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:
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.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
How Is Big Data Like Corporate Real Estate?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2014/07/01/big-data-real-estate/?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral
Your business’s data is growing—exponentially. But your competitiveness depends on your ability to gather, store and get value from that “big” data.
Sources like mobile devices, ubiquitous sensors and social media can tell you things—but only if you can understand what they’re saying.
Here’s how…
Successful companies find signals in this sea of data: They make informed decisions, which create massive competitive advantage.
But others see no signals. They see only the cost and burden of managing explosive data growth. They’re wasting a business-critical asset.
Buying infrastructure that supports and extracts value from this kind of growth is always challenging.
Tomi Engdahl says:
We cannot afford re-inventing the wheel
We do not come up with it, that is, not invented here, it is a familiar phenomenon for all those working in IT. Everyone has come across a type for which no ready-made solution invalid.
The undersigned has been through this first hand so many times, that the reinvention of the wheel is enough already. To any data technical problem can usually be found ready workable solution, or are currently being developed.
For example, Node.js, which is currently the most extensive and fastest-growing platform for programming, on any given day hundreds of new modules hundred thousand existing alongside. Must be some kind of wizard to come up with something that does not already exist.
It’s not that everything possible had already been invented, but the fact that inventors have a ton of a lot and the discovery rate increases. If you want to stay productive, is to raise the abstraction of their own work and make good use of it in manufacturing, which is currently around us is invented.
If you work in a couple of technical progress, the result of work need to be innovative. Otherwise, you can be sure that the professional shall be replaced before long by automation.
Fortunately, the innovation does not require the invention of new. Such can also be created by combining the previous discoveries in a new way. Consolidation just need to know how to do so, that will result in real added value.
Source: http://summa.talentum.fi/article/tv/9-2014/89512
Tomi Engdahl says:
BBC: We’re going to slip CODING into kids’ TV
Pureed-carrot-in-ice cream C++ surprise
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/01/dom_connor_bbc/
he BBC now has a policy of attaching an educational theme to each year that will be rammed into as many programmes as possible and will run across all of its channels and websites.
2014 was the centenary of WWI, as anyone with functioning sensory organs knows, and Auntie Beeb has decreed that in 2015, we will learn to code, create and generally impose our will on computers.
Smart kids already know the career value of IT, but, dear reader, most teenagers aren’t as smart as they believe. The BBC can wise them up a bit, by sprinkling coding and digital creativity across their programming and websites. So we’re going to see 3D printing, how digital FX in movies really works and inevitably driverless cars.
“Creativity” is a dangerous term in IT education. It is often used as an excuse to palm kids off with a cheap arts graduate teacher with no clue about programming and who gets the kids to draw stuff using MS Paint in order to attract girls to the subject because “girls like creative computing”.
They don’t.
A whopping 90 per cent of students taking Computing at A level are boys.
Between now and next spring, we are also going to see announcements on how coding is going to pervade drama and adult programming.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kickstarter Founder’s Next Project Will Crowdfund Nonprofits With a Dollar a Day
http://recode.net/2014/10/01/kickstarter-founders-next-project-will-crowdfund-nonprofits-with-a-dollar-a-day/
Perry Chen, co-founder and former CEO of the seminal crowdfunding site Kickstarter, has dreamed up another way to mobilize people to make something happen.
His new project, Dollar a Day, is an email newsletter that features one nonprofit organization on a daily basis. Subscribers can sign up to become donors and send a dollar a day to each chosen organization. Then, Dollar a Day — which itself is a nonprofit organization — bundles together the money and sends it off to the recipient.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Multitasking Brain: Juggling Devices Linked to Less Gray Matter
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/multitasking-brain-juggling-devices-linked-less-gray-matter-n210866
Some people don’t just work — they text, Snapchat, check Facebook and Tinder, listen to music and work. And a new study reveals those multitaskers have brains that look different than those of people who stick to one task.
There is no way of knowing if people with smaller anterior cingulate cortexes are more likely to multitask or if multitaskers are shrinking their gray matter.
“When you exercise the brain … it becomes effective at performing a mental task,” he said. While previous research has shown that multitasking leads to more mistakes, Small said research remains important to our understanding of something we’re all guilty of doing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet of Tomorrow Tour hitting the road
http://edn.com/electronics-blogs/now-hear-this/4435474/Internet-of-Tomorrow-Tour-hitting-the-road?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20141002&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20141002&elq=bd82cd71508644c7b1bec73dff020129&elqCampaignId=19430
At ARM TechCon, Freescale unveiled its Internet of Tomorrow Tour (IoTT) vehicle. The show is the first stop on a planned two-year tour that will bring the company’s mobile educational and training facility to venues all across the country.
The IoTT vehicle is an 18-wheel truck,
After ARM TechCon, the truck will be hitting the road to take this demo and training venue on the road. Current plans call for a two-year tour, traveling more than 20,000 miles all across the US (sorry, world, it won’t be crossing any oceans). The goal is to bring the IoT and Freescale’s technology directly to the companies and creative minds that are making the IoT a reality. This includes visits to customer sites, trade shows, universities, and other, public locations.
The truck is a work in progress, and will change as new opportunities to showcase the IoT, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and software defined networking (the truck’s three themes) become available.
Tomi Engdahl says:
GrabCAD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrabCAD
GrabCAD, Inc. is a Cambridge, Massachusetts based startup that has created an Collaborative product development (CPD) tool that helps engineering teams manage, view and share CAD files in the cloud.
Community
GrabCAD started off as a Community where engineers could upload and download models from a free CAD library, which now has over 1,000,000 community users and is nearing 300,000[8] open source models. The Community also offers a range of challenges with prizes, from Ultimaker’s “3D Printer Toy Design Challenge”[9] to GE’s “Jet Engine Bracket Challenge”,[10] as well as pro bono challenges like ModVic’s “Steampunk Wheelchair” and the “Eyes to Hear” Challenge.[11] There is also a large and growing number of engineering tutorials available on the Community site.
In April 2013, GrabCAD released Workbench,[12] which is a Collaborative Product Development (CPD) [13] tool that helps engineering teams manage, share and view CAD files.
GrabCAD Workbench
http://grabcad.com/
The fast, easy way to manage and share CAD files without PDM cost and hassle.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Power of Negative Thinking
Both ancient philosophy and modern psychology suggest that darker thoughts can make us happier
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324705104578147333270637790?mod=WSJ_article_SubOnlyEdPicks
Tomi Engdahl says:
Science
Obama Names National Medal of Science, Technology & Innovation Winners
President Obama honors standout computer scientists with National Medals
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2691753/education/president-obama-honors-standout-computer-scientists-with-national-medals.html
Winners of National Medals of Science and Technology and Innovation are announced
Computer scientists who made breakthroughs in areas such as software architectures and database management systems were among those named National Medal of Technology and Innovation winners today by President Barack Obama.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Designer makes helmet to combat work stress
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29086980
Japanese designer Tomomi Sayuda has made a special role-playing kit for office workers, to help relieve stress at work – an important issue in Japan.
Called Mask of Soul, it involves wearing colourful, cartoon-esque helmets to take on a new persona.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Designers make everyday objects pop
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28159977
Young designers are turning to spring steel technology to make familiar objects fold and pop.
