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Where does education go from here?

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the CloudOn Tuesday, Sugata Mitra accepted the 2013 TED Prize and offered a bold wish for the world: that we encourage children to explore questions about our world in self-organized learning environments. He proposed the founding of a School in the Cloud based in India, and encouraged TED community members, wherever they may be, to foster education by encouraging a sense of wonder in kids.

This week’s TED Weekends, posted a few days earlier than usual, features essays from great thinkers on the ideas advanced in Mitra’s talk. Here, a selection of these essays, for your reading pleasure. 

Sugata Mitra: We Need Schools … Not Factories

From Plato to Aurobindo, from Vygotsky to Montessori, centuries of educational thinking have vigorously debated a central pedagogical question: How do we spark creativity, curiosity, and wonder in children? But those who philosophized pre-Google were prevented from wondering just how the Internet might influence the contemporary answer to this age-old question.

Today, we can and must; a generation that has not known a world without vast global and online connectivity demands it of us. Read the full essay  »

Courtney E. Martin: The Most Powerful Technology of All … Questions

Many will see Sugata Mitra’s wish — to build a “School in the Clouds” — as a TED-style, uber futuristic, and potentially impractical, solution for a very real problem across the globe. But the innovation at the very heart of his wish, truth be told, is not about computers or Skype or even Google. The most critical technology is a really good question.

I think a lot about the power of questions, because I’m a journalist. Well, that, and a nosy person. I’m the kind of person that you sit down next to at a dinner party and ten minutes later you realize that I’ve pulled your life story right out of you. In many ways, it’s not a conscious process, even for me. One minute I’m learning someone’s name and the next I’m asking them, “And then what happened?!” Read the full essay »

Jackie Bezos: A Cloud of Human Potential

In every town in every nation, young people are moments away from inheriting complex problems. At the same time, disparities in educational opportunity and achievement are widening and threatening to undermine the vast potential of our youngest generations. As a global community, it is unconscionable that we leave so much promise unrealized among our youth.

In places where the greatest inequity exists, Dr. Sugata Mitra’s “School in the Cloud” holds enormous promise for leveling the playing field. But his methodology, which taps into a child’s innate sense of wonder and curiosity through Self-organized Learning Environments (or SOLES), is relevant for communities and classrooms everywhere. In essence, it’s about putting the power to learn, create and collaborate into the hands of our children. Read the full essay »

Vanessa Lafaye: If We Turn the Internet Into the World’s Memory, What Becomes of Our Own?

It is interesting to note that Mitra’s TEDTalk is titled, “The Future of Learning” rather than “Education.” This distinction seems like the heart of the issue, not only for SOLE (self-organized learning environment), but more widely. It’s the difference between absorbing information, and developing faculties for creative thought and analytical problem-solving.

He traces today’s education system back to the Victorian-era hunger for literate bureaucrats, needed to keep the wheels of the British Empire running smoothly. As it happens, my employer Wiley was established even before this time. Also as it happens, publishing is undergoing a dramatic reinvention today, in search of new models in response to the urgent imperative to prepare our young for the creative economy of tomorrow. This got me thinking about evolution, of knowledge and ourselves. Read the full essay »

John McWhorter: Back to the Future

Sugata Mitra’s inspiration offers promise in returning learning to what humans are programmed for.

And that is not what we today think of as “school.” The books-and-blackboards model of education will always be most productively engaged by students of two sorts.

One is the middle-class child from a quiet, book-lined home, in which concentration in solitude is drunk in from toddlerhood.

The other is the child of driven immigrant families, uniquely dedicated to their children’s making the most of the new circumstances. Read the full essay »

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

The growing desert

Allan Savory has dedicated his life to studying management of grasslands. And if that doesn’t sound exciting, just wait, because it touches on the deepest roots of climate change and the future of the planet.

“The most massive, tsunami, perfect storm is bearing down on us,” is the grim beginning to Savory’s talk. This storm is the result of rising population, of land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change. Savory is also unsure of the belief that new technology will solve all of the problems. He agrees that only tech will create alternatives to fossil fuels, but that’s not the only thing causing climate change.

