Tag: internet

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The New Urban Exodus

During the last half of the last century, there was much concern
about people leaving cities. Several books explored the phenomenon,
including one titled “Urban Exodus”, a phrase that became almost a rallying cry for urbanists and urban planners.

Many of the cities – even the largest ones – lost population as people moved out to the suburbs and even further to ex-urbs.

Then
over the last decade or two, with a general decrease in crime and
the arrival of both immigrants and young people who grew up elsewhere,
many cities – although certainly not all – were re-populated and turned
around. We read many stories about how these new arrivals are bringing a
new vibrancy to urban areas. And we frequently hear about the various
predictions of the continuing urbanization of the world’s population.

Of course, rural life continues to have its attractive qualities for some people. So, about two years ago, I asked “Will The Best & Brightest Return To The Countryside?”
That blog post even had a reference to a New York Times story about
older folks returning to rural life after business careers elsewhere – “A Second Career, Happily in the Weeds”.

A necessary youth movement among farmers has also developed. In western Canada, there is the Young Agrarians
whose motto is “growing the next generation of farmers and food lovers
in Canada”. On the other side of the continent, the Virtual Grange has
run young farmers conferences.

Even more recently, with the
diffusion of information and communications technology, there has
started a new urban exodus, with a more significant twist. This exodus
is not about the movement to the suburbs of middle class families, whose
breadwinners work for large corporations. Rather it is about creative
folks, artists, and others from cities, going past the suburbs, to live
in rural areas where they can practice their craft and/or become
farmers.

The magazine, Modern Farmer, was established to serve
this group of people – in its own special hipster way that would
otherwise be associated with parts of San Francisco or Brooklyn. In a
recent issue, the magazine contained an article “At Home with Jacob and Alissa Hessler of Urban Exodus”.

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The appropriately named Urban Exodus website describes its founders and cohorts this way:

“The
new age of back to landers. Urban Exodus gives an intimate glimpse into
the spaces and lives of creative urbanites who chose to leave the
concrete jungle for greener pastures. In addition to the idyllic imagery
of rustic farmhouses, working studios and cabins nestled in the woods,
are interviews detailing their journey. These interviews highlight the
triumphs and the struggles they have experienced and the inspirations
they have found since choosing to live a life away from the urban
existences they once knew.“

It’s filled with stories about people like those pictured here:

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Nor is this just a North American phenomenon. William van den Broek wrote about the same situation in France:

“Many
cities of the world are facing an unexpected phenomenon: urban exodus.
No longer constrained by a localized workspace, an increasing number of
freelancers are enjoying mobility, and ultimately leaving stressful and
polluted cities. After the rural exodus, following the industrial
revolution, are we now facing a digital urban exodus. Perhaps this
movement is now following the digital revolution?”

Any social
trend is complex, especially in the world today. So, for some people,
it’s not a matter of taking leave from the city, but living in both the
city and the country – a combination that technology also makes
possible.  I mentioned Brooklyn before as one of the centers of the
young creatives on the East Coast. Among those splitting their time in
city and country are young Brooklyn families who maintain residences
both in Brooklyn’s urban core and more than a hundred miles away in the
rural parts of the Hudson Valley and Catskills Mountains.

Unfortunately,
rural areas on the wrong side of the digital divide will not be very
inviting to this potential influx of sophisticated folks because those
areas lack the required connectivity to the rest of the world.
Nevertheless, with the creative and idealistic people behind it, this
new urban exodus is very much worth watching.

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/139052799904/the-new-urban-exodus]

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Talk To Anyone In Any Language?

It’s been clear for some time that the Internet can connect everyone
around the globe – in theory. This opens up tremendous potential for
collaboration, mutual economic growth, education and a variety of other
benefits. We’ve seen many of those benefits, but we still haven’t
touched the surface.

Among other reasons the true potential of a
globally connected world hasn’t yet been realized is that many people
still can’t communicate when they communicate – they don’t speak the
same language.

So it has been interesting to me to see the recent
improvements in real time translation on the Internet. I’m not talking
about the translation of text that has been around for a couple of years
through, for example, Google Translate of websites or even the very
useful app, WordLens, which I have used in my travels when I had to read
foreign signs.

No, the new improvements are in speech – taking
speech from one language and ultimately, quickly converting it correctly
into another language. Although text translation is not easy, speech
introduces much greater challenges.

These new real-time voice
translation services and devices aren’t perfect, but they’ve improved
enough that they are usable. And that usability will begin to make all
the difference.

Last year, Google took its Translate app into speech. You can see a quick video example here. Google claims it can handle 90 of the world’s languages.

Then,
more recently, Skype made its Translator generally available, although
it’s clearly still in a sort of test mode. For English, Spanish, French,
German, Italian and Mandarin, Skype describes its capabilities quite simply:

“You
can call almost anyone who has Skype. It will translate your
conversation into another language in near real-time. What someone else
says is translated back in your language. An on-screen transcript of
your call is displayed.”

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They have a charming video of school children in the US and Mexico talking to each other somewhat awkwardly.

There’s another video, titled “Speak Chinese Like A Local” with an American photojournalist in China arranging a tour for himself.

This translation work hasn’t only be done in the US. The Japanese have also been busy at this task, in their own way.

While not using the Internet, a Panasonic translator – in the form of a smart megaphone – will be tested at Narita Airport to translate between Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English.

Then there’s the “ili”,
a portable device (also not connected to the Internet) which translates
between Japanese, Chinese and English. The company describes it as “the
world’s first wearable translator for travelers”. They’ve posted a
video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6ngM0LHxuU. The video is a strange combination of cute and creepy, but it gets the point across.

These developments have led some stories
to proclaim the arrival of the universal translator of Star Trek. But
as Trekkie experts say, unlike the one in Star Trek, this doesn’t read brains, which may have been a necessity to communicate with non-human species.  

On
the other hand, if you only want to talk with other people, the new
language translators are pretty good substitutes 😉 With more use, they
can only get better, faster, all the while helping to improve
understanding between people around the world.

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© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/137156470627/talk-to-anyone-in-any-language]

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Older Suburban Cities: The New Startups Of Metro Regions

Last week, I was in Ridgeland, Mississippi, a suburban city of 25,000 outside of Jackson.  It is the second city in the state to adopt high speed broadband Internet in response to the challenge by the regional communications company, C-Spire.  For most of the day, I met with city aldermen and other public officials to discuss the various ways that broadband provides the foundation for economic development, learning, healthcare, even quality of life and tourism.

