Searching for innovation

Innovation is about finding a better way of doing something. Like many of the new development buzzwords (which many of them are over-used on many business documents), the concept of innovation originates from the world of business. It refers to the generation of new products through the process of creative entrepreneurship, putting it into production, and diffusing it more widely through increased sales. Innovation can be viewed as t he application of better solutions that meet new requirements, in-articulated needs, or existing market needs. This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments and society. The term innovation can be defined as something original and, as a consequence, new, that “breaks into” the market or society.

Innoveracy: Misunderstanding Innovation article points out that  there is a form of ignorance which seems to be universal: the inability to understand the concept and role of innovation. The way this is exhibited is in the misuse of the term and the inability to discern the difference between novelty, creation, invention and innovation. The result is a failure to understand the causes of success and failure in business and hence the conditions that lead to economic growth. The definition of innovation is easy to find but it seems to be hard to understand.  Here is a simple taxonomy of related activities that put innovation in context:

  • Novelty: Something new
  • Creation: Something new and valuable
  • Invention: Something new, having potential value through utility
  • Innovation: Something new and uniquely useful

The taxonomy is illustrated with the following diagram.

The differences are also evident in the mechanisms that exist to protect the works: Novelties are usually not protectable, Creations are protected by copyright or trademark, Inventions can be protected for a limited time through patents (or kept secret) and Innovations can be protected through market competition but are not defensible through legal means.

Innovation is a lot of talked about nowdays as essential to businesses to do. Is innovation essential for development work? article tells that innovation has become central to the way development organisations go about their work. In November 2011, Bill Gates told the G20 that innovation was the key to development. Donors increasingly stress innovation as a key condition for funding, and many civil society organisations emphasise that innovation is central to the work they do.

Some innovation ideas are pretty simple, and some are much more complicated and even sound crazy when heard first. The is place for crazy sounding ideas: venture capitalists are gravely concerned that the tech startups they’re investing in just aren’t crazy enough:

 

Not all development problems require new solutions, sometimes you just need to use old things in a slightly new way. Development innovations may involve devising technology (such as a nanotech water treatment kit), creating a new approach (such as microfinance), finding a better way of delivering public services (such as one-stop egovernment service centres), identifying ways of working with communities (such as participation), or generating a management technique (such as organisation learning).

Theorists of innovation identify innovation itself as a brief moment of creativity, to be followed by the main routine work of producing and selling the innovation. When it comes to development, things are more complicated. Innovation needs to be viewed as tool, not master. Innovation is a process, not a one time event. Genuine innovation is valuable but rare.

There are many views on the innovation and innvation process. I try to collect together there some views I have found on-line. Hopefully they help you more than confuze. Managing complexity and reducing risk article has this drawing which I think pretty well describes innovation as done in product development:

8 essential practices of successful innovation from The Innovator’s Way shows essential practices in innovation process. Those practices are all integrated into a non-sequential, coherent whole and style in the person of the innovator.

In the IT work there is lots of work where a little thinking can be a source of innovation. Automating IT processes can be a huge time saver or it can fail depending on situation. XKCD comic strip Automation as illustrates this:

XKCD Automation

System integration is a critical element in project design article has an interesting project cost influence graphic. The recommendation is to involve a system integrator early in project design to help ensure high-quality projects that satisfy project requirements. Of course this article tries to market system integration services, but has also valid points to consider.

Core Contributor Loop (CTTDC) from Art Journal blog posting Blog Is The New Black tries to link inventing an idea to theory of entrepreneurship. It is essential to tune the engine by making improvements in product, marketing, code, design and operations.

 

 

 

 

4,464 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Disney Is Making a Fortune and Safeguarding Its Future By Buying Childhood
    http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/15/12/21/149227/disney-is-making-a-fortune-and-safeguarding-its-future-by-buying-childhood

    Disney has been successful for the better part of a century. But they haven’t always had to work as hard to do it. Over the past couple of decades, they’ve been facing more and better competition than ever before, and they’ve had to change their business strategy in response. An article at The Economist details this strategy, which seems to have a central theme: buy up things people loved as kids, and commercialize the hell out of them. The recent Star Wars film is the latest example

    The force is strong in this firm
    Disney is making a fortune and safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece
    http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21684138-disney-making-fortune-and-safeguarding-its-future-buying-childhood-piece-piece

    In remodelling itself to prize content over the means to distribute it, Disney has become the envy of the industry. Profits have more than doubled over the past five years, to $8.4 billion, and Disney’s share price has risen nearly fivefold in a little over a decade, easily beating its rivals. Comcast comes closest. Its share price has tripled in the same period; that of 21st Century Fox has doubled. Time Warner’s is up by only 20% and Viacom’s is lower. Disney is the most valuable of the lot, worth a star-studded $187 billion.

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Kate Reed: The Creative Process in Action
    http://hackaday.com/2015/12/21/kate-reed-the-creative-process-in-action/

    Kate Reed is an artist. Kate Reed also builds hand-driven wheelchair accessories that work with any wheelchair. Wait, what? These things don’t have to be separate skills. We’re living in the age of artisanal creation and Kate is a perfect example that you need to embody all skills. She’s an artist who follows a creative idea from inception through to implementation. Check out her talk on the Creative Process in Action from the Hackaday SuperConference, then jump past the break for some more details on what she’s been building and how she build her diverse set of skills.

    She attends the NuVu Studio, an innovation school for middle and high school students in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The focus is to study the creative process from start to finish. The curriculum involves conceiving, developing, and building things. To us it looks like a technique that turns on its head the stereotype that students having no experience coming out of school, and we like it!

    https://cambridge.nuvustudio.com/discover

    We enjoyed Kate’s comment that “Creativity takes practice”. The current design of Hand Drive is the sixth prototype.

    Reply
  3. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Poverty Stunts IQ In the US But Not In Other Developed Countries
    http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/12/22/2152209/poverty-stunts-iq-in-the-us-but-not-in-other-developed-countries

    New research published in the journal Psychological Science (abstract) found that children who grow up in poverty within the United States tend to have lower IQs than peers from other socioeconomic brackets. Previous studies have shown a complex relationship between a child’s genetics, his environment, and his IQ. Your genes can’t pinpoint your IQ, but they can indicate a rough range of values within which your IQ is quite likely to fall.

    For kids in poverty, they seem to consistently end up on the low end of that window. Interestingly, this effect was not seen for any of the other countries hosting kids within the study

    Poverty stunts IQ in the US but not in other developed countries
    Country-specific effects may help solve a piece of nature-vs-nurture puzzle.
    http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/poverty-stunts-iq-in-the-us-but-not-in-other-developed-countries/

    When they separated the data by location, the authors found that the brute force of poverty in the US clearly pushed aside genetic influence on intelligence. But, the same relationship was not seen in any of the other countries.

    That doesn’t mean that poverty is simply making US kids dumber, Turkheimer cautions. The situation is a little more nuanced.

    So, Turkheimer said, kids in poverty all end up on the low side of their IQ window, losing that variation normally seen from genetics.

    While the authors speculate that inequalities in educational and medical access in the US may beef up poverty’s effects, Turkheimer thinks school environments in particular may be to blame.

    Reply
  4. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How do we remove the future urgency working life?

    I ran into a good day as always at a conference. I asked the news. He replied:

    “Oh, rush is. One flight. These peak years. Barely remember what I did yesterday. What to you? ”

    I mumbled something similar. The debate was so normal that it is difficult to imagine a different kind

    Work and rush are many synonymous. Work need to be fast-paced and do have to be a little too much. It forces to enhance and prioritize. The body has learned to miss the stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol secretion. Work must feel like work, or else it will not have a job. Efforts requires a physical response, even if it is knowledge work.

    We are experiencing urgency given circumstance, we are not a result of poorly organized human cooperation. We believe that the global market economy must be subordinate to run more and louder, and when the pace will fade, the Chinese are robots and algorithms Americans willing to do the work more cheaply. When we hear the latest worm national figures, we do not leave the possibility of the use of self-flagellation.

    Hurry is a macro problem that individual solutions are being sought. So treat the symptoms of the disease without improving.

    Hurry has reached a point where speed is an intrinsic value that no longer produce the desired result. So that things would happen de facto faster. Hasty preparation of the matter is repeated the hectic pace of decision, followed by a busy executive. There will be mess up spiral, where the volume of work is increasing due to frequent corrective moves. The outcome of the work is pressed taxi backseat emergency crap that goes through the customer only shown Cheek-level of self-confidence charlatanism.

    “When did you last time you were at work in a situation where you got together to try to learn, play and informally, to test something new without someone already had one foot in the air running to the next place or a meeting? What about when you got the first place in peace to do what is actual primary source of income? ”

    Busy people often affects the most advanced. He desired to meet and job’ll. However, the weak immune makes busy signals, which is shown for renewing needs. Busy does not have time to try alternative paths.

    Urgency ultimate reason is not necessarily success, but, for example poor contribution work, bureaucracy and poor organization matters.

    What do we do when we are busy?

    drone clubs paraphrase: busy is interested in everything, but does not care about anything.

    The system does not support the unhurried life. Therefore, it is encouraging to see that about two-thirds of Finnish supports the basic income of the Social Insurance Institution to a recent study.

    While waiting for a better system of an individual may engage in radicalism in their own lives. One just retired, and a long working life the person worked in management positions reported that his career really take off until the point when he decided to make only 60 per cent of the expected things from him. The revolution begins when you learn how to say sincerely: “I have no sense of urgency.”

    Source: http://paulikomonen.com/2015/12/22/miten-poistamme-kiireen-tulevaisuuden-tyoelamasta/

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  5. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Crispr Takes Gene-Editing Mainstream
    http://www.wired.com/2015/12/crispr-takes-gene-editing-mainstream-3/

    Thanks to some bold scientists working in gene-editing, playing God hit the mainstream in 2015. And while there are several ways to snip a nuclease, Crispr is taking all the headlines, due to its cheap price and ease of use. Things fired up in April, when Junjiu Huang, a molecular biologist at Sun Yat-sen University in China, used the technique to edit human embryos. Even though he used fertilized eggs with no shot of growing up, his paper set off a huge ethical debate. This eventually culminated in a December meeting in Washington, D.C., where researchers for the most part agreed to take gene editing nice and slow.

    But that wasn’t Crispr’s only story arc. All year long various researchers kept announcing new applications: Super buff Crispr beagles, Crispr as a cancer treatment, Woolly mammoth genes Crispr’ed into elephant DNA.

    Reply
  6. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How a Nation of Tech Copycats Transformed Into a Hub for Innovation
    http://www.wired.com/2015/12/tech-innovation-in-china/

    The young programmer had an idea, and everyone thought it was nuts. Just out of college, he’d gotten a job writing software for YY, a livestreaming company based in the mas­sive city of Guangzhou, in China’s Pearl River Delta. More than 100 million users every month stream them­selves, or tune in to broadcasts of others, singing, playing video­games, or hosting talk shows from their Beijing apartments. The audience chats back, prolifically, via voice or text.

