April 2016 – Looking Forward

April 27, 2016

Tech Frontiers On The Farm

Farming is a remote, not well understood, occupation for most people
who live in cites. So the technology frontiers being pursued by farmers
is one of the most interesting and unreported stories. But I’ve only
touched on this topic before, especially in my report about very
innovative areas of rural Netherlands.

In this post, I’m writing
about some things on the agricultural tech frontier that have caught my
eye. But this only is a sample – one that doesn’t even cover biological
engineering on the farm. There is so much going on in ag tech that a
single blog post cannot capture it all, even if it were limited to the
US which is certainly not the only place this technology is developing.

As Cory Reed, vice president of John Deere – a company most of us associate with traditional tractors – has said:

“We are on the cusp of the next innovation wave of digital agriculture.”

The Tech Products

The
various tech products cover everything from sensors and drones to
assess the condition of soil and crops to sensors and locators on
livestock to robotic farm machinery that does what was once back
breaking work.

More diverse farm robots may emerge from the program that the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) US Department of Agriculture announced a few months ago.

The
app phenomenon has also come to agriculture. LambTracker is a
smartphone app to track sheep. ThermalAid measures heat stress on
cattle.

You don’t even need to have a large farm to benefit from this developing technology. For example, there’s the Edyn Smart Garden System with its sensor stick.

And for more urban farmers, there is technology for vertical, indoor farms from a completely automated one to one that cuts out any transportation costs by being placed in a store.

Big Data On The Farm

With
all the data from sensors and drones collected on farms, it was only a
matter of time before the big data movement hit the world of
agriculture. As an example, Farmobile, has opened up its Data Store in Minnesota, where “farmers now have the ability to sell their agronomic and machine data to vetted third parties.”

Another company, the Farmers Business Network,
hopes to help farmers by enabling them to share their data. In that
way, FBN proposes to “access agriculture’s largest database of real
world seed performance” and thus “unlock profitable, actionable insights
from all your data”.

Startups & Investments

If you’re not
involved in agriculture or rural development, you might nevertheless be
thinking that this might be a good undiscovered market to invest in.
Sorry, you’ll have to get in line. Other investors are ahead of you
already, even in places where these investors are often hidden – for
example, in San Francisco where AgTech2050 held its World Agri-Tech Investment Summit last month, in Silicon Valley where the Third Annual 2016 Silicon Valley AgTech Conference will be held next month and in New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel which is hosting the Global AgInvesting 2016 conference today.

One
recent estimate points to $4.6 billion in investments in ag tech
startups last year, a doubling from the previous year. Just last week, one such company, PrecisionHawk, raised $18 million in funding from Verizon, Yamaha and NTT Docomo.

While
there will always be new investment opportunities, the more positive
part of this story is that this helps to ensure that the billions of us
on earth will not go hungry. For the future of the countryside, this
new technology adds to the attractiveness of rural life and the strength
of the farm economy.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/143481039969/tech-frontiers-on-the-farm]

April 20, 2016

Number Sense & Nonsense

As
you will know from the news media, business executives and the techno-sphere,
we are in the age of big data and analytics.
(Disclosure: I too am part of this trend with my forthcoming course on
leading change in the Applied Analytics Master’s program at Columbia University.)

For
those of us who have been practitioners of analytics, this attention is long
overdue. But there is a certain naiveté
in the breathless stories we have all read and in many of the uses – really misuses
– of analytics that we see now.

Partly to provide a more mature understanding of analytics, Kaiser Fung,
the director of the Columbia program, has written an insightful book
titled “NumberSense”.

Filled with compelling examples, the book is a
general call for more sophistication in this age of big data. I like to
think of it as a warning that a superficial look at the numbers you
first see will not necessarily provide the most accurate picture, any
more than the first thing you see about an unpeeled onion tells you as
much as you can see once it is cut.

Continuing this theme in his recent book, “The End Of Average”, Todd
Rose has popularized the story of the Air Force’s misuse of averages and
rankings after World War II. He describes how the Air Force was faced
with an inexplicable series of accidents despite nothing being wrong
with the equipment or seemingly with the training of the pilots. The
Air Force had even gone to the effort of designing the cockpits to fit
the exact dimensions of the average pilot!

As Rose reports in a recent article:

“In
the early 1950s, the U.S. air force measured more than 4,000 pilots on
140 dimensions of size, in order to tailor cockpit design to the
‘average’ pilot … [But] Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit
within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a
longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length.
Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more
astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the
ten dimensions of size — say, neck circumference, thigh circumference
and wrist circumference — less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be
average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear
and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot.
If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually
designed it to fit no one.”

Rose criticizes the very popular
one-dimension rankings and calls for an understanding of the full
complexity, the multi-dimensional nature of human behavior and
performance. As a Harvard Professor of Education, he puts special
emphasis on the misleading rankings that every student faces.

