By Blaire Briody

Approximately 16 minutes before the massive twister struck Oklahoma on Monday, meteorologists used satellites and radars to issue a tornado warning in Oklahoma City.

Sixteen minutes may not be much time—but it’s certainly a major advance from 30 years ago, when the average lead time was five minutes. In the 1950s, it was even illegal to predict tornadoes because of the uncertainty and panic that could result from a false forecast. Those 11 additional minutes likely saved more lives as people burrowed into safety shelters and basements. But imagine if they had as much as 30 minutes or more. Would parents have picked up their children from school and sheltered them? Would there have been time to turn off gas sources to avoid fires? New scientific breakthroughs may soon be able to deliver those precious minutes.

Tornadoes are difficult to predict because a thunderstorm can turn into a violent tornado-producing storm within minutes, and tornados can form and disperse just as quickly – unlike hurricanes or blizzards that spend days forming and moving slowly across satellite maps. The false-alarm rate for tornadoes is still at about 75 percent, according to Joshua Wurman, a meteorologist and president of the Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR) in Colorado.

Categorizing a tornado after it strikes on the Fujita scale from F0 to F5 is also difficult because in addition to wind speed, damage levels need to be assessed. Monday’s tornado was originally classified as an F4, but was revised to an F5 because meteorologists found one spot they thought should be in a higher category. “Even if one spot is rated F5, the tornado is deemed F5,” says Wurman. “I don’t think it’s a good system, but it’s how the weather service does it.”

The National Science Foundation (NSF) provides much of the funding for tornado research. The NSF’s current budget is $6.88 billion, $1.5 million of which goes to the CSWR. Oklahoma itself is a hub for much of the research—some $7 million of federal money goes to Oklahoma’s Department of Commerce for their National Severe Storms Lab every year, a unit of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Thanks to years of research, better mathematical models of thunderstorms, and scientists who “chase” tornadoes to study them (think of the 1996 film Twister), predicting tornadoes has come a long way. Recently, there have been a few innovations in the field that could help improve the accuracy of predictions and increase warning times.

1. Multimission Phased-Array Radars (MPAR). These enhanced radars have beams that can scan faster while avoiding unwanted ground clutter – producing clearer, more readable images. Researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center, are trying to reduce costs in order to replace current radars on a mass scale and streamline the nation’s weather surveillance system.

2. Drones. Engineering students (with one group calling themselves “the Stormtroopers”) from Oklahoma State University have developed unmanned aerial vehicles that can penetrate the eye of a tornado and collect important meteorological data. Flying the vehicles into a thunderstorm before a tornado hits could also help predict when one will occur. Other drones have been built by an ongoing research project called the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment 2 (or VORTEX2) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NSF.

3. More comprehensive radar systems. A group called the Collaborative Adapting Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) has been testing experimental radar systems that can provide a fresh image of a storm every minute—a big improvement from traditional radar that typically updates every five minutes. Traditional radars also have blind spots—they have trouble measuring storm activity close to the ground, where a lot of tornado-causing conditions form. The new radars are smaller, can be installed in more places, and send out waves that follow the curve of the earth, all of which helps improve coverage. The CSWR is also working on expanding its Doppler-on-Wheels project to increase the mobility in following a storm’s progress.

4. Gravity waves. Researchers at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, have been studying the effect of gravity waves on tornado formation. The waves are formed by a sudden change in the atmosphere—similar to ocean waves—and can push down on rotating thunderstorms to intensify the wind speed and form funnels. The ability to spot and predict the gravity waves sooner could increase the accuracy of a tornado prediction and save lives.

5. Supercomputing and sophisticated modeling. Supercomputers are behind the National Weather Services’ experimental warning system called Warn-on-Forecast – the researchers involved are hoping to produce accurate warnings 30 minutes to an hour before a tornado strikes. It involves taking extremely high-resolution images of a storm (that currently take too long to produce to track a storm in real-time), and comparing those with quick lower-resolution images.

