqXIG_WVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOXqXIG_WVM [6] - http://www.cultureofpermaculture.org/blog/ http://www.cultureofpermaculture.org/blog/ [7] - http://vimeo.com/19661805 http://vimeo.com/19661805

Retric 12y ago
Biofuel are actually a reasonable long term solution to the flight problem. Bulding a tube from NY to Hawaii is not.
- gdewilde 12y ago
  Can you grow biofuel crops in the ocean?
  - 12y ago

phkahler 12y ago

Aircraft? It's funny they're worried about CO2 from aircraft when the water vapor the emit has a much larger and immediate effect.

lazyant 12y ago

I guess the name comes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_prize , btw the little book "Longitude" http://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Dava-Sobel-ebook/dp/B003WUYE66/ http://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Dava-Sobel-ebook/dp/B003WUYE... is a fantastic read about that topic

nether 12y ago

Not listed: the next Angry Birds.