    Company executives were dubious. “The CEO almost killed it,”

    But the programmer was hungry and persistent, so they waved him on: Give it a try.

    In China, this type of employee didn’t used to exist. Ten years ago, high tech observers complained that the nation didn’t have enough bold innovators. There were, of course, wildly profi­table high tech firms, but they rarely took creative risks and mostly just mimicked Silicon Valley: Baidu was a replica of Google, Tencent a copy of Yahoo, JD a version of Amazon. Young Chinese coders had programming chops that were second to none, but they lacked the drive of a Mark Zucker­berg or Steve Jobs. The West Coast mantra—fail fast, fail often, the better to find a hit product—seemed alien, even dangerous, to youths schooled in an educational system that focused on rote memorization and punished mistakes. Graduates craved jobs at big, solid firms. The goal was stability

    That attitude is vanishing now. It’s been swept aside by a surge in prosperity, bringing with it a new level of confi­dence and boldness in the country’s young urban techies. In 2000, barely 4 percent of China was middle-class—meaning with an income ranging from $9,000 to $34,000—but by 2012 fully two-thirds had climbed into that bracket. In the same time frame, higher education soared sevenfold: 7 million graduated college this year. The result is a generation both creative and comfortable with risk-taking.

    Anyone with a promising idea and some experience can find money. Venture capitalists pumped a record $15.5 billion into Chinese startups last year, so entrepreneurs are being showered in funding, as well as crucial advice and mentoring from millionaire angels. (It’s still a fraction of the US venture capital pool from 2014, $48 billion.)

    The new boom encompasses both online services and the hardware arena. Recent local-kid-makes-good models like Xiaomi, the fast-rising Beijing mobile phone firm, or WeChat, Tencent’s globe-conquering social networking app, are leading the way forward. Homegrown firms have distinct advantages, namely familiarity with local tastes, the ability to plug into a first-class manufacturing system built for Western companies, and proximity to the world’s fastest-growing markets in India and Southeast Asia. The combination of factors is putting them in a position to beat the West at its own game. Xiaomi, for example, was the fourth-highest seller of mobile phones worldwide last year, behind Samsung, Apple, and Huawei.

    China’s tech boom in the late ’90s produced its own Web 1.0: search engines, email and blogging tools, news portals, and Alibaba’s sprawling online sales market.

    Back then, China very much needed local copies of US companies, because US firms often couldn’t operate easily in China. The government blocked many foreign sites by using a complex system of filters known as the Great Firewall of China. Local firms had an edge anyway: They understood the particular demands of the Chinese digerati in the early ’00s, when Internet access was still scanty.

    The success of copycat firms paved the way for “little dragons”—creative, upstart Web 2.0 firms that emerged in the late ’00s. The big dragons provided role models, but even more significantly, they built the infrastructure crucial for today’s high tech boom, including the cloud services that allow any twentysomething to launch a business overnight and immediately start billing customers.

    China’s techies don’t want jobs at Apple or Google—they want to build the next Apple or Google.

    Ecommerce, already big in China, has an astonishing amount yet to grow—a tremendous number of everyday services are not yet online. For example, 80 percent of China’s hotel rooms are still booked offline.

    Corruption is just one of the many challenges China faces. The country’s leaders and investors also contend with nontransparent banks, government regulators on the take, rampant pollution, fierce crackdowns on political speech, and a rural population yearning for better jobs in the cities. It’s not clear whether the party can solve all these messy problems.

    In the short run, though, the high tech gold rush has produced manic and fierce competition. Whenever a new category opens up, it’s immediately swarmed upon by dozens or even hundreds of entrepreneurs. By comparison, competition in the US is mild; for example, there are only two major firms—Uber and Lyft—duking it out for car bookings.

    China’s Creative boom in web services is significant enough, but arguably it has an even bigger edge over the US in hardware. The country has spent 30 years becoming the manufacturing capital of the world, so coastal cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou are now crammed with electronics facilities, from tiny three-person shops to Foxconn’s 30,000-employee city-factory complexes cranking out iPhones. All have a deep knowledge of how to make things, so it was almost inevitable that homegrown entrepreneurs would get in on the act.

    Living next to the factories or being able to stroll the electronics markets, they’re the first to know when trends in hardware emerge: for example, when a cutting-edge sensor arrives that lets you collect new forms of data—or when the cost of an existing one suddenly drops to a penny, allowing it to be sprinkled anywhere, like dust.

    “It’s easier in China than in other places,” Robin Han says, “because we have Shenzhen.”

    The high tech gold rush has produced manic and fierce competition among the swarms of entrepreneurs.

    There’s also been a hackerspace movement in China. The first one—Shanghai’s XinCheJian—was cofounded in 2010 by Chinese Internet entrepreneur David Li, when he noticed how cheap prototyping tools were allowing kitchen-table inventors to produce increasingly slick prototypes. Now local creators from across China mix with expatriates who flock to XinCheJian from around the world, brainstorming ideas with each other and going on tours of factories organized by Li to help them understand how China’s hardware ecosystem works.

    The acme of China’s innovation boom can be found in four office towers that loom over a sprawl of condos in the suburbs of Beijing. These are the headquarters of Xiaomi.
    Founded in 2010, the company has become famous for making mobile phones comparable to the iPhone—fast processors, large screens, and a sleek operating system called MIUI—but at half the cost.

    Xiaomi was founded by a serial entrepreneur who got a chance to make his early mistakes—and fortune—10 years ago: CEO Lei Jun founded the online bookseller Joyo, which he later sold to Amazon.

    Indeed, Xiaomi’s willingness to talk online with its customers has been a key part of both understanding the demands of young consumers and cultivating their manic devotion. Xiaomi sells its phones at close to cost; much of the company’s revenue comes from its line of accessories, like headphones and step-tracker wristbands, as well as from app store purchases of things like new OS skins.

    China’s creative generation, in other words, has proven it is ready to compete head-on with the world’s top high tech brands. “Apple and Samsung are right to be worried,” says Bunnie Huang, a well-known hardware hacker.

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  7. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Skin Cancer Biopsied by Optical Scan
    Non invasive way to identify skin cancer
    http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328583&

    TAIPEI, Taiwan.—Apollo Medical Optics Inc. (Taipei, Taiwan) aims to revolutionize skin cancer detection without the need for invasive biopsies by using a single-crystal sapphire and yttrium aluminium garnet crystalline fibers—surrounded by glass and a flexible polymer cladding—to look-through the skin and image suspicious skin anomalies non-invasively, instead of taking a skin sample and risk releasing malignant cancer cells into the bloodstream.

    The current prototype, using single-crystal sapphire at its core, is being integrated into a desktop unit that physicians can use in the office to identify skin cancer in a matter of minutes, determine its size and if small enough possibly even treating it (by excision) the very same day.

    “We are hoping to reverse the escalating costs of treating cancer with noninvasive imagers of living tissues—in vivo—with a very high resolution, allowing doctors of make see-and-treat decisions without the expense of in vitro testing with biopsies,”

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  8. Tomi Engdahl says:

    DNA Manufacturing Enters the Age of Mass Production
    http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/01/04/2244258/dna-manufacturing-enters-the-age-of-mass-production

    Now that it’s easy and cheap to build strands of DNA, what kinds of strange new organisms will scientists and start-ups build? That’s the question raised as synthetic biology companies like Twist Bioscience and Zymergen start up their DNA manufacturing lines. Researchers who order DNA snippets typically pay on a cost-per-nucleobase basis.

    DNA Manufacturing Enters the Age of Mass Production
    Synthetic-biology startups adopt technologies from the computer industry
    http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/dna-manufacturing-enters-the-age-of-mass-production

    Emily Leproust, CEO and cofounder of the buzzy biotech startup Twist Bioscience, is an industrialist on the nanoscale. “I remind everyone at Twist, we are a manufacturing company,” she says. “We manufacture DNA.”

    This burgeoning business sector has been hampered by the labor-intensive nature of DNA assembly, a painstaking process requiring trained personnel. Now, nimble startups are competing to fashion automated DNA assembly lines

    As their innovations bring down the cost of constructing DNA strands, these entrepreneurs are aiming for a low price point, which they say will cause a market boom. Twist Bioscience, which will begin commercial operations at its San Francisco headquarters in 2016, is a leading contender in that race to the bottom.

    Constructing a strand of DNA isn’t complicated; in fact it’s a routine procedure performed in labs all over the world. But that procedure is typically carried out by hand, says Twist’s Leproust: “Microbiology is manual labor. You have a Ph.D. student moving liquid from one test tube to the next all day long.” So she and her cofounders invented a machine that automates the construction process.

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  9. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Math, the Universal Language?
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=31&doc_id=1328463&

    If we could somehow speak in mathematics instead of English, how many miscommunications would we be able to negate?

    I was watching one of my favorite movies the other night, Contact with Jodi Foster. There are so many great quotes in this movie, and I find myself getting caught up in the “what if” about life on other planets. It’s also a movie that I can show to my friends and family where spectrum analyzers, frequencies, and math all come together. It gives them a small glimpse into what test and measurement equipment can be used for.

    One quote in particular stuck with me after the movie: “Mathematics is the only truly universal language.” I let that phrase roll around inside my head for a while because, fundamentally, I agree with this statement, but then again it causes me problems.

    On the flip side, playing the devil’s advocate, I would say that the English language explaining the math problems is the true issue.

    If we could somehow speak in mathematics instead of English, how many miscommunications would we be able to negate? It’s an interesting hypothesis.

    Reply
  10. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Why Silicon Valley Should Bring Unsexy Back
    http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/01/why-silicon-valley-should-bring-unsexy-back/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1462_1160331869827633380

    Neckties embedded with QR codes. Pants that make drum noises. “Uber for medical marijuana.” These are just a few of the goofy startup ideas that have cropped up in Silicon Valley in recent years.

    I can’t be the only one who’s disappointed with this. The Valley is the birthplace of game-changing innovations, like the microprocessor and the PC. It’s home to enough brainpower to take on the biggest problems of today, like world hunger and climate change. So why, in 2015, was it so myopically focused on silly wearables and more efficient pot delivery?

    To me, the answer seems like an obvious one. Like middle-schoolers at a high-school dance, startup founders are trying too hard to be cool. And it’s not only hurting the world — it’s hurting the longevity of the entire tech industry.

    So cool, it hurts

    I know tech industry insiders want to be cool because I used to be like them. I started my career at big companies with famous names, like Logitech and Kronos. But I quickly grew disillusioned with the waste I saw in the corporate environment. I wanted to solve real problems, not just fatten a bottom line.