C-Spire also has its headquarters in Ridgeland, so you’d think that adoption would be widespread.  But the pattern of adoption in Ridgeland is similar to elsewhere.  It often is picked up by the more educated and affluent section of the town and slower to be adopted by others – including those who would most benefit from expanded opportunity.

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It was very encouraging to see the public officials focusing on broadband.  With the local public leadership strongly behind this effort to position Ridgeland for the 21st century, the likelihood that all will benefit will be much greater than in other cities I’ve seen where the local leaders do not seem to understand.

Public officials are critical in creating a 21st century intelligent community because they have the necessary political skills.  While nothing is ever easy in public affairs, it is relatively easier to build a highway – the organizations and companies, who are the usual participants in civic discussions, grew up with older infrastructure investments.  

Broadband-based community building is new and may deliver benefits after the leaders of those organizations have retired.

So, public leaders need to widen the circle of people involved in envisioning the future of their communities.  For an intelligent community initiative to succeed, it needs to include the newer, growing parts of the economy – entrepreneurs, young people, tech businesses, artists, freelancers of all kinds, as well as the many others whose earnings depend on their knowledge.  

Ridgeland also fits into another pattern I’ve observed over the last couple of years – in cities as far apart and different culturally from it as New Westminster in British Columbia, Canada and Dublin, Ohio and Yonkers, New York.

Older, small cities in what is now a suburban ring are often the places where the most interesting adoption of technology is occurring.  These cities are the most far-sighted and devote the most effort to planning their futures.

And it’s not just a matter of having money.  Some are relatively affluent, but these cities are generally in the mid-range of income or even below the mid-range.
Much more than other places, they act as if they are in startup mode – and their leaders are, in a sense, public entrepreneurs.  Of course, like startups in the private sector, a few will fail in their efforts, many will achieve reasonable, if not spectacular, success and a few will achieve legendary status.

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By contrast, big cities often seem to sit on their laurels.  Besides, with big established interests and big bureaucracies, they are very hard to change and to achieve dramatic transformation.

Unfortunately, not all small cities are jumping on the opportunities presented by a globally connected world.  Too many smaller cities have suffered too long from the loss of their industrial base and population.  They have yet to overcome their despondency about the present, never mind their fear of a worse future.  

They should look to these similar-sized “startup” cities as examples to emulate.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved
[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/134727161698/older-suburban-cities-the-new-startups-of-metro]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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:

© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

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

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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”.

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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.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

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

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The Virtual City-State Of All Ohio?

Last week, I attended the conference that launched the new Global Institute for the Study of the Intelligent Community, based in Dublin, Ohio.

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In the annual evaluation by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF),
Dublin has been among the most intelligent communities in the world for
the last few years. Nearby Columbus, Ohio was designated the most
intelligent community this past June.

The institute will share
innovations and best practices to help make communities more prosperous,
livable, resilient and intelligent. Although using broadband and
technology is a part of the story, the institute is part of the ICF
movement which has distinguished itself by its emphasis as well on all
the other factors that make a community intelligent. As such, the effort
to become an intelligent community involves all elements of a
community, not just technologists. Much of the discussion encouraged
leaders from Dublin, Columbus and other places in Ohio to think about
what a successful intelligent community means and how to measure it.

Dana
McDaniel, who had been in charge of Dublin’s economic development
strategy and is now its city manager, organized and led the conference.
In the moments when people had a chance to outline their longer term
vision, he had an intriguing thought. He wants to unify and treat Ohio
as the first intelligent community that encompasses a whole state.

This
reminded me of my work on technology-based economic development in
Massachusetts a few years ago. Massachusetts’ problem was that the
Boston/Cambridge area of the state was its primary economic engine, but
that the rest of the state, especially the central region, had suffered
economically.

Several states have a similar situation with only
one truly prosperous region. New York, Illinois, Colorado and Washington
are reasonably good examples of the problem.

So we came up with a
plan that would use broadband connectivity to link the rest of
Massachusetts to the Boston area. We knew this might be fraught with
political objections from other parts of the state not wanting to lose
their identity by being considered virtual suburbs of Boston.

Instead,
we were trying to find a way to link together the whole state. This
would not only provide resources and potential financing from Boston for
those elsewhere, but just as important it could provide people in
Boston with new entrepreneurial ideas that could only flourish in areas
with a different business atmosphere.

While it certainly has
pockets of relative affluence and poverty, Ohio is actually not one of
those states with a single economic engine. Despite that – or maybe
because of that – the idea of weaving together all the communities in a
state is germinating there.

By contrast, some states that do have
the problem of a concentration of prosperity seem to be going in the
opposite direction – splitting themselves into non-cooperating regions,
thus diminishing the state’s overall impact and putting every region in a
weaker competitive position.

I’ve noted before that
communications technology today makes possible a virtual metropolis
created through the linked combination of rural areas.

Ohio’s
variation on the theme is also an interesting development to watch. It
may well position Ohio as the forerunner for economic growth for the
rest of the USA – a 21st century virtual version of the economically
dominant city-states of the European Renaissance.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved
[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/132017256455/the-virtual-city-state-of-all-ohio]

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8 Trends Create 8 Opportunities For 21st Century Libraries

The fifth annual worldwide virtual conference about the future of libraries in the digital age, Library 2.0, is being held today.  I just completed my keynote presentation.

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Too often, discussions about libraries focus on how technological and economic trends are assaulting them.

The
warnings have been around for some time. Twenty years ago at the
General Conference of the International Federation of Library
Associations, Chris Batt, then Director of the Croydon UK Library, gave a
speech on the “The library of the future”.  He said:

“What are
the implications of all for this for the future of public libraries? …
The answer is that while we cannot be certain about the future for our
services, we can and should be developing a vision which encompasses and
enriches the potential of the Internet. If we do not do that then
others will; and they will do it less well.”

So I followed the advice attributed to President Lincoln,

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

And
I chose instead to focus on the positive and the pro-active in my
keynote to the conference. I aimed to encourage the audience to push the
envelope, going beyond the constraints in their thinking about the role
of the library.

Its title tells the story: “How The Future
Requires Us To Re-envision Libraries: Trends In Technology, Society, The
Economy And Government Provide New Opportunities For Libraries”.

The
theme was that librarians should not just wait and see how to respond
to this century’s trends, but instead seize the opportunities these
trends open up and provide leadership to define the future of libraries
and society in our knowledge-based economy.

