Tag: technology

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Five Books To Help Us Think About Our Times

I’ve been quiet on the blog for the last few weeks during the summer doldrums and vacations – a great time to catch up on reading books, including some that were published a while ago.  

Here are quick highlights of some of my more interesting summer reading.

1. Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century by Cathy N. Davidson (2011)

This book describes how we should be thinking about life in the 21st century.  In many instances, Davidson completely upends well established patterns of the industrial era.  She is well known in academic circles as a neuroscientist and former dean at Duke University, where she introduced the widespread use of technology among students.  The book covers a variety of topics, including education, work and aging. 

2. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011)

Kahneman, Princeton Psychology Professor and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, has pulled together the basic knowledge in cognitive science and how people actually make decisions.  If you want to catch up on what’s happened in behavioral science since you left college, this is the book for you.  It draws out some of the implications in a variety of contexts.  (Later, I’ll be posting a blog on the implications for public officials who want to gain acceptance for innovations.)

3.  When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication In The Late Nineteenth Century by Carolyn Marvin (1988)

If you believe what you read and watch on the news media, we live in an age unparalleled rapid change in which technology causes people to become detached from each other by technology among other awful new phenomena.  Marvin takes us on a history of technologies, like the telegraph and telephone, which we now take for granted but once were new.  The same kind of observations we get today about the Internet were foreshadowed long ago.  (Later, I’ll post a separate blog with some wonderfully juicy quotes along these lines.)

4.  Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford (2011)

With so many people saying they are innovative, Harford shows how those people will not succeed at innovation unless they develop some patience, even an appetite, for the failures that often precede success.  He provides fascinating examples.

5.  Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution by Jack Rakove (1997)

In this year’s unusual election of ideological contrasts, there has been an underlying (and often visible) debate about the views of the Founding Fathers when they wrote the constitution.  Rakove’s book provides the details of their debates and their own ambiguous feelings about many of the decisions which we now treat as is handed down in stone by the supreme being. 

These were politicians with great insight into political behavior and how it might be shaped.  Their concerns were well-founded, since some of what they worried could happen has happened.  But, in part, they were reacting to experiences in the 18th century that we do not share today. 

It also revealed the Founding Fathers’ concerns about those who sought some clear original meaning in what they wrote – and when their short term political objectives encouraged them to make the same kind of arguments about original meaning that politicians today make.

© 2012 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/31399036091/five-books-to-help-us-think-about-our-times]


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What Kills Innovation?

Is innovation dying?  If yes, what is killing it?

This is a bit of follow up to my blog post last week.  Peter Thiel, well-known tech entrepreneur, has for a while argued that technology innovation has severely decelerated (with the exception of the computer business).  

His ideas are presented and somewhat debated in these three articles from earlier this year, among others:

He cites the rapid slowing of the last 200 years of progress in the US and Europe, noting that while existing technology is spreading elsewhere through globalization, new technology is not leaping forward in the US.  He feels we’ve forgotten how to innovate.

Of course, the debate with Gilder makes clear that trying to measure how much progress and innovation has occurred is a bit like the old line: how do you measure the length of a string?  (Depending upon the string you pull, it could be any length.)  

Thiel is a libertarian and identifies government regulation as the proximate cause of this deceleration.  No doubt, bad regulation exists and bad regulations can be a heavy hand on the wheels of progress.

But his perspective (as summarized in the first article) is broader than that:

speaking of “developed” versus “developing nations” is implicitly bearish about technology because it implies some convergence to the “developed” status quo. As a society, we seem to believe in a sort of technological end of history, almost by default.

This has bothered me too, but it points to a different cause than regulation and a set of solutions that involve the government.  

As long as we measure our economy in industrial terms (GDP) and give short shrift to the value of post-industrial, often intangible, goods and services, we will persist in this sense of stalled progress.  

If the problem is that we are telling ourselves that leap-forward innovation is at an end, then we need leaders who can help develop and propagate a new vision of the future – and who can then help change the culture that has created the problem.  This is true leadership, not the 5-point policy programs that result in a press release and not much else.

The US government’s reduction in investment in basic research has also been a negative factor – particularly when it shies away from underwriting many grants for ideas that have no immediately obvious value, which is exactly the kind of thing that leads to things of obvious value ten years later.  (The Fortune 500 corporations are also guilty of this shortsightedness.)

Another culprit is the “shareholder is always right” mantra, which has become the American legal standard over the last couple of decades.  This fiduciary standard has discouraged CEOs from making big innovation bets with long-term returns, since most of their shareholders have adopted a short-term outlook.  For a good assessment of this and other issues, see Lynn Stout’s article, Challenging the Long-Held Belief in ‘Shareholder Value’ where she describes the negative consequences when companies are run with the primary decision making criteria being maximizing return to shareholders.

This isn’t the whole story, but it points to a fundamental weakness in the way we think that is slowing us down.  What will it take to change that?  If you have ideas, let us know.

© 2012 Norman Jacknis August 8, 2012

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/28980374812/what-kills-innovation ]

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Diversity And Innovation

There’s an interesting post on the Harvard Business Review blog site by the founder of the Startup Genome project, which analyzes success/failure in new enterprises.  He titles it: “Reversing the Decline in Big Ideas”.  (See http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/reversing_the_decline_in_big_i.html)

He notes that there seems to be a lack of big new ideas in the tech industry and suggests that this is because there is not enough diversity in the founding teams of new enterprises.