    A recent IndustryWeek salary survey found only 2 percent of 21-29-year-old respondents worked in manufacturing. Students interviewed called the sector slow and out of date. Most people associate factories with repetitive work and mindless conformity — like that disrupted by a sledgehammer-wielding Anya Major in the iconic 1984 Apple ad.

    But just 150 years ago, factories were the Silicon Valley startup incubators of their time. Henry Ford’s Model T was every bit as disruptive as Uber (or Facebook or Google). How does a once-cool industry become so uncool — and yet still survive?

    For one, by realizing that cool doesn’t matter that much in business.

    Just take our customers, for example. Specialty chemicals have become an $800 billion industry, despite making what are frankly some of the most prosaic and least sexy products on earth. They’re behind the coating on a washing machine that makes it look shiny and new, the polymer added to concrete that makes it more flexible and less likely to crack, the glue that sticks the wood veneer to your desk securely enough to make it look authentic.

    “Innovation” in this context is often incremental. It’s not about “disrupting” a whole industry — it’s about redesigning to improve performance by a mere 0.0001 percent.

    But here’s the secret: That 0.0001 percent is ultimately more useful to the world than 10,000 pairs of DrumPants. To quote the tagline of German specialty chemicals company BASF: “We don’t make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better.” And customers are willing to pay a premium for those better products.

    More than a 1 percent problem

    Already in today’s crowded startup ecosystem, a new company that can’t make inroads outside the Silicon Valley bubble is bound to fail. In a survey by venture capital database CB Insights, 42 percent of tech startup founders cited “a lack of market need for their product” as the main reason for their company’s failure.

    merica has been left with a huge gap in our innovation infrastructure.

    Getting back to basics

    Think about the roots of the computer revolution. They’re not in the flashy offices of venture capital firms. They’re in unsexy industrial labs like Bell Labs, where scientists invented the transistor in 1947. Or Xerox PARC, home to the world’s first Ethernet connection and its first Graphical User Interface (GUI). These were places where great minds worked hard to solve big problems, without pressure to rush new products to market or create early exits for VCs. And as they’ve declined, America has been left with a huge gap in our innovation infrastructure.

    To move toward the future, the Internet really needs to get back to its roots — its unsexy, specialty-chemicals–like roots. It needs to turn its attention to real, practical problems that matter outside the urban, affluent 1 percent. And it needs to learn how to think big again.

    Reply
  11. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Sexifying Manufacturing
    http://miter.mit.edu/articlesexifying-manufacturing/

    A 2012 salary survey by IndustryWeek found that only 2% of survey respondents in the manufacturing industry are 21 to 29 years old. Students interviewed for this article characterized manufacturing as slow, out of date and, simply put, unsexy. The lack of interest in manufacturing from the younger generation erodes the industry’s future in two ways. First, there are no young workers to backfill retirees and second, there are fewer fresh ideas spurring innovation and growth. The industry can reverse this trend by creating more interesting companies.

    The Harvard Business Review1 comments that highly educated individuals are looking for greater “autonomy and intellectual stimulation.” These are not current features of manufacturing. Rather, they characterize cash-strapped, romantic startups with big dreams. Consequently, start-ups attract smart, independent workers to wear multiple hats in an environment that provides little managerial oversight. This entrepreneurial spirit is currently completely out of sync with the world of manufacturing.

    Reply
  12. Tomi Engdahl says:

    “Code reuse, libraries, sharing, and open-source are very important to software engineering, but we should be careful to not enable the belief that programming should be as easy as gluing things together.”

    In fact, these days I’m often skeptical when things feel a little bit too easy. If programming was as easy as this then it would’ve already been automated away.

    Sources:
    http://developers.slashdot.org/story/16/01/04/1637257/overcoming-intuition-in-programming
    http://amasad.me/2016/01/03/overcoming-intuition-in-programming/

    Reply
  13. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hacking When It Counts: The Great Depression
    http://hackaday.com/2016/01/07/hacking-when-it-counts-the-great-depression/

    In the summer of 1929, it would probably have been hard for the average Joe to imagine the degree to which his life was about to change. In October of that year, the US stock market tumbled, which in concert with myriad economic factors kicked off the Great Depression, a worldwide economic disaster that would send ripples through history to this very day. At its heart, the Depression was about a loss of confidence, manifested in bank failures, foreclosures, unemployment, and extreme austerity. People were thrust into situations for which they were ill-prepared, and if they were going to survive, they needed to adapt and do what they could with what they had on hand. In short, they needed to hack their way out of the Depression.

    Although tube-type superheterodyne receivers were widely available all through the Depression, crystal sets were still a popular and sometimes necessary hacker project during the Depression. Relying on nothing more than a tuned circuit and a detector connected to an antenna and high-impedance headphones, a crystal set was able to pick up strong AM broadcasts and sometimes even shortwave stations.

    Receivers weren’t the only area in which Depression-era hackers made an impact. As commercial broadcasting took off, so did amateur radio, and few commercial transmitters were available to satisfy the burgeoning ham market.

    The Great Depression lasted through the 1930s in America, finally dissipating just before the country mobilized for World War II.

    Reply
  14. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Modernize your engineer’s notebook
    http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/embedded-basics/4441142/Modernize-your-engineer-s-notebook?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160107&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160107&elq=12f7a3e53a614a4eb2d1c192fff96c7e&elqCampaignId=26384&elqaid=30159&elqat=1&elqTrackId=39f9f6373c934014870cb8dcd3e44a7e

    Engineers and scientists have always relied upon notebooks to document their ideas, inventions, progress, and even their missteps. Some of the most notable engineers and scientists who used notebooks include Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci. In fact, mankind would know very little of da Vinci’s discoveries had he not written them down in a notebook. One problem facing engineers today is that the paper-bound notebook is an inefficient means for recording information in a society driven by computer technology. It’s time to upgrade the engineering notebook for the 21st century.

    So what does a modern engineering notebook look like?

    A modern engineering notebook, whether for an individual or a team, must be capable of synchronization through the cloud. Engineers today don’t just use PCs; they rely on mobile devices such as tablets or cell phones to document their work. An engineer must be able to track and record notes on any of these devices and have the notes seamlessly synchronize with one another. The notebook medium must also be capable of potentially having multiple engineers working within the same notebook simultaneously in order to prevent synchronization issues.

    Paper- bound notebooks are great for writing in but whenever an image or graph needs to be recorded, engineers need to pull out the scissors, tape, and glue to meticulously insert the image into the notebook. Not only is inserting images into a paper notebook time consuming, it can potentially be dangerous for a software engineer working in dimly lit conditions (scissors are sharp and pointy). The use of a modern electronic notebook to add images or graphs is trivial!

    So far an electronic engineering notebook sounds promising, but what happens when an engineer needs to insert a hand drawing? In a paperbound notebook an engineer would simply draw out the diagram, and many software packages designed to work as a notebook include manual drawing tools, but drawing on a PC can seem uncomfortable and inefficient. The use of a tablet and stylus can give an engineer the same efficiency and feel of a paper notebook while taking advantage of the digital tools available to modern engineers. The main caveat in hand drawing on a tablet is to make sure the stylus being used has a narrow tip. Otherwise, drawing feels awkward.

    Given all these capabilities of an electronic engineering notebook, one might expect that they are already being used and wonder what software packages are available. A first thought might be to use something similar to Microsoft Word. The problem with Word, while it is very capable, is that it lacks many of the synchronization and multi-user capabilities that are required for a truly modern engineering notebook. So what else is available?

    There are three different software packages that immediately come to mind that would make great first attempts for an electronic notebook; Evernote, OneNote, and Wikis.

    One thing is certain, engineers and scientists need notebooks to keep their thoughts straight, monitor progress, collect relevant information about a project, and to share ideas. Paper notebooks no longer fit many of these needs efficiently. But an electronic notebook can prove to be exactly what engineers need to effectively track their thoughts in a digital age.

    How do you manage your modern-day engineering notebook?

    Reply
  15. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Baby Saved by Doctors Using Google Cardboard after 3D Printer Fails
    http://hackaday.com/2016/01/08/baby-saved-by-doctors-using-google-cardboard-after-3d-printer-fails/

    It’s a parent’s worst nightmare. Doctors tell you that your baby is sick and there’s nothing they can do. Luckily though, a combination of hacks led to a happy ending for [Teegan Lexcen] and her family.

    Google Cardboard saves baby’s life
    http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/07/health/google-cardboard-baby-saved/index.html

    A toy-like cardboard contraption that sells for less than $20 online has helped save the life of a baby who was so sick that doctors told her parents to take her home to die.

    Doctors at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami used the device to map out an operation they say they couldn’t have envisioned otherwise.

    “It was mind-blowing,” says Cassidy Lexcen, the baby’s mother. “To see this little cardboard box and a phone, and to think this is what saved our daughter’s life.”

    Burke asked Dr. Juan Carlos Muniz, a pediatric cardiologist who specializes in imaging, to make a 3-D model of Teegan’s heart. It had helped in complicated cases before.

    A few hours later, Muniz reported bad news: Their 3-D printer was broken. “Technology always goes on the fritz at the worst possible time,”

    But it turned out to be the best possible time, because it forced Muniz to come up with an option that worked better.

    He’d been chatting with Dr. David Ezon, a pediatric cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, about using virtual reality — mainly used for playing video games — for children’s hearts.

    After that discussion, Muniz bought a Google Cardboard device and had been playing with it in his office. With the broken printer, now was the time to use it for real, he decided.

    Using an app called Sketchfab, Muniz downloaded images of Teegan’s heart onto his iPhone and showed them to Burke.

    They were similar, yet different from 3-D images they’d been using on computer screens. With the goggles, it was possible to move around and see the heart from every angle — to almost be inside the heart checking out its structure.

    Reply
  16. Tomi Engdahl says:

    What does it mean to be bilingual?
    https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/the-bilingual-brain?bsc=engmag-a76-vid-bilingualbrain-tb&btp=1_eng_tab_cd&utm_campaign=cd_engall_gen_ceu_bilingualbrain&utm_content=Why+Europeans+speak+2%2B+languages+and+say+they+aren%27t+bilingual&utm_medium=CON&utm_source=taboola&utm_term=businessinsider

    What goes on in the brain of a bilingual person, and what are the effects of being raised in two languages? In this video and article, we discuss different perceptions of what it means to be bilingual.

    Reply
  17. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Six technologies that can change your life in 2016
    http://www.eeweb.com/news/six-technologies-that-can-change-your-life-in-2016

    A number of core technologies that were first realized as viable engineering components last year will break into consumer products in 2016.

