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:
Microsoft President Brad Smith: Computer Science Is Space Race of Today
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/07/01/0514242/microsoft-president-brad-smith-computer-science-is-space-race-of-today
Q. How is K-12 computer science like the Cold War? A. It could use a Sputnik moment, at least that’s the gist of an op-ed penned by Senator Jerry Moran (R., KS) and Microsoft President Brad Smith.
Computer science is space race of today
http://www.kansas.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article86754587.html
In the wake of the Soviet Union’s 1957 Sputnik launch, President Eisenhower confronted the reality that America’s educational standards were holding back the country’s opportunity to compete on a global technological scale. He responded and called for support of math and science, which resulted in the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and helped send the country to the moon by the end of the next decade. It also created the educational foundation for a new generation of technology, leadership and prosperity.
Today we face a similar challenge as the United States competes with nations across the globe in the indispensable field of computer science. To be up to the task, we must do a better job preparing our students for tomorrow’s jobs.
These fields and others offer computing jobs in Kansas that pay on average $72,128 – roughly 70 percent higher than the average Kansas salary of $42,020. Unfortunately, there are more than 3,000 unfilled computing jobs in the state.
Nationally, it’s the same picture: There are more than 500,000 unfilled computing jobs – with a projected million computing openings by 2024.
We’re at an important intersection of technology and agriculture. Enormous investments are being made in “farm tech” startups – more than $2.06 billion in the first half of 2015 alone – that will shape the future of farming. As the agricultural sector depends more on data from computers, our need for workers with a basic understanding of computer science grows.
Meanwhile, nations as large as China and as small as Estonia are taking steps to ensure that computer science education is available to all of their students. That puts our future workforce at a disadvantage in the increasingly globalized economy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Petitioning U.S. Senate1 response
Offer Computer Science in our public schools
https://www.change.org/p/offer-computer-science-in-our-public-schools-csforall
America should be a leader in computer science education, yet today most schools don’t even offer this foundational subject. Please join the CEOs, governors, and education leaders below and ask Congress to support computer science in every K-12 school – for our children, and for their future.
Every student in America should have this opportunity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
You Can Learn a Lot from a Candle
http://hackaday.com/2016/07/03/you-can-learn-a-lot-from-a-candle/
Beginning in 1827, [Michael Faraday] began giving a series of public lectures at Christmas on various subjects. The “Christmas Lectures” continued for 19 years and became wildly popular with upper-class Londoners. [Bill Hammack], aka [The Engineer Guy], has taken on the task of presenting [Faraday]’s famous 1848 “The Chemical History of a Candle” lecture in a five-part video series that is a real treat.
Faraday’s Great 19th Century Lectures
for a 21st Century Audience
http://www.engineerguy.com/faraday/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cyborg locusts with tattooed wings can sniff out bombs
A team of engineers believe they’ll be more effective than robots.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/04/bomb-sniffing-cyborg-locusts/
“Men, bring out the sniffer locusts.” That’s something a bomb squad chief could say in the future, thanks to a team of engineers working to turn the insects into cyborgs that can be sent anywhere to sniff out explosives. It won’t be an easy feat — the researchers, who hail from the Washington University in St. Louis, will have to equip the insects with several pieces of technology. Good thing they have a powerful backer: the Navy. Team leader Baranidharan Raman has received a three-year $750,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research to make his dreams a reality.
To turn ordinary locusts into bomb-sniffing machines, the engineers plan to implant an electrode into their brains to hijack their antennae and read electrical activity. Since operators need to get whatever info the bugs collect, the researchers are also developing a tiny backpack that can transmit data. The receiver’s red LED lights up in the presence of explosives, while the green LED lights up in the absence of any.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elad Blog:
Tech VCs, to their own detriment, are increasingly investing in businesses that aren’t software-driven
End of Cycle?
http://blog.eladgil.com/2016/07/end-of-cycle.html
One sign that technology markets often exhibit at the tail end of a cycle is a fast diversification of the types of startups getting funded. For example, following the core internet boom of the late 90s (Google, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal), in early 2000 and 2001 there was a sudden diversification and investment into P2P and mobile (before mobile was ready) and then in 2002-2003 people started looking at CleanTech, Nanotech etc – industries that obviously all eventually failed from an entrepreneurial and investment return perspective.