Spring steel is commonly used in measuring tapes, allowing the metallic ruler to twist, then return to its original shape, while remaining strong.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Downtown Project Suicides: Can the Pursuit of Happiness Kill You?
http://recode.net/2014/10/01/the-downtown-project-suicides-can-the-pursuit-of-happiness-kill-you/
Tony Hsieh, the charismatic CEO of Zappos.com, invested $350 million into turning Las Vegas into a startup. Buying 60 acres, setting up his own school, his own medical clinic, his own venture fund and restaurants, Hsieh is creating an innovation city in his own image. It is strange. And it is struggling. But it’s the most ambitious experiment in building a 21st century utopian city in the U.S. In this Re/code special series, we explore what it means to live there — and why its startups could flourish, or fail.
“It wasn’t just about building a business. It was about building a lifestyle that was about delivering happiness to everyone, including ourselves.” — Tony Hsieh, “Delivering Happiness”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Book review: ‘The Innovators,’ on the digital revolution, by Walter Isaacson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-innovators-on-the-creation-of-the-digital-revolution-by-walter-isaacson/2014/10/03/cd41676c-37a0-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html
In the Industrial Revolution’s wake, aspiring entrepreneurs combed through a landmark biography of inventors for the secrets to success.
“The Innovators,” which has been long-listed for the 2014 National Book Award in nonfiction, revisits the Industrial Revolution to locate the origins of the information age. At a salon party featuring mechanical androids and tableaux vivants, hosted by the visionary technologist Charles Babbage, we meet Ada Lovelace, daughter of the libertine poet Lord Byron, as she sets out to make “analytical engines” that are equal partners with humanity. For Isaacson, this feminist icon embodies the “combining faculty” that links disparate forces of the digital revolution: countercultural rebelliousness, entrepreneurial drive, state-funded technology and the integration of art with science.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Code-In 2014 and Google Summer of Code 2015 Announced
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/10/06/1820222/google-code-in-2014-and-google-summer-of-code-2015-announced
A call to all students: if you have ever thought it would be cool to write code and see it make a difference in the world
Tomi Engdahl says:
That’s the thing with most big company endeavors, though: they almost always look good on paper.
And yet, Silicon Valley is in many way premised on the idea that big companies can be beaten by, as the myth has it, a founder in a garage with little more than an idea. On paper it doesn’t make sense, and yet the examples are legion.
Source: http://stratechery.com/2014/paypals-incentive-problem/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Sounds & Sights of Productivity
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1324201&
That is a key question for all those who want to increase productivity for themselves or their employees: Does noise hinder or help? A number of studies question whether silence really is golden as far as that goes.
Knowing that many people enjoy taking their notebooks to coffee bars
“The noise increases processing difficulty, inducing a higher construal level and thus promoting abstract processing, which subsequently leads to higher creativity,” the study posits. That works only if the noise remains moderate. “A high level of noise” actually hampers “information processing and thus impairs creativity.” The study concludes that there are more questions to be investigated about the effect of background noise on creativity, including “more pleasant types of noise” like music.
This study from the University of Exeter’s Identity Realisation research group, conducted in association with Indoor Garden Design, found productivity in plants. “The results showed that allowing staff to make design decisions in a workspace enhanced with office plants can increase well-being by 47%, increase creativity by 45%, and increase productivity by 38%.” What’s striking about this summation, though, is that it’s not really a matter of oxygen or beauty, but of autonomy. The research showed that employees who have control over the layout of their workspace are not only happier and healthier, but are also more productive.
The bottom line is that employees who feel better about their workspaces are better at their work. Allowing them to find what sounds or décor works make them feel the most creative is the best way to achieve that end.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Genes don’t just influence your IQ—they determine how well you do in school
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/10/genes-dont-just-influence-your-iq-they-determine-how-well-you-do-school
If you sailed through school with high grades and perfect test scores, you probably did it with traits beyond sheer smarts. A new study of more than 6000 pairs of twins finds that academic achievement is influenced by genes affecting motivation, personality, confidence, and dozens of other traits, in addition to those that shape intelligence. The results may lead to new ways to improve childhood education.
“I think this is going to end up being a really classic paper in the literature,”
Researchers have previously shown that a person’s IQ is highly influenced by genetic factors, and have even identified certain genes that play a role. They’ve also shown that performance in school has genetic factors. But it’s been unclear whether the same genes that influence IQ also influence grades and test scores.
The team found nine general groups of traits that were all highly hereditary—the identical twins were more likely to share the traits than nonidentical twins—and also correlated with performance on the GCSE. Not only were traits other than intelligence correlated with GCSE scores, but these other traits also explained more than half of the total genetic basis for the test scores.
In all, about 62% of academic achievement—at least when it came to GCSE scores—could be attributed to genetic factors, a number similar to previous studies’ findings, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It’s really important to understand why children differ in academic achievement,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
GitHub Partners With DigitalOcean, Unreal Engine, Others To Give Students Free Access To Developer Tools
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/github-partners-with-digital-ocean-unreal-engine-and-others-to-give-students-free-access-to-developer-tools/
Back in the days of shrink-wrapped software, students would often get huge discounts on expensive software packages like Adobe’s Creative Suite or Microsoft’s developer tools. But because almost every developer startup has now moved to a SaaS model, it’s become a bit harder to find student discounts.
To help students start new software projects without breaking the bank, GitHub, Bitnami, Crowdflower, DigitalOcean, DNSimple, HackHands, Namecheap, Orchestrate, Screenhero, SendGrid, Stripe, Travis CI and Epic Game’s Unreal Engine are launching the GitHub Student Developer Pack, a new program to give students free access to their tools.
A GitHub spokesperson told me that the company already has about 100,000 students on its free plan, but with the Developer Pack, they can now get free access to a GitHub micro account (usually $7/month) with up to five private repositories for as long as they are students.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Glut of Postdoc Researchers Stirs Quiet Crisis In Science
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/10/07/2146258/glut-of-postdoc-researchers-stirs-quiet-crisis-in-science
Carolyn Johnson reports in the Boston Globe that in recent years, the position of postdoctoral researcher has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Postdocs are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in an underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand. “It’s sunk in that it’s by no means guaranteed — for anyone, really — that an academic position is possible,”
Glut of postdoc researchers stirs quiet crisis in science
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/04/glut-postdoc-researchers-stirs-quiet-crisis-science/HWxyErx9RNIW17khv0MWTN/story.html
The life of the humble biomedical postdoctoral researcher was never easy: toiling in obscurity in a low-paying scientific apprenticeship that can stretch more than a decade. The long hours were worth it for the expected reward — the chance to launch an independent laboratory and do science that could expand human understanding of biology and disease.
But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Some of the smartest people in Boston are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a biomedical underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand.
Postdocs fill an essential, but little-known niche in the scientific pipeline.
In the Boston area, where more than 8,000 postdocs — largely in the biosciences — are estimated to work, tough job prospects are more than just an issue of academic interest. Postdocs are a critical part of the scientific landscape that in many ways distinguishes the region — they are both future leaders and the workers who carry out experiments crucial for science to advance.
The plight of postdocs has become a point of national discussion among senior scientists, as their struggles have come to be seen as symptoms of broader problems plaguing biomedical research.
Biomedical research training traditionally has followed a well-worn path. After college, people who want to pursue an advanced degree enroll in graduate school. The vast majority of biology graduate students then go on to do one or more postdoc positions, where they continue their training, often well into their 30s.