    1. Medical sensors

    Six technologies that can change your life in 2016
    Posted Jan 07th 2016

    By Richard Comerford, Senior Technical Editor, Electronic Products

    A number of core technologies that were first realized as viable engineering components last year will break into consumer products in 2016. As technologists and marketers meet in Las Vegas this week for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, we preview six advanced technologies that we expect to see on store shelves in the coming year, and what they’ll mean to you as an end user.

    1. Medical sensors
    2. Handheld wireless voice control
    3. Faster-acting handheld devices
    4. Better back-up power
    5. Smart workplaces
    6. Virtual reality/augmented reality

    Reply
  18. Tomi Engdahl says:

    2016 Google Tracker: Everything Google is working on for the new year
    Android N, a big VR program, Google Glass, and lots more are in store for Alphabet.
    http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/2016-google-tracker-everything-google-is-working-on-for-the-new-year/

    Reply
  19. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Apple CEO Tim Cook Says We Need More Computer, Coding Education
    http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-says-we-need-more-computer-coding-n477251

    Apple CEO Tim Cook says teaching coding to kids is just as important as teaching any other foreign language. And the younger kids start learning it, the better.

    Cook spoke to a group of New York third graders who visited a Manhattan Apple store for a coding class Wednesday. He says schools don’t put enough emphasis on computer science education and that he hopes that one day coding will become a required class for all kids.

    The “Hour of Code” workshop was one of many held by Apple this week as part of Computer Science Education Week.

    Reply
  20. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Why Do Americans Work So Much?
    http://news.slashdot.org/story/16/01/10/039201/why-do-americans-work-so-much

    Rebecca Rosen has an interesting essay at The Atlantic on economist John Maynard Keynes’ prediction in 1930 that with increased productivity, over the next 100 years the economy would become so productive that people would barely need to work at all. For a while, it looked like Keynes was right: In 1930 the average workweek was 47 hours. By 1970 it had fallen to slightly less than 39. But then something changed. Instead of continuing to decline, the duration of the workweek stayed put; it’s hovered just below 40 hours for nearly five decades.

    Keynes got that right: Technology has made the economy massively more productive.

    the key reason that Keynes prediction failed to come true is that Keynes failed to allow for the changing distribution of wealth.

    Why Do Americans Work So Much?
    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality-work-hours/422775/

    The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a society so prosperous that people would hardly have to work. But that isn’t exactly how things have played out.

    What Keynes foretold was a very optimistic version of what economists call technological unemployment—the idea that less labor will be necessary because machines can do so much. In Keynes’s vision, the resulting unemployment would be distributed more or less evenly across society in the form of increased leisure.

    Friedman says that reality comports more with a darker version of technological unemployment: It’s not unemployment per se, but a soft labor market in which millions of people are “desperately seeking whatever low-wage work [they] can get.” This is corroborated by a recent poll by Marketplace that found that for half of hourly workers, their top concern isn’t that they work too much but that they work too little—not, presumably, because they like their jobs so much, but because they need the money.

    This explanation leaves an important question: If the very rich—the workers who have reaped above-average gains from the increased productivity since Keynes’s time—can afford to work less, why don’t they? I asked Friedman about this and he theorized that for many top earners, work is a labor of love. They are doing work they care about and are interested in, and doing more of it isn’t such a burden—it may even be a pleasure. They derive meaning from their jobs, and it is an important part of how they think of themselves. And, of course, they are compensated for it at a level that makes it worth their while.

    Reply
  21. Tomi Engdahl says:

    David Bowie: Musician, actor… techie
    The muso was the medium
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/11/david_bowie_obituary/

    David Bowie, the iconic rock star, has died aged 69 following an 18-month battle against cancer.

    Bowie’s death was announced on his Facebook page and confirmed by son Duncan Jones on Twitter.

    A chameleon, Bowie meant different things to different people thanks to a creativity that spanned music, film, fashion, technology, media and the web. He had a musical career that sprawled across 50 years and produced 25 albums… but there was more to the man than the music.

    Bowie released a number of early singles in the 1960s but made his name with 1969’s “Space Oddity”, which went to No. 1 in the UK.

    Most people remember Major Tom

    The scenes showing multi-screened disconnectedness, combined with the eerie Brian Eno-brewed sounds of the Berlin period – which spawned “Heroes” and “Ashes to Ashes”, amongst others – defined the look and sound of our current techno-alienation, even as a bunch of West Coast dropouts and hippies were building the technology to create it for real.

    Both sides cringingly came together when Windows 98’s launch was soundtracked with “Heroes”.

    Decades after The Man who Fell to Earth, Bowie was an early internet believer, putting his name to BowieNet in 1998. The dial-up internet service was a collaboration with UltraStar, and the idea was to provide internet access for a monthly fee of $5.95 packaged with Exclusive Bowie art, words and music.

    Whereas artists today talk about giving away albums free online or try to reach fans “directly” via social networks, Bowie was there first.

    Reply
  22. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Major Health Organization Stops Forcing Doctors To Adopt New Technology
    http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/01/12/1931219/major-health-organization-stops-forcing-doctors-to-adopt-new-technology?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29

    The administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, told an investors’ conference that they will be backing off the unpopular requirement that doctors show “meaningful use” of their new computer systems. Andy Slavitt, acting administrator, admitted that “physician burden and frustration levels are real. Programs that are designed to improve often distract. Done poorly, measures are divorced from how physicians practice and add to the cynicism that the people who build these programs just don’t get it.”

    Dr. James L. Madara, CEO of the American Medical Association, agreed that EHRs were having a negative impact on physicians’ practices.

    CMS’s Slavitt: End of meaningful use imminent in 2016
    http://www.internalmedicinenews.com/practice-economics/health-reform/single-article/cmss-slavitt-end-of-meaningful-use-imminent-in-2016/94653f2ba164a8131ca214d5325c0d74.html

    Meaningful use is on its way out.

    Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, told investors attending the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that CMS is pulling back from the health care IT incentive program in the coming months.

    “The meaningful use program as it has existed will now be effectively over and replaced with something better,” Mr. Slavitt said. Without providing full details, he said that March 25 would be an important date as concerns the rollout of the new health IT initiatives.

    “We have to get the hearts and minds of physicians back. I think we’ve lost them,” Mr. Slavitt said. He noted that, when the meaningful use incentive program began, few physicians and practices used electronic health records and concerns were that many would not willingly embrace information technology. Now that “virtually everywhere care is delivered has a computer,” it’s time to make health care technology serve beneficiaries and the physicians who serve them, Mr. Slavitt said.

    The cost, however, was too high, Mr. Slavitt said. “As any physician will tell you, physician burden and frustration levels are real. Programs that are designed to improve often distract. Done poorly, measures are divorced from how physicians practice and add to the cynicism that the people who build these programs just don’t get it.”

    Soon, CMS will no longer reward health care providers for using technology, but will instead focus on patient outcomes through the merit-based incentive pay systems created by last year’s Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) legislation.

    Anyone seeking to block data transfer will find CMS is not their friend. Mr. Slavitt said. “We’re deadly serious about interoperability. Technology companies that look for ways to practice data blocking in opposition to new regulations will find that it will not be tolerated.”

    Reply
  23. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Profiles in Design: Pat Byrne, Tektronix
    http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4441182/Profiles-in-Design–Pat-Byrne–Tektronix?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160112&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160112&elq=19ece4ba67de47d6ab181241f2986e91&elqCampaignId=26457&elqaid=30266&elqat=1&elqTrackId=7aa19bcd16484e28bd614eb627d7c9c6

    “Engineering is practical problem solving in service of great breakthroughs.” –Pat Byrne

    EDN: What is it that you like most about engineering?
    Pat Byrne: Engineering is about solving practical problems in service of big objectives. For example, I recently saw the movie The Martian about an astronaut who gets stranded on Mars. It’s a great movie for engineering, similar to Apollo 13, because it shows how he improvised to solve practical problems but in the end did something that had never been done before. It’s just a movie but it makes the point – engineering is practical problem solving in service of great breakthroughs.

    EDN: What has surprised you over the years in terms of technology?
    Byrne: Consumers are driving technology innovation more than enterprises. When I started in technology 20-30 years ago, it was large corporations that drove technology for enterprise-related applications. Now the most sophisticated technologies we have in our lives are in our smart phones or cars or on our wrists. The pace of innovation driven by consumer cycle times and the consumerization of technologies has been a massive shift, one that means technology is now moving much faster and at lower power.

    EDN: What did you think we’d be able to do now that we still can’t?
    Byrne: The transportation industry is still as it was 20 years ago. The experience of sitting on an airplane or in traffic is not that different, if anything, it is worse. I expected that those dynamics would have changed substantially through technology because moving people and goods efficiently is a large part of the economy.

    EDN: What are the biggest misconceptions about test & measurement?
    Byrne: Test and measurement should be seen as an innovation platform to enable competitive advantage rather than a hurdle to overcome.

    EDN: What’s next for you/the industry?
    Byrne: The next phase for the industry is to create partnerships that can develop solutions that will enable customers to break down barriers between exciting new ideas and their realization.

    Reply
  24. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Number of Yankee patents decreased

    US Patent Office PTO has published in recent years on patenting. IBM continues to clearly the most active patentees of new technologies. Instead, the total number of patents decreased for the first time in seven years.

    All in all, the PTO received 298 407 patent applications. The amount is one percent lower than the previous year. IBM names of the applications recorded in 7355, which in itself is a little less than last year.

    IBM, following the highest number of applications the PTO for giant Samsung, a total of 5072 pieces. Canon (4134), Qualcomm (2900) and Google (2835) complete the top five patenting stockholder list.

    Microsoft (Microsoft Corporation) submitted last year to the PTO for only 465 patent applications

    Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3831:jenkkipatenttien-maara-vaheni&catid=13&Itemid=101

    Reply
  25. Tomi Engdahl says:

    UK Device Developers’ Conference: Build Better Embedded Systems Faster
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=216&doc_id=1328659&

    Reply
  26. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The actual father of electricity
    http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/all-things-measured/4441206/The-actual-father-of-electricity

    Recently, while rummaging through the antique book section at my local bookstore, I came across Applied Electrical Measurements, written by Isaac F. Kinnard and copyrighted in 1956 by the General Electric Company. Being a geek for all things that make measurements possible I was giddy to add it to my library.

    That night, I began reading the book’s opening chapter, “Milestones in the Progress of Electrical Measurements,” where I came across a reference to the “Father of Electricity.” Much to my surprise, I had no idea who he was. If you asked me who that was, I would have probably guessed Alessandro Volta (credited as the inventor of the electrical battery) or maybe Andre Marie Ampere (one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism) or possibly Thales of Miletus (in 600 B.C. he observed and recorded the electrostatic effect produced by rubbing amber). But, I would have been wrong. The person widely considered the “Father of Electricity” is Sir William Gilbert.

