November 2015 – Looking Forward

November 30, 2015

Good Books Read In 2015

At the end of the year, there are many top 10 lists of the best
movies, best books, etc. of the year. Here’s my list of the best
non-fiction books I’ve read this year. But it has only eight books and
some were published earlier than this year since, like the rest of you,
I’m always behind in my reading no matter how many books, articles, and
blogs I read.

Although some are better than others, none of these
books is perfect. What book is perfect? But they each provide the reader
with a new way of looking at the world, which in turn is, at a minimum,
thought provoking and, even better, helps us to be more innovative.

I’ve
highlighted the major theme of each, but these are books that have many
layers and depth so my summary only touches on what they offer.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

We’ve
had a few scary books out this past year or so about how robots are
going to take our work from us and enslave us. Kaplan’s brilliant book,
published this year, is much more nuanced and sophisticated. It is not
just “ripped from today’s headlines”. Instead, Kaplan provides history
and deep context. Especially interesting is his discussion of the legal
and ethical issues that arise when we use more of these
artificially-intelligent devices.

Creating the Learning Society by Joseph Stiglitz & Bruce Greenwald

Joseph
Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, has been better known for
“The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them”
which was published this year and is a sequel to his earlier book on the
subject, “The Price of Inequality” (2012). While those deal with the
important issue of economic inequality, at this point, that’s not news
to most of us.

Less well known, if more rigorous as a work of
economics, is his 2013 book “Creating the Learning Society”. With all
the talk about the importance of lifelong learning and innovation to
succeed in the economy of this century, there have been few in-depth
analyses of how that translates into economic growth and greater
incomes. Nor has there been much about what are the appropriate
government policies to have a modern economy to grow. Stiglitz provides
both in this book.

The End Of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Talking
about lifelong learning, I found this book thought-provoking,
especially as a college trustee. Published this year, the rap on it is
that it’s all about massive open online courses (MOOCs), but it is
actually about much more than that. It provides a good history of the
roles that colleges have been asked to play and describes a variety of
ways that many people are trying to improve the education of students.

BiblioTech by John Palfrey

John
Palfrey was the patron of Harvard Law School’s Library Lab, one of the
nation’s leading intellectual property experts and now chairman of the Digital Public Library of America,
among other important positions. BiblioTech, which was published
earlier this year, describes a hopeful future for libraries – including a
national network of libraries. (Readers of this blog won’t be surprised
that Palfrey and I share many views, although he put these ideas all
together in a book and, of course, elaborated on them much more than I
do in these relatively short posts.)

Too Big To Know by David Weinberger

About
five years ago, I got to work a bit with David Weinberger when he was
one of the leaders of the library innovation lab at Harvard Law School,
in addition to his work at Harvard’s Berkman Center. When I was
introduced to the library lab’s ambitious projects, I joked with David
that his ultimate ambition was to do nothing less than organize all of
the world’s knowledge for the 21st century. This book, which was
published a year later is, I suppose, a kind of response to that
thought.

My reading of Weinberger’s big theme is that we can no
longer organize the world’s knowledge completely. The network itself has
the knowledge. As the subtitle says: now “the smartest person in the
room is the room” itself. Since not all parts of the network are
directly connected, there’s also knowledge yet to be realized.

Breakpoint by Jeff Stibel

Despite
the overheated subtitle this book, this book, published in 2013, is
somewhat related to Weinberger’s book in that it focuses on the network.
Using analogies from ant colonies and the neuron network of the human
mind, Stibel tries to explain the recent past and the future of the
Internet. As the title indicates, a key concept of the book is the
breakpoint – the point at which the extraordinary growth of networks
stops and its survival depends upon enrichment, rather than attempts at
continuing growth. As a brain scientists, he also argues that the
Internet, rather than any single artificially intelligent computer, is
really the digital equivalent of the human brain.

Previously I’ve devoted whole posts to two other significant books. Just follow the links below:

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull (2014)
The Patient Will See You Now by Eric Topol

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/134268683548/good-books-read-in-2015]

November 19, 2015

Urban-Rural Interdependency

Much of the discussion about economic growth and the availability of
broadband assumes there is a vast gulf between rural and urban areas.
I’ve written before about how, in some ways, trends in this century seem to be leading to something of a convergence of rural and urban areas.

So
I thought it especially interesting that the NTCA–The Rural Broadband
Association yesterday hosted a policy meeting in the US Capitol that was
titled: “Beyond Rural Walls: Identifying Impacts and Interdependencies
Among Rural and Urban Spaces”.

I was there for the panel
discussion, along with Professor Sharon Strover of the College of
Communication at University of Texas in Austin and Professor Charles
Fluharty of the Department of Health Management and Policy at the
University of Iowa (who is also the CEO of the Rural Policy Research
Institute).

We covered the changing demographics and ambiguities
in the boundaries between urban and rural, broadband deployment and
adoption, and how to measure both the interdependencies between these
areas as well as the impact of broadband communications. Perhaps there
were too many knotty issues for one morning!