Their progress is very poorly tracked; the leader of a national report on the state of postdocs has called them “invisible people.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Concurrent Engineering
http://www.edn.com/design/integrated-circuit-design/4435122/3/Is-FPGA-power-design-ready-for-concurrent-engineering-
A description of concurrent engineering appeared in a 1988 report from the Institute for Defense Analysis saying that it is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers, from the outset, to consider all elements of the product life cycle from conception through disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements (Reference 1). Concurrent engineering is similar to and overlaps with other terms such as collaborative engineering, simultaneous engineering, and integrated product development.
For every project in history that involved two or more people working together, concurrent engineering in some form has been practiced, but modern concurrent engineering relies on information and communication technology to enable larger and multi-disciplinary development teams to work together and share new project information at a faster rate than ever before.
Aerospace projects were among the earliest groups to adopt modern concurrent engineering practices in an attempt to discover disconnects between the teams that were responsible for prototyping, manufacturing, and repairing the product. Many of the earliest discoveries of where disconnects of assumptions occur is between upstream and downstream activities during the design cycle.
In each of these cases, the extra effort to coordinate and communicate early and frequently with the other members of the system development team was offset by a larger benefit of discovering errors and disconnects in assumptions when they were much less expensive to negotiate and resolve.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hierarchical physical design—issues and methodologies
http://www.edn.com/design/integrated-circuit-design/4418334/Hierarchical-physical-design-issues-and-methodologies
In IC physical design, there is a tendency to focus on the synthesis and layout tasks, and to not give much consideration to the chip finishing tasks, at least not until the more pressing matters of timing closure and power analysis are in hand. This can be a dangerous practice to follow, and for large hierarchical designs there is a significant risk that issues identified during top-level finishing could require flow modifications at the block level, causing blocks to be re-opened and schedules to slip. Also, there is the wider issue of consistency across the blocks of library versions, flows, tools, and procedures, particularly where different parts of the design are farmed out to different design team members.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Co-Founder of PayPal Peter Thiel: Society Is Hostile To Science and Technology
http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/10/08/1943236/co-founder-of-paypal-peter-thiel-society-is-hostile-to-science-and-technology
Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, billionaire investor and author, says “we live in a financial, capitalistic age, we do not live in a scientific or technological age. We live in a period were people generally dislike science and technology. Our culture dislikes it, our government dislikes it.”
Why we live in an anti-tech age
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2692890/why-we-live-in-an-anti-tech-age.html
Complex planning — and true innovation — is out of fashion, argues PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel
hough it seems as if we’re surrounded by innovative products, services and technologies, there’s a growing counter argument that we’re living in a dismal era. Science is hated. Real technological progress has stalled. And what we call innovation today really isn’t very innovative.
Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, billionaire investor and author, is among those challenging the notion of innovation and progress.
“We live in a financial, capitalistic age, we do not live in a scientific or technological age,” said Thiel. “We live in a period were people generally dislike science and technology. Our culture dislikes it, our government dislikes it.”
The easiest way to see “how hostile our society is to technology” is to look at Hollywood. Movies “all show technology that doesn’t work, that … kills people, that it is bad for the world,” said Thiel.
He pointed to films like The Terminator, The Matrix, Avatar, Elysium and Gravity. The underlying message in Gravityis that “you never want to go into outer space,” Thiel said.
Technology has a much different meaning today than it did in the 1950s or 1960s. During that period, it meant computers and rockets, underwater cities, new forms of energy and all sorts of supersonic airplanes. Since then, there “has been this narrowing” view that technology is mostly information technology, he said.
While advances today may be enough to dramatically improve business efficiencies and create great new companies, “it’s not clear it’s always enough to take our civilization to the next level,” said Thiel.
In the last decade, argued Gordon, attention “has focused not on labor-saving innovation, but rather on a succession of entertainment and communication devices that do the same things as we could do before, but now in smaller and more convenient packages.”
The problem may be partly the result of the process used to develop new technologies.
“We’ve come out with a lot of cool technology, and it has made first-world lives maybe a little more superficially fun, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the human condition,” said Hanaman.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are you afraid of brain-wind day after day the same path? Creativity Trainer Krista Launonen advice on how to air your thoughts with ease!
Launonen give you tips on how you can easily refresh the brain.
1 Surprise yourself: Decide to go within a week of just such an occasion in which you do not normally visit, and the one is not for you at all familiar with.
2 Read the strange book: Read any kind of literature that deals with you a strange or unfamiliar things.
3 Visit a foreign: Discuss with a stranger. New experiences open up new ways of thinking
4 Sniffing: Be endlessly curious. All study helps to develop creativity.
5 Consider: Once you are familiar with any of your new, think afterwards what happened. Could you somehow take advantage of your experience? Write something, make a note and come back to it later.
Source: http://www.iltalehti.fi/mieli/2014100618723464_md.shtml
Tomi Engdahl says:
Increasingly complex digital designs require a better collaboration and decision-making platform. A sustainable platform based solution must help managers track design progress and see problems early, as well as help engineers see the big picture and get their jobs done. Without both these capabilities, designs will have a higher risk and a difficult time meeting schedules
Source: http://www.techonline.com/electrical-engineers/education-training/webinars/4435371/Managing-the-Chaos-of-Design-Closure–How-to-regain-control-of-your-development-schedule
Choosing Remote-Collaboration Software
Hardware development requires more than general-purpose tools
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/choosing-remotecollaboration-software
Hardware development, like many engineering projects, is typically a group effort, with contributors increasingly working from home or across multiple buildings, organizations, states, countries, and continents rather than face-to-face. And as a new wave of hardware start-ups are finding out, coordinating those contributors often requires more sophisticated tools than just e-mail and phone calls.
Many general-purpose remote-collaboration platforms are currently available and in use by engineers, such as Dropbox for file sharing, Basecamp for project management, Google Docs for collaborative document sharing and editing, and WebEx for screen sharing. But the nature of engineering often requires more specialized systems, such as the Git platform, which is designed for managing changes to source code and documentation.
Originally developed for managing the source code of Linux, Git has found broader use, often in conjunction with other tools.
But Git isn’t always well suited to hardware.
One company that’s trying to provide better support for distributed hardware tools for EEs is Altium.
“Hardware development follows specific rules and sequences to produce high-quality, stable products in the quantity you need,” agrees Lucas Wang, CEO of HWTrek, another company founded to develop software for hardware collaborators.
Part of the challenge is a lack of domain knowledge, adds Wang: “Large buyers like Dell and HP know how to work with larger manufacturers like Foxconn and have project managers to handle communication, scheduling, and following details. But many hardware developers today are small start-ups, working on smaller projects—and don’t have the in-depth knowledge of manufacturing, logistics, or other details involved in producing hardware.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Democratization Of System Design…
…And the fourth major era of computing.
http://semiengineering.com/the-democratization-of-system-design/
“The original mainframe computer of the 1960s automated back offices and transactions, bringing efficiency and lowering costs. That cycle ended in the early 1990s when the personal computer picked up steam. By the mid-1990s the Web was helping to automate interaction between companies and their customers, allowing people to buy goods and services through the magical Internet.”
We have just entered the mobile era because there are now more users of mobile devices than there are of desktop devices.