“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” he says. It’s a process that happens if we leave ground bare, allowing water to evaporate. Even heavy rainfalls will quickly vanish. Terrifyingly, about two-thirds of the world’s land is desertifying. This is huge, because ”the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil and organic matter. When we damage soils, we give off carbon.”

Even worse, we might think that only arid and semi-arid land is becoming desert, but tall grasslands are in danger as well. They can have a cancer “that we don’t recognize until it’s terminal form.”

This is mostly caused by livestock. Everyone knows this, says Savory. Scientists have known it for decades. Livestock damage the land, leading to dry ground, leading to desert. This makes sense, and turns out to be quite wrong.

A terrible mistake

In the 1950s, Savory helped to set aside large areas of Africa for national parks. As soon as they removed the people (to protect the animals), the land deteriorated. His theory, backed up by data, was that it was because there were too many elephants. That was “political dynamite,” he said, but a panel agreed with his assessment.

So they shot 40,000 elephants.

But the deterioration only got worse. The elephants were not the problem after all. Says Savory, “That was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life. I will carry that to my grave.” It did give Savory one thing: “I was absolutely determined to find solutions.”

Later, in California he was shocked to find similar problems in national parks, but there was no livestock nearby. So he looked at research stations where cattle had been removed, to prove that that would stop desertification. It didn’t. ”Clearly,” he says, “we have never understood what is causing desertification.”

If it wasn’t livestock, as had been assumed for centuries, what was it? “What we had failed to understand was that … the soil and vegetation developed with large numbers of grazing animals.” They also had predators, and so defended themselves by making herds, which are forced to move. This movement prevented over-grazing, while periodic trampling produced good soil. It wasn’t the livestock, but the way the livestock were kept by farmers.

The problems spiral out from this failure to understand. If grass dies on it’s own, at the end of a season, it must decay biologically before the next growing season. If it doesn’t, will stifle next growth. The typical method used to deal with that is to burn the grassland. That does remove the dead grass, allowing a new crop to grow, but it is very damaging, releasing an amount of carbon equivalent to 6,000 cars/second.

Holistic management

So what can they do? “There is only one option left to climatologists and scientists. That is to do the unthinkable: to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for the herds.” Those herds mulch it down, leaving both the trampled grass and their dung. The grass is then free to grow without having damaged with fire.

Now, how do you actually do that? Herders had 10,000 years of experience moving animals, “but they had created the great man-made desserts of the world.” And then 100 years of modern science that accelerated that process. Clearly more was needed.

He studied other professions — and found new management techniques. With this, he was able to develop what he calls Holistic Management — a way of moving livestock around to mimic the patterns of nature.

The results are stunning. For location after location he shows two comparison photos, one using his technique, one not. The difference is, “a profound change,” and he’s not kidding — in some cases the locations are unrecognizable (in one case the audience gasped). Not only is the land greener, crop yields are increasing. For example, in Patagonia, an expanding desert, they put 25,000 sheep into one flock. They found an extraordinary 50% improvement in production of land in the first year.

“What we are doing globally is causing climate change, as much or more than by fossil fuels,” says Savory. It is also causing poverty, suffering, and war. “If this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop climate change even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels.”

He is currently using this on 15 million hectares on five continents. He estimated that if we do it on half the available land, the growth with take in enough carbon to go back to pre-industrial levles, while feeding people.

“I can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet, for our children, for their children, and for all of humanity.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Architect Michael Green presents an interesting riddle: why are buildings made of wood only a few stories high when trees found in nature are remarkable for their height?

Speaking in session 7 of TED2013, Green shares his deep love of wood — which he first discovered from his grandfather, a woodworker who taught him to “honor a tree’s life by making it as beautiful as you possibly can.” Now, Green designs buildings made of wood and he notices that people have an usual relationship to wooden walls, columns and ceilings.

“They hug it. They touch it,” he says. ”Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can be the same anywhere on earth. I’d like to think that wood gives mother nature fingerprints in our buildings.”

However, building codes currently limit wood buildings to four stories high. And this needs to change, says Green. He proposes that we build skyscrapers out of wood. For the last century, tall buildings have been crafted of steel and concrete — but the green house gas emissions of these materials are huge. As Green notes, 3% of world’s energy goes into the making of steel and 5% goes into the making of concrete. While most people think of transportation as the main villain when it comes to CO2 emissions, building is actually the true top offender — accounting for 47% of CO2 emissions.