This article originally appeared in The Fiscal Times on May 22. More from The Fiscal Times:

4.5-Mile Tornado Disaster Strikes Oklahoma

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The world’s most famous real-estate mogul, Donald Trump, is jumping into the crowdfunding fray. Trump has partnered with Bill Zanker, founder of The Learning Annex, to create FundAnything, a crowdfunding platform that allows people to create campaigns for any amount of money in various categories—creative arts, causes, personal pursuits, business ideas. The site charges a nine percent commission, returning four percent to the creator if the fundraising goal is achieved. FundAnything also enables entrepreneurs to offer non-financial rewards in exchange for donations.

“For many using the site, the possibility of connecting with Trump is a major selling point,” writes Mohana Ravindranath in The Washington Post, who notes that in its first few weeks, FundAnything has already amassed hundreds of campaigns. “But having big-name support doesn’t guarantee a campaign’s success—a D.C. filmmaking team recently hoped to crowdfund a documentary narrated by actor Matt Damon, but fell several thousand dollars short of their campaign goal on Kickstarter,” she cautions.

Time will tell whether FundAnything will be wildly successful or a footnote in The Donald’s storied career. And while we could speculate about his motives—more fame, money, and relevance?—ultimately they don’t much matter. Most interesting is whether Trump’s entry signals that crowdfunding has truly entered the mainstream, and, if so, what the impact on the democratization of fundraising will be.

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Alibaba’s eTao ties up with Qihoo

A sudden rush to form new partnerships on China’s Internet is creating some interesting new tie-ups, including the latest one that is seeing e-commerce leader Alibaba join with security software firm Qihoo 360 in the e-commerce search space. This new pair-up actually seems relatively minor, with Qihoo using Alibaba’s specialized eTao search engine to power e-commerce searches on Qihoo’s own so.com general search site. This kind of tie-up isn’t all that uncommon in search, where portals and other companies that want to include a search function on their home page often license a third party’s engine like Google’s or Baidu’s for the job. From my perspective, this move has both its good points and bad points for both Alibaba and Qihoo. Alibaba has won an important new partner for its eTao e-commerce search engine, which is competing with a similar, recently launched product from search leader Baidu. At the same time, Alibaba has also recently launched its own general search product, challenging Baidu.

Qihoo itself is also in a bitter battle with Baidu, long China’s dominant search engine. Qihoo’s so.com search engine has rapidly picked up share since its launch last summer, and now controls more than 10 percent of the market. Despite that rapid rise, Baidu remains the industry’s dominant player with an over 70 percent share.

Thus, this new pairing of Alibaba and Qihoo brings together two companies with a common rival in Baidu. The only problem is, there’s plenty of room for conflict between Alibaba and Qihoo as well, which could quickly cause this new alliance to fall apart. For starters, Qihoo and Alibaba may be working together in e-commerce search, but they are also rivals in the general search market. What’s more, Qihoo has a reputation for business practices that many consider underhanded, and I could easily see it try to manipulate this newest partnership to its advantage at the expense of Alibaba.

This new tie-up is just the latest in a recent flurry for Alibaba, which is suddenly forming all kinds of new partnerships as it seeks to boost its mobile and location-based services (LBS) capacities in the run-up to a blockbuster IPO. The company recently purchased a major stake in leading social networking site Sina Weibo, and has also purchased a major stake in mapping services firm AutoNavi. The company has also been in several lower-key partnerships, including a gaming tie-up with entertainment specialist Shanda and an insurance tie-up with Ping An.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Qihoo, given its reputation, has much less experience in forming successful partnerships. The company has instead been rather good in getting tangled up in lawsuits, both bringing such suits against other companies and also getting sued itself. The latest of those lawsuits saw a court rule against Qihoo last moth in a case stemming from a business dispute with Internet leader Tencent. Qihoo’s founder Zhou Hongyi has also had stormy relations in the past with Alibaba itself over a former business relationship involving the China unit of US search company Yahoo.

All of that said, this latest partnership is probably being driven by necessity more than anything else, since everyone on the Chinese Internet is suddenly forming such partnerships in a bid to gain advantage over their rivals. Alibaba’s structuring of this pairing looks smart, as it looks like a relatively straightforward business licensing deal that should involve relatively minimal contact with Qihoo. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this partnership run into trouble and probably unravel within a year or two based on Qihoo’s previous record for contentious relations with its partners.