He shows three ways that these averages can mislead by not recognizing that:

The
one number used to rank someone actually represents multiple dimensions
of skills, personality and the like. Two people can have the same
score, but actually have a very different set of attributes.
Behavior and skill change depending upon context.
The
path to even the same endpoint can be different for two people. While
they may look the same when they get there, watching their progress
shows a different picture. He provides, as an example, the various
patterns of infants learning to walk. Eventually, they all do learn,
but many babies do not follow any standard pattern of doing so.

It
is not too difficult to take this argument back to Michael Lewis’s
portrayal in Moneyball of the way that the Oakland A’s put together a
successful roster by not selecting those who looked like star baseball
athletes – a uni-dimensional, if very subjective, ranking.

Let’s
hope that as big data analytics mature, there are more instances of
Moneyball sophistication and less of the academic rankings that Rose
criticizes.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/143113012009/number-sense-nonsense]

April 5, 2016

The Last Big Barrier To A Rural Renaissance: Healthcare

I’ve written before about the ways that small towns and rural areas
can take advantage of broadband Internet connections to gain access to
global economic opportunities, educational and cultural resources, even
the virtual equivalents of coffee shops that used to be only available
in big cities.

Perhaps the biggest remaining barrier to a 21st century rural renaissance is access to world class health care.

With
that in mind, President Obama’s Rural Council brought together about
three dozen experts to the White House complex last week to identify
innovative ways of bringing health care to the countryside and to
establish a “community of practice” that will help the Obama
administration and hopefully its successor to address the problem.

The
group included:

Federal officials from various agencies, including Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack
Leading broadband providers and the Rural Broadband Association’s CEO, Shirley Bloomfield, and Joshua Seidemann, Vice President of Policy (who helped organize this meeting)
Exemplary providers of tele-health, and
A
couple of other experts, including myself (in my role as Senior Fellow
of the Intelligent Community Forum and director of its New Connected
Countryside initiative)

This “convening” was led by Doug O’Brien, Senior White House Advisor for Rural Affairs.

It
was noted, although not news to those around the table, that the nearly
60 million Americans who live in rural areas were hit especially hard
by the Great Recession. Their local economies have taken longer to
recover, still not back to pre-recession employment levels.

But the comparisons of rural versus urban health care were most striking. Here are just some highlights:

Rural areas have higher rates of disease and higher mortality rates than urban areas. In 1980, the rural mortality rate was 2% worse than the urban rate and now it’s 13% worse.
While
approximately one in six Americans live in rural areas, only one in ten
physicians practice there. There are even fewer medical specialists per
capita.
Suicide rates are higher and getting worse in rural
areas. Along with a growing drug abuse problem, this is a reflection of a
growing need for mental health services.

None of these
medical problems are helped by the fact that rural residents are poorer
and less likely to have health insurance. Of course, given the lack of
sufficient nearby medical resources, rural residents need to travel
further – often hours further – than their urban counterparts.

In
the Internet age, that last problem should be able to be mostly overcome
with health care delivered remotely. So most of the meeting was
devoted learning about the use and deployment of tele-health care. In
this post, I won’t be able to describe all of them or any one of them in
detail, but here are some that stood out to me:

Using cost-effective solutions, like iPads, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
has established a network of rural tele-health services. This even
includes virtual group sessions for people with drug addictions.

The
US Department of Veterans Affairs has pioneered the use of virtual ICUs
in its rural clinics and facilities. With a fully developed set of
tele-health tools, to the patients and local staff, it’s like having the
expert ICU doctor at the bedside. As a byproduct of these virtual
ICUs, the medical staff at these facilities are also getting an
education in newer and better medical techniques.

Through East Carolina University School of Medicine, there is now a tele-psychiatry network in North Carolina. The relatively low cost of making tele-psychiatry available is helpful, given the increasing need for mental health services.

Obviously,
many rural areas do not yet have the broadband which is necessary to
deliver these services. But there are clearly broadband providers,
especially telecommunications coops, which are up to the task. We heard
about just two of those who had completed gigabit deployments to every
household in their rural areas in Kentucky and North Carolina. One of
those, Peoples Rural Telephone Coop was reported on in a Daily Yonder article last month, “One of the Nation’s Fastest Networks Serves Two of Its Poorest Counties”.

Even
before the recent recession, there were long term trends in rural
America that called out for a different and new economic strategy. In
his closing remarks, Secretary Vilsack noted that, since 1950,
agricultural productivity has increased a hundred fold on 27% less land
and with 22 million fewer farmers. So the challenge today is what
opportunities and quality of life can the remaining families have.

The
people around that table last week and ICF believe that a revived rural
community can be built upon the intelligent and creative use of
technology – and improving access to quality healthcare is just one very
important example.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/142294161516/the-last-big-barrier-to-a-rural-renaissance]