Wood, on the other hand, grows by the power of sun, giving off oxygen and storing carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide is released when the tree falls and decomposes. By building with wood, we could sequester carbon dioxide. Green says that building with 1 cubic meter of wood stores 1 ton of CO2.

“We have an ethic that the earth grows our food,” says Green. “We should move toward an ethic that the earth should grow our homes.”

Green is not talking about building 20- and 30-story buildings with 2x4s. He explains the technology that has been created to form rapid growth trees into mass timber panels. There is a flexible system to build with these huge panels.

Now, on to the obvious question: what about fires?

Green points out that mass timber panels are extremely dense and, thus, don’t catch fire easily — it’s the same principle that makes a log hard to burn. And when a fire does catch, it moves slowly and behaves predictably, allowing for uniform fire safety measures to be put in place.

Another question that people often ask of his system: what about deforestation?

Green introduces us to sustainable forestry, and shares that enough wood grown in North America every 13 minutes for a 20 story building.

“This is the first new way to build a skyscraper in 100 years or more,” says Green. He notes that people were terrified to walk under the first skyscraper, but that the perception of these buildings as unsafe began to change with the building of the Eiffel Tower.

“I’m looking for an Eiffel Tower moment,” says Green. ”The engineering of this is the easy part. It’s about changing the scale of imagination … Mother nature holds the patent.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Pedrito Martinez is back onstage at TED, and this time he’s brought his band, including the dynamite Ariacne Trujillo on keys. “They have almost a psychic communication,” says TED music advisor, Bill Bragin, a longtime fan who describes taking guests who visit New York City to go see Martinez play at the local Cuban restaurant at which he plays three times a week. “When artists want to see a slice of New York, I often bring them to see Pedrito. It always blows them away.” The TED audience, too.

Ed. note: This was originally published on the Let's Move website. You can see the original post here

Today, Rachael Ray joined First Lady Michelle Obama and 400 elementary school students in Clinton, Mississippi to celebrate the new, healthier school meals being served in cafeterias across the country. Two teams — cafeteria chef Fannie and celebrity chef Sunny Anderson versus cafeteria chef Wendy and celebrity Ryan Scott — competed in a Let's Move! Cafeteria Cook-off to make the most delicious, healthy school lunch. 

Rachael Ray and Mrs. Obama watched as student judges scored the lunches from blind taste tests. Before the winner was announced, the First Lady applauded the work of Fannie, Wendy, and their peers in school cafeterias across the country.

“These are major, major achievements. And I know that getting to this point hasn’t been easy. I know that a lot of folks had to put in a lot of time and effort to make all this possible. And I’m particularly proud of all of the school chefs, the food service workers at schools like this one all across this state, and all across this country. And I want to take time to recognize those folks in the kitchen who do the hard work of cooking for our kids and loving every minute of it. When we passed historic legislation to improve school lunches for the first time in 15 years, these were the folks who had to totally transform their menus in a matter of months. They went from frying to baking. They had to work with totally new ingredients. And they had to satisfy both strict nutrition requirements and, as we know, picky eaters.”

read more

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao were the winners in British Columbia of the 2012 Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada. After a visit to a Vancouver waste station, Wang and Yao were blown away by the enormous amount of waste in plastic. Plastic is very hard to sort for recycling — all types have a similar density. Says Wang, “Plastics are useful, but the downside of this convenience is that plastics cause serious problems like the destruction of ecosystems.”

So Wang and Yao decided to see if there was a way to break them down … with bacteria! It’s a cool idea, but difficult. They made a proposal in grade 12: Find a bacteria from local river to metabolize phthalates. Phthalates are a component of plastic, but they’re not well bonded, so they easily pollute and are found in products like babies’ toys, cosmetics, food wraps. In fact, the EPA has classified them as a top-priority pollutant.

Wang and Yao figured that if there were places along the local river that were contaminated, then maybe bacteria have evolved to degrade them. So they met a professor who gave them lab space and set to work. They collected samples from three sites, and enriched cultures with phthalates as the only food source. And they discovered that “bacteria can do it” — several local species had indeed evolved to metabolize phthalates. They DNA-sequenced the bacteria, and found several that were not previously associated with phthalate degradation. That’s a real discovery.