In a recent presentation, I noted that we’ve learned about the importance of cross-pollination among disciplines for true innovation.  And then I made the point that many of the “innovation clusters” planned by governments instead aim to drill down into one very focused domain of knowledge – which might mean they won’t get the innovation they expect.  

The author’s argument about the homogenous nature of Silicon Valley startups is perhaps another example of this pattern.  All of those public officials who have dreams of duplicating the past success of Silicon Valley should take note.

© 2012 Norman Jacknis on July 31, 2012

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/28409866759/diversity-and-innovation/]


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Video: How To Get Fit For The Future Economy


A few weeks ago, in a post “How Intelligent Communities Get Fit For The Future Innovation Economy”, I summarized my keynote presentation at the Annual Summit of the Intelligent Community Forum.

If you’d like to see a video of the keynote presentation that ICF recorded, go to http://vimeo.com/45415273

Unfortunately, the ICF staff also cut out all of the brief video clips that engaged the audience, including holographic-like telepresence, laser projections on city walls, virtual/physical interactions on Times Square and the like.  (I suspect they were worried about copyright issues, although they needn’t have worried.)

If you’re interested in seeing those videos, in their full length, you can find them as follows:

As always, please send me your comments and observations (njacknis@cisco.com).

© 2012 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/27907953361/video-how-to-get-fit-for-the-future-economy-a]

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
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The Three Legs Of Traditional Economic Development Strategy Are Breaking

I was asked to lead a panel on economic development at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Counties last Friday.  My task was to provide some background on economic trends for the panelists who were to speak on what their communities are doing.

I presented what have been the three main legs of the traditional economic development strategy of state and local governments:

1. Provide incentives for big companies to bring lots of jobs to your community

2. Encourage the creation and development of physical clusters of the same kind of businesses

3. Subsidize the building of places that concentrate a large number of jobs, like office buildings, factories, etc.

Then I pointed out that these three parts of the traditional strategy are being undermined by the consequences of:

  • a shift in employment from making things and food to intangible services and digital goods and 
  • increasingly available communications

As a result, incentives to big companies don’t work well because those companies can no longer deliver or move lots of jobs.  In addition to explaining why this is, I gave examples of the failure of incentives.  

In a sense, there is a movement away from the world of Coase to the world of Shirky.  Ronald Coase, an economics Nobel Prize winner, developed the theory of the firm – why large enterprises emerged in the industrial era and were more efficient in many ways than the marketplace itself.  Clay Shirky of NYU has written about how the Internet can provide the means of collaboration today that only the large industrial corporation used to provide.

As a result, in their thinking about economic growth, governments should focus on small companies and fluid teams as the individual increasingly becomes the key unit of economic activity.

The second part of the traditional strategy has been to create clusters.  However, as some major economic studies have made clear, the value of physical clusters of the same industry is waning. Moreover, the more recent talk of “innovation clusters” would seem to fly in the face of what we have learned about how innovation happens.  Innovation is more likely to occur from people in diverse fields exchanging ideas than people who are all narrowly focused on the same domain of knowledge.

Then finally there has been the practical equation of real estate development with economic development. As noted in an earlier blog, companies require less commercial real estate space per employee.  Work at home and flexible co-working spaces are the substitutes and these don’t look like traditional office towers.  Physical real estate itself is changing and become more a blending of virtual/physical.  So perpetuating more traditional office or other industrial real estate projects would not seem to be a good future-proof investment of public funds.

I suggested that public officials needed to shift their thinking about what is economic success.  Is it the total revenues of companies that might happen to have an address in your county OR is it the amount of income and wealth of its residents?

To put it another way: if you had to choose, which is the better economic picture for your community – corporate skyscrapers or headquarters in downtown, but a median household income of $40,000 per year OR no skyscrapers, but a median household income of $100,000 per year?  To me the answer is clear – the latter option to both questions.

My talk was followed by presentations from the two coasts of the US.  First, Ira Levy of Howard County, MD described that county’s approach with its emphasis on entrepreneurs, education, etc.  We didn’t do any coordination ahead of time, but his presentation was very much in line with the ideas I presented in the opening talk.  And, of course, he had to point out that Howard County has a median household income of $105,000.

A similar story came from Robert Ross of the San Mateo (CA) Council, who referred to the trends that I had outlined.  These required a change in strategy even in the heart of Silicon Valley. 

Please feel free to contact me at njacknis@cisco.com if you want a copy of the details of the presentation.

© 2012 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/27476032969/the-three-legs-of-traditional-economic-development]

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Why Do We Still Have Tax Brackets?

It must be the warm summer that has made me wonder about silly things like: why do we still have these tables of brackets that determine how much income tax we’re supposed to pay?

I can understand there was a time, many decades ago, that the government wanted to keep things simple so each person could easily determine the tax rate that would apply.  And I know that the continued use of tax brackets is not the biggest problem around,  However, tax brackets are just another symptom of government’s failure to see the widespread deployment of technology in the general public and its failure to use basic technology for simple improvements that are appropriate in this century.

There are some problems that brackets cause.   Politicians, like Steve Forbes and Rick Perry, who advocate a single flat tax rate often start with the argument that their approach would be so simple people could just send in a postcard.  Putting aside the merits or demerits of a flat tax, there is, of course, something really backward about telling people to use a postcard.  From 2000 to 2010, postcard usage dropped by half, an even greater drop than in first class envelope mail.