Doug Young lives in Shanghai and writes opinion pieces about tech investment in China for Techonomy and at www.youngchinabiz.com. He is the author of a new book about the media in China, The Party Line: How the Media Dictates Public Opinion in Modern China.

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Graduation image via Shutterstock

I’m jealous of anyone graduating college today. You are stepping as a newly-burnished adult into an era of unprecedented promise, innovation, and opportunity. The world you will witness and contribute to can be fairer, wealthier, and more peaceful than any that people have ever known.

What makes all these glories possible is the exponential pace of change driven by technology. Your generation takes that for granted, and revels in it. But it makes those older than you deeply uncomfortable, and many simply refuse to see it. That puts a lot of responsibility on you.

If you put down your smartphone long enough to think about it, you’ll realize that your life has been radically different than that of anyone who has come before you. You’ve been using computers as far back as you can remember. If you’re a typical middle-class American, you’ve never known your parents not to have cellphones. From about fifth grade you’ve been making PowerPoint presentations for classes. You’ve never had a question you couldn’t look up on Google or Wikipedia. And since junior high school you’ve been yoked into a net of constant interaction with all your friends on Facebook. Not only can you reach out directly to any individual with a myriad of apps, you now have the ability to broadcast your experiences, ideas, and beliefs to lots of people through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, among many others.

All these things have given you a new power that people before you never had. You are an empowered being graduating into a world of similarly-empowered beings.

The question before you is whether you and your peers will use all this amazing capability to turn outward as cooperating citizens, or inward as — excuse the expression — self-righteous narcissists. The great promise of all the technology that surrounds and enables you is that you can help create an era of collaboration and collective progress that includes all the people of the world. But this isn’t inevitable. With power comes responsibility.

Here’s another reality of the world you are entering that nobody before ever had to face: It really is one world. All those tools you have become so familiar with are getting cheaper by the day, and as a result are going into the hands of billions whose lives otherwise would never have resembled yours. In fundamental ways the result is that the experience of tech-enabled empowerment is increasingly becoming a global one — as available to a child in a village in Gabon as to an American in Denver. But because that African child will probably be acutely aware of what makes her life less privileged, she will be willing to work harder than many of us to get the kind of life that Americans in recent generations generally considered their birthright.

We are now in an era of adaptation to this new inclusion. The next several decades will see an astonishing leveling of education levels, health, economic attainment and political participation for all the peoples of the world. Many, perhaps including you, will lose prerogatives they might in the past have taken for granted. But the positive flip side is that far greater numbers of people will gain prerogatives — the prerogative to live longer, know more, and be a full citizen in the global economy.

This is why I am so confident that, on balance, the world will be wealthier and healthier than ever before. As for the fairness and peace — that’s up to you. The biggest unknown about this era of adaptation is how those in the historically-wealthier parts of the world react as the vast billions of formerly-underprivileged demand to be included. Most people in the world will rise as the leveling takes place, but some — especially those in historically richer places–will fall. How will you react when a young worker in Bangladesh is willing to do your job for less? What will American and European voters do when voters in other parts of the world insist on regaining control of resources that we used to take disproportionately for ourselves?

Will the world find ways to share equitably? Will your digitized empowerment enable you to see more clearly the collective benefits of sharing resources with people no matter where they are? Or will you use it to organize with others of relative privilege to defend your prerogatives?

I bet firmly on the harmony scenario. One reason has nothing to do with morality or generosity. Again it’s because of my confidence of the power of the technology. More and more physical stuff that used to cost a lot of money is being sucked into that smartphone you carry. Maybe in the future it will look more like Google Glass. But you won’t need a camera, a stereo, a television, physical books, a typewriter, binoculars, stamps and envelopes, a desk, a GPS, a game machine, or the panoply of other single-function products and tools that will steadily get absorbed into the universe of virtualized experience. All those things will be as available to that kid in Gabon as to you. In some key ways, we will all need less to live good lives. Of course everyone will need food, clothing, and shelter. There’s reason to believe innovation can lower the cost and increase the availability of much of that as well.

But for all the plenty that the digitized world bequeaths us, nothing technology has proffered can substitute for empathy, brotherhood, and tolerance. Those are the things we must draw from inside ourselves to accompany technological progress.