It turned out the real wave was just around the corner with the rise of social products (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Pinterest) and consumer enabled marketplaces (aka sharing economy – e.g. AirBnB, Uber, Lyft). The heavy investments in cleantech and other areas was a sign that one economic cycle had ended and there was a gap in identifying the next one.
Tomi Engdahl says:
UW, Microsoft Successfully Encoded 200MB of Data Onto Synthetic DNA Molecules
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/07/07/206251/uw-microsoft-successfully-encoded-200mb-of-data-onto-synthetic-dna-molecules?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington said Thursday that they had successfully encoded about 200 megabytes of data onto synthetic DNA molecules. The information included more than 100 books, translations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a high-definition music video from the band OK Go. Previously, the record was 22 megabytes encoded and decoded on DNA
UW, Microsoft claim big breakthrough with data storage using DNA
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/uw-microsoft-claim-big-breakthrough-with-data-storage-using-dna/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tissue-Engineered Soft Robot Swims Like a Stingray
http://hackaday.com/2016/07/07/tissue-engineered-soft-robot-swims-like-a-stingray/
We’re about to enter a new age in robotics. Forget the servos, the microcontrollers, the H-bridges and the steppers. Start thinking in terms of optogenetically engineered myocytes, microfabricated gold endoskeletons, and hydrodynamically optimized elastomeric skins, because all of these have now come together in a tissue-engineered swimming robotic stingray that pushes the boundary between machine and life.
This Swimming Stingray Robot Is Powered by Real, Living Rat Cells
The cells are activated by light and contract so the robo-stingray can swim.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a21716/swimming-stingray-robot-rat-cells/
This soft robotic stingray is made of rat heart muscle. Yeah, it’s just as crazy as it sounds.
“Roughly speaking, we made this thing with a pinch of rat cardiac cells, a pinch of breast implant, and a pinch of gold. That pretty much sums it up, except for the genetic engineering,” says Kit Parker, the bio-engineer at Harvard who led the team that developed the strange robot.
Parker’s robotic stingray is tiny—a bit more than half an inch long—and weighs only 10 grams. But it glides through liquid with the very same undulating motion used by fish like real stingrays and skates. The robot is powered by the contraction of 200,000 genetically engineered rat heart-muscle cells grown on the underside of the bot.
“By using living cells they were able to build this robot in a way that you just couldn’t replicate with any other material,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Storyboarding is a useful tool for the software design process
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/storyboarding-is-a-useful-tool-for-the-software-design-process/56501cdde516cadcf79c7d37fec31c54.html
Though storyboarding adds an additional step to the software design process, it is invaluable to the client and the engineer when used in software development because it offers transparency and clarity to the client while streamlining the process for the developers and engineers.
While storyboarding has long been considered a tool employed by those in the film and entertainment industry, its use in the software design process is becoming more expected and appreciated by both the developer and the client.
Though storyboarding adds an additional step to the software design process, it is invaluable to the client and the engineer when used in software development. This process avoids confusion and miscommunication when a team is working on a set of complex ideas. It affords the ability to easily present a cohesive plan to the client. Storyboarding also offers transparency and clarity to the client, while streamlining the process for the developers and engineers.
During the specification phase of development, screens that the software will display are drawn, either on paper, or using specialized software, to illustrate significant elements of the user experience.
Focus on savings
Storyboards can be configured to run with accurate navigation and user interaction. This provides a visual representation of the software as well as a process flow with the feel of a completed solution. Altering the storyboard is less time-consuming than making changes to an implemented piece of software representing a significant time and cost savings. The engineers then modify the storyboard and create a custom end product meeting the client’s specific needs.