There are also those who observe people trying to game the system by adjusting their income so they don’t get into a higher bracket.  Those who argue for lower taxes in the higher brackets implicitly say that people will work less if it means an obvious jump in tax rates by shifting into a higher bracket.  Similarly, US News published a story earlier this year on “How to Avoid a High Tax Bracket in Retirement”.

With the current set of progressive tax rates, your percentage of tax goes up as your income goes up.  There is nothing in today’s world that requires the use of brackets in a progressive tax system.  Indeed, a system based on a formula instead would eliminate the negative impacts of bracket-avoiding behavior that critics of progressive taxation point to.

There are a few possible formulas that might work.  The most complex would be a logarithmic or exponential curve, which is nevertheless easily computed by a computer.  If you want to make it even simpler, another formula would set the percentage tax rate as a percentage of income.  (Remember school math?  TaxRate = m * Income where m is some small fraction.)

No matter the formula, computers can handle it.  The IRS could make a formula available on line or over the phone – just enter your taxable income and it will tell you what you owe.  It can be built into the calculator function of cell phones.  We no longer have to assume we live a world limited to paper-based tables.

While we’re at the effort to bring government into the modern technological era, why do we still have fixed budgets?  This budget reform from the 1920s was also developed in a world that did not have the ability to dynamically make calculations.  So every year, government officials make their best guess on the condition of the economy, the demand from an unknown number of potentially needy citizens and other factors that determine the ebb and flow of public finances.  Since the budget process is lengthy, they make this guess well ahead of time so they could be trying to predict the future more than 18 months ahead of time.

A rolling budget would work better by automatically adjusting each month to the flow of revenue and the demands on government programs – and all you need is a big spreadsheet on a not-so-big computer.  However, the budget makers would have to decide what their priorities are.  For example, for every percentage of unemployment, we need to put aside $X billion dollars for unemployment insurance payments.  It would take work to do this for each of the promises the government makes – although maybe not as much work as trying to guess the future.  

(Of course, the real obstacle to a rolling budget model is that policy makers would be forced to make more explicit their priorities.)

I could go on, but you get the idea.  It’s about time that government not only buys technology (which it does, sometimes, in large volumes), but also brings that technology into its thinking.

© 2012 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/26971606341/why-do-we-still-have-tax-brackets]

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Living Long In A Networked Age

This post was started in 2010 in Australia, when I was asked to speak at the biennial world meeting of the International Federation on Ageing (www.ifa-fiv.org/) and the World Health Organization.  They were interested in my early work on socio-economic trends in this networked age.

I don’t like giving packaged presentations and much prefer to talk about things that have some meaning for the audience.  So I did some research on aging and tried to work out in my mind what are the implications of the growing digital network on the way that we live longer.

This post is a summary of that thought process.

First consider the traditional view of aging, perhaps more prevalent in the general public than among experts.  

Basically, as you get older, this view says you will get increasingly debilitated and immobile, have to retire from the work force, become dependent upon government financial support and personal service from others, and spend much of your time in medical facilities.  There is no doubt that some of these things can happen and eventually the body does wear out.  

But is this a necessary picture of aging in today’s world? Not when people can be connected by broadband networks that, increasingly, include video capabilities which really make it feel that you are together with others who are far away.   

First, let’s deal with the dissociation from the work force.  In 1900, 71% of the American labor made goods or food.  This was often back-breaking work, the kind of job that indeed did become untenable for the elderly.

But, by 2000, only 21% of American workers are still in the business of making goods or food.  The rest provide services, increasingly intangible services that are created on computers and delivered over the Internet.  

One of the consequences of this is that many people no longer go to a job.  Their work goes to them wherever they might be.  It is so common that people are working at home or in locations outside of the offices of their employers that many companies have found they need half the space per employee that they did ten years ago.  

So when people are faced with reduced mobility, whether it is due to a skiing accident or the aging of the body, it no longer means that they cannot work and earn a living.

Is this relevant to seniors?  The Pew Internet and American Life Project has found that 41% of those over 65 are online.  Among the next wave of potential retirees,  those between 50 and 64, 74% are online.  

Even a couple of years ago, you could find a story about “Seniors finding social networking exhilarating” (from The Dallas Morning News, October 12, 2009).  And many of us have seen grandparents connect with the grandkids via videoconferencing and social media.

Ok, you might say, that seniors might be able to work, but do they want to or do they wish to just live off their savings and government help?

In an article entitled, “Successful Seniors Who Won’t Retire”,  Business Week featured 105 seniors a couple of years ago who won’t quit, with Jane Fonda as the prime example.

There have been recent research studies about this very question.  Labor force participation by seniors has gone up in recent decades.

In another Pew study, they reported that 12% of current retirees already work for pay.  More than three quarters of current workers expect to work for pay after retirement – 60% because they want to and only 30% because they have to work to make ends meet.  The authors conclusion:

“The latest Pew findings suggest that retirement is a phase of life about which public attitudes, expectations and experiences are in a period of transition.”

This is not just an American phenomenon.  Xinhua News reported:

“About one third of the retired people in Beijing want to keep on working to earn more and to stay in touch with society.”

