January 2014 – Looking Forward

January 30, 2014

Who & What Is Tech For In The Inner City?

The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) was created twenty years ago by the famed strategy professor at Harvard Business School Professor, Michael Porter. ICIC focuses on economic development strategies for inner cities. Their stated mission is “to drive economic prosperity in America’s inner cities through private sector investment to create jobs, income and wealth for local residents”.

As part of their What Works For Cities series, last Thursday, ICIC held a webinar for about two hundred attendees on “How inner cities can increase the impact of technology clusters”. On behalf of the Intelligent Community Forum, I was one of the invited speakers.

ICIC wanted to address three questions:

What can city governments do to create technology-based economies in inner cities?
How can cities ensure that inner city residents have access to technology so that they are prepared, skilled, and able to participate in a tech-based economy?
What is a local governments’ role in building the capacity of innovative businesses so that they create jobs for inner city residents? What policies have worked?

So I took this as an opportunity to discuss technology-based economic growth from a global perspective, based on my own experience and that of the hundreds of cities and regions who have been identified as intelligent communities by the Intelligent Community Forum over the last fifteen years. My focus was especially on innovation and inclusion.

There were two underlying themes in my presentation.

First, technology-based economic development should not mean solely creating software and other tech companies. Partly that is because good social policy doesn’t just replace current poor inner city residents with newcomers who are programmers and web designers.

Helping existing residents learn programming is a key part of the story that the two New York City public officials presented during the webinar. NYC’s focus is to fulfill the demand for programmers, web designers and engineers from among those who have been unemployed – recognizing that in the tech industry, aptitude is more important than degrees, an important consideration for inner city residents.

I’d add that there are a variety of places and ways that people can learn programming from the Internet, including the well-known Code Academy. In his recent post “Can Tech Help Inner City Poverty?” Michael Mandel reviewed the generally positive results of these programs.

But the world needs more than just programmers, as was well discussed in a recent NPR report, “Computers Are The Future, But Does Everyone Need To Code?”.

A successful technology-based economy strategy for inner city residents should also help non-programmers and low-tech businesses benefit from being connected digitally to the greater opportunities of the global economy.

Second, in this century with its digital, knowledge-based global economy, innovation is the key to competitive success. I described several ways that cities can be an example of innovation and facilitate innovation among their residents, including, or perhaps especially, among inner city residents.

While the full presentation will be on the ICIC website later, here is a summary of the various aspects of the strategy that I presented. The 21^st century city:

connects residents to the global economic opportunities
connects residents to open innovation
provides a platform for lifelong learning for residents
has a culture of innovation
creates places that inspire residents to innovate

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/75049511867/who-what-is-tech-for-in-the-inner-city]

January 23, 2014

Intellectual Property?

Last, the Metropolitan New York Library Council held its Annual Meeting at the vertical campus of Baruch College/CUNY. [Disclosure: I’m President of the board, although the staff does all the real work.]

METRO has turned this into quite an event, filled all day with various breakout sessions. But there is still a keynote address, given this year by Jessamyn West who discussed her views on copyrights and how libraries are and will continue to be affected by copyright law.

You can see the slides from her presentation at http://www.librarian.net/talks/metro/ , although you can’t see and hear what she had to say about each. You can get a flavor for her entertaining presentation style by noting her concluding slide.

If I had to summarize her message to the library world and to others in one sentence, it is this: aggressively apply your “fair use” rights for copyrighted material. (You can read this article for a summary of “fair use”.)

The Wikipedia entry on fair use provides this conventional summary:

“In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship.”

The traditional copyright that the writers of the US Constitution had in mind – fourteen years for printed material – has been buffeted by the pressures of copyright owners, on the one hand, and developments in technology on the other.

The copyright owners have succeeded in extending the life of copyrights to seven decades after the death of the original copyright holder. They have also tended to generalize what was a fairly limited monopoly into the much larger concept of “intellectual property”, which often translates into a monopoly on an idea.

The Internet, of course, has made things more complicated. There is the increasing digitization (scanning) of existing printed material. There is also an ever increasing percentage of published material that is born digital. The Internet has also made possible a boom in self-published works, usually in e-book form.

All of these trends mean that traditional copyrights, which were managed by a small set of big publishers of printed books can no longer be so easily managed. Readers can more easily copy digital books than printed books, so having a copyright is no longer as strong a protection of a monopoly as it used to be.