Most interestingly, Wang says, “We found the most efficient degraders came from the local landfill.” Nature was indeed evolving ways of dealing with the problem, one that we could someday use. Yao finishes by noting, ”We weren’t the first ones to break down phthalates, but we were the first ones to look into our local river and find a possible solution to a local problem.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

We all know sustainability is essential to our future, in vague terms. But what does that mean for the choices we make every day? In other words: paper or plastic? For one thing, design consultant Leyla Acaroglu wants you to think beyond choosing a material for your grocery tote. Instead, she encourages us to think about the entire life of a finished product, to think hard about the net impact a product has on the environment. This is life-cycle thinking, not just whether a product can be recycled, but all the parts of its existence: material extraction, manufacturing, packaging and transportation, product use, and end of life. Every step of the way, there’s a way to do something smart to make the most out of the product for net environmental gain.

She introduces (and busts) some myths:

1. “Biodegradability”

This is a word used a lot in marketing, but it’s not what you think. Yes, when a natural material ends up in nature it biodegrades normally. But most of our discarded natural materials end up in landfills, anaerobic environments where the carbon molecules can’t break down and instead release methane, which is a 25 percent more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Biodegradability, Acaroglu says, isn’t everything.

2. Fridges

Your fridge is great, but it’s killing the environment. And not just because it requires so much energy to run, but because it keeps things fresh — and keeps getting bigger, so it’s easier to fill with food … that you’re going to end up throwing out. According to Acaroglu, in the U.S. 40 percent of fresh food is wasted each year, amounting to $165 billion. Half of the world’s food is wasted, about 1.3 billion tons per annum. It comes down to the soggy lettuce, kept in a crisper that doesn’t keep things crisp. (In the UK the problem is so bad that there was a notorious Soggy Lettuce Report.) Acaroglu says: Design fridges that help prevent food waste from the start.

3. Electric tea kettles
In the UK, 97 percent of households have an electric tea kettle, and 65 percent of tea drinkers admit to overfilling their kettles, boiling way more water than they need for a cuppa. One day of extra energy use from these kettles is enough to light all the streetlights in London for a night. What we need, Acaroglu says, is not better materials for the tea kettle, but a behavior-changing kettle that helps you boil just what you need.

4. Mobile phone subscriptions
Last year there were 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions; yet only 11 percent of outdated or not-sexy-anymore mobile phones were recycled. In some regions, phones are burned for the gold inside: “it’s now cheaper,” she says, “to mine gold from a ton of phones than a ton of ore.” Acaroglu encourages designing phones for disassembly.

So what’s the answer to paper or plastic? Well, paper pound for pound is more sustainable — but a paper bag weighs about 10 times what a plastic one does.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

It sounds like music that could be pumping from the sound system of a packed nightclub. But these electronic-tinged sounds actually come from the mouth of one man, Wang Li, a master mouth harp musician, as he plays the kouxiang.

In session 7 of TED2013, Li gives the audience a taste of his sonic stylings. Raised in Northeastern China, Wang Li played the electric bass before heading to a French monastery after college. There, in the solitude of the monastery, he mastered these unusual instruments and the breath control required to play them. And took away a mystical mindset as well …

“Sometimes I feel I have already died,” says Li on the TED stage, “so I would like to know if you are my illusion or if you are mine.”

He picks up the calabash flute, a haunting instrument that seems to tap into another plane. He creates a mesmerizing songscape with a hint of sadness, yes — but also filled with hope.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Ron Finley describes himself as a “renegade gardener,” and he’s here to tell us all about his home, in South Central, or South Los Angeles, as city planners attempted to rebrand the area. Whatever you call it, the truth is that the area comprises liquor stores, fast food and vacant lots, and it epitomizes the stark reality that 26.5 million Americans live in a food desert. Truth is, “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys,” says Finley. “People are dying from curable diseases in South Central Los Angeles. The obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times what it is in Beverly Hills, eight miles away.”

Tired of seeing wheelchairs “bought and sold like used cars,” tired of seeing ”drop-in dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks,” and tired of “driving a 45-minute round trip to get an apple that was not impregnated with pesticide,” he could only come to one conclusion: “This has to stop.”