Although age discrimination is widespread in hiring, it is counter-productive. Other research has found that “Older Workers Had Higher Educational Attainment Overall Than Older Non-workers.”  

Of course, those people, no matter what their age, who have higher education are more likely participants in the knowledge economy – the intangible, digital part of the economy.  Thus the labor force participation rate of those with advanced degrees was about three times that of those with less than a high school education.

But what about the disabilities that seem to be part of aging?

Among those who work with seniors, there has been a movement called “universal design” whose aim is to ensure that every room in a home or other building is designed with ease of use.  For example, look at the work by the NCSU Center for Universal Design (http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud).

Their goal for seniors is to prevent accidents, like slipping in a shower.  (The point has been made, of course, that these improvement also help those who are no so old.  Anyone can slip in a shower if it’s not properly designed.)

In this century, we can do more than be careful with traditional physical design. 

There has been much in the news lately about the “Internet of things”, which is a phrase that describes the increasing number of sensors and other devices without direct human interfaces all over the world, including in our homes.  

This enables architects to design a blended virtual/physical environment for seniors that can monitor their safety and health.  For example, it is possible to build in prevention and detection of falls among seniors.

Being always connected can mean always having access to tele-health.  I’m thinking of what exists now.  There are all sort of devices to monitor chronic diseases, which means that doctors can remotely diagnose and catch problems early before they become critical and expensive.  

These devices allow for a range of options for senior, instead of unnecessary commitment to a long-term care facility.

In the future, sensors that transmit from inside your body and that help repair your body will become available and take tele-medicine to an extraordinary new level.

The connectivity of seniors at home can also lead to better health outcomes as was demonstrated in the Vermont Telecare for Rural Health Project.  They ran a successful, multi-way interactive tai-chi exercise class for those over 70 who did not leave their homes.  As the leaders of the project noted:  

“We know that exercise is helpful for senior patients, but we can’t get to them. And we know that Tai Chi helps keep seniors healthy, increases their well-being and balance.“

So even home-bound seniors with chronic diseases can still participate in the economy and the wider society.

Ok, you might say, we can overcome some of the physical handicaps that sometime accompany aging.  But what about the mental degradation? the intellectual stodginess that is part of the common view of the elderly?  Aren’t seniors unprepared to participate in an economy in which innovation is a critical element of competitive success?

In many, these views are misleading or irrelevant in this century.  Let’s start with the irrelevant by observing our own children and how they use the Internet.

Is a quick and expansive memory for details something they cherish, even among themselves, when there is the Internet to look up almost any fact?

Is it necessary to worry about reminders when "there’s an app for that”?

But the misleading part of this view is more interesting, if less well known.

There was a time that it was assumed that only the very young were creative.  However, there has been more recent bio-medical research on the resilience and continuing growth of the brain even among older people.

There was also the interesting research by the economist Galenson who focused on artists, among others.  In a review of Galenson’s work, Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker magazine, asked: “why do we equate genius with precociousness?" 

Galenson divided creativity into two types – conceptual and experimental.  The complete conceptual revision of some domain, be it art or physics, is often associated with the very young.  

The experimental or experiential type of creativity is evidenced by those much older since it is based on the ability to make connections among diverse experiences that only older people have had.  It is also based on a lifetime of experimentation with the world.  

In discussions of innovations in business and in driving future economic growth, it is this kind of creativity that makes the most difference.

But there is a catch, which is why many are misled about this subject.  The catch is that creativity is a collaborative act.  It is not about some lone 20 year old genius sitting on a mountainside.  As Steven Johnson put it in his book "Where Good Ideas Come From”:

“That is how innovation happens … chance favors the connected mind.” 

No matter what someone’s age, if they are not in the stream of new ideas, they will not achieve their creative potential.  Unfortunately, for most people, they are exposed to new ideas and knowledge less and less for each year they are away from college or their last formal educational experience.

Some colleges, for example Purchase College of the State University of New York, have admirably tried to remedy this by enabling seniors to audit classes for a very low fee.  But classroom instruction is expensive and not always convenient for seniors.

The Internet, however, has a vast potential to put seniors back into that stream so that they too can be innovative.  MIT has put its courses online, among other universities.  Carnegie-Mellon is leading an open learning project.  Florida has a virtual reference librarian available 24 hours a day.  There are training videos and tutorials in almost every subject imaginable.  

Especially interesting is the cooperative, free online university for seniors – University for the Third Age (U3A).  

There is just a tremendous amount of scientific and other research that used to be available only on the campus where it occurred or later in scientific journals and conferences.  Now much of that is available online.  And local librarians can help people find this, if it becomes too daunting to search through for an individual.

Public leaders in the 19th century recognized the economic importance of ensuring that all citizens could read and they created the public schools and libraries necessary to achieve that goal.  In this century, public leaders need to ensure that residents of all ages are helped to identify where they can get 21st century learning. 

Another significant socio-economic trend in this century is the increased recognition of the role played by new entrepreneurs in economic growth – and the way that the Internet makes it easier than ever to start up a business.

Thus, there is no reason that this greater entrepreneurial opportunity cannot be grabbed by a 59 year-old as much as 19 year-old almost-college-dropouts.  Apparently, this is something that older people realize.  The Kauffman Foundation highlights its finding (http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/kiea-interactive.aspx) that the 

“increasing rate of entrepreneurship among older adults has led to a rising share of new entrepreneurs in the fifty-five to sixty-four age group. This age group represented 14.5 percent of new entrepreneurs in 1996, whereas it represented 22.9 percent of new entrepreneurs in 2010.”   