    Sir William Gilbert was born on 24 May 1544 in Colchester, Essex. He held the position of president of the Royal College of Physicians and was physician to Elizabeth I. In 1600, Sir Gilbert published De Magnete, which became accepted as the defacto standard on electrical and magnetic phenomena throughout Europe.

    It’s interesting to note that it would be over two centuries before new knowledge on magnetism would appear when in 1825 William Sturgeon created the first electromagnet (around the same time Michael Faraday began studying magnetism). Sir Gilbert was first to make the case for differentiating between magnetic attraction and electrical attraction—static electricity

    Sir Gilbert’s work led to the coining the term electricity, a term first used by Sir Thomas Browne in 1646. The word derives from Gilbert’s 1600 New Latin electricus, meaning “like amber” because of its attractive properties.

    Reply
  27. Tomi Engdahl says:

    More People In Europe Are Dying Than Are Being Born
    http://politics.slashdot.org/story/16/01/14/2032213/more-people-in-europe-are-dying-than-are-being-born

    More people in Europe are dying than are being born, according to a new report co-authored by a Texas A&M University demographer. In contrast, births exceed deaths, by significant margins, in Texas and elsewhere in the United States, with few exceptions. The researchers find that in Europe, deaths exceeded births in most of the counties of Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, as well as in Sweden and the Baltic States.

    More people in Europe are dying than are being born
    http://phys.org/news/2016-01-people-europe-dying-born.html

    “Natural decrease is much more common in Europe than in the U.S because its population is older, fertility rates are lower and there are fewer women of child-bearing age,” Poston and his colleagues explain. “Natural decrease is a major policy concern because it drains the demographic resilience from a region diminishing its economic viability and competitiveness.”

    Reply
  28. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Al Gore on China, Mobile Web
    Collaboration, higher values are key
    http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328692&

    Former vice president Al Gore is an optimist. He also has a unique view into ways technology will shape the future as a member of Apple’s board of directors and chairman of both Generation Investment Management and The Climate Reality Project.

    “I don’t think we are in a dark era. I think we’re in an era filled with unprecedented challenges but I am an optimist in overcoming those challenges,” Gore said at Connect 2016, the Cross-Pacific Mobile Internet Conference sponsored by Chinese company Cheetah Mobile. “But we have to communicate with one another and make intelligent decisions.”

    Collaboration is already well underway, with the COP21 UN climate conference and economic partnerships between the United States and China driving the trend. As a result, tech — and particularly mobile — startups are living in a world of possibilities where connections are easier and the value of the market is growing exponentially.

    “These underlying technological trends are creating an ever-larger set of commercial opportunities,

    Mobile entrepreneurs should think altruistically because the most successful companies will be those that “keep in mind the larger context in which they are making change,” Gore said. Much of the young talent that will develop the mobile ecosystem wants to work for a company that is has “higher values” than profits, he added.

    “I think that the same ingenuity and technology change that has created excitement in digital mobile communication is also transforming energy,”

    Reply
  29. Tomi Engdahl says:

    All Aboard the Hardware Startup Train
    http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328676&

    After years of software-based funding and tedious development, the crowdfunding tide is turning toward hardware. At International CES, held Jan. 6- 9, officials from Indiegogo said companies throughout the chip and gadget ecosystem are getting on board.

    “Everyone from Foxconn to Qualcomm want to talk to entrepreneurs…and offer them all the resources so they can make great products. That’s a new thing,” Evan Cohen, Indiegogo’s senior director of design, technology and hardware, told EE Times. “The whole maker movement has matured into an entrepreneur movement at this point.”

    More than 110 products at this year’s CES started on Indiegogo, CEO Slava Rubin said, adding that the company has raised over $800 million in campaigns. Rubin believes one out of six companies on the CES show floor received funding from an Indiegogo campaign.

    Direct conversations with larger companies are leading to a serious advancement in developer tools for the Arduinos and Raspberry Pis commonly used by startups, Cohen said. Companies such as Brookstone and GE are also getting in on some of crowdfunding’s benefits—market validation of otherwise unknown products and a built-in audience—with a recently announced enterprise crowdfunding from Indiegogo.

    “The higher-up enthusiasm toward the startup world is really exciting. There was a time where you were a maker and you were lucky to get in front of somebody,”

    Reply
  30. Tomi Engdahl says:

    CIOs challenged to get disruptive and be more courageous in their digital vision
    http://www.cio.co.uk/insight/strategy/cios-challenged-get-disruptive-3630546/

    CIOs have been challenged to demand more from their CEOs, build digital platform businesses, lead transformation and innovation programmes, and use emerging digital technologies to disrupt and reimagine rather than optimise current business processes by IT analyst, research and advisory firm Gartner.

    While vice president and Gartner Fellow Dave Aron said that CIOs – particularly in the EMEA region – were leading digital transformation and innovation efforts and staving of the threat of Chief Digital Officers treading on their toes, Aron warned that CIOs might not be being brave enough, and analyst peer Mark Raskino suggested CIOs should request and expect CEO involvement to drive the digital agenda.

    Aron’s team of researchers found that 43% of EMEA CIOs said that they were were leading digital transformation, and 33% responded they were leading innovation programmes at their organisations, while the growth of the CDO role had stalled with the majority of CIOs fighting back to take on digital leadership and only 30% performing a role described by Aron as “functional IT leadership”.

    What is Bimodal IT? It’s not two-speed, it’s about making your Samurais and ninjas work together according to Gartner analyst Dave Aron

    Getting disruptive

    However, Aron questioned whether CIOs who said they were overseeing transformation and the digital impacts on their business were being bold enough. The study found that CIOs are focusing on increased revenue from better operations and more business conducted through digital channels.

    Business as a Platform

    Gartner’s latest theme, following on from last year’s focus on so-called Bimodal IT, was for organisations of all sizes to become platform businesses.

    “As digital deepens, it’s clear that hardcoded business and operating models won’t suffice,” Aron said. “What’s changed is that there’s a shift to platform thinking. Business executives need to look at their business as a hierarchy of processes, in terms of their business models, delivery mechanisms, talent and leadership. Platform concepts need to penetrate all aspects of a business.

    “Even if your business isn’t directly susceptible to platform thinking now, platform thinking will make your business successful.”

    What is Bimodal IT?

    Gartner had not coined the term to advocate having a two-speed organisation, Aron said, with its combination of old-style and modern IT practices, with two separate organisations focusing on innovation and keeping the lights on respectively. Instead, it was about interdisciplinary teams offering different skills.

    “Bimodal IT is not two-speed,” Aron said. “It’s about Samurais and ninjas. You don’t want an army of ninjas because it would be too chaotic, and you don’t want your innovation done by Samurais because it would be too boring.

    “The end game is to recognise who your Samurais are and who are your ninjas and have them working together.”

    Reply
  31. Tomi Engdahl says:

    World Bank Says Internet Technology May Widen Inequality
    http://news.slashdot.org/story/16/01/15/027213/world-bank-says-internet-technology-may-widen-inequality

    Somini Sengupta writes in the NY Times that a new report from the World Bank concludes that the vast changes wrought by Internet technology have not expanded economic opportunities or improved access to basic public services but stand to widen inequalities and even hasten the hollowing out of middle-class employment. “Digital technologies are spreading rapidly, but digital dividends — growth, jobs and services — have lagged behind,”

    Internet Yields Uneven Dividends and May Widen Inequality, Report Says
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/world/asia/internet-yields-uneven-dividends-and-may-widen-inequality-report-says.html?_r=0

    “Digital technologies are spreading rapidly, but digital dividends — growth, jobs and services — have lagged behind,” the bank said in a news release announcing the report.

    Those who are already well-off and well-educated have been able to take advantage of the Internet economy, the report concluded pointedly, and despite the expansion of Internet access, 60 percent of humanity remains offline.

    China has the largest number of Internet users, followed by the United States and India, according to the report.

    The bank’s findings come at a time when the technology industry — which sometimes tends to see itself as the solver of the world’s greatest problems — has been rushing to expand Internet access through a variety of new means. Google, through its Project Loon, aims to use a constellation of balloons to beam down wireless signals to places that lack connectivity. Facebook has offered a limited sphere of the World Wide Web for users in some developing countries — and in turn, has come under intense criticism, especially in India.

    “Countries that are investing in both digital technology and its analog complements will reap significant dividends, while others are likely to fall behind” the report added. “Technology without a strong foundation risks creating divergent economic fortunes, higher inequality and an intrusive state.”

    How a society takes advantage of information technology depends on what kind of a society it is, the report concluded.

    The bank, which says it has itself invested $12.6 billion in information technology projects, calls on countries to make the Internet “universal, affordable, open and safe.” Yet it also takes pains to say that expanding access will not be enough for citizens to take advantage of the benefits

    “The triple complements — a favorable business climate, strong human capital and good governance — will sound familiar — and they should because they are the foundation of economic development,”

    Reply
  32. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Full of fear at work: Blame the boss, or yourself?
    Fear inhibits change, but it’s also a great motivator
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/fear_inhibits_change_fear_is_the_great_motivator/

    Fear is a great motivator. Fear pushes adrenaline. It primes our “fight or flight” response. It primes us for a confrontation. Fear shuts down our higher cognitive functions, priming us for a visceral response, on top of which we layer rationalisation.

    Fear ensures continued survival of our species in times of dire straits. When we are afraid, we have only our intuition and built-in responses to draw on. When we are afraid, we can’t accept feedback, respond to things which run counter to our expectations, or learn. And so, a culture in which fear operates is one in which no learning takes place. Fear inhibits change.

    In the last 200 years, work has changed significantly. Most of us do not face daily threats to our continued existence. But our fear response remains. We still respond with adrenaline when threatened, or embarrassed; we still shut down; we still lose our capacity for higher reasoning and openness. And it kills improvement at work. It kills creativity. And it’s common.

    Needless to say, fear response is a response borne of perception, not reality.

    In a world where we are taught to define ourselves by how successful we are at work, how much money we make, how influential we are, and how people see us, threats to our continued existence do not have to be life or death.

    Job loss, income loss, prestige loss, or promotion loss all generate a similar response. And the idea that trying something, but not succeeding at it, is frequently tied to more than one of those losses, making us risk averse, and afraid of experimentation.

    “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.” – Arie de Geus

    Knowledge-heavy roles (such as IT or management) require learning in order to be effective, or help the company succeed. Learning through experience and mistakes is necessary in any role that brings about change, whether the goal is figuring out how to convert page views into sales, or transforming your business into a leaner, more effective organisation. Knowledge economies are driven by learning – the converting of information into knowledge and understanding.

    Without learning, we cannot progress; without learning, our companies can’t adapt; without learning, we are doomed to eventual replacement by companies with newer ideas that we couldn’t test

    Agile, Lean, Kanban, and DevOps all attempt to remove this fear by explicitly creating conditions where experimentation and learning are encouraged. All too often, however, the adoption of these processes fail, not due to failures in the processes, but due to their incompleteness.