Since the NTCA will be making available further information about this, I’m now just going to highlight my own observations.

There
are many examples of rural communities using broadband in innovative
and intelligent ways. One example is the work of the counties in
Appalachian Kentucky, one of the poorest parts of the US.

But most
of these communities don’t know about each other, which means that each
has to re-invent the wheel instead of learning from others’ experience
and experiments. That’s one reason ICF is planning a global virtual
summit for these communities.

The limited distribution of this
news also encourages major national/global philanthropic foundations to
give up hope for rural areas in the US. Dr. Fluharty noted that less
than five percent of philanthropy goes to American rural areas, although
twenty percent of the population lives there.

He also emphasized
that doing something about rural broadband and development is a national
issue, not something to be merely dealt with locally. He even
classified it as a national security issue because the countryside holds
so much of the country’s critical resources – our food, not the least.

The
problem is that for many national leaders, especially members of
Congress, the mental image of the countryside is of past decline and
abandonment. The national media reinforce that image. So they may feel
it’s a hopeless problem and/or have no idea what might be happening that
ought to be encouraged.

Many of our current national leaders also
have forgotten the common understanding of the founders of the USA that
a large country would only succeed if it was brought together. That’s
why building postal roads is one of the few specific responsibilities
given to Congress in the constitution. It’s why the Erie Canal was
built, the Land Grant colleges, etc. We seem to have forgotten what led
to our success. In this century, physical roads aren’t enough. Digital
communications are just as important.

Of course, not all public
officials are oblivious. There was a keynote by Lisa Mensah, Under
Secretary for Rural Development of the US Department of Agriculture.

Representative
Bill Johnson (Republican of Ohio’s 6th District) opened the conference
with a statement about the importance of rural broadband for urban
economies. Senator Al Franken of Minnesota closed the conference by
saying he viewed rural broadband in the same way people viewed rural
electrification decades ago – a basic necessity and common right of the
American people. Or, as he said “A no-brainer”.

Along with these
misperceptions on the part of media, national officials and foundations
is the failure to recognize the increasing integration of rural and
urban areas. The boundaries are getting fuzzy.

Even residence is
no longer clear. There are an increasing number of people – especially
knowledge workers and creative folks – who may spend 3-4 days a week in a
city and 3-4 days a week in the countryside. They may contact you, via
broadband Internet, and you won’t know which location they’re in. Are
they rural residents or urban residents or is that an increasingly
meaningless question?

Finally, in the question-and-answer part of
the conference, one of the many operators of rural communications
companies there pointed out that they know how to deploy broadband and
run it, but that their communities need help figuring out what to do
with it. Of course, that provided me an opportunity to discuss ICF’s
accelerator program and workshops that help community leaders do exactly
that.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/133528658560/urban-rural-interdependency]

November 12, 2015

Why Is Government So Slow To Collaborate On Software?

Open source software is free and is often developed by collaborations
of volunteer programmers around the world, along with staff at big
companies who find it in their common interest that this software be
maintained.

Open source software has been an enormous success.
Most of the web services on the Internet are delivered by Apache
software on the Linux platform – both open source projects. Indeed,
there are over 25 million open source projects listed on the open source
directory of GitHub.

Despite the billions of dollars spent by the
public sector for software each year, the public sector’s share of
those open source projects has been much smaller than its share of the
overall economy. This small commitment to open source is not what you’d
expect considering the situation of the public sector compared to the
private sector.

First, unlike private companies, governments
cannot really consider their software to be proprietary and a key
strategic advantage in competing with others. Taxpayers have already
paid for the software and, like much else in government, it is supposed
to be open and available (unless security or privacy is at stake).

Second,
there are many programmers who would help to build and maintain public
sector software out of civic spirit and a recognition that they too
benefit as citizens.

Code For America
has been an outstanding example, but not the only example, of the
willingness of software developers to help even local governments. Ben Balter has been a champion for public sector open source as well. The GovCode
website proclaims:

“Code for your country! We believe in a government
of the hackers, for the hackers and by the hackers”.

[That’s hackers in
the good sense of creative, expert programmers.]

Third, open
source software is often much less expensive than commercial,
proprietary products and just as often better quality. This is
especially true in the public sector where many of the companies
providing products for various special purposes – like jail management or health –
aren’t very big themselves and thus their products are often constrained
or sometimes buggy.

It’s hard to come by the total
number of software developers in governments or total expenditures for
software development – or even packaged software where open source might
substitute. But considering how many government agencies there are, it
is likely that government at all levels has a lot more developers in total than these
companies.

Of course, in fits and starts, open source has come to government, with 2012-2013 a recent peak of interest.

The US Defense Department issued guidelines
for use of open source in that agency. And the US Federal government
has, officially, been an advocate for open source software – at least
within itself. It is not easy to determine what percentage of software
the Feds have actually shifted from proprietary to open source.

Also, a few years ago, the Open Source Institute
dedicated itself to

“promote the development and implementation of open
source software solutions within U.S. Federal, state, and local
government agencies.”