As we enter into the world of ubiquitous communications in this century, we will find that the traditional issues which have handicapped older people are diminishing.  This should generate a whole new way of looking at them and at this part of life – not a phase of debilitation and near vegetation, but an active life despite whatever limitations the aging body may impose.

This new outlook may be represented by a new equation, with apologies to Einstein, e = (mc)²  Enhancement of life experience results from more connectivity which leads to more choices.

© 2012 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/20006652147/living-long-in-a-networked-age]

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The Golden Age: Somewhere by Paul Nicholls

The Golden Age: Somewhere by Paul Nicholls

In this movie by Paul Nicholls of architectural animation studio Factory Fifteen, the world is conceptualised as a series of virtual interfaces, where people visit places and meet each other without leaving the room. Going to a party? You’ll need the IP address. Want to go to the park? Just download a template and build it.

Called Somewhere, the film is the follow-up to Nicholls’ award-winning movie The Simulation. You can see all the movies we’ve featured by Factory Fifteen here.

Here’s some information from Factory Fifteen:

Golden Age – Somewhere

Within ‘Somewhere’ we are transported to a time where the boundaries between what is real and what is simulated are blurred. We live online and download places to relax, parks and shopping malls. We can even interact with our friends as if they were in the same room with simulated tele-presence. Everyone is connected and immersed in nanorobotic replications of any kind of object or furnishings, downloadable on credit based systems. Distance and time become as alien as the ‘offline’ The local becomes the global and the global becomes the local. Consumer based capitalism has changed forever. A truly ‘glocolised’ world. The singularity is near.

The film places us into this vision, observing an average inhabitant within the ever changing environment of the latest SimuHouse. From a painting to a park and from a telephone call to a shopping mall. That is until there is a leek in the system and everything malfunctions. The film concludes with the house being forced to reset, giving the character and viewer a stark reminder that nothing is ‘real’ even her dog, which re-materializes in front of her.

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More confusion about cities

The video, Thinking Cities, from Ericsson is well done.  You can see it at http://www.techi.com/2012/02/ericssons-vision-of-a-networked-society-expands-with-thinking-cities/ 

But initially this reminded me an old vaudeville line – “everyone wants to get into the act.”  Since IBM has stamped their effort “Smarter Cities” and Cisco initiated “Smart + Connected” cities, I guess Ericsson felt that the word “thinking” was all that was left 😉  The marketing folks at the ICT companies all seem to be working from the same script and featuring many of the same (usual) suspects.

What bothers me is that the start of the video is simplistic and misleading – two tales of cities, which got mixed up.  There is all this talk about people going to cities.  That’s true if you look at the global numbers.  But, as occurred in developed countries a hundred years ago, that’s more a reflection of the industrialization happening around the globe in today’s developing countries, rather than some desire of people to experience urban life in and of itself.  Indeed, there has been no recent mass migration of people in developed countries to central cities.

So it’s rather odd that almost all of the people in this and similar videos are from developed countries and are talking about the urban experience.  I’d like to see a video where the people interviewed were from the developing countries that are undergoing urbanization.  

Let them explain the reasons why they move.  (I suspect it’s first to get out of poverty and make a better living.  They’re also working too hard to worry about the wonderful cultural assets of their new location.)  Such a video would direct the attention of the ICT companies to issues that they have ignored when they talk glowingly of urbanization.

So that gets to cities in the developed world which this video really speaks to, although dramatic growth in urbanization is not the issue there. Of course, as the video notes, there is a separate set of issues in both the developed and developing world where ICT can help – namely the management of the physical infrastructure of cities.  

Unfortunately, this is the second step to first making a commitment to modernize that infrastructure and such a commitment has been missing in the USA.

You won’t be surprised that I like the part, near the end, where there is a brief discussion about citizen engagement.  For me, the most valuable role of ICT in urban areas of developed countries is to enhance quality of life and public governance is part of that quality of life.

© 2012 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/18847694070/more-confusion-about-cities]


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Telegraph vs. Internet: Which Had Greater Impact?

2012 is the bicentennial of the War of 1812.  You may remember just two things about this period from your high school history class.  First, in an act of ignominy for the Americans, the British burned down the capital.  Second, the war ended with the resounding defeat of the British by the heroic General Andrew Jackson in January 1815, in what was the war’s only set-piece battle between the opposing sides.  Jackson eventually rode this victory into the Presidency.

There is only one problem with this battle.  It took place after the war was over.  The previous month, in Europe, the two sides had agreed to peace.  But in those days, communications was so slow that word of the peace didn’t reach New Orleans until February 1815.

Fast forward, approximately forty-eight years later, to the Civil War.  In the period between these two wars, in 1831, Morse thought up the idea for the electronic telegraph.  The Union Army had mastered its quick deployment, so that in 1863 while sitting in Washington, President Lincoln could read almost real time reports from the battlefields many miles away. 

This was a dramatic increase in the speed of communications.  Not all that many decades later, telegraph lines and cables would unite the world.  Yet this did not fundamentally change the way people worked or lived or governed themselves.