The technology you know so well will continue to improve so quickly that it will astonish even you. You are blessed to live in a time of such abundance. What you need to do is work to improve your own and society’s empathy, brotherhood, and tolerance. Because you are so comfortable with change, facile with tech, and familiar with its benefits, you are uniquely suited to be the generation that blends both innovation and empathy. The world that can result will be far more astonishing even than the tools that will get you there.

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(Photo: Rijkswaterstaat/Joop van Houdt)

Necessity truly is the mother of invention. With almost three quarters of the Netherlands at or below sea level, Dutch engineers are finding new ways to protect themselves from the increasing threat of floods due to climate change by using nature as a defense against rising tides.

In a report for Yale Environment 360, Cheryl Katz explains:

“With sea levels climbing—many coastal experts are projecting rises of 3 to 5 feet this century—and climate change expected to boost storm frequency and intensity, flood protection is an increasingly pressing issue worldwide. And at the forefront of flood-control technology are the Dutch, long aware of the damage that surging oceans and overflowing rivers can wreak in their low-lying country. Hydraulic engineering has been underway here since the Middle Ages, and the country’s 16.7 million residents have ‘dry feet’ thanks to a network of dikes, canals, and engineering marvels like the Maeslant Barrier near Rotterdam: two floating gates, each the length of the Eiffel Tower, that automatically close to shield the city and its major port when a North Sea storm surge threatens.”

A most recent example of one of these types of “soft defenses” (so named because they circumvent the construction dikes and other hard structures), is the Sand Engine, a vast reservoir of sand continually cultivated to protect eroding beaches. “Completed in late 2011 at a cost of $67 million, the Sand Engine’s goal is to provide long-term fortification for eroding beaches as ocean currents gradually redistribute its dredged material,” writes Katz. “Until now, this coastline needed sand replenishment every five years, requiring expensive dredging that damaged marine ecosystems.” The Sand Engine, meanwhile, should last for 20 years.

Katz warns that soft defenses are not a panacea, noting that Dutch engineers are simultaneously employing other technologies, such as “Smart Dikes”—sensor-embedded levees that relay real-time information—to aid in decision-making.

And while soft defenses are not commonly used in the United States, which has favored emergency preparedness and recovery over taking a more preventative approach, Katz writes that when faced with the global challenge of climate change, “the objectives are now converging.”

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Most companies are showing no signs of cutting back their spending, and Tencent’s latest campaign continues that trend with word that its 51Buy online store is launching the new super-fast delivery service. According to media reports, 51Buy’s expedited delivery service would be rolled out in about a dozen major cities, and would offer guaranteed delivery in two hours or less for some products.

The launch of such a service undoubtedly is requiring a massive investment from Tencent, which is now building a network of massive warehouses to support the initiative. According  to the reports, the current building campaign will see 51Buy set up logistics centers in 10 major Chinese cities, including Chendgdu and Jinan.

Word of this express delivery service comes just a week after media reported that Jingdong, China’s second largest e-commerce company, is trialing a similar program to deliver products within 3 hours of an order’s placement. Such ultra-fast delivery services will not only pressure other e-commerce firms, but also traditional retailers whose ability to immediately provide goods was one of their biggest advantages over online rivals. By comparison, most of the fastest e-commerce deliveries now take at least 24 hours, and can often take days.

From the Tencent news, let’s move to Yihaodian, the Chinese online store controlled by Walmart, which is planning to launch its own brand of apparel later this month. This kind of house-brand product is relatively common in major brick-and-mortar retailers in the West, but it hasn’t been a major component so far for most Chinese e-commerce firms, which typically get most of their goods from third-party suppliers.

This new campaign will see Yihaodian sell clothes under its own brand called Bestluck. The move is probably getting strong support from Walmart, which already counts apparel as an important product line in its own massive network of real-world and online stores.

Like the fast-delivery campaigns from Jingdong and Tencent, this move into own-brand development will now put big pressure on other e-commerce firms to make similar steps to bring in more business. But of course everyone knows that such moves, while ultimately profitable over the long term if they are executed well, are extremely costly to start up and develop.