    The value of mistakes

    Mistakes are inevitable. By punishing mistakes a company (explicitly with firing, or implicitly through reduced career or salary progression) doesn’t eliminate them, it merely ensures that nobody will talk about them. And nobody will talk about the fact that nobody is talking about them.

    The entire organisation will collude in hiding mistakes in order to avoid feelings of embarrassment or threats (Argyris, Knowledge for Action). Any company in which failures are not openly discussed, in order to be learned from (without any sense of blame or shame), is not learning effectively.

    Companies rarely explicitly punish failure. Instead, there are unspoken rules about the acceptability and impact of failure – fewer promotions, reduced raises, fewer hours, worse reviews.

    Admitting failure requires vulnerability, so creating a culture that learns from failure also requires vulnerability, usually in the form of managers making their own failures, and learnings, more visible.

    Conclusion

    Admitting failure isn’t easy. It can make us feel vulnerable. The alternative is worse. The alternative is not admitting failure, not admitting mistakes, not learning from things we know are, or were, wrong. Companies which can’t learn from mistakes stagnate, and eventually fail.

    Reply
  33. Tomi Engdahl says:

    You, yes YOU: DevOps’ people problem
    Chucking a copy of The Phoenix Project at the team ain’t the answer
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/devops_people_problem/

    You’ve no doubt heard of DevOps. This is the process of getting developers and sysadmins working together closely on the same team to support a company’s custom-written software.

    I know, I know, Dear Reader: you’ve been doing this ever since operating that AS/400; no one really needs weekly releases; and, of course, the favorite: “this is just the current way for consultants to make money.”

    All signs point towards DevOps being not only all those things, but actually A Thing on its own. Ever since starting my career as a programmer, and through being an industry analyst, strategist, and, now, marketer, I’ve been motivated by the quest of learning how to improve the software development and delivery process. DevOps seems like the current, best method.

    Things are not too joyous when it comes to IT actually delivering on this dream of helping companies innovate. When I want to gin up an excuse to drink heavily, one of my favorite charts to look at is this one from the Cutter consortium.

    When it comes to innovation, over 3 short years IT has plummeted in usefulness. To put it bluntly: IT sucks.

    You’re doing CD? Yeah, sure…

    Continuous Delivery (CD) is yet another one of those things that most people say they’ve done since the days of mainframes … but reality is usually different, as seen by one study

    A fair number of people think they’re doing continuous delivery, but when compared to the textbook definition, they’re more like dabblers, picking and choosing practices that are easiest and leaving out the rest.

    Trying is the first step to failing

    While longer-running bodies of work like the always excellent, annual Puppet Labs DevOps survey are showing that the ideas work, things are not so rosy when it comes to putting DevOps in place. More often than not when I’ve worked with groups that want their software processes with DevOps, they underestimate the amount of organizational change needed. They view software more like building a Lego kit. Creating good software is more like inventing Lego all over again, each time. Fostering that kind of continuous learning requires putting the process in place that creates metaphoric “innovation factories.” DevOps thinking describes much of how those “factories” run, which is often much different than the status quo.

    What I’ve learned is that it’s a meatware problem: people’s default to resist change is what holds back transforming to a DevOps mind-set. This is why the DevOps cult leaders go on and on about “culture.”

    Reply
  34. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Self-regulation can address issues that arise in the digital economy, says Airbnb
    Special pleading by ‘sharing economy’ biz
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/self_regulation_can_address_issues_that_arise_in_the_digital_economy_says_airbnb/

    Self regulation can be a “more effective way” of addressing issues that arise in online markets than passing new legislation, Airbnb has said.

    “Self-regulatory initiatives are emerging (such as Sharing Economy UK’s forthcoming ‘trust mark’) that may present more effective, more flexible approaches to consumer protection and quality than statutory models of regulation,” Airbnb said. “We would therefore encourage the [Business, Innovation and Skills] Committee to consider the role of self regulation in such a fast-moving environment. It is so often found to be a far more effective way of regulation keeping pace with rapidly evolving markets.”

    Airbnb is an online platform that helps match people willing to rent out their accommodation to those looking for a place to stay. It is an example of a business operating on the basis of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ model. The sharing, or collaborative, economy is a term used to describe operations where ordinary people trade the use of their assets with consumers who have a temporary need for them, usually over digital peer-to-peer platforms.

    Airbnb said that “trust is the essential currency of the collaborative economy” and that the “trust mechanisms” it deploys, which include peer-to-peer reviews, serve as “additional layers of protection” for users of its platform beyond those provided for under law.

    Reply
  35. Tomi Engdahl says:

    As the President has said many times, “If we want America to lead in the 21st Century, nothing is more important than giving everyone the best education possible.”

    All you see, read, and hear will proclaim, “You are not meant to succeed. You don’t belong here.”

    I refused to accept those stats. It became an “I’ll show them” mission. I needed to prove myself!

    My 14 year old wants to skip high school and go to college now to focus on game design and development.

    Their outlook on life is fundamentally different. They see no obstacles in their way. They fear no barriers. In just one generation we’ve been able to change our family’s destiny. This is the real power of education.

    Often we ask our students the wrong question, “What do you want to be when you grow up.” I don’t like this question. First, there is a very good chance your “job” doesn’t exist. Second, I do not expect kids growing up in communities like Hell’s Kitchen to tell me that they want to be a microbiologist or a sustainable materials architect.

    Instead, I want to ask you, “What problem do you want to solve?” What problem occupies your thoughts?

    I want you to think about the knowledge, skills, and abilities you need to solve this problem.

    Where can you start building the knowledge, skills, and abilities you need?

    What research do you need to do?
    What publications and websites should you subscribe to?
    What classes can you take? Online? In school?
    What books should you read?
    What videos and documentaries should you watch?
    Who else is interested in solving this problem? Who are the people you can collaborate with?
    Who should you follow on LinkedIn or Twitter?
    What blogs should you be reading?

    When I ask you to think about what problem you want to solve, I am asking you to take ownership of your learning. I am asking you to begin to create mastery for the most critical skills you will need. I want to give you the opportunity to think about purpose.

    This is the American dream and some people believe this dream is no longer reachable. I am here to tell you it is possible. I want you to believe it is possible!

    Source: http://www.jcasap.com/2015/07/my-speech-for-flotus-beat-odds-summit.html

    Reply
  36. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Change conversation from, “who do you want to work for” to “what problem do you want to solve” #edchat #edtech
    https://twitter.com/jcasap/status/672079586822242304

    Reply
  37. Tomi Engdahl says:

    From failure to innovation: A story of engineering success
    http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/designcon-central-/4441241/From-failure-to-innovation–A-story-of-engineering-success?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160120&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160120&elq=4543d67618c5450caaf2f712d8e03966&elqCampaignId=26590&elqaid=30402&elqat=1&elqTrackId=da6bfe22673249b6b191c54aed6d1760

    Al Eisaian is no stranger to failure. It’s what has made him a successful engineer and entrepreneur.

    Beginning as a hardware test engineer and advancing through product and business unit management, Eisaian is currently the CEO of IntelinAir Inc., an aerial information analytics firm, the fifth company he has co-founded.

    To create success as an engineer and entrepreneur, Eisaian approaches missteps as learning opportunities. “There are no failures. Just lessons,” he said.

    Eisaian shared his own framework for achieving success, dubbed the 5 Cs for:

    1. Clarity: “Fundamentally, everyone has to answer the question ‘why?’. Why does this [design/product/company] exist?” One must be clear on that.
    2. Commitment: “Once you deeply care about something, that passion brings about commitment,” he said. Eisaian elaborated that if you truly have something you want to devote your life to – be it a design, a start-up, a family—you will not succeed without a strong commitment to that thing’s success.
    3. Competency: Success doesn’t just come because you want it. Success takes learning, discussion with peers and competitors, a design plan, and attention. “It takes focus—focused study, focused conversation, focused tinkering – to know what you are talking about,” he said.
    4. Creativity: “It’s not enough to know what’s out there,” Eisaian said of engineering beyond being competent. “You have to start sharing and taking risks.”
    5. Community: Eisaian referenced Weir’s contributions to the DesignCon community and the enormous appreciation his peers showed for his willingness to collaborate. “The days of being the lonely engineer in the corner inventing are over. Collaborate in such a way that brings things that matter to the world,” he advised.

    Eisaian closed by stating: “In this new era, the calculated risk takers are the ones winning.”

    What’s your take? Are you a calculated risk taker or the lonely engineer in the corner?

    Reply
  38. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Finnish innovation system is praised

    International ITIF Foundation (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation) to praise the Finnish innovation policy. In the new study, Finland was ranked the world’s number one country.

    This achievement is significant because the report compares 56 different country innovation systems. Together, they produce as much as 90 percent of the world economy.

    In the past, countries in order of merit on the basis of what the results of their innovation system produces. The new benchmark considers innovation systems in countries more broadly. Included are, for example, innovation, improve tax arrangements and national investments in research.

    According to the report, Finland generates the third highest outputs of the global innovation ecosystem use. The Finnish system is globally the least harmful.

    Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3879:suomen-innovaatiojarjestelmaa-kiitetaan&catid=13&Itemid=101

    ITIF’s report can explore the Foundation’s website at
    http://www2.itif.org/2016-contributors-and-detractors-executive-summary.pdf

    Reply
  39. Tomi Engdahl says:

    J.C. Bose and the Invention of Radio
    http://hackaday.com/2016/01/19/j-c-bose-and-the-invention-of-radio/

    The early days of electricity appear to have been a cutthroat time. While academics were busy uncovering the mysteries of electromagnetism, bands of entrepreneurs were waiting to pounce on the pure science and engineer solutions to problems that didn’t even exist yet, but could no doubt turn into profitable ventures. We’ve all heard of the epic battles between Edison and Tesla and Westinghouse, and even with the benefit of more than a century of hindsight it’s hard to tell who did what to whom. But another conflict was brewing at the turn of 19th century, this time between an Indian polymath and an Italian nobleman, and it would determine who got credit for laying the foundations for the key technology of the 20th century – radio.

    In 1885, a 27-year old Jagadish Chandra Bose returned to his native India from England, where he had been studying natural science at Cambridge. Originally sent there to study medicine, Bose had withdrawn due to ill-health exacerbated by the disagreeable aroma of the dissection rooms. Instead, Bose returned with a collection of degrees in multiple disciplines and a letter of introduction that prompted the Viceroy of India to request an appointment for him at Presidency College in Kolkata (Calcutta).