Here then are the eight trends I discussed and how each opens up another opportunity for library leadership in this century:

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If you’d like to see the presentation, it’s at https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/recording/playback/link/table/dropin?sid=2008350&suid=D.CC1B958CD5B8C600676595BA71FF55

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved
[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/131572189014/8-trends-create-8-opportunities-for-21st-century]

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The Digital Imperative Of Rural Libraries

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The maker movement is one of the hottest trends in the public library world. Maker spaces in libraries have the latest in 3D printing technology, digital media tools and other tools for the creative person who wants to make things. These are full-fledged STEAM (science, tech, engineering, arts and math) labs.

As you might expect, there are maker spaces somewhere in most major urban and suburban libraries.

But what is perhaps surprising and intriguing is the growth of maker spaces in small towns and rural areas — and why maker spaces are especially needed in those places and why those areas are fertile ground for maker spaces.

The countryside is known for the mechanical skills of many of its residents. Perhaps these skills were developed in response to distance from major service hubs and the necessity to keep farm and household equipment going.

For at least the last ten years, much traditional mechanical equipment has become computerized. And engines have become more reliable. So mechanical skills just aren’t as useful anymore.

Or maybe they are. That is what I think has caught the attention of rural librarians. Leah Hamilton, the manager of the Phelps Library in a small upstate New York town that had one of the first makerspaces in the USA, puts it this way:

“The library is a place for idea-sharing, … Our region has a wealth of manufacturing industries, and these businesses require well-trained, highly qualified employees. … We can provide the tools for inspiration of invention and the betterment of people’s livelihoods.”

Considering their limited budgets, it’s amazing how many of these libraries in rural areas have built makerspaces.

These are in small towns in Wisconsin, with populations well under 10,000 residents, like Sauk City’s 3D printer or Lomira’s MediaLab. They’re in the old, but small (population 12,000), city of Beaufort, South Carolina.

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A couple of years ago, the Idaho Commission for Libraries began its “Make It At The Library” project, a network of makerspaces in small libraries across the state.

There are small and rural libraries with makerspaces arising in places as widespread as Maine, Montana, New Mexico, small town New Jersey, Canada and as far as the United Kingdom and New Zealand!

As interesting as the adoption of makerspaces is, it is part of a larger picture about the technology and leadership role of libraries in small towns and rural areas.

A few months ago, Professor Brian Whitacre of Oklahoma State University and Professor Colin Rhinesmith of the University of Oklahoma published interested research that dealt with another part of this larger picture:

“Rural libraries have long been a crucial part of the small-town way of life … Now we’ve found through a new study that rural libraries may also provide another important benefit: They may increase local rates of household broadband adoption.

“Our study found that, even after controlling for other things that likely influence broadband adoption (such as levels of income, education, and age), an additional library in a rural county was associated with higher residential broadband adoption rates … libraries were the only type of ‘community anchor institution’ to show any kind of relationship.”

Whether it is makerspaces or enabling necessary connections to the global Internet, these rural libraries are playing the role that all libraries should — fulfilling their potential as the central institution in a digital world and a knowledge economy.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/131154892399/the-digital-imperative-of-rural-libraries]

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Engineering Human Biology

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Although information technology companies get most of the attention in discussions of future trends, it’s worth remembering that biotechnology and medical developments will perhaps have a greater impact on our lives going forward.

The engineering of human biology is already moving rapidly, sometimes in ways that are even scarier than the dystopian visions you can read about future computer technology.

In its August issue, WIRED magazine had a story about scientists creating new enhanced capabilities to reorder genes.  The article was titled “Easy DNA Editing Will Remake the World. Buckle Up.” with this teaser:

“We now have the power to quickly and easily alter DNA.  It could eliminate disease.  It could solve world hunger.  It could provide unlimited clean energy.  It could really get out of hand.”

And

“The end of life as we know it”.

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More recently, in another example, researchers at the University of California San Francisco announced that they have created a way to “print” human tissue on demand.  Their goals in the short run are not as dramatic as WIRED portrayed, but the possibilities are also large.

In another form of biological engineering, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University was given an award several months ago by the Defense Department’s DARPA.  While there have been exoskeletons to help soldiers with limb injuries (or just to take a load off their bodies), these have been clunky metallic models.  The scientists at Harvard are to develop a more comfortable, less noticeable, exoskeleton – a Soft Exosuit as described in this video.

A few miles away, however, other scientists are doing away with the need for such external supports in something from science fiction stories – the Massachusetts General Hospital announced in June that its staff had developed a “transplantable bioengineered forelimb”.  The chief researcher at MGH noted:

“Limbs contain muscles, bone, cartilage, blood vessels, tendons, ligaments and nerves – each of which has to be rebuilt and requires a specific supporting structure called the matrix.  We have shown that we can maintain the matrix of all of these tissues in their natural relationships to each other, that we can culture the entire construct over prolonged periods of time, and that we can repopulate the vascular system and musculature.”  

Of course, before we get to these biological futures, there is already computer technology to help our bodies.   The mental health profession has been one of the early adopters of information technology, so let’s start with that.

Thriveport promises its MoodNotes app:

“helps you to: Track your mood and identify what influences it; Develop healthier thinking habits; Learn about “traps” in your thinking style and how to avoid them; Bring new, helpful perspectives to situations; Increase your self-awareness; [and] Reduce your distress and enhance your sense of well-being”

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Along the same lines, the research staff of the University of Rochester “have developed an innovative approach to turn any computer or smartphone with a camera into a personal mental health monitoring device.”  It analyzes “selfie” videos when you use social media.

The number of physical health apps and inexpensive devices available now is too numerous to be called news anymore.  

But a couple of months ago, Australia’s Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics announced that they had “created a simple, portable and economic biosensing device that allows for immediate diagnostic testing of arthritis, cystic fibrosis, acute pancreatitis and other clinical diseases.”  They built it because

“the device has enormous potential for use in point of care medical diagnostics, particularly in remote or developing areas where professional and expensive research laboratory equipment is unavailable”.

They’ve also made their software available so you can convert your smartphone into a “portable bioanalytical devices”.  

Finally, to keep healthy, you apparently not only need to monitor your body, but also to monitor the environment where you live and work.  So along comes the network-connected CubeSensors, which claims that it will “help you discover how small changes in your environment also affect your wellbeing” by observing factors like air quality, air pressure, temperature, humidity, noise and light.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

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The Edgy Post-Industrial Economy

Last week, I wrote about the workforce becoming more freelance and the policies that have been proposed to deal with this change.  In this post, I continue the discussion about work in general and more broadly economic trends.

According to the standard measures, the economy is doing ok.  But there are unsettling, even bizarre, trends that make people feel anxious about their economic future.

