The year in ideas - some great ones

The year in Ideas
Feed your head with our best big, bad, bold ideas – from The Toronto Star

1. Feel the beat, beat the field

The idea of using music to enhance performance among athletes already has some critics muttering about cheating. But music has been a primary motivator and inspiration to people ever since our prehistoric ancestors beat drums around a campfire. So maybe the cave dudes didn't have tempo-setting sensors built into their running shoes or mini-MP3 players implanted under their skin. But can such tuneful technology be all bad?

As Ideas reported in the fall, manufacturers are even now working on a sneaker that will co-ordinate the runner's pace with the music he or she is listening to, and many Olympic athletes are now using music to improve their performance – inspired perhaps by Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie, who set an indoor world record in 1998 for the 2,000 metres by synchronizing his stride rate to the song "Scatman."

2. Hemingway, the spy

While working as a business reporter in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, writer Peter Moreira decided to author a book about the place and went looking for a fresh angle. He was also an Ernest Hemingway devotee, so he decided to research the period the revered U.S. author spent in the Far East. In 1941, Hemingway and his third wife, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, spent three months travelling to Hong Kong, China and Burma. It turns out that Hemingway did a little spying while in East Asia.

As Moreira wrote, Hemingway had been contacted by Harry Dexter White, deputy to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who was seeking background information about Nationalist-Communist conflict in China to help the Treasury negotiate loans, silver purchases and other forms of aid to prop up the Nationalist government.

In a July 30 letter to Morgenthau and White, Hemingway told them that Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek considered the Communists a greater enemy than China's Japanese occupiers. He also wrote that civil war between the two camps was inevitable unless the latter were given their own territory.

Hemingway's Asian espionage apparently gave him a taste for more, and he continued working periodically as a spy until the end of World War II. Meanwhile, his six-page letter to Morgenthau and White, as well as articles he wrote in Asia for a new liberal paper in New York called PM (Hemingway's pieces were never published, being deemed too dry and analytical), reveal that he quickly and astutely read the Asian situation before the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Though he was drunk during much of his 11 weeks there, wrote Moreira, "he was able to piece together a compelling analysis of the political, economic and military forces at play in the Asian theatre."

3. A charitable dose of capitalism

Billions of dollars are donated each year to developing-world causes, but too often the news is full of how that money goes astray, or sits unused, or gets pocketed by greedy interlopers. So it's nice to see how the hands-on approach of Toronto furniture designer Patty Johnson is putting cash directly into the coffers of autonomous, non-exploited workers in Guyana, Botswana and elsewhere. As reported by the Star 's Leslie Scrivener, Johnson worked with the Wai Wai people in the Amazon rainforest in southern Guyana over the past year, helping them transfer their basket-weaving skills to the production of a modern, high-end light fixture that won raves and an award at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York.

Under the umbrella of Johnson's North South Project, the Wai Wai keep most of the profit, instead of selling their wares cheap to a middleman and watching them get marked up by several thousand per cent. Other products under the North South Project include woven chairs and outdoor furniture, manufactured by a company called Liana Cane in Georgetown, Guyana, and custom pieces created by Mabeo Furniture in Botswana.

4. Plane and simple

It seems counterintuitive, but the fact is that most people in airplane accidents survive. According to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which studied 568 U.S. commercial air carrier accidents from 1983 to 2000, only 12.5 per cent involved fatalities. Furthermore, out of 53,487 passengers on the fatal flights, 51,207 lived, for a survival rate of 96 per cent. As the Star 's Andrew Chung reported, "improvements in fire retardancy, aircraft configuration, floor lighting, seat and exit design and evacuation procedures are reflected in the large number of crash survivors."

Chung also included a list of simple tips guaranteed to improve anyone's chances, including: listen to the flight attendants, buckle up, assume the position, and when the exciting part is over, unbuckle yourself and get away from the plane.

5. Fair play, a dying notion?

The concept of good sportsmanship and how you play the game comes from 19th-century British private schools, where games were used to strengthen the moral fibre of the nation's future leaders.

But a sense of fair play, which led a Norwegian coach to pass a pole to Canadian cross-country skier Sara Renner after she broke hers during last winter's Olympics, seems to be in decline, wrote the Star 's Leslie Scrivener. She cited a study by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Los Angeles that found one in three male high school athletes agreed that "when all is said and done, it's more important to win than be considered a good sport." Forty per cent of boys agreed that "a person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed."

