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Dear Sirs/Ma'ams: I am an Iranian Scientist and Inventor working on a project to derive energy from Earth magnetic Field. I have a theory in this concern under the name of "TAEZZ". As to this theory man will have another free ,green everlasting ENERGY which is different from Existing renewable energies. We may use it right now in space for space labs and so forth. when super Conductor gets industrial market man may use it on earth. In future soon there will be cables hanging from sky to supply earth energy demands.

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I too see the ARPA paradigm as profoundly successful and insufficiently applied. I am also convinced "the knowledge of how to organize is the mother of all knowledge". Yet, we engineers are far too weakly applying our insights to governance. We know that the politics of scarcity is manufactured, and that true poverty is wasting resources that might serve our progeny, yet we are not organizing -- even ourselves -- to do dramatically better. DARPA, Stanford, MIT, ATT, IBM, Intel, etc, repeatedly show that profound investment in profound ideas yields profound results. We should also not forget the idea that so famously got away. Toyota didn't -- and GM surely won't. Specialization imposes the necessity of hand-offs. As citizens, we have an interest not only in the basic science and the technology, but in the market deployment. For example, when municipal broadband is so grossly outperforming commercial market providers -- per dollar -- why did the FCC only _acquiesce_ to let muni governments in, after they made a show of strength at the COPE Act hearings. We should have been nationally _leading_ municipalities, not helping to slow them down. We are letting good ideas take too long to deploy; we are not applying the known power of "massive parallelism" and experimentation to innovation in _governance_.

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Maybe our traditional model of technology development needs adaptation. A survey I am completing examines a sample of about 120 innovations and "scientific breakthroughs" reported as "emerging" in 1981. I wanted to see which ones had reached "maturity" in the sense that they had been widely adopted, either by commercial exploitation or other means of diffusion. About 60% remained scientific or technical curiosities (e.g. a kite-powered ship). All except one innovation that had matured within 25 years were IT-related (e.g. the internet, mobile phones). The only exception was LEDs. The remainder (e.g. subsea oil production, driver-less trains) show a relatively consistent time to maturity of 40 years. This is not so different from the time when the telephone and electric power were emerging in the 1870s. We have closely related energy, water supply and greenhouse gas pollution problems that threaten to overwhelm us long before we can respond with widely diffused new technologies. Like Don Chaffin, I think that the key to these problems lies in human behaviour and novel ways to combine IT with existing technologies. The diffusion of mobile phone technology serves as a model: we can make dramatic changes in a short time. Government can make a contribution by providing strong incentives for new solutions across traditional discipline boundaries. There are some remarkable gaps in our understanding of these issues. Just recently I discovered that there is almost a complete absence of systematic research on what ordinary engineers and technologists actually do in their daily work. When we started to look we found many further surprises. With gaps like this, there must be great potential to make rapid advances in understanding.

"... one of the greatest challenges for engineering is in the development of better concepts, principals and tools that will allow engineers to consider the multitude of real human behaviors, capabilities and needs while designing new products and manufacturing environments." 

Let me begin by quoting George Fisher (The Bridge, 2000) when he stated as part of his final address as Chair of the NAE: "Integrating human needs is engineering's biggest challenge and opportunity. The end of the twentieth century will seem like the Dark Ages in terms of convenience." The recent NAE report entitled: " The Engineer of 2020" seems overly optimistic about this matter by stating: "Ergonomic design, and an eye on other physical and mental health influences of engineered products will be an underlying theme across all engineering disciplines". I say this is overly optimistic because a very small proportion (probaly less than 10%) of engineering students receive any education related to the the ergonomics and human factors aspect of technologies and product designs, based on a survey I ran last year that was presented to the NRC Human Factors Panel. So I am suggesting that one of the greatest challenges for engineering is in the development of better concepts, principals and tools that will allow engineers to consider the multitude of real human behaviors, capabilities and needs while designing new products and manufacturing environments. Today we are just beginning to see how this might be accomplished with the emergence of digital human modeling methods. Simulations of realistic looking humans are now common place, but their livelike behaviors and vulnerabilities are far from being predicted well. Cross-cutting research involving engineers, computer scientists, psychologists, physiologists and many others are making progress in this domain, but the challenges are large, as we truly are in the "dark ages" when it comes to predicting how various people will behave in different engineered environments, and how they can be easily injuried in certain circumstances. I believe this to be a "grand challenge". Please let me know if I can provide any further background on this topic. Don Chaffin