For example, much has been made about the shift of jobs to China and India – even in popular culture.  About ten years ago there was a movie, Outsourced, about an American who was sent to India to train his replacements.  

But last month, the New York Times had a story that “Chinese Textile Mills Are Now Hiring in Places Where Cotton Was King”.  As manufacturing costs in the US become relatively competitive again with China, Chinese companies are buying American plants and sending their workers here to train Americans on how to do their jobs – jobs that were once in the USA.

I’ve noted before in this blog that the nature of work life is changing in ways that are more fundamental than whether the work is in the US or China or whether you work as a freelancer or in a traditional job.  Ross Perlin pulled together a list of some of these changes in an article in Fast Company magazine.  Its title: “These Are The New Rules of Work: Forget everything you’ve always known about work. The rules have changed.”

Here’s his list:

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But it’s not just that the nature of work is changing.  Many people worry that old jobs are disappearing and new ones not being created fast enough to replace the old or that the economy is not just changing, but somehow imploding.  

For example, in the cover story of last month’s issue of the Atlantic Magazine, Derek Thompson provided a thorough analysis of these issues in an article titled “A World Without Work: For centuries, experts have predicted that machines would make workers obsolete. That moment may finally be arriving. Could that be a good thing?”

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Of course, there are other, more positive responses, to the changes that are happening.

Some workers love the changes, as Karoli Hindriks, who runs a service that identifies global job opportunities, reported in “On-Demand Employment: How Today’s Workers Are Choosing Journeys Over Jobs”.

Finally, and reminiscent of the old phrase “the King is dead; long live the King”, Robin Chase (founder of ZipCar and since then an evangelist for the sharing economy) has written “Bye, Bye Capitalism. We’re Entering the Age of Abundance.  The old model of unwieldy behemoths is giving way to a new one of collaboration. Welcome to the world of Peers.”

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved
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The Internet Of Things Spreads And Raises Concerns

Although it’s not growing as fast as some people thought a year ago, the Internet of Things continues to be deployed.

While
we often think of the sensors and other aspects of the Internet of
Things being part of the management of large cities or industrial
enterprises, some of the most interesting developments have occurred,
but gone largely unnoticed, on the farm.

A few weeks ago, two articles about this appeared – “The Dawn Of The Smart Farmer: Sowing Sensors And Connecting Crops” and a blog by Steve Lohr (one of the NY Times very best technology reporters) “The Internet of Things and the Future of Farming”.

The
things that are being connected have, so far, been digital devices. But
the Korean company Naran is introducing a micro-robot, called the Push.
Any non-digital switch, like a light switch, can be controlled by this
nearby device, which in turn is connected to a small Prota computer that
tells the little robot when to turn the switch on or off based on a set
of rules set up by the user. There’s also a smartphone app for
preparing these rules or simply controlling the robot directly. 

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Perhaps the greatest potential
of the Internet of Things is as a step to other ways of extending the
Internet. The University of Virginia announced a new way to use regular LED lights:

“It’s
like using fiber optics to communicate – only without the fiber.
Imagine connecting to the Internet through the same room lights that
brighten your day. A University of Virginia engineering professor and
her former graduate student are already there… Their breakthrough means
that data can be transmitted faster with light waves using no more
energy than is already required to run the lights.”

Of course,
problems, like security, are always an issue, even in surprising
quarters. Vint Cerf, the unofficial father of the Internet and Chief
Internet Evangelist at Google, worries that the software behind the
Internet of Things has bugs. Last week, he publicly confessed that “Sometimes I’m terrified by it”.

Andy Greenberg of WIRED magazine has been particularly active reporting on these issues. In July, he wrote how “Hackers Can Disable a Sniper Rifle—Or Change Its Target”.

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In July, starting with another article in WIRED,
the hacking of cars built by major American car manufacturers made big
news. That led to a recall that was a nuisance, a necessary nuisance,
for car owners.

On a more positive note earlier this month, another reporter at WIRED followed up with an article titled “Researchers Hacked a Model S, But Tesla’s Already Released a Patch”
noting that the same Internet of Things which opened up a vulnerability
could also be used by smart companies to close those doors quickly.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

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Lessons From The Intelligent Community Forum Summit

Last week, the Intelligent Community Forum held its annual summit in Toronto.  The underlying theme was “How Intelligent Communities Are Re-Inventing Urban and Rural Planning”, so much of the discussion was about re-invention and innovating.  

In addition to the all-day workshops for large urban jurisdictions and smaller cities/towns/rural areas, all of Friday was devoted to Ideas Day – with a slew of presentations sharing novel approaches to local government and planning.

On Thursday, capping his successful 16 year run as mayor as he retires, Mayor Michael Coleman proudly accepted the award to Columbus, Ohio as the world’s most Intelligent Community this year.

(You can see the full agenda at icfsummit2015.com.  The presentations, including mine, will be available on intelligentcommunity.org in the coming weeks.)

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One of the other highlights of the week was the keynote speech by David Johnston, the Governor General of Canada spoke on June 10th.  Before that, he was the President of the University Of Waterloo, Canada’s premier engineering school.  

Since it was established in the late 1950s, it has become the cradle for a thriving tech innovation community – Blackberry being one if the best known examples. In part, for this reason, he was part of the team in the City of Waterloo who succeeded in being named the most Intelligent Community of the year in 2007.  

He attributed its success to two policies that stand in contrast with the way that many universities try to contain the fruits of innovation within their campuses – thus actually diminishing their innovation.  

The first policy is that the university makes no intellectual property claims on the research done by faculty, researchers or students.   Instead they encourage them to commercialize their research and reap the rewards for themselves and the community.  

The second policy requires coop education of all students.  Each year, every student spends two trimesters in class and one working in a company (for pay) to apply what they’ve learned.  

Finally, it’s worth noting that all of this – the need for innovation, the changes in ways in communities have to plan – is not happening in a vacuum.  

To provide some urgency to these discussions and in case you don’t realize how fast things are changing in what are still the early days of the Internet, Rob McCann, President of ClearCable, gave an interesting presentation on the growth of Internet usage — increasing roughly 50% per year.  (He also made a strong case for the involvement of local government in building out broadband networks, especially in less dense, more rural areas.) 

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

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Libraries: No Future Or Leading The Future?

Twenty years ago at the 1995 General Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), Chris Batt of the Croydon Libraries in the UK gave a talk on the library of the future.  This was his prophetic conclusion:

“What are the implications of all for this [the Internet] for the future of public libraries? … The answer is that while we cannot be certain about the future for our services, we can and should be developing a vision which encompasses and enriches the potential of the Internet. If we do not do that then others will; and they will do it less well.”