“Having a personal computer in your pocket is changing the tech world because, unlike a computer, a smartphone is always there when you need it,” Kessler writes.
He sees companies working diligently to perfect the mobile-cloud infrastructure and once that happens, technology spending will accelerate and productivity and profitability will rise.
He argues that for a couple of decades now technology cycles have replaced the old four-year economic cycles that businesses set their watches to. Technology has smoothed those cycles in which inventory builds up to oversupply, prices fall and companies pull back and retrench for a time before the cycle kicks in.
Electronics companies have been enabling this new era of computing for a few years now, but challenges remain. They remain because one of the key structures that will drive this new era is the Internet of Things (IoT), a brave new world of system design that we’re just getting our heads (and engineering teams) around.
Internet of Things applications require a new cycle of innovation for engineering teams. Over the decades, teams have grappled with these cycles within cycles. They’re gone through engineering cycles driven by performance and cost; cycles driven by integration and costs; Makimoto’s Wave cycles of customization swinging to programmability and back again.
Disruptive influences
Open-source software and hardware, integrated and widely available SoCs and programming languages, have sparked an era we can only glimpse at this point.
Think about the rise of the drones. This technology is enabled by what I just mentioned—open, available and approachable technologies in the hands of clever people.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Q&A: Ashton Kutcher, Lenovo ‘Product Engineer,’ Doesn’t Fear the iPad
http://blogs.wsj.com/personal-technology/2014/10/09/qa-ashton-kutcher-lenovo-product-engineer-doesnt-fear-the-ipad/
Ashton Kutcher helped design the latest Lenovo Yoga laptops and tablets.
Lenovo
Ashton Kutcher plays the role of Lenovo product engineer well. Really well, almost like Michael Kelso well.
Like most product managers or engineers I speak to about their new devices, he hits the key points: how the new Android-powered Yoga Tablet 2 has been improved, why it meets consumer demands and, of course, why it’s so much better than the competition. He even deflects corporate questions, deferring to higher-up executives.
The 36-year-old actor was “hired” by Lenovo about a year ago, and at the time, he promised that the role would go beyond the typical celebrity spokesperson arrangement.
Now he’s making good on that promise with the Yoga rollout. I chatted with Kutcher this week and I think you’ll agree: This is a breakthrough role for him.
You’ve been a product engineer at Lenovo for about a year now. How did you contribute to the creation of these new Yoga tablets?
From the get-go, having not built anything like this before, I had a lot more questions than answers. The first thing I did was go to China to sit down with the team and brainstorm. We felt it was really important with the product to build something that consumers want. We found out that consumers were primarily using it in the home and primarily for entertainment to watch TV and movies.
I think a lot of people think this process is, “What you can put in the box?” But a lot of times it is about what you don’t put in the box.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Woz Talks Engineering Passion At Gartner Symposium
Apple co-founder wants to see engineers get more respect, have more fun, and play nice.
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324245&
If your enthusiasm for technology ever flags, just listen to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak motor-mouth his way through all the possibilities he sees.
“The biggest thing about everything I did in work was it had to make things fun,” he said. “The Apple II I designed was only for myself, because I wanted to own a computer like that, and it came out so beautiful.” Years later, when Steve Jobs led the company to create the iPhone, that was also a thing of beauty — and this time Jobs was smart enough not to give Bill Gates a peek before the product launched, he said.
Particularly in this era of consumer-friendly technology, one of the best things an engineer can do is design products he would like to own himself.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SOC Verification: Can We Stop the Stampede?
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=93&doc_id=1324247&
In the stories of the Wild West from the 1800s, the image of a cattle drive often is depicted. A small team of cowboys deliver thousands of heads of cattle to market. The cowboys spend many days crossing open land until they reach their destination — one with stock yards to accept their precious herd, and a rail station to deliver it quickly to market. Along the way there are dangers, including losses by predators and mad stampedes by cattle rushing blindly when frightened or disturbed. The primary job of the cowboys is to keep the herd on track and settled as they move to ship-out.
I see immediate parallels between the cowboys of the Wild West and today’s system-on-chip (SoC) design and verification engineers. Cowhands struggle to control and move a big herd. Similarly, today’s design teams grapple with how to keep a project on target and converging to tape-out, and successful when the gate count of SoCs has become so large it can stretch and even overwhelm their ability to stay on track. How big are these new SoCs?
With each smaller semiconductor node foundries provide, more gates can be squeezed into the same die size. In parallel, many different kinds of design blocks and intellectual property (IP) are employed, usually created by third-parties, to accelerate the implementation of the design objectives. The interaction of the various blocks across various power and timing conditions adds a new kind of complexity to the design. The result is a “herd” of interfaces with thousands of different crossings that must be checked and verified to ensure the design does not run off into a fatal operating condition.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Woz Talks Engineering Passion At Gartner Symposium
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak wants to see engineers get more respect, have more fun, and play nice.
http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/team-building-and-staffing/woz-talks-engineering-passion-at-gartner-symposium/d/d-id/1316464
“The biggest thing about everything I did in work was it had to make things fun,” he said. “The Apple II I designed was only for myself because I wanted to own a computer like that, and it came out so beautiful.” Years later, when Steve Jobs led the company to create the iPhone, that was also a thing of beauty — and this time Jobs was smart enough not to give Bill Gates a peek before the product launched, he said.
Particularly in this era of consumer-friendly technology, one of the best things an engineer can do is design products he would like to own himself.
Google Glass may not be the wearable product that ultimately succeeds in the marketplace, but the more Wozniak hears it criticized, the more he wants to wear it himself, he said. “It’s so nice and small and convenient that it triggers ideas … about what the future could be.”
One of the things he enjoys most is working with young, enthusiastic engineers. He remembers when he was studying computer science, he would get the textbooks on a Friday and power through them without waiting for the course to start because he was so eager to learn. “You couldn’t stop me from going as fast as I wanted — I couldn’t go at the speed of the class.” Particularly today, students of technology should not allow themselves to be held back, he said. “You shouldn’t even think the way it’s stated in engineering books is the way it has to work.” Re-envision things however you want as long as you understand that “in engineering, it has to work — that’s the answer.”
“Everywhere in the world, we’ve only got about two standards,” he said, noting that electrical plugs and phone jacks are different from country to country, but Ethernet and WiFi are the same everywhere.
“We have to get away from the technology being more important than us.” One of the most exciting trends is how technologies like voice recognition are allowing technology to blend into the background, so that we interact with it in a more human way, he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Your Company Can Innovate The Disney Way
http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2014/09/08/innovate-like-disney/
The Walt Disney Company makes media for a living. And they make physical things associated with that media—mostly merchandise and theme parks.
More concisely, Disney makes entertainment.
It doesn’t invent much, but it’s extraordinarily innovative. Make sure you don’t confuse the two.
To over-simplify: Invention is the creation of something new. Innovation can be new, but more often it involves improving something that already exists…
An even more important distinction is that invention can be purely theoretical: The practical use of a thing is optional. For example, Leonardo da Vinci invented the parachute, but he never created an actual parachute. His invention was all in his head and on his sketchpad.
But innovation implies application. And that’s why it’s interesting…
To use technology is not to be innovative. But to apply technology in a new way is extremely innovated — even if you don’t innovate a change in the technology itself.