The bottom line to all of this is that we can probably expect to see similar fast-delivery and own-brand initiatives from the other major e-commerce players in the months ahead, as everyone tries to keep up with each other. That will result in big spending by everyone, keeping the competition stiff until some of the big players are finally forced to withdraw from the market, combine with rivals, or simply run out of cash.

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While it’s easy to portray many policy initiatives pushed by the tech industry as socially beneficial, even to those increasingly suffering as wealth concentrates, the fact of that concentration needs more consciously to be taken into account by those pushing for policy changes, regardless of what they seek. The hyper-aggressive efforts of FWD.us for immigration reform are crystallizing for many a perception of arrogance and insensitivity to larger issues of social welfare. While objections to the lobbying of FWD.us have focused mostly on its celebration of the anti-environmentalism of certain politicians, I’m confident that if its tactics continue, the issue of wealth, income, and the crisis in jobs will take center stage.

The most serious error in Kotkin’s essay, in my view, is how he talks about jobs. He acts and talks as if the only reason that manufacturing has escaped from America’s workers is a willful selfishness on the part of oligarchs. That’s nonsense, but extremely telling. One thing he is right about is that there will be fewer and fewer manufacturing jobs, but it has nothing to do with the selfishness and greed of tech’s billionaires. Nonetheless, they are implicated, because the main reason it’s happening is a radical increase in automation and robotics driven by the very set of technologies so fabulously enriching Silicon Valley’s .01%. Kotkin disregards the actual connection, but focuses instead on a language calculated to prod workers and those left out towards anger and resentment.

America’s real worker crisis is not immigration, it is jobs. That’s not to say that we don’t need immigration reform. We do, both for fairness and to enable the U.S. to remain a center of global innovation. But any advocacy on the part of the absurdly-wealthy bosses of tech had better take into account the most central actual consequence of the social change their industry is driving—an increasingly overarching and shocking reduction in good-paying jobs for America’s middle class. This will have political consequences—most likely, if present trends continue, by radicalizing more Americans towards the kind of resentment and anger Kotkin advocates. It will also, sadly, probably broaden, as even formerly-secure professions like law and medicine begin to see automation wash over them.

Read Kotkin carefully to see where the zeitgeist will move if tech’s leaders don’t increase their sensitivity and activism about this central crisis. I am among those who routinely celebrate the extraordinary progress tech has made in empowering individuals, enhancing access to information, and improving efficiency across society. This should be, at root, positive for just about all Americans. But wouldn’t it be tragic if all those information-aware empowered people turn their energies towards fighting against the very class that has given them these new capabilities?

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Jeff Skoll made his fortune as the first full-time employee and president of eBay. Now, as a philanthropist, he uses his eponymous foundation to back people tackling problems like education inequality and disease. At 48, Skoll says  he expects to give away  the majority of his estimated net worth of $3.7 billion

Not bad for a guy who pumped gas to pay his way through college.

A few weeks ago I attended the Skoll Foundation’s tenth annual World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. (“Social entrepreneur” is one of those terms that mean different things to different people; Skoll defines it broadly as a person who changes the world for the better.) The three-day event takes place at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, where in 2003 Skoll endowed a center devoted to social entrepreneurship. “Skoll,” as it’s known to insiders, attracts 1,000 invited attendees from around the world, a mix of academics, entrepreneurs, donors, and nonprofit execs. They pay between $500 and $2,700—depending on their sector—for the opportunity to network, catch up with people who work in remote locations, and share ideas about fundraising, partnerships, and other practical issues that help their organizations.

They also get a pep talk. With much talk of bravery, disruption, and bold thinking, the mood was often self-congratulatory. Sessions included a performance by Rwanda’s first-ever all female drumming group, a mix of Hutu and Tutsi women who were on opposite sides during the 1994 genocide. Marina Silva, a Brazilian environmentalist and politician, described her rise from extreme poverty to the upper ranks of Brazilian politics. Prince Charles delivered opening remarks via a pre-recorded video. Singer and AIDS activist Annie Lennox accepted an honorary award.

Technology is increasingly integral to the projects celebrated at Skoll. Salman Khan, one of the six recipients of this year’s $1.25 million Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, provides free, online educational videos through the nonprofit Khan Academy.