6. Westerns vs. Christianity

It was supremely ironic, argued Toronto writer Nick Hune-Brown, that the gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain was dismissed as anti-Christian by the religious right. Hune-Brown quoted a column in Renew America headlined "You can't fight Islamism with gay cowboys," in which Andrew Longman argued that the "homosexualization" of an American icon of masculinity was not only immoral but also tantamount to treason at a time when U.S. values were under attack.

"It's true that Westerns have always exemplified certain myths of the American frontier," Hune-Brown wrote, "but they have rarely been anything but dismissive of traditional Christian conceptions of morality. In the hundred-odd years that writers and filmmakers have been churning them out, westerns have endorsed a number of decidedly unchristian acts, including, among others, the killing of intolerant religious fanatics."

He goes on to cite, among other works, Zane Grey's classic 1912 novel Riders of the Purple Sage , in which the violent gunman Lassiter convinces a devoutly religious woman to renounce her faith, and the Gary Cooper/Grace Kelly film High Noon , in which a Christian woman renounces non-violence.

7. Birth of the throwaway ethic

America's "disposable culture" was born in the middle of the 19th century, according to an excerpt from Michael Slade's book Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Harvard University Press). At that time, a number of cheap materials became available to industry – including paper, which became a substitute for cloth in things like disposable shirt collars and cuffs. At the same time, a revolution in steel production gave rise to cheap watches such as the Yankee, which sold for a dollar and worked for at least a year.

A major leap in the emergence of planned obsolescence came in 1895, when King Camp Gillette had an epiphany while using his safety razor, which was in need of sharpening. Slade recounts: "That very day, Gillette wrote to his wife, `Our fortune is made,' and he was almost right. Another six years would pass before a process could be developed that would interleave sheet steel and copper in order to allow thin metal sheets to temper without buckling. Only thin metal so tempered could hold the razor-sharp edge needed for Gillette's disposable blades.

"By 1905, using the slogan `No stropping. No honing,' Gillette's safety razor had won public acceptance and begun its steep trajectory of growth."

Fast forward to the 1920s, when women had become disproportionately in charge of family spending, even on things like automobiles and men's clothing. Slade looks at the pivotal emergence in 1920 of Kotex, the relatively cheap disposable sanitary napkin, fashioned from a new, absorbent material made from celluloid. The popularity of Kotex led other manufacturers to devise their own disposable hygienic products, including Band-Aids. Meanwhile, the sanitary napkin continued to evolve, finally yielding the tampon in 1934.

"Not only wee tampons and sanitary napkins tossed in the trash after one use," writes Slade, "but such products also gave more affluent women one less reason to hoard scraps of cloth, as their forebears had done. Among this monied group, the ready-to-wear fashions of the day could be quickly disposed of and replaced once they were no longer in style."

8. Say you're sorry – it's crucial

Chinese Canadians' demands for an apology for the head tax imposed by Ottawa a century ago – finally satisfied with an official "sorry" from Prime Minister Stephen Harper in June – is typical of the importance of apologies for aggrieved people, the Star 's Olivia Ward wrote in January.

Ward quoted George Shirinian, director of the Zoryan Institute of Canada – a research centre for genocide and diaspora studies that focuses on Armenian issues – who says: "An apology would be the first step toward creating an atmosphere for reintroducing justice in the aftermath of innumerable, heinous crimes, and the beginning of a process of rebuilding working relations between people who cannot dare trust each other ... It is crucial that an apology be commensurate – big, public, serious, sincere, with serious compensation and perhaps even retribution – with the crime committed, in order to serve justice."

Ward noted that Turkey has never acknowledged its responsibility for the killing of more than 1 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917, "a crime recognized by Canada and other countries as genocide."

On the other hand, she continued, "Germany has rewritten its history texts to decry the Holocaust, and its president apologized for the murder of six million Jews in a speech in the Israeli Knesset ... The Queen apologized for the wrongs done to the Maoris of New Zealand, and made symbolic restitution for the suffering of Acadians deported in the 18th century."

9. Taxes, what's not to love?

We can't afford higher taxes. Wrong. Taxes are a burden. Wrong. Taxes restrict freedom. Wrong. In a rare defence of one of the two inevitabilities, Neil Brooks, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, maintained that he likes paying taxes, which aren't just good for us but crucial to a civil society.