So from the relatively early days of the Internet – three years before Google was even founded – libraries have been warned about the challenge to their future.

Although many librarians have been innovative in various ways since then, it is fair to say that during those twenty years many players have been offering services that were once the exclusive function of libraries.

As a headline a month ago in the Washington Post put it: “When Google Is Your Librarian And Starbucks Your WiFi, Do We Still Need Public Libraries?”  (The answer was yes, but clearly enough people think otherwise that the editors thought the question was worth asking.)

Libraries have been challenged even as a source of collected books, with the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription service and similar services from Oyster and Scribd over the last year.  [Skip past the pictures to continue reading.]

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For roughly $120 per year, a person could have access to a very large collection of books.  It would be interesting to see what libraries could do if they had a similar amount of money to work with.  But they don’t.

The most recent year in which national statistics were collected about public libraries is 2012.  Earlier this year (2015), the US Government’s Institute of Museums and Library Services issued its final analysis of that data.  IMLS noted that public library operating expenditures were $35.47 per person – and, of course, that’s for more than just offering e-books.

Of course, libraries are not alone in facing change.   All of us do.

In addition to the Internet revolution we already deal with, there are several technology trends whose impact is only beginning — machine intelligence and analytics, a ubiquitous interface to the Internet and high-quality visual conversations that will finally enable the virtual world to replicate the trust, the serendipity and the nature of normal face-to-face human communications.

These technology trends intertwine with and reinforce trends in the economy and society – the transition in employment to a post-industrial, digital economy where many people will earn their living providing knowledge-based services and intangible products; innovation as the competitive edge in the knowledge economy; the increase in the number of people who are both producers and consumers of content; the resulting requirement for cost-effective lifelong learning for adults.

As with all change, while one part of your world is nibbled away, other opportunities open up.  So it is with libraries.

This is the background, the context, for the Aspen Institute’s creation of a working group on libraries (of which I’m a member) and its report “Rising To The Challenge: Re-envisioning Public Libraries.”   I’ve written about the report itself before.  [Skip past the pictures to continue reading.]

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As part of the effort to disseminate the ideas in the report, I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the New Hampshire Library Trustees Association last week.  I then joined with Maureen Sullivan, former President of the American Library Association and long-time consultant in the field, to run two workshops for the trustees.

The gist of my talk was straightforward.  Libraries do not exist in isolation from the rest of the world.  They need to be embedded in their communities, which means that they need to understand and respond to how their patrons’ lives are changing.  Library leaders need to understand how each trend will have an impact on libraries.

Libraries need to lay the foundation for where they need to be in the future.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but continuing just doing a good job with things as they are now is insufficient and unsustainable.

While the Aspen report notes the continuing importance of the library building, it is more for a future role than merely the warehousing of books.  Moreover, successful libraries services can no longer be constrained by the walls of the library building.  Every space in the community should be considered to be virtually part of the library.  The library should be everywhere – physically and virtually.

Librarians need to provide access and intelligent guidance not just to their local collection, but to a national, eventually international, and fluid combination of materials.  Indeed, the global digital network makes possible an emerging model of networked libraries that promotes economies of scale and broadens each library’s reach.

As Maureen Sullivan has stated:

“With a nationally networked platform, library and other leaders will also have more capacity to think about the work they can do at the national level that so many libraries have been so effective at doing at the state and local levels.” 

Libraries can be the central institution of the knowledge/innovation economy, but to do so they must take the lead in helping their communities deal with the future so that both the libraries and their communities flourish.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

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“You Belong Here” Says It All

Some of us live in places that are lucky enough to have some highly unusual feature that stands out – whether it’s the mountains in Colorado towns or the surf of Key West, Florida or even the sheer scale of New York City.  But unlike those examples, there are many fine places to live which have a high quality of life, but don’t otherwise have an obvious promotable distinction.  

The big question for these places is how to maintain and build on that quality of life in a century that raises new challenges to every place, as more people are able to earn a living no matter where they are – if there’s high-speed Internet connectivity available.

Consider the small city of Clinton, Mississippi.  It has a population of about 25,000 people and is near Jackson, the State Capitol.  Although it is a relatively old city in the state, having been created in the early 1820s, it was known as Jackson’s first suburb.   More recently, other more affluent suburbs have grown up around Jackson with high-end national stores in upscale shopping malls.  

While many small cities dream of having a Fortune 500 company, Clinton had already “done that, been there”.  WorldCom (later MCI Worldcom), for several years the second largest long-distance phone company in the US, made Clinton its headquarters location.  In the early 2000s, a major fraud and financial scandal was discovered at the company.  It went bankrupt in 2002 and after a while its nice headquarters was empty and the company’s assets were eventually acquired by a company far away, Verizon.  So Clinton was no longer a big company town.

Clinton has, however, retained much of its original small town urban charm, with a number of brick-covered streets and an urban center that’s mostly missing from other suburbs.   It has a well-developed sense of community, which is, in part, reflected in the quality of its schools that are ranked number 1 in the state.

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Nevertheless, the people of Clinton know there are challenges ahead, so they have been an early adopter of gigabit connections to the home, through a program offered by the regional telecommunications company, C-Spire.  The company announced at the end of last month that Clinton had five neighborhoods where pre-registration for the service exceeded the minimum necessary and Clinton becomes the second city in the state to become a gig-city.  

(See my earlier blog post about Quitman, MS, for a report on the first city to do this last fall.)

Thanks to the work of the Intelligent Community Institute of Mississippi State University Extension Service, there I was last week to talk to a room full of Clinton’s community leaders.  They met to envision how this gigabit network investment can be used to provide new economic opportunity for its residents and to ensure that the city can flourish in the future.

Of course, I pointed out that broadband, while necessary, isn’t sufficient.  It’s only the start in building an attractive 21st century community that will retain and, better yet, attract people to live there.

I presented a picture of where the economy and technology have come from and where they seem to be going – and what Clinton can do to get ahead of the curve.  I offered numerous examples of things that can be accomplished by a small city, pointing out that small cities can make a bigger impact this way than big cities.  After my presentation, Clinton’s community leaders worked together to identify concrete actions they would get done in the next six months.

I was struck especially by the city’s new slogan and campaign.  It was not the all-too-frequent argument that “we’re cheaper than the next city down the road and we’ll give your company big incentives to come here.”  Even before I arrived with my message that, instead, these days the key question for economic development is how you go about keeping people and attracting newcomers to your city, they had already figured it out.