Once computer-assisted quadcopter drones were invented, innovators of all sorts got to work coming up with things to do with them. The most obvious is aerial photography.
But Disney makes entertainment. So they innovated a way to apply existing drone technologies to their own business of entertaining people.
One Disney patent is for an aerial display, where each drone has two lights that function as two pixels.
Why Any Company Can Think Like Disney
Disney is an unusual company. But in many respects they’re exactly like your company.
For starters, they have challenges to overcome, and some of these challenges can be overcome using innovation.
They want to keep their theme parks fresh and new, thrilling visitors with spectacle they can’t see anywhere else. Other theme parks have their own style of innovation.
So they look at emerging technology and think: How can we apply this to entertainment?
Think about every new technology and how it could be applied to solving your specific challenges. The Disney way to innovate is the right way.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Where leads a gigabit Internet? Experts: holograms, 3D porn and telepresence
When the speed of internet connections will eventually generally gigabit level services will be available to consumers are not yet able to properly imagine. Pew Research Center asked the experts, however, these views of the future and got a few guesses: the Star Trek series familiar with the holodeck, online shopping becomes immersive 3D experience, 3d porn because porn has often led to the technological development, new uses for education and health sectors
Some of the respondents also expressed concern at the increase in the digital divide in the future .. High-speed internet connections to reach the first rich parts of the world
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/uutisia/mihin+johtaa+gigabitin+internet+asiantuntijat+hologrammeja+3dpornoa+ja+etalasnaoloa/a1018988
Tomi Engdahl says:
Where Do You Get Inspiration for Creative Work?
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1324242&
I suspect many folks have a place they go for inspiration — some special locale that stimulates their creative juices and provides a catalyst for their best work. These places can be anywhere and for anyone.
Bob Pease, the late analog wizard of National Semiconductor, famously worked in a cramped cubicle piled so high with books and papers that the only working surface was his lap. In a 60 Minutes interview, the singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett said he found creative refuge in the alley behind his favorite Key West haunt. Charles Schulz, creator of the comic strip Peanuts, kept a downtown office because he couldn’t get anything done lounging around in his pajamas.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Can do better: Tech industry report on Australia’s tech curriculum
Freelancer CEO Matt Barrie ropable, blames intractable teachers for resistance to new subject
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/13/can_do_better_tech_industry_report_on_australias_tech_curriculum/
Industry has reacted unkindly to Australia’s decision to walk away from previous plans to teach digital technologies – including computation thinking – to all students from kindergarten until the fourth year of high school.
A review of Australia’s national curriculum, released yesterday, recommended that the recently-created digital technologies curriculum be taught as part of other subjects instead of as a discrete course. Only in year nine, the third year of High School, will dedicated technology courses become available as electives.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nobels Should Celebrate Invention and Optimization
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1324275&
This year, the Nobel Prize in physics went to three distinguished Japanese semiconductor engineers, Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura for “invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes”. Press articles appeared questioning why the original inventor of the magnesium-doped GaN blue light emitting diode, Herbert P. Maruska, wasn’t included among the winners.
The answer appears to lie in the word “efficient.” But the bigger question seems to be whether conception and demonstration of an invention is more important, or the optimization of that invention.
The choice of Nobel Laureates varies on this question.
Apple didn’t invent the cellphone. But Apple made improvements to the usability and infrastructure of cellular communications that were revolutionary.
Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile. But Ford optimized automobile design and manufacturing to make cars widely affordable.
The general consensus today seems to be that efficiency improvements that make products economically manufacturable are the most valuable contribution to our society.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Theoretical’ Nobel economics explain WHY the tech industry’s such a damned mess
Regulation’s not a dirty word
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/15/economics_nobel_explains_tech_industry_oddness/
Jean Tirole was this year’s Nobel Laureate in Economics* and what the prize was awarded (in part) for should interest people around here.
This year the prize goes to something useful in the real world
Tirole’s work has largely been in industrial organisation: how do firms organise themselves and interact?
When is a monopoly actually exercising its economic power? How are oligopolistic firms (ie, two or a handful of dominant firms) competing or carving up the market between them and what should we do about it if we don’t like what they’re doing?
Tirole’s biggest finding is that the correct answer is, as the correct answer so often is in economics, “it depends”. We need to look at the details of that specific market and see how changing regulation and oversight would actually impact upon current behaviour, before we can decide what, if anything, should be done.
The standard answer of “regulate the bastards” doesn’t particularly work as regulators all too often end up protecting the industry they’re supposed to be regulating
More specifically about the tech world, Tirole has done a lot of work on “platform markets”. The simplest example of this is perhaps Facebook: it’s free to us the consumers because we’re the product being sold to the advertisers. Facebook is a platform that gives us something we want (social media) but the economic driver being that it collects a billion of us, with lots of lovely data, that can be sold to advertisers. The economics of such platforms are subtly different from those of regular producers of something because there’s two entirely different sets of customers to placate.
Two-sided (or more generally multi-sided) markets are roughly defined as markets in which one or several platforms enable interactions between end-users, and try to get the two (or multiple) sides “on board” by appropriately charging each side. That is, platforms court each side while attempting to make, or at least not lose, money overall.
Examples of two-sided markets readily come to mind. Videogame platforms
Software producers court both users and application developers, client and server sides, or readers and writers. Portals, TV networks and newspapers compete for advertisers as well as “eyeballs”. And payment card systems need to attract both merchants and cardholders.
Regulation is BAD. Unless we need regulation… but how do we know?
The trick, as every newspaper ever has worked out (and as the dead tree and free computing magazines of yore also knew) is carefully balancing the desires of the two groups of customers.
So this is a Nobel for real world work (despite many describing it as a theoretical one) which already informs much of how we regulate that real world.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft, Facebook Declare European Kids Clueless About Coding, Too
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/10/15/1235229/microsoft-facebook-declare-european-kids-clueless-about-coding-too
Having declared U.S. kids clueless about coding, Facebook and Microsoft are now turning their attention to Europe’s young ‘uns. “As stewards of Europe’s future generations,” begins the Open Letter to the European Union Ministers for Education signed by Facebook and Microsoft, “you will be all too aware that as early as the age of 7, children reach a critical juncture, when they are learning the core life skills of reading, writing and basic maths. However, to flourish in tomorrow’s digital economy and society, they should also be learning to code. And many, sadly, are not.”
Open Letter to EU Ministers for Education
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/open-letter-to-eu-ministers-for-education-279101521.html
Code is easy to learn but not widely taught in schools. Only 20% of Europe’s school children are in schools which have adopted over-arching formal policies covering the use of ICT across all subjects. All too often, ICT and computer science skills are seen as niche, with little relevance to other fundamental academic pursuits. In Europe, fewer than 15% of students have the opportunity to use the kind of higher level ICT in school that would help them develop ’21st century skills’ such as collaboration, self-regulation and problem-solving.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software bottlenecks necessitate innovative development tools
http://www.edn-europe.com/en/software-bottlenecks-necessitate-innovative-development-tools.html?cmp_id=7&news_id=10004914#.VD9o3hZsUik
As the complexity of modern embedded systems continues to rise at an almost exponential rate, the exacting demands placed onto engineering teams are piling up. More sophisticated memory systems with varying sizes and access latencies are now starting to be incorporated into designs. Multi-core processors are also becoming more commonplace. The question is – are developers adequately equipped to take on the challenges that lie ahead?