Indeed, the very idea of a fixed book – something with a finite number of printed pages, contained within hard covers – is challenged by the digital form. We are already seen and can expect to see more mash-ups that might take a paragraph or a chapter here and another from there and so on in order to create something that some readers might find more efficient than reading all the original material.

Who owns what in that mash-up? How much can be used from the original sources? How are rights affected if the original material is modified in some way? What if those original sources are also some form of mash-up? These are just some of the questions that will grist for the legal mills in the future.

Indeed, whether ideas can be considered non-sharable, protectable property will be one of the big policy debates of this century – perhaps on a par with the labor vs. capital conflicts of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Ms. West’s presentation gave the attendees of METRO’s meeting a taste of what that battle will be like.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/74279930335/intellectual-property ]

January 16, 2014

Images Of Moving?

I’ve written before about spaces that blend the virtual and physical, but those spaces didn’t move. Now we have new vehicles planned that take this blended reality on the road.

Below are just some news items that caught my eye over the past few months featuring the frontiers of vehicle technology, beyond the well-publicized self-driving cars.

First up is Lexus’s Art in Motion, which analyzes the way the car is being driven and reflects that in a portrait of the driver on the display screen in the car, as in the next picture. For more information see http://www.artismotion.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8cqJptwNVI

Toyota’s FV2, “Fun To Drive”, concept vehicle is not quite a car. But it combines features of a car, a motorcycle, augmented reality, robotics, human/machine communications and sensing of the driver’s mood. Like other concept cars, it may never hit the road, but it’s fun to think about. Here are two pictures and read http://www.toyota-global.com/tokyoms2013/fv2/ for more information from the company. Oh, and they also have a smartphone app, that you can get now, to simulate what the FV2 is like.

We’ve seen self-parking cars on the road, but for those really tough parking spaces you may need to ask your passenger to get out and guide you in inch-by-inch. But what if you’re driving alone? Well, you’ll have to be your own passenger. Just get out of the car and park it using your smartphone. See how this is done with a VW car at http://youtu.be/PfcHm70BHL8

Prof. Michael Ferreira of Portugal’s University of Porto has developed what he calls a “see through” system that lets you see through the vehicle ahead of you. The project has a video that sort of shows the system – http://youtu.be/Esh1EjgBQaI . More information, in English, can be found at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029394.600-augmented-reality-system-makes-cars-seethrough.html

MIT Professor Berthold Horn has developed a system that would tame traffic jams by coordinating cruise control among all the cars. For more information, see http://web.mit.edu/press/2013/algorithm-could-mitigate-freeway-backups.html

Finally, for those drivers who end up being pursued by the police, law enforcement agencies have a new tool from StarChase that’s being tested now. It enables the police to shoot GPS locators on the target vehicles so they don’t have to engage in one of those dangerous car chases.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/73512317522/images-of-moving ]

January 9, 2014

Are MOOCs Failing?

There have been recent articles featuring primarily Sebastian Thrun, the earlier leader of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and founder of the company, Udacity, which specializes in developing and delivering MOOCs.

The first was a piece in Fast Company about how Thrun has been disappointed by the experience of MOOCs. This was followed by a more positive piece in the New York Times about changes in MOOCs that are being considered in order to address their failures. The failures turn out to be the small percentage of people who actually attend the full course and the fact that most of them already have degrees.

However, the discussion might be misleading. It not so much whether online courses are good or bad, but how it is very difficult to succeed with a new innovation by casting it as a minor modification of something that already exists. In this case, the idea that online learning should be very much like a typical college course, but just online, may not have been an innovative enough idea. For example, the Khan Academy, which packages learning into ten minute videos that anyone can access, is a much greater change from convention and has also been much more successful.

Indeed, the fact that many in the MOOCs already have degrees maybe should make MOOC developers reconsider their target. Perhaps MOOCs will be much more appealing as a cost-effective means of lifelong learning for those who cannot afford the time or additional money to attend college than for those who would be college students.

In a knowledge age, the biggest challenge is how to provide learning opportunities for all adults – all of whom need to continue to learn.

(Disclosure: While this blog has had previous posts on higher education, it is now more relevant since I was recently appointed to the board of the Westchester Community College. Of course, my views do not represent those of the College now, or as it may turn out, even in the future 😉

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/72768461219/are-moocs-failing]