I wish I had come up with their slogan, since it is spot on – “You Belong Here”.  I’ll be following up to see how Clinton goes about making good on that slogan and its promise for the future.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

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The Internet & The Battle Over Innovation

The public policy battle that defined the 19th century pitted labor against capital.  While that battle has not completely ended, the battle that may define this century is about “intellectual property” – who owns it, what others can do with it, and indeed whether ideas and innovations can or should be treated as property in the same way that land or a car is property.

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To go back to original principles, copyrights (and patents) were made part of the US Constitution to primarily encourage innovation by granting monopoly control over an idea for a limited time.  It wasn’t there primarily to protect the value of that monopoly.  That was just the tool the authors of the Constitution used to provide incentives for innovation by any inventive genius then living in the hinterlands.

Of course, a lot has changed since then.  We realize much better now that it is rare for a lone genius to come up with an idea or even a creative work, without having been influenced, perhaps even collaborating in a way, with many others.  So the importance of that monopoly incentive for all the people who play a role in creating something new is not as clear today.  Nor are the current owners of copyrights and patents necessarily the original creators.

The battle was started more than ten years ago by the development of the Internet.  Then, in 2004, the famed intellectual property law professor, Lawrence Lessig, wrote “Free Culture”.  He explained: “Free Cultures are cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build upon. Ours was a free culture. It is becoming less so.”

He argued that ever since the Constitution set out a limited term for copyrights, Congress has continually extended that term and added other limitations on the use of copyrighted material until now that there is almost no public domain left.  His concern is that few works remain – and no new ones added – that are free to be used and help contribute to our common knowledge without restrictions.  

As he wrote: “At the start of this book, I distinguished between commercial and noncommercial culture. In the course of this chapter, I have distinguished between copying a work and transforming it. We can now combine these two distinctions and draw a clear map of the changes that copyright law has undergone.” 

He then proceeded to show that in 1790 only works that were published commercially were covered by copyrights.  In this century “the law now regulates the full range of creativity — commercial or not, transformative or not—with the same rules designed to regulate commercial publishers.”  Moreover, these copyrights extend for a much longer period of time.

Lessig worries that this imbalance and overuse of copyrights is diminishing the vibrancy of our culture and ultimately reducing innovation.

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By the way, I opened this post with a reference to how your car is considered to be a very traditional kind of property.  But nothing really escapes the digital age, so it’s fascinating to see the lawyers for John Deere and General Motors recently claiming that you don’t really own their vehicles completely.  Yes, you own the mechanical parts, but they claim they retain ownership of the software that is now a critical component of those vehicles – so, no, you don’t really own that car after all.  Yet another example of the extremism that Lessig criticizes.

This past year, the science-fiction author and activist, Cory Doctorow, wrote his update to the debate in “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age”.  

But bringing some wisdom and historical perspective to the debate at hand, he adds a delightful chapter about the principle he calls “Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral”

It’s not as though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve…

When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose income came from sheet music, were aghast. They couldn’t believe that player-piano companies had the audacity to record and sell performances of their work. They tried—unsuccessfully—to have such recordings classified as copyright violations.

Then (thanks in part to the institution of a compulsory license) the piano-roll pirates and their compatriots in the wax-cylinder business got legit, and became the record industry.

Then the radio came along, and broadcasters had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block radio broadcasts without explicit permission from recording artists. Their argument was “When we used technology to appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.”

A few decades later, with the dust settled around radio transmission, along came cable TV, which appropriated broadcasts sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy, and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.”

Then came the VCR, which instigated a landmark lawsuit by the cable operators and the studios, a legal battle that was waged for eight years, finishing up in the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling. You can look up the briefs if you’d like, but fundamentally, they went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress.  Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.”

Sony won, and fifteen years later it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online…

The purpose of copyright shouldn’t be to ensure that whoever got lucky with last year’s business model gets to stay on top forever. Live music is great, but what a rotten thing it would have been if the winners of the live-music lottery in 1908 had been allowed to strangle recorded music to protect their turf.”

Doctorow noted that the public has found ways around the ever increasing copyright restrictions, albeit with questionable legality.  At its conclusion, the book is intended to help the creative artists and innovators of our day – if not the corporate owners of intellectual property – understand how they might still make a living.  

Chris Anderson also offered ideas along these lines in his 2009 book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”, but more in response to the fact that the cost of products, including creative products, has gone down dramatically.  But that is also a factor in the intellectual property debate.  

A couple of years ago, I participated in the annual innovation summit that the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania runs.  I remember a generational divide in the room among the people who made a living in biotech and pharmaceuticals.  The younger executives told the older ones that they could no longer expect the kind of monopoly returns on their patented drugs that they use to have because new ideas and inventions were so much easier to generate now.  

And, getting back to basics, wasn’t the original point to encourage innovation?
As befitting a battle of the century, there’s lots more to say about this controversy, but I’ll say that later.  This post is long enough for an opening round.

And, without irony ;-), while on Tumblr, take note © 2015 Norman Jacknis

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Innovation Grows Where You’re Not Looking

When people talk about innovative places, they often refer to Silicon Valley or New York or some other urban megalopolis.  By contrast, most of us have a sense that rural areas around the world face overwhelming problems.  Some of us – hopefully the readers of this blog – also know there’s great future potential in those areas.

And that potential is being realized in a few corners of the world that might surprise you.  Consider the countryside in the southern part of the Netherlands – the small city of Eersel and the other towns and farms nearby.  

You may even have an image of the place from Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings of potato farmers 130 years ago.  (He lived in the nearby town of Nuenen.) 

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It’s a different place today.  Not different in the way much of the world has gone – with modern cities replacing what had been primitive countryside – but rather a modern countryside.  

Taking me on a tour of this region two weeks ago was Mr. Kees Rovers, a long-time supporter of the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), a noted telecommunications entrepreneur and speaker on the impact of the Internet.  Years ago he was a leader in bringing a high speed fiber network to Nuenen.  Now he’s working on bringing fiber networks to the nearby town of Eersel.

Perhaps partly, but not only, due to the presence of Philips research labs in the city of Eindhoven, Wikipedia has noted:

“The province of Noord-Brabant [which contains the areas I’m describing] is one of the most innovative regions of the European Union.  This is shown by the extensive amount of new research patents by Eurostat.”

The support of innovators and pride about local innovation by the leaders of the community, like Eersel Mayor Anja Thijs-Rademakers, contributes to this local culture of innovation.  The Mayor, along with Mr. Harrie Timmermans (City Manager/Alderman), and Mrs. Liesbeth Sjouw (Alderman), joined Mr. Rovers and myself in visits to three good examples of innovation in the countryside.  