    At around the time Bose joined Presidency College, Heinrich Hertz was confirming the existence of electromagnetic waves, postulated by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s. Maxwell died before he could demonstrate that electricity, magnetism, and light are all one in the same phenomenon, but Hertz and his spark gap transmitters and receivers proved it. Inspired by this work and intrigued by the idea that “Hertzian Waves” and visible light were the same thing, Bose set about exploring this new field.

    By 1895, barely a year after starting his research, Bose made the first public demonstration of radio waves in the Kolkata town hall.

    Bose’s wireless demonstration was remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, it took place two years before Marconi’s first public demonstrations of wireless telegraphy in England. Where Marconi was keenly interested in commercializing radio, Bose’s interest was purely academic

    The 1895 demonstration also used microwave signals instead of the low and medium frequency waves that Marconi and others were working with. Bose recognized early on that shorter wavelengths would make it easier to explore the properties of radio waves that were similar to light, like reflection, refraction, and polarization. To do so, he invented almost all the basic components of microwave systems – waveguides, polarizers, horn antennas, dielectric lenses, parabolic reflectors, and attenuators. His spark-gap transmitters were capable of 60GHz operation.

    Bose also did early work in semiconductor detectors. Bose was exploring the optical properties of radio waves when he discovered that galena, an ore of lead rich in lead sulfide, was able to selectively conduct in the presence of radio waves.

    Reply
  40. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age?
    http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/01/25/0134243/is-blockchain-the-most-important-it-invention-of-our-age

    This article makes a fairly persuasive argument for the utility of the blockchain. It discusses a wide variety of companies and government exploring blockchain to maintain secure records which cannot be altered. One interesting application is to use blockchain to maintain property records in many countries where these records are often incomplete and are easily corrupted (intentionally or unintentionally).

    Is Blockchain the most important IT invention of our age?
    John Naughton
    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/24/blockchain-bitcoin-technology-most-important-tech-invention-of-our-age-sir-mark-walport

    The technology behind Bitcoin could revolutionise the way governments provide healthcare, deliver benefits, collect taxes – you name it…
    There are not many occasions when one can give an unqualified thumbs-up to something the government does, but this is one such occasion. Last week, Sir Mark Walport, the government’s chief scientific adviser, published a report with the forbidding title Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond Block Chain. The report sets out the findings of an official study that explores how the aforementioned technology “can revolutionise services, both in government and the private sector”. Since this is the kind of talk one normally hears from loopy startup founders pitching to venture capitalists rather than from sober Whitehall mandarins, it made this columnist choke on his muesli – especially given that, in so far as Joe Public thinks about distributed ledgers at all, it is in the context of Bitcoin, money laundering and online drug dealing. So what, one is tempted to ask, has the chief scientific adviser been smoking?

    Before we get to that, however, some background might be useful. A distributed ledger is a special kind of database that is spread across multiple sites, countries or institutions, and is typically public in the sense that anyone can view it. Entries in the database are configured in “blocks” which are then chained together using digital, cryptographic signatures – hence the term blockchain, which is really just a techie name for a distributed ledger that can be shared and corroborated by anyone who has the appropriate permissions.

    Most of the early examples of distributed ledgers have no “owner”. Instead anyone can contribute data to the ledger and everybody who has access to the ledger has an identical copy of it at any given time. This means that no individual can prevent someone from adding data to the ledger, and so it can constantly be updated. But it also means that all those in possession of copies of the ledger have to agree that the updates have happened.

    Blockchain technology appeared first as the cryptographic engine that powered Bitcoin.

    After all, a blockchain is essentially an incorruptible ledger of blocks of data, and that data can be records of just about anything.

    Like records of land ownership. Creating and maintaining incorruptible registers of land titles is a huge – and mostly unsolved – problem for developing countries.

    The unmistakable message was that this technology could be much more useful than merely securing cryptocurrencies. It might actually turn out to be one of the biggest IT inventions of our time.

    The report makes eight recommendations on how to turn enthusiasm for blockchain technology into reality. There needs to be serious ministerial buy-in, for example, which – given our current collection of technologically illiterate tribunes – might be a bit of a stretch. We need working pilot schemes at local and national level. Academia and industry should be co-opted to address the security and other challenges that large-scale deployment will throw up. And of course there is a “need to build capability and skills within government”, not to mention “a cross-government community of interest… to generate and develop potential ‘use cases’ and create a body of knowledge and expertise within the civil service”.

    All good stuff. The problem is that the supertanker that is the British state takes a long time to change course. Which is why small countries with techno-savvy administrations like Estonia are already experimenting with blockchain technology. They can turn on a sixpence, or even a Bitcoin.

    Research and analysis
    Distributed ledger technology: Blackett review
    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/distributed-ledger-technology-blackett-review

    The great chain of being sure about things
    http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21677228-technology-behind-bitcoin-lets-people-who-do-not-know-or-trust-each-other-build-dependable

    The technology behind bitcoin lets people who do not know or trust each other build a dependable ledger. This has implications far beyond the cryptocurrency

    A place in the past

    Other applications for blockchain and similar “distributed ledgers” range from thwarting diamond thieves to streamlining stockmarkets: the NASDAQ exchange will soon start using a blockchain-based system to record trades in privately held companies. The Bank of England, not known for technological flights of fancy, seems electrified: distributed ledgers, it concluded in a research note late last year, are a “significant innovation” that could have “far-reaching implications” in the financial industry.

    The politically minded see the blockchain reaching further than that. When co-operatives and left-wingers gathered for this year’s OuiShare Fest in Paris to discuss ways that grass-roots organisations could undermine giant repositories of data like Facebook, the blockchain made it into almost every speech. Libertarians dream of a world where more and more state regulations are replaced with private contracts between individuals—contracts which blockchain-based programming would make self-enforcing.

    The blockchain began life in the mind of Satoshi Nakamoto, the brilliant, pseudonymous and so far unidentified creator of bitcoin—a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash”, as he put it in a paper published in 2008. To work as cash, bitcoin had to be able to change hands without being diverted into the wrong account and to be incapable of being spent twice by the same person. To fulfil Mr Nakamoto’s dream of a decentralised system the avoidance of such abuses had to be achieved without recourse to any trusted third party, such as the banks which stand behind conventional payment systems.

    It is the blockchain that replaces this trusted third party. A database that contains the payment history of every bitcoin in circulation, the blockchain provides proof of who owns what at any given juncture. This distributed ledger is replicated on thousands of computers—bitcoin’s “nodes”—around the world and is publicly available. But for all its openness it is also trustworthy and secure. This is guaranteed by the mixture of mathematical subtlety and computational brute force built into its “consensus mechanism”—the process by which the nodes agree on how to update the blockchain in the light of bitcoin transfers from one person to another.

    Running in the shadows

    That hash is put, along with some other data, into the header of the proposed block. This header then becomes the basis for an exacting mathematical puzzle which involves using the hash function yet again. This puzzle can only be solved by trial and error. Across the network, miners grind through trillions and trillions of possibilities looking for the answer. When a miner finally comes up with a solution other nodes quickly check it (that’s the one-way street again: solving is hard but checking is easy), and each node that confirms the solution updates the blockchain accordingly. The hash of the header becomes the new block’s identifying string, and that block is now part of the ledger. Alice’s payment to Bob, and all the other transactions the block contains, are confirmed.

    This puzzle stage introduces three things that add hugely to bitcoin’s security. One is chance. You cannot predict which miner will solve a puzzle, and so you cannot predict who will get to update the blockchain at any given time, except in so far as it has to be one of the hard working miners, not some random interloper. This makes cheating hard.

    The second addition is history. Each new header contains a hash of the previous block’s header, which in turn contains a hash of the header before that, and so on and so on all the way back to the beginning. It is this concatenation that makes the blocks into a chain.
    Make a change anywhere, though—even back in one of the earliest blocks—and that changed block’s header will come out different.

    And nodes always work on the longest version of the blockchain there is. This rule stops the occasions when two miners find the solution almost simultaneously from causing anything more than a temporary fork in the chain. It also stops cheating.

    Energy is contagious

    The advent of distributed ledgers opens up an “entirely new quadrant of possibilities”, in the words of Albert Wenger of USV, a New York venture firm that has invested in startups such as OpenBazaar, a middleman-free peer-to-peer marketplace. But for all that the blockchain is open and exciting, sceptics argue that its security may yet be fallible and its procedures may not scale. What works for bitcoin and a few niche applications may be unable to support thousands of different services with millions of users.

    Though Mr Nakamoto’s subtle design has so far proved impregnable, academic researchers have identified tactics that might allow a sneaky and well financed miner to compromise the block chain without direct control of 51% of it.

    Because miners keep details of their hardware secret, nobody really knows how much power the network consumes. If everyone were using the most efficient hardware, its annual electricity usage might be about two terawatt-hours—a bit more than the amount used by the 150,000 inhabitants of King’s County in California’s Central Valley. Make really pessimistic assumptions about the miners’ efficiency, though, and you can get the figure up to 40 terawatt-hours, almost two-thirds of what the 10m people in Los Angeles County get through. That surely overstates the problem; still, the more widely people use bitcoin, the worse the waste could get.

    Yet for all this profligacy bitcoin remains limited. Because Mr Nakamoto decided to cap the size of a block at one megabyte, or about 1,400 transactions, it can handle only around seven transactions per second, compared to the 1,736 a second Visa handles in America. Blocks could be made bigger; but bigger blocks would take longer to propagate through the network, worsening the risks of forking.

    The problem is not so much a lack of fixes. It is that the network’s “bitcoin improvement process” makes it hard to choose one. Change requires community-wide agreement, and these are not people to whom consensus comes easily.

    Reply
  41. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hajaan.nu!
    Decentralized Autonomous Organization
    https://hackaday.io/project/9073-hajaannu

    Hajaan.nu is Ethereum based ldap-blockchain organization, which establishes openvpn subnet for its DAC members with decision process defined by Liquid Feedback.

    DAC’s contains humans, who can join DAO as members of DAC.

    Fuzzy Nemesis is binary-only corporation (DAC), which aims to create bootstrappable reference structure for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO)

    hajaan.nu

    Reply
  42. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Engineer: Promote Thyself!
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328826&

    Engineers need to learn that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know — network, network, network!

    “I do wonder if marketing/PR principles can be applied within an engineering team itself, or between engineering teams, since engineers often have to ‘sell’ ideas or approaches or make the case for getting the resources they need to see a feature idea through to a finished product. In my experience, engineers could sometimes use a little PR to achieve their ends rather than trying to dictate to people who don’t necessarily have to follow along.”

    Good question. Marketing and PR principles could be applied to an individual or an engineering team as well. Clive (Max) Maxfield is a terrific example of an engineer who has used successfully a few marketing approaches.

    When we talked, he offered several examples of how he promoted himself and built a high profile prior to becoming an even higher profile editor at EETimes.com and Embedded.com. He had been a regular blogger and wrote technical articles, both of which led to speaking opportunities. Max has written a few books as well. All helped position him as an expert.