Producing a working software system within project timescales and budget constraints is of paramount importance. These aren’t the only challenges of course. Engineers also need to maximise the efficiency of their design to gain a competitive advantage. They must undertake optimisation in relation to a variety of key parameters, such as:
- Completeness and feature set of their design
- Hardware cost
- Code size
- Performance level
- Power budget
The way in which optimisations are applied is still relatively crude in comparison to the cutting-edge embedded systems being designed. Existing code generation tools make optimisations using processor-focused instructions, but these are, as a result, inadequate for anything but the most rudimentary of sequences. The numerous interactions between the processor/memory have the greatest influence over the performance of an embedded system, so these should be appropriately addressed. Traditional tools try to identify the most common control flows through a program then optimise for this dynamic behaviour at the expense of other, seemingly less important control flows.
In reality there is a considerable gap between hardware’s theoretical performance, and new hardware features such as high performance tightly-coupled memories, and what can be achieved with traditional software development tools. This is starting to cause major issues
Programmers should concentrate on optimising the overall algorithm and architecture of their software. The fundamental problem at the heart of the software development tools’ inadequacies is their inability to control low level hardware/software interactions and the requirement that there is still a “human in the loop” trying to optimise fundamental aspects of the software’s execution by altering the source code.
Such efforts to remove execution bottlenecks using current optimisation techniques are poorly coordinated and lead to new problems being created elsewhere. This is akin to “balloon squeezing” – rather than making the balloon smaller it just pushes air around and causes bulges elsewhere. Even seasoned engineers will struggle to coordinate their efforts under such circumstances.
It has become clear that the current approach taken is not capable of furnishing engineers with the level of functionality that they require. The tools available only encourage development and optimisation procedures which are both unpredictable and time consuming. Engineers desperately need development tools which are more sophisticated, supporting hardware/software interactions and whole-program optimisations which can’t be expressed in the source code, whilst also being much less labour intensive to use.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ada Lovelace Day: Meet the 6 women who gave you the ‘computer’
You thought YOU dealt with a rat’s nest of cables?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/14/lovelace_day_2014/
Ada Lovelace Day, 14 October, marks the achievements of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).
Women have ascended to great heights in the technology sector – Ginni Rometty is chairperson, president and chief exec of IBM, Meg Whitman and Marissa Mayer are CEOs of Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo! respectively, Safra Catz is joint CEO of Oracle, Padmasree Warrior is chief technology and strategy officer of Cisco, Sheryl Sandberg is Facebook chief operating officer. But at the grassroots, the number of women in our field is low.
Women comprise 49 per cent of the UK’s workforce, but make up just 17 per cent of IT professionals.
Around 181 years ago, in 1833, Lovelace met the man who cemented her name in history and they began an entirely unique relationship.
Mathematician and mechanical engineer Charles Babbage was working on his prototype computers the Difference Engine and the Analytics Engine when they met.
Lovelace is credited with developing an algorithm for Babbage’s engine that would calculate a sequence of rational numbers.
Lovelace was the daughter Lord Byron and mathematics-loving mother Annabella Milibanke who ensured rigorous studies in science, maths and logic.
Lovelace’s contribution and status as “world’s first programmer” has become subject to debate, but one thing you can’t deny is without women in high tech during its pioneering post WWII period, the device you’re reading this on probably wouldn’t be called a “computer” – it might not even have existed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Patents Drive Innovation – James Dyson’s Interview
http://www.edn-europe.com/en/patents-drive-innovation-james-dyson-s-interview.html?cmp_id=99&news_id=10001025&vID=44#.VD-XZxZsUik
Despite all the legal battles between Samsung and Apple, patents are a key way of protecting investors and encouraging the exploitation of innovation, says the UK’s leading engineer, James Dyson.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NYC Shines as Maker City
Maker movement spreads across the US
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324278&
The maker movement is helping to redefine manufacturing in New York City and around the world, a panel of city officials and industry experts said last month at MakerCon. The advent of smaller production volumes, collective workspaces, and refined equipment is paving the way for a 21st century Industrial Revolution, they said.
“I think a maker city is like a jazz city. Jazz is about individual performance, but it demands selfless collaboration,” said Peter Hirshberg, chairman of The Re:imagine Group, quoting the trumpeter and urbanist Wynton Marsalis. “We call this a maker movement because we have a lot to get done. It is the core building block that will lead to the reinvention of our cities.”
The New York City maker movement came about organically, with hacker spaces such as NYC Resistor giving rise to hardware startups and incubators. The NYC Department of Design and Construction then put its support behind them, Hirshberg said, leading to a reinvigorated industrial landscape.
“In a maker city, a wide cross-section of hardware and software types, students, designers, and so on come together and crowdsource solutions or create prototypes,”
“New York City is supposed to be sort of a design hub,” David Belt, the developer of New Lab, told The New York Times in 2013. “I was frustrated seeing so much time and effort pumped into software. I’m more interested in products and hardware.”
Fashion forward
The maker movement may be the ideal convergence of talent, space, and technology for the New York fashion industry. The high cost of real estate has forced designers and developers to work in close proximity, driving creativity in a highly competitive environment that is conducive to maker principles.
“We’re at an interesting point in that we’re about five years away from losing a lot of the incredible artisans that made this an incredible fashion city,” said Manufacture NY chief strategic officer Rob Sanchez. “But where innovation is coming back is in teaching people about those old skills… combining the newest technology and skills with the handwork.” His company 3D printed the innards of a swimsuit to reduce manufacturing costs.
Innovators “fight battles every day,” Hirshberg said. “A lot of this requires government to reconsider existing rules and regulations… It is still difficult to use the city as a lab.” Making transcends traditional liberal/conservative pitfalls. “Makers are all about self-determination, solving problems and not needing government permission to do it. Those are traditional values. But the movement is also about solving problems, intervening, rapidly experimenting, engaging in the civic sphere — qualities we often associate with progressives.”
The big challenge, then, is figuring out what cities must do to attract the kind of people who will cultivate a maker ethos. Cities must “support a lifestyle that encourages innovators to put down roots,” Hirshberg said.
Beyond encouraging the manufacturing community to new adopt new models of production, makers hope to get consumers on board with a new paradigm.
“One of the problems we have is that we’re all consumers of devices at an export level,”
By involving more people in the manufacturing process at the ground level, Hirshberg hopes to create stable, middle-class jobs in the US.
Tomi Engdahl says:
In Conversation Marc Andreessen
The Netscape creator turned Silicon Valley sage on why optimism is always the safest bet.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-conversation.html
But clearly you don’t think everything’s going to work.
No. But there are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.
Isn’t there a role for skepticism in the tech industry?
I don’t know what it buys you. Let me put it this way. If you could point to periods of time in the last hundred years when everything just stabilized and didn’t change, then maybe yes. But that never seems to actually happen. The skeptics are wrong all the time.
There are a few big companies in the tech industry today: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple. Which of today’s start-ups do you think is going to join them?
All of ours.
You believe in the meritocratic ideal of Silicon Valley.