Alas, currently it seems to be in a quiescent
state.

More recently, Github has created a platform for public sector sharing. But much of what is being shared is data or best practices, not software.

It’s
worth noting that, despite the efforts of the former DOD CIO and groups
within the General Services Administration, like 18F, too little of that movement
has been the result of leadership from within the government. Most has
come from outsiders offering to help.

Most significant is this
nuance: even when there is interest, government policies on open source
are focused on using open source software developed elsewhere, like
Linux, and not necessarily contributing to that software or creating new
open source software.

A key missing element in the failure to
make open source development the standard approach in the public sector is lack of
collaboration among governments. This is hard to understand in an era
when public agencies are strapped for cash. Each public agency may have
only a small software budget. However, pooling their financial and human
resources will achieve a scale that could allow for the creation of
good, feature-rich software for all of them.

This collaboration
need not stop at national borders. For example, the requirements for
software to manage the vaccination of a population are very much
consistent in the public health agencies of many countries. Moreover,
several trends should make collaboration easier – the shift to cloud
computing, new forms of communications that can ease discussions among
developers and the decreasing cost of building software compared to
years past.

It is now possible for government technologists, with
support from citizens, to truly scale up their open source software
development efforts.

So what are public officials, especially
public sector CIOs, waiting for?

If you have the answer or, better yet,
suggestions on how to make public sector open source more widely
adopted, please let us all know.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/133033805117/why-is-government-so-slow-to-collaborate-on]

November 3, 2015

Reality Becomes More Blended

I’ve blogged before about the blending of the digital and physical to create new kinds of hybrid spaces – here, here, here, here and here. This blending opens up all kinds of possibilities for new experiences in cities, in entertainment, education, and elsewhere.

(We, at the Gotham Innovation Greenhouse, hope to move this forward as well in a few months – but that’s another story.)

Of course, blended reality is not yet part of the everyday lives of most people.

That
hasn’t stopped creative technologists. There have been several
developments this year which illustrate new kinds of blended reality.

Here are some that caught my attention.

HoloLens

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its HoloLens
and “Windows Holographic Platform”. The HoloLens is their version of
virtual reality that lets you see three-dimensional holographic images
in the space around you.

While the obvious gaming uses have already been reported
on, there are other uses, for example, enabling a person to envision
what a building interior would look like from the viewpoint of someone
walking inside. The latter was shown at the Architecture and Design Film Festival.

Of course, since this is a Microsoft product, there have been both enthusiastic and not-so-enthusiastic reviews, sometimes in the same magazine, as you can see if you follow the links.

MagicLeap

Microsoft
also doesn’t always provide leading edge technologies, so there has
been much interest – but not too much information – about a
Florida-based company called Magic Leap which is going beyond the
HoloLens. The company proclaims its aim to mix the physical and virtual
worlds.

It has received investments from major competitors of Microsoft,
but until two weeks ago didn’t show much. Then it released a video
showing a person interacting with virtual objects, robots and the solar
system. The company has assured everyone that the video was recorded
just as it happened, without special effects.

Magic Leap’s CEO, Rony Abovitz, was reported
to say

“We are sensing the world — the floor, the people. We’re doing
real-time understanding of the world, so that all these objects can know
where they sit.”

While Microsoft and Magic Leap seem to be mainly
focused on blending reality indoors, others are demonstrating ways that
the virtual and physical can work together outdoors or both indoors and
outdoors.

Samsung

In June, Samsung showed
the latest generation of see-through 55 inch OLED display that seems to
be able to really handle high transparency and strong light going
through it. To add to the feeling, the company has combined it with
Intel’s technology to see and understand what a person is doing with
what’s on the screen.

Trilite

While Microsoft and Oculus, among
others, are busy creating devices you can wear over your eyes, in a
sense the real challenge is to create 3D illusions without the need for
glasses. The Technical University of Vienna and Trilite announced their prototype earlier this year.

As they describe it:

“A sophisticated laser system sends laser
beams into different directions. Therefore, different pictures are
visible from different angles. The angular resolution is so fine that
the left eye is presented a different picture than the right one,
creating a 3D effect… 3D movies in the cinema only show two different
pictures – one for each eye. The newly developed display, however, can
present hundreds of pictures. Walking by the display, one can get a view
of the displayed object from different sides, just like passing a real
object.”

2wenty Lightworks

More ephemeral, but more dramatic, is the work of the Los Angeles light and media artist, 2wenty, who has created dancing lightworks, such as this:

Pixelstick

And for those us who want to paint with light, there is Pixelstick,
which contains 200 full color LEDs controlled by a programmed SD card.
Although it started as a Kickstarter campaign two years ago, it has
graduated from that status.

There’s more background in a video at https://youtu.be/TjXvqfWfRi4

This
blending of the physical and the virtual, of art and technology, is at
the very least a lot of fun. More later on its broader significance.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/132476393322/reality-becomes-more-blended]