While a verbal description of a screen or product is useful, there is room for misinterpretation. Sample images provided by a storyboard allow little room for misunderstanding and help the user understand exactly how the software will be employed in real-world circumstances
Basic sketches of a storyboard on paper can be helpful, but there are a variety of more advanced and efficient tools available to software engineers.
Storyboarding is a crucial part of the software design process that allows designers, in collaboration with their clients, to capture all the relevant information needed to produce the most custom and tailored product.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Katie Jacobs Stanton:
145 tech leaders, including Vinod Khosla, Ev Williams, and Stewart Butterfield sign letter saying a Trump presidency “would be a disaster for innovation” — We are inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, researchers, and business leaders working in the technology sector.
An open letter from technology sector leaders on Donald Trump’s candidacy for President
https://medium.com/@KatieS/an-open-letter-from-technology-sector-leaders-on-donald-trumps-candidacy-for-president-5bf734c159e4#.na6m71or5
We are inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, researchers, and business leaders working in the technology sector. We are proud that American innovation is the envy of the world, a source of widely-shared prosperity, and a hallmark of our global leadership.
We believe in an inclusive country that fosters opportunity, creativity and a level playing field. Donald Trump does not. He campaigns on anger, bigotry, fear of new ideas and new people, and a fundamental belief that America is weak and in decline. We have listened to Donald Trump over the past year and we have concluded: Trump would be a disaster for innovation. His vision stands against the open exchange of ideas, free movement of people, and productive engagement with the outside world that is critical to our economy — and that provide the foundation for innovation and growth.
Let’s start with the human talent that drives innovation forward. We believe that America’s diversity is our strength.
We also believe in the free and open exchange of ideas, including over the Internet, as a seed from which innovation springs. Donald Trump proposes “shutting down” parts of the Internet as a security strategy — demonstrating both poor judgment and ignorance about how technology works.
Finally, we believe that government plays an important role in the technology economy by investing in infrastructure, education and scientific research.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adam Banks / Ars Technica UK:
Apple’s Swift Playgrounds for iPad is designed for kids but still requires coding, doesn’t generate standalone apps
Apple’s Swift Playgrounds can help you learn to code, but it’s no HyperCard
The programming sandbox, seen through the eyes of devs, slightly misses the mark
http://arstechnica.co.uk/apple/2016/07/apple-swift-playgrounds-not-hypercard/
For all Apple’s obsessive secrecy, even its senior managers acknowledge with an on-stage wink that much of what they announce these days has already been predicted. In the run-up to WWDC, I saw developers on Twitter wishlisting “Xcode for iPad”—a way to write apps on an iOS device rather than in the Xcode integrated development environment (IDE) that Apple makes available exclusively for the Mac. One suggestion was that this could be an iOS version of Playgrounds, the interactive test builder that Apple added to Xcode when launching its new programming language, Swift, in 2014.
Sure enough, 45 minutes into the 2016 WWDC keynote, Tim Cook—not an SVP, but Tim himself!—unveiled Swift Playgrounds for iPad, “a new way to learn to code.” Because I’d been thinking about it, I had my tweet ready: “I personally think a way to learn Swift is not what the iPad needs—it needs a 21st Century HyperCard. But let’s see.”
HyperCard’s legacy
Further Reading
The macOS Sierra developer preview: Different name, same ol‘ Mac
Siri ushers in a range of updates that refine but don’t transform the Mac.
What’s HyperCard? Back in the ’90s, it was how you got stuff done on a Mac when there wasn’t already an application to use. There still isn’t a word to describe it except “HyperCard.” Arguably, HyperCard was mostly a database with a form designer, a stateless data repository, and scripting. Rather than standalone sequences of commands that you could run on the system like macros, HyperTalk scripts were code snippets attached to objects and triggered by events. It was a very modern approach and, just as significantly, it didn’t feel like code.
Some people will tell you HyperCard’s HyperTalk was object-oriented; others call it procedural.
HyperCard “stacks” became a popular medium for creating and sharing homemade software; for some a rapid application development (RAD) tool, for others a visual authoring environment.