"Taxes have brought us high-quality public schools that remain our democratic treasure," he wrote, "low tuition at world-class universities, freedom from fear of crippling health bills, excellent medical services, public parks and libraries, and liveable cities. None of these things comes cheaply.

"To promise, as some politicians are doing, that they are going to cut taxes in order to `allow Canadians to keep more of their hard-earned dollars' is simply a way of saying `forget about your moral obligations to one another, to heck with pursuing your most noble aspirations collectively and do not worry about securing the blessings of real freedom.' These people need a civics lesson. As a famous U.S. jurist noted, taxes are the price we pay for civilization."

10. A smaller, smarter jet set

A jet engine the size of a quarter may eventually replace the relatively clunky battery you're using now to power your laptop. The revolutionary idea comes from Alan Epstein, a professor in the aeronautics and astronautics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is working on a prototype with about 20 colleagues and students. The work, using silicon chips, the burgeoning field of microelectromechanical systems and about $30 million (U.S.) from the American military, could result in tiny gas turbine generators in consumer products within five years, Epstein told the Star 's Kenneth Kidd. "My laptop now runs about three hours with a full charge," said Epstein. "With a micro-engine about the same size and weight (as a laptop battery), you'd end up with somewhere between 15 and 30 hours." \

11. Mass aged by the medium

Metta Spencer is a peace activist and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Toronto who argues that TV and film have already helped make the world a better place, and could make it better still. Not all TV and movies, of course, but shows with humanity, idealism and a sense of social justice. In a May interview with the Star 's Olivia Ward, Spencer – whose latest book, Two Aspirins and a Comedy: How Television Can Enhance Health and Society , had recently been published – recounted how she watched the Alaska-based series Northern Exposure while recovering from hip-replacement surgery, and "my pain would diminish for hours."

But in her book, and the interview, Spencer went beyond the biochemical impact of laughter and positive emotions to look at how popular entertainments can spur social change. "Birth rates in the developing world are dropping ahead of schedule – TV viewers see small, happy families and emulate them," she told Ward. "Intelligence levels are increasing by three points per decade, largely because of exposure to complicated plots in TV shows.

"In 1983, the film Gandhi brought non-violent methods to a wide audience, and activists studied that film closely and implemented those techniques in 1989, toppling Communism almost without bloodshed. It's astounding."

Ultimately, Spencer believes that TV and film could literally save the planet. "Motivation simply doesn't come from information," she said. "It comes from feelings – sentiments, affects. It comes from caring. It comes from emotional human relationships. Even fictional relationships can have emotional power."

12. When money talks, space-flight scientists listen

Offering gigantic cash prizes can stimulate gigantic scientific breakthroughs, judging by the efforts of Dr. Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation. Ten years ago, Diamandis announced the "X Prize," a $10-million (U.S.) award for the first privately built suborbital space flight. In 2004, the prize was won by a privately built, manned vehicle called SpaceShipOne – the first to punch through the atmosphere and achieve two suborbital flights in quick succession. As reported by the Star 's Scott Simmie, the ship's technology will now serve as the design for the U.K.'s Virgin Galactic spaceships, which will begin regular suborbital tourist flights in the next few years.

Diamandis, who has medical and engineering degrees from Harvard and MIT, was a graduate researcher at NASA, and is founder of the International Space University and co-founder of Space Adventures, which sent the first space tourist to the international space station in 2001. He was also winner of the first-ever $500,000 Heinlein Prize for his contributions to the commercialization of space.

As he told the Star from his home in Santa Monica, Calif., "I think in the not-too-distant future we'll see $100-million prizes and even billion-dollar prizes from large philanthropic organizations that want to cause change – in whatever area, technical or social."

13. Two great bloody inventions

Freeze-dried blood: It's light, it doesn't require refrigeration and there would be no compatibility or contamination problems, because the supply would be created from your own blood. What sounds too good to be true may be a reality within the next couple of years if lab work (and funding to support it) continues apace at the Israeli biotechnology Core Dynamics Israel in Ness Ziona not far from Tel Aviv.

"It's the equivalent of Nescafe," said Bity Natan, program manager of the blood-preservation project, which the Star 's Oakland Ross reported on earlier this year. With funding from the Israeli Defence Forces, the idea is to provide Israeli soldiers with small pouches of their own powdered blood tucked in with other emergency medical gear. Just add water – distilled is best – and the result is human blood perfectly matched to the recipient and ready for transfusions on or near the battlefield.