Yes. But I believe the ideal is compromised by two things right now: One is educational skills development, and the other is access. This is the critique that I think is actually the most interesting, which is, yeah, the meritocracy works if you know the right people, if you have access to the networks. How do venture capitalists make investment decisions? Well, we get referrals based on people we already know. Well, what if you’re somebody who doesn’t already know anybody, right? What if you don’t know the recruiter at Facebook so you can’t get the job? What if you don’t know the venture capitalist so you can’t raise funding? We think access is broadening out the network so that everybody who could contribute can get access to the network. And that’s the one that we’re working on.
So if you’re designing a country from scratch, a government from scratch, to ensure rapid change and maximum gains—
I think basically the same as the U.S. is set up now. I would set up a system designed for gridlock. Three branches, two parties, representation, Electoral College, all good. Love it, fantastic, let’s do that again.
Tomi Engdahl says:
11 lesser-known, but important, engineers
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/serious-fun/4436117/11-lesser-known–but-important–engineers
Tomi Engdahl says:
Isaac Asimov: How Do People Get New Ideas?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/10/22/0014235/isaac-asimov-how-do-people-get-new-ideas
recently rediscovered an unpublished essay by Asimov written in 1959
Obermayer says it is “as broadly relevant today as when he wrote it. It describes not only the creative process and the nature of creative people but also the kind of environment that promotes creativity.”
” The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.”
Isaac Asimov Mulls “How Do People Get New Ideas?”
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov-mulls-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/
Presumably, the process of creativity, whatever it is, is essentially the same in all its branches and varieties, so that the evolution of a new art form, a new gadget, a new scientific principle, all involve common factors. We are most interested in the “creation” of a new scientific principle or a new application of an old one, but we can be general here.
One way of investigating the problem is to consider the great ideas of the past and see just how they were generated. Unfortunately, the method of generation is never clear even to the “generators” themselves.
Once you have the people you want, the next question is: Do you want to bring them together so that they may discuss the problem mutually, or should you inform each of the problem and allow them to work in isolation?
My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it.
The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.
Nevertheless, a meeting of such people may be desirable for reasons other than the act of creation itself.
No two people exactly duplicate each other’s mental stores of items. One person may know A and not B, another may know B and not A, and either knowing A and B, both may get the idea—though not necessarily at once or even soon.
The optimum number of the group would probably not be very high. I should guess that no more than five would be wanted.
For best purposes, there should be a feeling of informality. Joviality, the use of first names, joking, relaxed kidding are, I think, of the essence—not in themselves, but because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness. For this purpose I think a meeting in someone’s home or over a dinner table at some restaurant is perhaps more useful than one in a conference room.
If thoroughly relaxed, free of responsibility, discussing something of interest, and being by nature unconventional, the participants themselves will create devices to stimulate discussion.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The ‘fun-nification’ of computer education – good idea?
Compulsory code schools, luvvies love it, but what about Maths and Physics?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/20/the_funnification_of_it_good_or_bad/
Battle of Ideas The idea that computer programming should be compulsory in schools is hugely popular with metropolitan media luvvies and quango-hoppers – but serious questions were raised by people who do it and teach it this weekend.
Some argued that the current overemphasis of the field, rather than encouraging an enquiring technical mind, could well extinguish any interest.
After-hours code clubs run by enthusiastic and skilled developers and teachers are nothing new. But the state has bounded in, and made it a focus of a reformed ITC curriculum, which means even five-year-olds will dabble with “gamified” development or HTML.
Advocates for compulsion include businesspeople such as Ian Livingstone – who called it “the New Latin” – and VCs eager to sell material into such a lucrative market, such as Saul Klein.
It quickly became apparent that what we were discussing wasn’t whether programming or even IT skills are a good idea, but whether the idea of compulsion was. Will it help or hurt?
“To be good at Computer Science you need Maths and Physics,”
Nevertheless she thought it would be a good idea, because the best possible outcome would be a good thing: a more economically productive UK plc and a more diverse IT workforce. What was missing was the leap of logic: how we got from those schoolrooms full of bored kids placing angle brackets around letters, to that best possible outcome. Or if it was there, I couldn’t see it.
All that fun = BAD for programming
The sole software engineer on the panel, Paul Reeves, had some ripe observations about British programming culture. He blamed the “Baby Beebers” – the products of the micro boom 30 years ago.
“Computing in the 1980s, especially in the UK, was seen as a hobby. Now it’s being presented as ‘creative’ to get people into the subject and into the jobs.” He thought the micro boom had created a generation that didn’t take its work seriously enough, and lacked the professional rigour of other engineering vocations:
“I often hear the attitude that ‘I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this job’. A lot of the ‘Baby Beebers’ generation are now managers. Programming hasn’t really grown up compared to other engineering activities and it isn’t as professional,” Reeves said.
Not so, argued Reeves. The consequence of “fun-nification” was that people didn’t appreciate that the work would then be hard and messy.
“A lot of developers don’t like to read a book all the way through. They don’t consider how their work interacts with others. A product might be no fun to work on for years but it will ultimately be important. So it’s unfair to say to children that insist that it’s a fun and interesting thing to do,” Reeves thought.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Microsoft Garage Site Invites Public To Test a Wide Range of App Ideas
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/10/22/2142232/new-microsoft-garage-site-invites-public-to-test-a-wide-range-of-app-ideas
Microsoft today launched a new section on its website: The Microsoft Garage is designed to give the public early access to various projects the company is testing right now. The team is kicking off with a total of 16 free consumer-facing apps, spanning Android, Android Wear, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, and even the Xbox One
New Microsoft Garage site invites public to test a wide range of app ideas
http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/22/microsoft-launches-garage-site-asking-the-public-to-test-a-wide-range-of-new-apps/
Microsoft Garage
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The DARPA Grand Challenge: Ten Years Later
http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2014/03/13.aspx
At the break of dawn on March 13, 2004, 15 vehicles left a starting gate in the desert outside of Barstow, Calif., to make history in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a first-of-its-kind race to foster the development of self-driving ground vehicles. The immediate goal: autonomously navigate a 142-mile course that ran across the desert to Primm, Nev. The longer-term aim was to accelerate development of the technological foundations for autonomous vehicles that could ultimately substitute for men and women in hazardous military operations, such as supply convoys.
The Grand Challenge was designed to reach beyond the traditional defense performer base and tap into the ingenuity of the wider research community. It was DARPA’s first major attempt to use a prize-based competition to attract novel performers and ideas and encourage collaboration across diverse fields.
“That first competition created a community of innovators, engineers, students, programmers, off-road racers, backyard mechanics, inventors and dreamers who came together to make history by trying to solve a tough technical problem,”
Although it isn’t easy to quantify the effects of these DARPA challenges on the development and deployment of autonomous vehicle technology, ten years later defense and commercial applications are proliferating. The rapid evolution of the technology and rules for how to deploy it are being driven by the information technology and automotive industries, academic and research institutions, the Defense Department and its contractors, and federal and state transportation agencies.
DARPA expects that, like the original Grand Challenge before them, these challenges will encourage new waves of research and development that will spur continued innovation, encourage commercial investment, and lower the cost of advanced technologies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Getting Creative With the Internet of Things
http://www.saasintheenterprise.com/author.asp?doc_id=274610&_mc=sem_otb_site
much of Northern California woke to its largest earthquake in a couple of decades. It hit the wine industry very hard, with many wineries reporting as much as 50% of their stock stored in their caves and warehouses destroyed.