So consider 2011, when the US Navy Seals got Osama Bin Laden.  There was a tweet about helicopters within several minutes, but the author didn’t know why the helicopters were nearby.  The first tweet with some confirmation came about forty-five minutes before President Obama made his announcement.

Now think back about forty-eight years before to November 22, 1963 and the assassination of President John Kennedy.  The news was out quickly all over television and radio and newspapers.  Walter Cronkite famously told the viewers of CBS News that the President had died thirty-eight minutes before.

Unlike the 19th century examples, there was no dramatic speed up in the reporting of these two more recent events separated by roughly forty-eight years.  While we may have more sources of information in more places now than in 1963, word doesn’t get out all that much faster.  You could argue that the Telegraph had a greater impact on communications than the Internet.

Yet many of us have the feeling that our world has been changed by this communications.  Why is that?

I think it has to do with the changing nature of the work we do.  In the mid-19th century, more than three quarters of Americans made things or grew food.  In 2011, less than a quarter do so and the rest of us provide services – and increasingly intangible services, including ideas, knowledge, entertainment and the like which is delivered digitally.  Because better digital communications directly speeds up the delivery of these services, we see the impact more.  It’s the increasing availability of high quality communications, in conjunction with these significant socio-economic trends, which will continue to change our lives. 

[picture credit for Battle of New Orleans http://www.frenchcreoles.com/battnozz.jpg]

© 2011 Norman Jacknis
[Permalink: http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/13598472900/telegraph-vs-internet-which-had-greater-impact]

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From 1954, AT&T’s instruction for the last “communications revolution.” Is this what we need for the successful introduction of broadband?  😉

© 2011 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/11373422468/from-1954-at-ts-instruction-for-the-last]

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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Beyond The Traditional Office Network

There have been several recent articles that demonstrate how the data network has escaped the confines of data centers and office buildings.  When people talk about the Internet of Things, it is really about all of the various connected devices that don’t fit into the traditional mode of a personal computer or equivalent (like a smart phone).

Earlier this month, there was a story about how “Ford investigates creating a mobile data network using the cars themselves” at 

http://connectedplanetonline.com/3g4g/news/ford-investigates-creating-mobile-data-network-using-cars-themselves-0810/ 

With every car being a node on a moving network, there are endless possibilities for new applications.

A couple of weeks ago, there was an Associated Press report about a “Tattoo-like patch breakthrough in patient monitoring” (http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/medical/story/2011/08/Tattoo-like-patch-to-breakthrough-in-patient-monitoring/49944506/1).  The mission of the researchers at University of Illinois is “really to blur the distinction between electronics and biological tissue”.  The little bandaid-like patch contains an antenna so its data can be transmitted to the network.

In “Computers That You Can Wear” (http://www.pcworld.com/article/237238/computers_that_you_can_wear.html), David Daw writes about wearable computers – which are, of course, on the network.  He features the Looxcie camera, Jawbone and Nike+ sensor.  There was a New York Times story on Looxcie last year at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/business/07novel.html

Then there is the work by Dartmouth Professor Andrew T. Campbell’s Mobile Sensing Group, which focuses on the use of mobile phones for various kinds of sensing.  It will read your eye expressions and eventually read your mind.  For more information, go to http://sensorlab.cs.dartmouth.edu/  and http://sensorlab.cs.dartmouth.edu/publications.html

© 2011 Norman Jacknis

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Pervasive Internet: “Remote Control, With a Wave of a Hand”

Pervasive Internet: “Remote Control, With a Wave of a Hand”

At some point, the data network (Internet) becomes so pervasive, it is no longer a network – in the sense of connecting nodes.  It changes into something closer to what a physicist would call a field.  Perhaps, a more homely analogy is that we will not be connected to the Internet, but will be swimming in it. I’m not sure that anyone sees clearly what the implications are.
© 2011 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/10122528158/pervasive-internet-remote-control-with-a-wave-of-a]
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Soon gestures may be controlling more than just games. Scientists at Microsoft Research and the University of Washington have come up with a new system that uses the human body as an antenna. The technology could one day be used to turn on lights, buy a ticket at a train station kiosk, or interact with a world of other computer applications. And no elaborate instruments would be required.

“You could walk up to a ticket-purchasing machine, stand in front and make a gesture to be able to buy your ticket"

Instead, the technology uses something that is always with us, unless we live in the wilderness: ambient electromagnetic radiation emitted as a matter of course by the wiring in households, by the power lines above homes, and by those gas pumps at the service station.

The human body produces a small signal as it interacts with this ambient electrical field. The new system employs algorithms to interpret and harness that interaction.

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Symmetrical Broadband Will Create The Real Cloud Computing

Symmetrical Broadband Will Create The Real Cloud Computing

In ExtremeTech (http://www.extremetech.com/computing/94428-will-100-megabit-internet-connections-destroy-the-web-as-we-know-it), Sebastian Anthony recently asked the question:  “What do you think will happen when every home is connected to the internet via 100 or 1,000Mbps Ethernet or fiber?”  

He goes on to give an answer that is yes, under the assumption that the 100Mbps is symmetrical.