    If you are interested in blogging in the context of promoting yourself as an engineer, Max strongly advises writing blogs about something of interest to other engineers

    Marketing for Engineers: Making Use of Pre-Event Announcements
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1326793

    Nanette Collins continues on her quest to educate engineers about the value of good PR and marketing.

    As these three exhibitors will attest, pre-event announcements, especially product news, should be part of every event plan. They build awareness and visibility, and can help drive attendees to the company’s booth to watch a demo and to generate leads. News releases go out on one of the wire services — Businesswire, Marketwired and PRnewswire (owned by UBM) are the three most popular in our industry — and should get posted on Yahoo Finance! and other online databases.

    They’re also multi-purpose. A tradeshow or industry event serves as an immovable deadline for a new product or product upgrade. After all, the show must go on, and it is one of the best opportunities for the company to “strut its stuff” to a large community of potential users in a personalized manner. It’s also the place to reinforce any new features and capabilities of the company’s software or hardware to existing customers.

    Reply
  43. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Megatrends 2016 by Sitra
    http://www.slideshare.net/SitraFund/megatrends-2016-by-sitra?next_slideshow=1

    What are the megatrends that affect our future? How will our lives change as a result of the need

    Reply
  44. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Davey Alba / Wired:
    Obama proposes $4B in funding for states to expand computer science education in schools — Obama Pledges $4 Billion to Computer Science in US Schools — President Obama today pledged $4 billion in funding for computer science education in the nation’s schools.

    Obama Pledges $4 Billion to Computer Science in US Schools
    http://www.wired.com/2016/01/obama-pledges-4-billion-to-computer-science-in-us-schools/

    Reply
  45. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Five Innovation Personalities For The Idea Economy
    http://businessvalueexchange.com/blog/2015/12/17/five-innovation-personalities-for-the-idea-economy/?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral

    The trouble with inspirational quotes and motivational dictums is that they are all too easy to say out loud, but very often much harder to put into practice.

    “If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”

    This quote is attributed to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. As president of Liberia, Sirleaf became the first female elected head of state in Africa.

    See how easy it is to talk about the big picture?

    If we accept that this is the age of the ‘idea economy’ where anybody can have remarkable business, industrial, social, consumer or human ideas, and bring them forward to the point of innovation anywhere, then how do we avoid falling at the first fence?

    Personality types for success

    The night-worker: This person is in the wrong job. They are in the job that they do to pay the bills before they get the job they really want. The night-worker daydreams about how they will leap forward into the career that they really want during lunchtimes.

    The rugby player: This person is also in the wrong job, or at least in the wrong position. The rugby player is big and brash though, and will tell each and every person he or she meets what they really ought to be doing.

    The chess master: The chess master is a strategist, obviously. We will again assume that the chess master has yet to see his or her ideas flourish, but this person has a quiet stoic confidence.

    The networker: This is the age of social media, collaborative communications and the Internet, so the networker’s existence shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. The networker is capable of encouraging, cultivating and ultimately corralling community spirit in much the same way that we have seen open source flourish.

    The suit: The suit is last in this list. This person plays it by the book and tables their ideas to the board, the product development team, his or her line manager or whoever the most appropriate approved source would be inside any given company.

    As HPE has said, “We’re now living in an Idea Economy, where the ability to turn an idea into a new product or service has never been easier. And, in the Idea Economy, no industry is immune to disruption. Companies, whether they be startups or large enterprises, must combine their vision with technological agility to quickly turn ideas into reality or risk falling behind.”

    - See more at: http://businessvalueexchange.com/blog/2015/12/17/five-innovation-personalities-for-the-idea-economy/?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral#sthash.oxclxIJ7.dpuf

    Reply
  46. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How to Market to Young Engineers
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328839&

    Today’s young engineers consume information differently than their elders. Learn how to reach the millennials.

    Engineers strive to solve problems by innovating beyond our imagination to create solutions. They wield a unique set of skills, with deliberate precision, an obsessive focus, and often a playful intuition, as they make one generation’s impossible the next generation’s ordinary.

    Part of what makes engineers who they are is their stubbornness as they plow forward towards their goals in spite of what others say. The other side of this coin, however, means that engineers may not fall in line with the accepted standards of the day. In an ever-changing world, this makes it quite a challenge for businesses to constantly adapt their marketing strategies as they cater to today’s engineers.

    At Analog Arts, we are still learning about marketing strategies, especially to younger engineers. We’d like to share some of what we’ve learned, which could only be the tip of the iceberg.

    Understand the Digital World
    Engineers in their twenties and thirties grew up in a digital generation. There are more than three billion internet users in the world, which will further grow by an additional billion in just five years. Millennial engineers are a vibrant part of this community, relying on it as their primary source of information. A survey of engineers reveals that this group is constantly connected, whether it is on their computer during the day or on their phone while on the move.

    To reach these young engineers, you must maintain a strong online presence. Updating your web site regularly, making it mobile friendly, applying SEO tactics, strategizing images, choosing an appealing title, and researching key words are absolute musts for any online presence. It is also vital to get the point to this group fast. An average internet user spends only 15 seconds before they x-out of a page.

    Harness social media

    Thirty years ago, engineers had to read hundreds of paper articles, go through tons of vendors’ data books, and collect shelves of technical texts to stay at the forefront of the field. Today, all these information is only one click away. Sifting through a sea of web pages to find the right article or product now becomes the main challenge for the young engineer. Instead, many turn to social media where they develop communities of experts.

    today’s generation relies on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and hundreds of other platforms to exchange ideas.

    Maintaining an active presence at these podiums is quite time consuming. Larger companies often devote a whole department to social media.

    Shifting Paradigms: Read and talk vs. watch and blog The previous generation of engineers was used to “read and talk.” They would read articles or newsletters on their own, and then gather together to discuss key ideas. The younger generation has started to find an alternative, “watch and blog.”

    For example, a technical video on the internet could easily get tens of thousands of views in a short period of time. Making an appealing technical or demo video has become an art in itself.

    Think Outside the Box
    Finding distinctive means to attract customers may sound like a cliché, but the age-old advice remains true with today’s engineers. It requires understanding your target demographic well and finding ways uncommon to the market that could work well for you. Giving incentives to special groups, learning about your customers’ needs by analyzing their inquiries, educating your audience with data and information that is relevant to them, taking a proactive response to their problems, and using visual language to communicate with engineers (graphs, charts, tables, etc.) often appeal to the young engineer. At the same time, the young engineer doesn’t like to be approached like his predecessors with simple slick advertisements. He is much more resistant to traditional tactics. Don’t be afraid to think outside of the box as you develop your marketing strategy.

    Young engineers are a subset of college-educated personas. To market to them, you must have a clear view of the demographic.

    Reply
  47. Tomi Engdahl says:

    EEG feedback offers interesting possibilities for virtual reality
    https://thestack.com/world/2016/02/03/eeg-feedback-offers-interesting-possibilities-for-virtual-reality/

    A new paper from the University of Memphis examines the potential of consumer-grade EEG equipment to provide meaningful and accurate recognition of the wearer’s mental state, opening up possibilities not only for useful medical or health-oriented implementations, but of incorporating similar sensors into virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) headsets, permitting extraordinary scope for feedback loops useful in medicine, entertainment – and, inevitably, marketing.

    http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1602/1602.00985.pdf

    Reply
  48. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Katja Hölttä-Otto: “Towards discipline-free product development”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9po0BHkRyFA

    Aalto University Tenured Professors’ Installation Lectures Jan. 19 2016.

    “Towards discipline-free product development”
    Katja Hölttä-Otto
    Department of Engineering Design and Production
    School of Engineering

    Reply
  49. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Unique Microsoft hiring program opens more doors to people with autism
    http://news.microsoft.com/stories/people/kyle-schwaneke.html

    A promising young developer, Schwaneke graduated from a world-renowned university for computer interactive technologies. He also has Asperger’s syndrome, a disorder on the autism spectrum.

    His situation is far from an anomaly. An estimated 80 percent of people with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are unemployed, though many are fully capable of holding down a job, and some possess exceptional skills in areas such as science, mathematics or technology. The 80 percent unemployment rate becomes even more significant considering an estimated one percent of the world’s population has an Autism Spectrum Disorder.

    “These are people who may not be able to pass an initial interview or screen because their social skills might not be 100 percent in line with what’s expected in a typical interview, but what amazing talent are we missing as a result?” Smith said, after recounting her memorable day at the U.N. “There are unique minds being underused and overlooked.”

    Like many parents who have children with autism, Smith has become a tireless advocate.

    Though Microsoft has been committed to enabling people with disabilities for a long time, news of the pilot program to hire people with autism generated tremendous internal support, Flurrie said.

    “By adjusting our hiring practices, we are able to recruit from a new talent pool – a talent pool that is rich with mad skills,” Flurrie said. “We’re hiring these folks because they’re amazingly talented individuals who are going to help us do amazing things at Microsoft.” In that pile of resumes from people with “mad skills” was one from Schwaneke, who heard about the Microsoft pilot program from his mom. “Nothing else has worked, so why don’t we give this a shot,” he remembers thinking.

    In June, after working with Schwaneke for four weeks in the interview “academy,” Johnson offered him a job as a software engineer on a small team working to bring Cortana, Microsoft’s voice-activated digital personal assistant, to Xbox. “The team I’m on is incredibly supportive, and even though we have deadlines and things change, it’s a very relaxed work environment,” Schwaneke said. “I haven’t felt the extreme stress I felt at college or in other jobs.”

    Reply
  50. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Women devs – want your pull requests accepted? Just don’t tell anyone you’re a girl
    Did you pull last night? … Code. We’re talking about code
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/11/female_devs_experience_discrimination/

    A new study has found that women are more likely than men to have their open-source software contributions accepted – but only when their gender is hidden from project leaders.

    The study from North Carolina State University and Cal Poly examined code committed by more than 1.4 million GitHub users and their contributions to various open-source projects on the source-code repository service.

    The researchers found that women have their pull requests (or suggested changes to code) accepted by project owners more often than men overall across all programming languages, with one important caveat: acceptance rates for women drop lower than those of men when their gender is made known.

    The researchers noted that familiarity plays a major role in showing the bias. When contributions from “insiders” who were known and trusted within a project were analysed, the gender differences disappeared.

    In short, as a whole women contribute more successful submissions to GitHub than men do, but when faced with the choice between the submissions of a man and a woman, a project leader is more apt to use code from a man.

    As a result, the researchers suggest that overall, the women contributing code to GitHub are more competent than their male counterparts, with the theory being that higher attrition rates for women in the lower levels of STEM careers lead to higher levels of average training and experience.

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