In a panel called “Big Data. Big Deal?” a group of data scientists—from the UN and elsewhere—talked about harnessing data for social good. Across sectors, delegates talked up the potential of mobile technology: from banking to agriculture to health care. Skoll Entrepreneur Gopi Gopalakrishnan created World Health Partners, which allows patients in rural India to connect with a city doctor through a computer or cell phone. Panelist Premal Shah cofounded Kiva.org, which acts as an online intermediary between donors and the nonprofits they support.

Workshops and panel sessions on topics like “Mo(bile)mentum: Accelerating Mobile for Development” were held in lecture halls at the business school. Delegate-led lunchtime discussions—like “Big Data for Real Impact in Social Enterprises”—took place under a giant tent in the courtyard.

On Tuesday night, the Foundation provided dinner in the Oxford dining halls on long, candlelit tables that had Harry Potter enthusiasts reaching for their cameras. At my dinner in Balliol College, Larry Brilliant of the Skoll Global Threats Fund (and previously, Google.org) gave the opening remarks.

Oxford oozes tradition, yet the Saïd Business School is glassy and sleek. Attendees connected with each other through a private social network. In a lecture hall built with eBay money, entrepreneurs could Skype with a colleague in Africa—who could then stream a live video of the event. The hope, of course, was that it would all help tackle problems that have strained the world for centuries.

(Disclosure: The author traveled to Oxford with support from the Skoll Foundation.)

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Synapse image via Shutterstock

It’s no secret that crowdsourcing has been a successful approach in many industries. Even complex and technical topics can be addressed this way; one great example is Foldit, an online game that lets regular people design efficient protein structures. Those designs are submitted to a top protein laboratory, which tests to see whether predicted structures match the real-life structures of specific proteins.

In the biomedical community, though, Foldit is an outlier. The concept of pulling in as many minds and resources as possible to solve a problem, though proven to work repeatedly in other industries, has not gained real traction in life sciences. In a recent presentation at the Genomes, Environments, Traits (GET) Conference, Sage Bionetworks President Stephen Friend noted that there’s an institutional challenge to adopting this mindset in the biomedical community: the peer review process.

Peer review is to science what Consumer Reports and Amazon reviews are to washing machines, phones, or cars. Scientists who feel they have made an important discovery write it up in a paper and submit it to a journal. Before publishing it, that journal forwards the paper to a few other scientists in the field for a reality check: Does the science hold up? Do the methods make sense? Have the paper’s authors considered other explanations for this finding, and have they addressed them adequately? The reviewers’ feedback offers the journal educated insight into whether the science being reported is worthy of publication.

Peer review is an essential part of science, and influences developments throughout the field. A scientist’s ability to land a job, get tenure, win grant funding, or lead a laboratory hinges on how many papers and in what journals he or she has published. Because publication is so tightly woven into career success, the contents of those papers—the starting hypothesis, data generated, even the scientific problem being tackled—are highly valued, competitive assets. Until publication, which might happen months or even years after the experiments have been run, that information is guarded about as closely as a bank account password.

In this kind of environment, telling scientists that answers could come faster if the problem is opened up to thousands or millions of people doesn’t make much difference. Sure, scientists want answers faster; they also want viable careers.

That is where Stephen Friend comes in. He has spent years in the life sciences, directing cancer research at Merck, starting companies, and more. At the GET conference, he spoke about an interesting new initiative he’s working on called Synapse, which is run through a nonprofit organization and aims to be a GitHub for life sciences. (GitHub, for those not familiar, is an online community where programmers write and develop code together; activity there is used in the world of software engineering as a better proxy for someone’s skills and knowledge than a resume or CV.) Synapse is trying to buck the life sciences system by providing a framework where scientists can upload and share data, build on each others’ findings, and tag all information with history so that the people responsible get credit.

Synapse, still in its infancy, is unlikely to change the peer review process. After all, despite the advent of the Internet and its knack for sweeping away business models, peer review publishing still operates much as it did in the days of Newton or Galileo. But it’s encouraging to see that scientists themselves are trying to make progress and to find ways to maintain what’s needed for the scientific culture while improving how data is accessed, shared, and analyzed. We will need lots more innovation before we see real change, but Synapse is promising. Ultimately, it will lead to scientific problems getting solved faster.

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