“At some point in the not-so-distant future, then, we’re all going to be connected to the web at LAN-like speeds — 100 megabits per second up and down — and this, just like the advent of the telephone, will change the world as we know it. … ”

“Instead of your entire life being represented by a handful of bytes in amongst Facebook’s faceless sea, symmetric connections will enable the web to become metropolitan. Your presence on the web will be your home. ”

“The end result would be a truly decentralized internet that closely mimics human settlement and society. There will still be nodes on the internet where more people congregate — the bars, clubs, and McDonalds of the real world — but for the most part, a symmetric web would let people hang out and connect with the people they care about, and ignore everyone else.”

This is my definition of real cloud computing – something way beyond the standard view which is not much more than a new marketing twist on the old time-sharing data centers.

© 2011 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/9873965864/symmetrical-broadband-will-create-the-real-cloud]

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Virtual vs. Physical Interactions

In response to my post of the Chattanooga editorial, someone wrote to me that he thought that virtual communications would make physical interaction even more important.  I won’t go into the whole argument here, but note that this is more sophisticated than the simple comparison of virtual vs. physical interactions that many people have made.

Nevertheless, I did think that it deserved a response and here it is:

I think the Internet in its current form (texting, email, social media, etc.) is still an immature form of communications.  So the crux of the matter is not so much whether the current Internet will change how people interact, but how the ubiquitous video communications of the future will affect behavior.

Our physical selves will not disappear, so there will still be physical interaction.  But I suspect that these interactions – and the cities in which these interactions takes place – will be of a different nature than what we’ve been accustomed to.  I’ve been working with the mayors, in part, on what that future city should look like and what will be its functions.  Most under threat is the urban model that primarily views the city as the dominant, centralized location of economic production.  Indeed, the traditional physical business cluster has already dissipated in many places – Detroit and Wall Street, to name just two famous clusters which are no longer as dominant in their industries as they used to be. 

Economic relationships will perhaps be more affected by ubiquitous video communications than other human relationships because video communications increases the likelihood that trust will develop between potential business partners.

Of course, how this all plays out will be a cultural question.  I remember that my grandmother believed that the telephone was only to be used for very minor or extremely urgent conversations – nothing in the wide swath of human conversation in the middle, especially not business.  If you wanted to converse with her, you saw her personally, probably preceded by a letter.  My parents thought this quaint and had no problem at all conducting important business matters on the telephone.  My bet is that the next generation will take video chat for granted as a perfectly acceptable way of doing business.

Time will tell – so let’s make a date in 20 years to see which of these opposing views gets closer to the future reality. 

© 2011 Norman Jacknis

[Permalink: http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/8198382507/virtual-vs-physical-interactions]

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Chattanooga’s Gigabit Network As The Base For Future Economic Growth

I’ve been working on a future-oriented economic growth program with the US Conference of Mayors and we have identified Chattanooga as a location to demonstrate some of these ideas because it has, by far, the largest and fastest deployment of fiber in any metro area in the US — enabling every home and other building to have a gigabit connection.  

I’ve described to them how and why this kind of network changes a city’s economy and should change its economic growth strategy.  I’m also helping them think of innovative uses of their network that will set up their future economic growth for a couple of decades — with particular emphasis on those that are only feasible at these higher bandwidths.  Among other aspects, this includes virtual collaboration among entrepreneurs in the global marketplace, virtual lifelong learning and blended virtual/physical spaces that become destinations for both residents and tourists.  

Last week, I made a presentation about this to the civic and business community in Chattanooga.  

That presentation led to a significant editorial by the Chattanooga Times Free-Press (http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2011/jul/21/the-other-economic-vision/?opiniontimes) as well as a news story (http://timesfreepress.com/news/2011/jul/21/epb-grid-attracts-cisco-systems/).

© 2011 Norman Jacknis

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Calculate The Benefits Of Telework

[Note: This was originally posted on a blog for government leaders, March 16, 2009.  Since then, the Federal government has enacted a law enabling its employees to officially use telework.]

Telework is getting a fresh look because the factors that make telecommuting attractive are converging from various directions. 

Telework is a green strategy in both meanings of the word: (1) saving money and (2) doing things that will help reduce greenhouse gases and sustain the environment. 

First, in the current very tight — even dire — financial circumstances of local and state governments, public employees are being asked to accept pay-less workdays, no salary increases and other budget cutting measures. Telecommuting is one way to help employees to reduce their costs of getting to work that will not add anything to your budget.

Telecommuting also helps save money by reducing your costs for operating your buildings. While statistics on this subject are not yet generally available, I can draw upon the experience of Cisco. Converting the employees in one building in San Jose to a less office-oriented work pattern resulted in reduced building costs — a 40% reduction in space per employee and 55% less money spent on IT infrastructure and cabling. And the employees were happier and more productive.

Second, there is also an increasing emphasis in governments not only on developing new policies to sustain the environment, but also to set an example by operating in a greener way. Telecommuting helps reduce greenhouses gases by getting vehicles off the roads, especially during rush hour. (And that again reduces local government costs by reducing highway maintenance.)

Sun Microsystems [now part of Oracle] has had a telework program for 10 years with more than half of its workforce at home or in flexible work spaces. The company found that office equipment consumed twice as much energy in a Sun office as in a home office — 130 watts per hour versus 64. But that was not the greatest factor in greenhouse gas reductions. Employees who eliminated the commute to a Sun office also slashed their carbon footprints, with commuting accounting for more than 98% of each employee’s work-related carbon footprint; running office equipment made up less than 1.7% of a person’s total work-related carbon emissions.Of course, you will want to tally up the benefits of telecommuting for your particular area. 