So he started working with the organization L.A. Green Grounds to install a vegetable garden on the 150 ft x 10 ft patch of ground in front of his house, that strip between the sidewalk and the street that the city owns but the resident has to keep up … and was promptly issued with a citation to remove the garden. Then he was served with a warrant for arrest. “Come on, really? A warrant for growing food on a strip of land you could give a f– … care less about? I said cool. Bring it.” Finley, it is clear, is not one to be cowed. The city backed off, a councilman endorsed what he was doing, and the city of Los Angeles is now set to change its ordinance. And why not? “There are 26 square miles of vacant lots in the city,” Finley says. “That’s 20 Central Parks; that’s enough space for 724,838,400 tomato plants. Why in the hell would they not okay this?”

“Growing your own food is like printing your own money,” he says, to applause. Then he tells us why this really matters to him. “I raised my sons in South Central. I have a legacy here. I refuse to be a part of this reality that was manufactured by other people; I manufactured my own reality,” he says. “I am an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. A graffiti artist beautifies walls; I beautify parkways and yards. I treat the garden as a piece of cloth and the plants and the trees are the embellishment of that cloth. You’d be surprised what soil can do if you let it be your canvas.”

“Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city,” he continues. “Plus, you get strawberries.”

One night, he looked outside to see a mother and daughter in his garden at 10:30. “They looked so ashamed,” says Finley. “It made me feel ashamed to see people this close to me who were hungry. This reinforced why I do this. People ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid people are going to steal your food?’ Hell, no! That’s why it’s on the street! That’s the whole idea! I want them to take it and take back their health.”

To date, Green Grounds has planted 20 gardens; 50 volunteers have come to their “dig ins.” The benefits are clear, says Finley: “If kids grow kale, they eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. But if they’re not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever’s put in front of them.” He wants to help the young people he sees, guide the disenfranchised away from a track leading nowhere. As far as he’s concerned, gardening provides an opportunity to take over those communities, to have a sustainable life.

He wants to plant a whole block of gardens, he tells us. “I want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafés,” he says. And for anyone concerned about the business model. “I’m not talking about no free shit. Free is not sustainable. The funny thing about sustainability: you have to sustain it.” The audience loves this. “What I’m talking about is putting people to work, getting kids off the street, about the pride and the honor of growing your own food. We’ve got to make this sexy,” he proclaims. “Let’s all become renegades, gangster gardeners. We have to flip the script on what a gangster is. If you ain’t a gardener, you ain’t gangster. Let that be your weapon of choice!”

Finley knows he has the audience’s attention. He’s not done yet.

“If you want to meet with me, don’t call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit,” he concludes. “If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit. Peace.” A standing ovation.

It has been a busy week for data news already, so here are 10 of the big and/or interesting items you might have missed if you blinked:

• EMC Greenplum lays down the SQL-on-Hadoop gauntlet: The company’s new Pivotal HD Hadoop distribution fuses its analytic database technology with Hadoop to create a single data store for everything. Greenplum co-founder Scott Yara claims the data warehouse — where Greenplum got its start — is the new mainframe.
• Intel does Hadoop: Intel’s Hadoop distribution is interesting for so many reasons, but the biggest might be the sense that it’s an attempt to keep x86 relevant as ARM pushers pursue big data workloads. Among Intel’s hardware partners are Cray, SuperMicro and Cisco.

• How Friendster died and Facebook might die: Researchers studied the collapse of Friendster and decided that a dimished cost-benefit analysis and users’ average number of friends contributed to its demise. The fewer friends, the more influential one friend’s decision to quit. And people quit when services begin to suck.
• Using memristors to recreate the brain: This is a heady research project based on the theory that memristors are similar enough to synapses in the human brain that they could help create an artificial brain. Memristors are a nanotechnology that allow electrical currents to pass between circuits based on the past currents they have  transmitted.
  
• MapR and Google in a high-performance lovefest: MapR is all about faster Hadoop, and Google is all about touting how great its Compute Engine cloud is for high-performance job. A MinuteSort benchmark test of MapR on Compute Engine bested the previous record (and crushed the previous Hadoop record for MinuteSort) — and on standard cloud servers, no less.
• LinkedIn open sources Databus: Databus is LinkedIn’s tools for updating changes in data between its various storage systems and applications at high speed. It could be pretty valuable, and I assume it’s something LinkedIn’s Bhaskar Ghosh will discuss during our guru panel at Structure: Data next month.