But, adds Natan, "The market for this product is universal," and could change the current blood-banking system. Currently, Natan says, liquid blood must be refrigerated and becomes unusable after six weeks. The freeze-dried variety can be stored indefinitely at room temperature.

Bleeding control: A biodegradable liquid that stops bleeding on contact could revolutionize both surgical procedures and battlefield medicine – but at the moment, it's only being used on rats. The Star 's Leslie Scrivener wrote about the liquid in October, just after its development was announced by scientists at MIT and Hong Kong University. Surgeons now spend 50 per cent of their time controlling bleeding by cauterizing around incisions, using chemical vasoconstrictors, or working around obtrusive clamps and sponges. The liquid, made of bits of protein called peptides, "self-assembles" into a sealing nanofibre gel when poured on a wound, which could greatly decrease times of operations and greatly increase visibility and accessibility at the same time. If trials continue to be successful, the liquid could be in public use within 10 years.

14. Stick-to-it-iveness gets results in glue research

Researchers in the multibillion-dollar glue industry are using nanotechnology to improve their products. A.T. Charlie Johnson, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, mixed tiny carbon nanotubes – tubes with walls of carbon atoms – into epoxy. "The nanotubes are very, very strong – among the strongest materials known," he told the New York Times , "and so the idea is that when you put the epoxy under some kind of load of some sort, if you can transfer some of that load to the nanotubes, the combined system will be stronger than the original epoxy."

Another leading-edge example of adhesion on a nanoscale comes from Germany, where scientists studying the jumping spider's feet reported two years ago that the microscopic hairs stick because of atomic-scale electrical attractions called Van der Waals forces – the forces that allow an insect to walk across a ceiling. And, as reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , researchers have unravelled the molecular basis of the "glue" mussels secrete to latch on to rocks underwater and even to Teflon. The bonding substance could potentially be used in surgical procedures to hold together tissues inside patients.

15. Remembrance of things – all things – past

Historians, and probably many others, would kill to be able to Google intimate details about how people lived hundreds of years ago – clearly an impossibility (at least until time machines are invented). But historians of the future will be able to tap an infinite variety of mundane details from today, thanks to the seemingly infinite number of blogs and sites like MySpace currently on the Internet. Even better, there is now an attempt to organize and index people's memories of current events. Historian Marshall Poe came up with the idea for a website called memoryarchive.org while teaching a class in Russian history at American University in Washington. With help from students, and using Wikipedia software, the Internet Memory Archive invites anyone and everyone to go online and reminisce.

"If we ask people for memories, just memories about anything, people will come and share their stories," Poe told the Star 's Christopher Maughan, "and this will be a great resource because these sources will be primary sources for historians in the future."

16. An idea that doesn't suck

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best – like the LifeStraw, an invention from the Danish textile company Vestergaard Frandsen. Without access to clean drinking water, thousands of people die every day from water-borne diseases in poor countries around the world. The LifeStraw is a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It doesn't stop viruses or metals like arsenic, and it has a slight iodine aftertaste, but it does filter out at least 99.99 per cent of parasites and bacteria that cause typhoid, cholera, dysentery and diarrhea.

It costs $3 to manufacture, can be worn about the neck and lasts a year. About 100,000 have been handed out, 70,000 to earthquake victims in Kashmir last year.

17. Eliminating the competition

There once was a time when toilet testers used mashed potatoes, bananas or weighted sponges to simulate human waste. But Bill Gauley of Veritec Consulting Inc. in Mississauga had a better idea. "He and his team eventually found a material that eerily replicates the density, moisture content and other properties of the real thing," wrote Ideas editor Peter Scowen in a feature inspired by his own environmentally friendly, water-conserving new six-litre-flush Toto Drake toilet, "a brownish soybean paste imported from Japan in 20-kilogram containers. It's better known as miso."

Gauley's team not only came up with a fresh approach to fake feces; they also set a new standard for manufacturers both in Canada and the U.S. Gauley is currently in discussions with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about developing a labelling system for performance-tested toilets in the United States. And some manufacturers are happy to boast about exceeding the current ideal standard of flushing 250 grams of waste with six litres of water. "It's not necessary" to flush 1,000 grams, said Lisa Kloosterman, the Canadian sales manager for Vortens, a fixtures company in Newmarket, "but it's kind of fun to be able to say you can do it."