Fortunately, a pair of dedicated telework experts have made that easy for you by creating a telework calculator at http://undress4success.com/research/telework-savings-calculator/. (While you are there, you might want to take a look at the Undress4Success.com home page for a variety of other telecommuting resources.)

The Telework Calculator has data for every city, county, region, Congressional District, and State, so you can see the results just for your area. There are a couple of dozen metrics, including savings to your government and your employees, as well as the reduction in greenhouse gases. You can even play with the assumptions behind it, such as what percentage of workers could easily switch to telecommuting. Their estimate may be on the high side.Much of the work that government does is especially suitable for telework. 

The Federal government, which has been developing its telework expertise for years, has found that 52% of its employees are eligible for telecommuting. You can find more Federal information at http://www.telework.gov and from the Federal-private sector partnership, the Telework Exchange at http://www.teleworkexchange.com (which also has its own telework calculator).

At the State level, Arizona has led with telework in the Phoenix area. See http://www.teleworkarizona.com for more information. The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance has used this approach to create what is in many ways a virtual, but much more responsive, agency.

Bringing this discussion back to your policy making role, you can use the Telework Calculator to measure the value of telecommuting in your area if every public and private entity ran a telecommuting program. Last week the folks behind the Telework Calculator released a study in which they added up the numbers and suggested that, if telework really took off, “working from home could save United States consumers $228 billion, add $260 billion to companies’ bottom line.” 

© 2011 Norman Jacknis

[Permalink: http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/7643727248/calculate-the-benefits-of-telework ]

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We are impatient and quick to dismiss ideas that don’t take hold quickly, but I regularly see evidence of how long it takes a new technology to become accepted.  For example, it might be worth considering the success of iPad as a delivery mechanism for newspapers in light of this 7 minute video from 1994.  (Courtesy of Teresa Martin.)

© 2011 Norman Jacknis

[Permalink: http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/7390470648/we-are-impatient-and-quick-to-dismiss-ideas-that ]

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
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Smart Communities Can Do Something About The Recession

[Note: This was originally posted on a blog for government leaders, May 11, 2009.]

This week the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) is holding its annual awards ceremony in New York from among the top seven communities around the world who have been the best examples of using broadband technology. While your community may not be in the top 7, many of you have some degree of broadband networks covering a majority of the residents in your area.

The theme is how the governments of smart communities can respond to a deep recession. I’ve been asked to give the keynote speech and so I thought I should devote this post to some of the ideas I’ll be presenting.

The overriding message is quite simple: take advantage of the data network that exists in your community. Using that network wisely can save money in the government, help your residents reduce their costs and even create more wealth in your community – which, of course, is the best way to get out of a recession.

Your government can save money in several ways. First, those organizations that have integrated the controls of their buildings and other physical facilities into their data networks have been able to achieve substantial savings. The State of Missouri, with a thousand buildings, has been able to reduce its energy costs alone by $20 million a year (about a $1 per square foot). 

You can get greater employee productivity by getting public employees out of the office so they can do their work, which is often in the field. The network lets them work where their tasks takes them – while managers can still observe and even participate in that work when necessary. While telecommuting has been a long standing program of many governments, it is time to think of mobile telecommuting instead.

The Internet and network connectivity you have also makes it possible to provide and to use the best, most cost effective software and services. If your government has strong IT capabilities, then offer these services to others so you can spread your IT costs over a larger base. If your government isn’t strong in IT, then use these services since they may be cheaper than trying to do it yourself.

Of course, readers of this blog will not be surprised that I also think that some paid-for government services can instead be provided for free by letting your residents use the Internet to help each other.

You can help your residents reduce their own costs, especially the time and money they spend in traffic and the money they spend on energy use. There are good examples of local governments offering all sorts of network-based services that reduce the time people spend in traffic. Some have even set up smart work centers, which eliminate the need for people to travel all the way downtown, but enable them to virtually participate in the workplace of their employers. You can also eliminate travel for your residents if government services are available over the Internet and on smart phones, instead of just in government offices. These services can now include videoconference meetings over the Internet and real collaborative interaction between public employees and residents.

Through the use of smart home energy controllers (and, beyond that, smart grids) your residents can save money on their energy use. In the Pacific Northwest, one recent trial found that just letting people use the Internet to know about their energy usage and to do something about that no matter where they were resulted in an average energy cost reduction of 10%.

In various ways, the investments that have been made in broadband have direct economic benefits. For example, one study found that every dollar in broadband investments yielded ten in economic growth. And broadband has direct impact on the growth and profitability of businesses. But you can help those businesses learn how to use the Internet better, even offering assistance with Virtual Trade Missions and videoconferencing. 

For many of you, the broadband network investment has been made. Now is the time to use to respond in recessionary times by reducing your government costs, your citizens’ cost of living and by ramping up economic growth.

© 2011 Norman Jacknis

[Permalink at http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/7369010423/smart-communities-can-do-something-about-the-recession ]

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Chattanooga Gigabit Fiber To Every Building

This is a segment of the Council for the New American City at the US Conference of Mayors Annual Meeting, June 17, 2011. It features Mayor Ron Littlefield and Norman Jacknis, Cisco IBSG Public Sector Director discussing the gigabit fiber network that the city has deployed throughout its metro area and its implications for future economic development.

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)