• Continuuity free beta now open to the public: Continuuity is the startup from former Yahoo VP Todd Papaioannou and Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray that’s building a platform as a service for  developing big data applications. On Wednesday, it opened a beta version to developers who want to test the experience of building Hadoop applications on the cloud-based platform.
• Placed Analytics shows who shops in stores but buys online: This is the latest piece of research from Placed, a startup tracking mobile phone data to determine what businesses people like to visit, or at least hang out near. This report highlights which businesses are most at risk from consumers viewing products in their stores and then buying them on Amazon.
• IBM, South Korea and weather predictions:Weather forecasting has always been a good area for big data and high-performance computing, so this use case is pretty much straight data porn. From the press release: “IBM has provided KMA and NMSC with the latest IBM storage technologies capable of recording 20 gigabytes (equivalent to 400,000 web pages) of data per second … [w]ith a total storage capacity of 9.3 petabytes.”
• Virtustream using Druid for cloud analytics service: Virtustream is dead serious about staking its claim as theenterprise cloud provider, and this partnership with Metamarkets (see disclosure) is a good way to expand its reach into big data applications. Essentially, Metamarkets will provide consulting services for companies wanting to build apps atop Hadoop and Druid, the in-memory analytic database that Metamarkets created.

In addition to LinkedIn’s Ghosh, the founders of Placed, Continuuity and Metamarkets will all be on stage at Structure: Data talking about everything from building Hadoop applications, to managing massive data infrastructure to the new era of web privacy, so please come come and watch.

Disclosure: Metamarkets is a portfolio company of True Ventures, which is also an investor in GigaOM. Om Malik is also a venture partner at True.

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When GigaOM asked its readers last June to read the tea leaves on Tesla’s future, 61 percent said that Tesla would be break even by this coming June and would be able to start making money by selling more mainstream cars. Tesla reported its Q4 numbers last week and our readers appear prescient. Founder Elon Musk told investors that the company would turn its first profit in the first quarter of 2013 after having been cash flow positive this past December.

Tesla is still a few years away from being able to sell EVs to the mass market but the company continues to plug away toward the goal. Wall Street did not like Tesla’s Q4 results, causing the share price to shed about 7 percent. The quarterly loss was worse than analysts had expected despite revenue coming in at $306 million, $7 million north of the $299 million consensus estimate.

Getting to gross margin

The earnings and revenue numbers highlight a core theme for 2013 and Tesla, which will revolve around getting to the 25 percent gross margin that Musk has promised, a milestone he reiterated on the investor conference call last Wednesday. For the fourth quarter, the gross margin was just 8 percent, owing to the high expense of ramping production and reaching economies of scale for a factory that’s geared to produce just 5,000 cars a quarter.

The small volume production of the Model S makes improving margins challenging. During Q4, Tesla flew in tires from a supplier in the Czech Republic in order to meet production goals. Air freight costs about ten times shipping freight for an automotive part, and Musk noted that the costs made him want “to punch myself in the face for that one.”

Musk told the anecdote about the Czech tires to highlight that he believes a lot of excesses like overtime and supplier costs can be dealt with over time to expand margins. When Tesla reaches certain volume levels on its orders for batteries, for example, Panasonic cuts back its pricing.

Surprises: Foreign demand and leasing

And just as Tesla has some work to meet expectations in terms of gross margin, there are also potential surprises in the company in terms of demand. The European and Asian markets open up later this year as Tesla’s head of retail George Blankenship said he’s looking forward to stores in Hong Kong and Beijing.

Additionally, the Model S cannot currently be leased, which likely is a barrier for some customers who aren’t sitting on the cash to buy the luxury car. I’d expect that to change by the end of the year, though Musk was clear that he wants compelling interest rates before rolling out a program, something I suspect could be challenging. No one really knows what a Model S will be worth in 4 to 5 years when a lease would be up. It’s such a new product for an luxury EV market about which future vehicle values are mostly a mystery.