First, we saw the van der Aa family farm, which has invested in robotics – robots for milking the cows and robots to clear the barn of the manure the cows produce in great quantity.  Think of a bigger, smarter, more necessary version of the Roomba, like the one in this picture.

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Then we visited Vencomatic, which was created by a local entrepreneur but is now a global business, still based in the countryside.  In addition to pioneering animal-friendly technology for the poultry industry, their headquarters won the award as “Europe’s most sustainable commercial building”.

The final stop was at Jacob Van Den Borne’s potato farm in Reusel.  He described his use of four drones, numerous sensors deep in the ground, analytics and scientific experiments to increase quality and production on the land.  You can see his two minute video in Dutch about precision agriculture, with English captions at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlS8nVaI698

This is a picture of a potato farmer that Van Gogh could never have imagined.

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Of course, what’s missing in this picture of innovation – and ultimately limits the growth of that innovation and its spirit – is broadband beyond the more densely populated villages.  That’s why Rovers and the City of Eersel are deploying broadband away from the town center, using the motto “Close The Gap”.   (Mr. Rovers is also the Founder/Director of the NGO of the same name.)

It’s also something that Van Den Borne knows, so he has organized a co-operative to build out broadband in the countryside that doesn’t have connectivity yet.  Then he can take his innovations to a whole new level.

Whether it’s just an unusually strong regional culture of innovation or the historical necessity of being creative in rural areas where you can’t just pay someone down the block to solve your problems, this region of the world sets a good example for many other rural areas.  That, in part, is what motivates us to continue ICF’s efforts to build a new connected countryside everywhere.  

[Note: you can see a local report about my trip and more pictures at http://www.eersel.nl/internet/nieuwsberichten_41633/item/werkbezoek-norman-jacknis_68294.html .  If you don’t read Dutch, Google has a pretty good translation.]

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

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A Post-Industrial City Built On Broadband

Situated in the center of Metro Vancouver, New Westminster, which was founded more than 150 years ago, is one of the oldest cities in Canada west of Ontario. Like many older cities, its industrial base was hit by hard times beginning in the 1970s.

Now, with the strong support of its newly elected Mayor and City Council, it has set its sights on a government-sponsored fiber network backbone for its future revitalization.   This is, in part, feasible because of its relatively small size, 7 square miles.  It also helps that the city has a publicly owned electric utility which will also run the broadband network.

With the network underway, the Mayor, most of the City Council, many members of the New Westminster’s Intelligent City Advisory Committee and other leaders met, for two days last week, to consider the city’s future in a broadband era and what they will be doing about it.  

The event started with my hour-long keynote, reviewing the trends in the economy, society and technology that any small city must consider as it plans for the future.  I told the participants that the Internet age is giving small cities, like theirs, a new chance to flourish and so I wanted them to think about these big questions:

  • How can a city of fewer than 70,000 stand out in a world of 7,000,000,000 people?
  • How can New Westminster build a high quality of life by intelligently responding to the trends that will affect all of us in the future?
  • How can the people there expand their thinking about their options?

My underlying theme was that broadband, while absolutely necessary, is insufficient by itself.   I showed many examples – even a few videos – from other intelligent communities around the world who have built on the foundation of a broadband network.

(A copy of the slides can be found at http://www.newwestcity.ca/database/files/library/New_Westminster_Keynote.pdf )

I especially emphasized lifelong learning in a knowledge economy, connecting residents to global economic opportunities and services and creating a culture of innovation.  I finished by pointing out how they could use their network to provide delightful new urban experiences for both residents and visitors, which in turn would also inspire people to be more creative.  

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The second day was devoted to further discussion about the contents of the keynote and a workshop in which the participants broke out into five groups, each on a different subject – education, health, economic development, government services and the network itself.  Each group debated the implications for that subject and came up with projects they will undertake to make use of the new network.

They developed a sophisticated and broad understanding of what they’re getting into with the broadband network.

They clearly understood that high speed Internet made it possible for their residents to overcome large geographic distances and connect to others anywhere on the globe.  But I suggested that, because New Westminster is a small city, they shouldn’t assume that it would be easy for everyone to participate by going downtown.  Even within the city, the Internet can make it easier for residents not to have to travel to participate in public discussions, to get government services, to collaborate on growing their businesses, etc.

I noticed that some people were trying to find an answer that would work for everyone, although the residents of the city had quite varied needs.  (This is somewhat related to another phenomenon you sometimes see in cities trying to figure out their broadband strategy – the search for the one “killer app.”)  So I pointed out to them that the Internet has, instead, renewed our awareness of the long tail – the need for and ability now to deliver many solutions and more personalized service to individual.  There is no longer a requirement for a mass production, one-size-fits-all approach.

At the end of the second day, Mayor Coté said that he realized being an intelligent community is so much more than just laying fiber.  Some of the more technologically savvy in the room offered their own examples and ideas, which is great because these efforts must be led from within the community and not depend on outside experts.

What is often encouraging to people like me is that many participants told me that they felt inspired – yes, that was the word they used – to take on the potential opportunities offered by their new broadband network.

I was also impressed by them.  New Westminster still has much work to do, but they clearly have their act together and have the leadership to get the job done. They will indeed re-create their city for a new century.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/115851214799/a-post-industrial-city-built-on-broadband]

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Does A Cluster Strategy Work?

The conventional wisdom in economic development calls for growth strategies that are based on clusters of businesses in the same sector.  Here are just a few examples of the many cluster-based economic plans that I’ve come across from one end of the country to the other:

The problem with this conventional wisdom is that it is increasingly unwise.  

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Princeton University Economics Professor Paul Krugman won the 2008 Nobel Prize for his work 20-30 years earlier in identifying the “new economic geography” (the theoretical foundation of the cluster approach).  But in his acceptance speech, he noted changes:

“[Clustering] may describe forces that are waning rather than gathering strength.”

“The data accord with common perception: many of the traditional localizations of industry have declined (think of the Akron rubber industry), and those that have arisen, such as Silicon Valley, don’t seem comparable in scale.”

A European report from 2011 found:

“Business clusters could be less relevant as drivers of innovation than has been commonly assumed. The Stavanger Centre for Innovation Research analysed 1,600 companies with more than 10 employees located in the five largest Norwegian city-regions. Rather than national clusters, international cooperation or global pipelines were identified as the main drivers of innovation.”