Thankfully, those bottles of fine wine were the only reported fatalities.
After Californians resisted the urge to go lick the floors of Napa’s wineries, they began to assess the damage. And if you are a fan of the cloud or the Internet of Things you’ll be interested in the new way it was done.
The fitness tracking company Jawbone, which produces the popular Up fitness tracker, found an exciting new way to track the earthquake. The Up system tracks quality of sleep as a fitness indicator, and the band uses sensors to report sleep habits to the cloud for users to track. Jawbone was able to report how powerful, and how far reaching, the quake was by charting how far away from the epicenter people woke up. They published a great infographic.
Clearly, Up was not designed as a seismograph. And we already have seismographs, so on the surface one questions exactly the value of a chart like this. But the value comes in widening the net of data sources in order to gain more insight. Even the US Geological Survey, which we assume owns a lot of seismographs, asks citizens to report whether they felt an earthquake. But just try to get the word out and inspire thousands of people to call or go to a website to help the US Geological Survey. Jawbone has access to a segment of people who may or may not think to opt-in with a US Geological Survey wearing sensors on their arms.
And this is the growing value of the IoT revolution: Sensors everywhere that can report in real time. Of course, enterprises know that. But most of them are trying to use those sensors for what they are intended to do. A smart thermostat reports on the temperature of the room. The Up example is a clever use of existing data in an unintended way — a remix if you will.
Therein lies the real value of the IoT.
As last year’s Gartner CIO Symposium, several keynotes centered around the idea of sensors in clothing, shoes, food containers, and anything else you can imagine.
Not all of the wine lost was from bottles shattered on the floor. Some was discarded because it was assumed spoiled by the shaking, or by condition changes in the storage area caused by power outages.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Losing Sleep Over Innovation
http://performance.cfo.com/2014/08/22/losing-sleep-innovation/
As a rule CFOs don’t sleep that well anyway. They worry about weak economic growth and what their competition is doing, but even a CFO can only worry so much about things he can’t influence.
Failure to innovate is a classic path to stagnant revenue growth, and the seeds of this failure are often sown during a period of success and fast growth. When professional services firms are extremely busy delivering against the issue of the moment (e.g., FASB changes, IRS changes, technology changes, legislative changes), they often neglect the innovation process that will keep their firm’s future offerings relevant when the issue of the moment passes.
While innovation is viewed by some as being derived from the brilliant, sometimes serendipitous, insights of a client-facing professional, to the CFO it connects directly to the firm’s future revenue stream, pure and simple. Which means that the CFO’s role related to innovation is to ensure that the innovation process is just that, a real process, and to require finance visibility into the components of the process.
An innovation “pipeline” report, similar to a sales pipeline report, is the ultimate goal, with each topic linked to revenue ranges, time frames, and likelihood of success.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Problem With Positive Thinking
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/opinion/sunday/the-problem-with-positive-thinking.html?_r=0
MANY people think that the key to success is to cultivate and doggedly maintain an optimistic outlook. This belief in the power of positive thinking, expressed with varying degrees of sophistication, informs everything from affirmative pop anthems like Katy Perry’s “Roar” to the Mayo Clinic’s suggestion that you may be able to improve your health by eliminating “negative self-talk.”
But the truth is that positive thinking often hinders us.
The results were striking: The more positively women had imagined themselves in these scenarios, the fewer pounds they had lost.
My colleagues and I have since performed many follow-up studies, observing a range of people, including children and adults; residents of different countries (the United States and Germany); and people with various kinds of wishes — college students wanting a date, hip-replacement patients hoping to get back on their feet, graduate students looking for a job, schoolchildren wishing to get good grades. In each of these studies, the results have been clear: Fantasizing about happy outcomes — about smoothly attaining your wishes — didn’t help. Indeed, it hindered people from realizing their dreams.
Why doesn’t positive thinking work the way you might assume? As my colleagues and I have discovered, dreaming about the future calms you down, measurably reducing systolic blood pressure, but it also can drain you of the energy you need to take action in pursuit of your goals.
Positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we’ve already attained our goal, slackening our readiness to pursue it.
Some critics of positive thinking have advised people to discard all happy talk and “get real” by dwelling on the challenges or obstacles. But this is too extreme a correction. Studies have shown that this strategy doesn’t work any better than entertaining positive fantasies.
Positive thinking is pleasurable, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for us.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Positive thinking is for suckers!
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/25/positive_thinking_is_for_suckers/
Self-help books don’t work. Sex, family and work are stressful. Maybe we need to look at happiness in a new light
The logic of Schuller’s philosophy, which is the doctrine of positive thinking at its most distilled, isn’t exactly complex: decide to think happy and successful thoughts — banish the spectres of sadness and failure — and happiness and success will follow. It could be argued that not every speaker listed in the glossy brochure for today’s seminar provides uncontroversial evidence in support of this outlook: the keynote speech is to be delivered, in a few hours’ time, by George W . Bush, a president far from universally viewed as successful. But if you voiced this objection to Dr. Schuller, he would probably dismiss it as “negativity thinking.” To criticize the power of positivity is to demonstrate that you haven’t really grasped it at all. If you had, you would stop grumbling about such things, and indeed about anything else.
Perhaps you don’t need telling that self-help books, the modern-day apotheosis of the quest for happiness, are among the things that fail to make us happy. But, for the record, research strongly suggests that they are rarely much help. This is why, among themselves, some self-help publishers refer to the “eighteen-month rule,” which states that the person most likely to purchase any given self-help book is someone who, within the previous eighteen months, purchased a self-help book — one that evidently didn’t solve all their problems. When you look at the self-help shelves with a coldly impartial eye, this isn’t especially surprising. That we yearn for neat, book-sized solutions to the problem of being human is understandable, but strip away the packaging, and you’ll find that the messages of such works are frequently banal. The “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” essentially tells you to decide what matters most to you in life, and then do it; “How to Win Friends and Influence People” advises its readers to be pleasant rather than obnoxious, and to use people’s first names a lot. One of the most successful management manuals of the last few years, “Fish!,” which is intended to help foster happiness and productivity in the workplace, suggests handing out small toy fish to your hardest-working employees.
One of the foremost investigators of the problems with positive thinking is a professor of psychology named Daniel Wegner, who runs the Mental Control Laboratory at Harvard University.
Seen from this perspective, swathes of the self-help industry’s favorite techniques for achieving happiness and success — from positive thinking to visualizing your goals to “getting motivated” — stand revealed to be suffering from one enormous flaw. A person who has resolved to “think positive” must constantly scan his or her mind for negative thoughts — there’s no other way that the mind could ever gauge its success at the operation — yet that scanning will draw attention to the presence of negative thoughts. (Worse, if the negative thoughts start to predominate, a vicious spiral may kick in, since the failure to think positively may become the trigger for a new stream of self-berating thoughts, about not thinking positively enough.) Suppose you decide to follow Dr. Schuller’s suggestion and try to eliminate the word “impossible” from your vocabulary, or more generally try to focus exclusively on successful outcomes, and stop thinking about things not working out. As we’ll see, there are all sorts of problems with this approach. But the most basic one is that you may well fail, as a result of the very act of monitoring your success.
This problem of self-sabotage through self-monitoring is not the only hazard of positive thinking