So it gets hard for any financial institution that would underwrite a leasing program to take on risk by offering lower interest rates.  But we’ll see. I wouldn’t be shocked if Tesla is willing to offer a bit of a higher interest rate for leasing, knowing that in a recovering economy we’re going to start to see more widespread demand for luxury cars.

The Future

Finally, buried at the end of the conference call was a reference to the Model X, Tesla’s crossover SUV. Musk was reticent to give out numbers on early reservations for the all electric SUV, but he estimated that buying interest would be around 70 percent of that for the Model S. Delivering the Model X in 2014 is another incremental step for Tesla but it’s an important one and given how hard it was for the company to ramp production on the Model S, producing an SUV at good margins could be very difficult. Not to mention that significant R&D and selling expenses will be incurred to launch the Model X.

Tesla remains a production supply constrained company as it lacks the facilities to meet demand. The average wait time for a Model S is 5 months. And while Blankenship and Musk talked up potential future growth in Europe and Asia, it’s irrelevant in the short term because there are limits right now on how much Tesla can scale given that it can only output 20,000 cars a year. But all in all, these are good problems to have.

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Marissa Mayer is not shy about making changes to make sure Yahoo gets its groove back. I am in the “not buying it” camp because I don’t think it is easy for tech companies, especially ones like Yahoo that have been eaten from inside by a systematic rot. Still, she like the Greek god Sisyphus, she is trying to push the rock up the hill.

Her moves, including buying new talent, are one way to graft new cells into the old cancerous host. And recently she put a kibosh on the company’s work-from-home policies and expects people to come to office nearest to them. The move has come under a lot of criticism. Many who have never managed folks who work remotely have been quick to criticize Mayer’s decision. Our own Mathew Ingram too isn’t a fan of her decisions.

Now, I am a big, big fan of remote work. Remember, it has been something I have been talking about since 2004 and even started a blog dedicated to this cultural shift. GigaOM itself was a remote worker powered startup. So I totally understand the benefits and shortcomings of remote work.

Still, I can understand why she is making such a move. She is trying to revitalize the company culture and it means bringing back the folks into the Yahoo offices. I don’t know if that will be enough to save the company from its actual fate, but in her attempts for cultural overhaul, it is a gamble worth taking.

Also there is an upside of all this hand wringing — people are talking about Yahoo. When was the last time did you have people even talking about Yahoo other than the constant changes in the executive suite?

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With 3D printing on the verge of going mainstream, you can manufacture almost anything.

As of November 2010, you can add a 3D-printed car to that list, too.

The Urbee 2 is a two-wheeled hybrid assembled entirely from parts spat out of 3D printers, reports Wired. Just as Makerbot and Form 1 have changed the way we perceive manufacturing, Urbee is seeking to change the way we build cars.

Urbee is the brainchild of Jim Kor and his team at Kor Ecologic, a company solely dedicated to the future of 3D vehicle manufacturing. Their website expands upon their grand vision for the future of the automobile, a few points of which we’ve listed below.

“Use the least amount of energy possible for every kilometer travelled.
Cause as little pollution as possible during manufacturing, operation, and recycling of the car.
Use materials available as close as possible to where the car is built.”

Kor’s aim is to make the cars of the future light, energy-efficient and easy to manufacture.

The manufacturing process of the Urbee takes place entirely inside RedEye, a 3D-printing facility that was also used to produce the world’s first 3D-printed motorcycle. Kor says one of the virtues of 3D printing is the added flexibility that’s impossible to produce with sheet metal. Instead of producing a multitude of parts that would be assembled later, the 3D printers can spit out a single, unibody part that makes manufacturing a heck of a lot easier. Kor simply uploads the models for each part into the printers, and 2,500 hours later (that’s something like 105 days), Kor has all the plastic parts he needs to assemble his car.

That’s right, the world’s first 3D-printed car is also a plastic car.

Kor has assurances that the Urbee will be perfectly safe to drive out on in the road. “We’re calling it race car safety,” Kor tells Wired. “We want the car to pass the tech inspection required at Le Mans.” And the car isn’t entirely made of plastic. The engine and the base chassis, of course, will be made of steel.

Good luck, Urbee. You may look like an oversized computer mouse, but you’ve come a long way from the days when you looked like this.