For his University of North Carolina Ph.D. thesis research titled, “Cluster Requiem And The Rise Of Cumulative Growth Theory”, Dr. Gary Kunkle tracked the growth and survival of a cohort of more than 300,000 establishments operating in Pennsylvania from 1997-2007.  His findings:

“Industry cluster theory has … an inability to explain economic dispersion and the presence of high-growing firms that thrive in non-clustered industries and locations.”

“Firm characteristics are 10-times more powerful than industry and cluster characteristics, and 50-times more powerful than location characteristics, in explaining and predicting establishment-level growth and survival”

“A sub-set of businesses systematically accumulate a disproportionate share of employment growth. Roughly 1% of establishments created 169% of all net new jobs added in the state over a ten-year period.”

This latter point is one of the reasons that the Economic Gardening movement, led by Chris Gibbons, has arisen as an insurgent force within the economic development world.  It concentrates on the small proportion of enterprises that create the most new jobs.

There is nothing wrong with encouraging any existing local business to grow – again an economic gardening strategy.  But it is foolish to try to build a region’s economic development strategy around a cluster where none exists.  

While many regions try to be more sophisticated in their approach, too often, I’ve heard people say that they have a few web design firms and from that they’re going to invest in building a “high tech cluster”.  Every town has someone who claims to design websites.  Really, that’s not a cluster even in the old industrial era.  And it’s not an effective strategy for economic growth in this era.

The famous economist John Maynard Keynes once said “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”  While some of the economists who developed cluster approaches are not quite defunct yet, the message is the still relevant.

We are in an economy where everyone in the world is connected by information and communications technologies.  For residents of any city or state to flourish economically, they should not be limited to a cluster of business activity which is based on purely local, physical proximity.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/115120132463/does-a-cluster-strategy-work]

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The Decentralization Of Health Care

Eric Topol is a physician and editor-in-chief at Medscape.  He was interviewed on the Colbert Report last year.  His new book, published last month, has been reviewed in the major newspapers.  Yet this book, “The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands”, hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

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The book is about the future of health care – what’s already happening and what could be coming that’s even better.

Topol’s theme is that new technology and practices make it possible to democratize medical care – to move away from the traditional, paternalistic, hierarchical relationship between doctor and patient.

Hence the title which inverts the traditional words of a medical receptionist that the “doctor will see you now.”

Here’s a sample of some of his key arguments:

“… the world is changing.  Patients are generating their own data on their own devices.  Already any individual can take unlimited blood pressures or blood glucose measurements.”

“We are embarking on a time when each individual will have all their own medical data and the computer power to process it in the context of their own world.  There will be comprehensive medical information about a person that is eminently accessible, analyzable and transferable.”

“Today patients can rapidly diagnose their skin lesion or child’s ear infection without a doctor.  That’s just the beginning.  … your smartphone will become central to labs, physical exams, and even medical imaging; … you can have ICU-like monitoring in the safety, reduced expense, and convenience of your home.”

“The doctor will see you now via your smartphone screen … they will incorporate sharing your data – the full gamut from sensors, images, labs, and genomic sequence, well beyond an electronic medical record.”

The book is very well researched and comprehensively covers all kinds of ways that technology is interacting with and affecting health care.  Dr. Topol provides dozens of examples from all over the field – a laboratory on a chip, smart phones with all kinds of attachments that enable easy measurement of health conditions anywhere, etc.

As a physician, he rightly is concerned about the doctor-patient relationship.   As a sometime patient myself, this is of course of personal interest to me as well.

But more than that obvious reason, why else is the picture he presents so important?

With my perspective on how technology will affect where andhow we will live and work, his story is as much about the decentralization of
medical care as it is about the democratization.

With this decentralization, Dr. Topol envisions the
patient’s home becoming an instant medical lab or even a temporary hospital
wing.  This means that you can dramatically
improve the quality of your health care even if your home is in the
countryside, miles from a major medical center in the center of a metropolis.

And it’s this distance from medical care that frequently
worries those who live in the countryside. 
So when the transformation of medical care becomes more common, one more
traditional disadvantage of rural living that will disappear.

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© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/110724183408/the-decentralization-of-health-care]

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Managing A Global Virtual Workforce

In many of my presentations, I point out that an increasing number of people will no longer have traditional 9-5 jobs in office buildings.  Of course, I’m not the only one to observe that the labor market is potentially global and that entrepreneurs who live anywhere can connect with others who have the skills they need to make their businesses successful.

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When I say these things, people generally agree – in the abstract – but they seem not to know how they can actually do this.  They just don’t know how to start and sustain a global virtual business.

This is a particularly important problem for entrepreneurs who do not live in one of the half dozen biggest metropolitan areas in this country or their equivalent metropolitan areas elsewhere.

With that in mind, it’s worth noting that last year a book was published that can set virtual entrepreneurs on their way.  It’s “Virtual Freedom: How to Work with Virtual Staff to Buy More Time, Become More Productive, and Build Your Dream Business” by Chris Ducker, a serial entrepreneur based in the Philippines.  (He’s also responsible for the slide above.)

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Ducker starts by describing the feeling that entrepreneurs have that they must do everything themselves because they can’t find others to help them.  And, of course, those who are outside of big cities feel even lonelier.  But reminding readers of that feeling is really just the motivation for reading on.

“Virtual Freedom” is essentially a practical handbook for managing a virtual global workforce.  It goes into some detail about hiring people, compensating them, managing them, etc.  It provides case studies and references to tools that the entrepreneur can use.

It’s interesting that the advice in much of the book applies to management in general, not just management of virtual workforces. 

Perhaps managing a virtual workforce forces you to think about management more clearly than when you manage in traditional offices.  In those offices, people seem to think they know the rules and patterns of behavior – even when they don’t really know.

Some of the advice is common sense, except we all know that common sense is not so common.  

For example, he gives examples of entrepreneurs who were frustrated by the poor quality of those they depended on, until the entrepreneurs realized the problem was, in large part, on their side – a failure to communicate clearly and specifically what they were asking for and a failure to verify this was understood by workers who often came from other cultures.  But in the diverse workforce in many countries today, this is an issue even in traditional offices.

Along with communicating clearly, he emphasizes that the entrepreneur needs to think clearly about the tasks that need to be accomplished.  After all, when you can’t really look over the shoulders of the people who work for you, the only measure of effectiveness you have is what results they deliver.

Of course, such an approach in a traditional office environment is also a good idea – rather than trying to see if “people are working hard”.  It’s easy to look busy.  Not so easy to get tasks done and deliver results.

Bottom line: if you want to get a quick course in management of virtual staff, read this book.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/109394419164/managing-a-global-virtual-workforce]