The point is not that HyperCard itself was so successful, but that HyperCard was was so enabling. HyperCard succeeded precisely because it didn’t try to teach anyone to be a programmer, and instead it put the raw capability of the computer in the hands of people who didn’t have time to become programmers.
HyperCard, “like a software erector set,” would crystallise computing into building blocks that any user could snap together to implement the functionality and user interface they had in mind.
Learning curve
I asked Apple developers and educators around the UK what they thought of Swift Playgrounds for iPad. None yet had time to try it out in depth
“a valuable tool for grasping the basics of Swift and seeing the output of each line of code” and thought the iPad version looked “colourful and a brilliant take on gamifying learning.”
Giles Hill, a teacher and education technology adviser in the south west of England, wasn’t surprised that Apple had released an iPad tool, “firstly to promote the Swift language generally, secondly because they know that coding in schools is a big deal at the moment.” But he felt “it probably should have been there a year or so ago.”
welcomed Playgrounds as “a tool to teach kids computer programming, rather than Swift per se.” Still, he agreed that expectations should be managed. “Children have absolutely no idea how hard it is to ‘make an app’ to the standard they are used to from the App Store,” he told Ars. “This is a live issue in Computer Science education. Children come in expecting to build the next Minecraft. It’s akin to walking into a physics class and expecting to build a supercollider.”
So would Playgrounds help or hinder efforts to make coding more accessible? “Depends on the learner,”
Swift Playgrounds “books” allow teachers to prepare projects where sections of code are hidden or non-editable and “cut scenes” walk students through a programming process step by step, avoiding the “blank screen” barrier.
Language barriers
Swift itself is a new language designed on rigorous computer science principles to satisfy the highest echelons of professional developers. It doesn’t obviously lend itself to introductory tuition
Many commercial developers now start with Python, for example, which already has a friendly and comprehensive iPad IDE called Pythonista.
“It doesn’t have the active help or touch-driven editing that Playgrounds has,” said Speirs, who currently teaches with Pythonista. “In terms of power, they’re equivalent. Playgrounds has a lower floor, but their ceilings are about the same.”
Hill, who helps primary teachers get kids into coding via simplified environments such as Scratch, worries that “the typed code approach (rather than simple drag and drop blocks) is going to make it prohibitive to all but the most interested children.” He thinks “sustained interest will come from those who have at least chosen to study computing at GCSE.”
Playgrounds “makes a lot of sense as an educational tool—I’d have loved this sort of thing when I started coding.”
Cramer also sees the Apple platform as a limitation. “You’d need to start out on an iPad and then move on to a Mac. If a child [has access to] an iPad, I would more or less assume they would, sometime in the future, also be able to get access to a Mac [to move on to Xcode]. The problem lies more with those who can’t access any of this. How can they learn these skills? Something like a Web application that can be accessed in the browser would be more versatile and inclusive.”
Lost in translation
Perhaps the biggest restriction of Swift Playgrounds is that it can’t produce finished apps. “It’s possible kids would be put off not being able to make a ‘real app’,” Hill said, although he admitted “this could be the first step towards that.” Bishop agreed that like many other learning tools, Swift Playgrounds was “simplified, limited in scope, and won’t satisfy the need that all learners have at some stage to create a real product.” Although projects can be exported to Xcode on the Mac, this requires a whole new set of skills. “They’ll need more lessons as soon as they enter Xcode,” he warned.
“As it stands, it could be a great little tool to explore learning to code and [make] tiny experimental apps, but beyond that it doesn’t look like a rapid prototyping tool,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Big Lie: Tech Companies and Diversity Hiring
https://42hire.com/the-big-lie-tech-companies-and-diversity-hiring-f52fb82abfbf#.kpynbnitr
In the past week or so I’ve had three instances to reflect on how three major tech companies talk about diversity hiring and their actions. One pattern that continues to repeat itself is that companies say a lot about how much diversity is important to them and wanting to hire more underrepresented minorities but then can’t get out of the rut of their ingrained hiring practices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Georgia Wells / Wall Street Journal:
Facebook shows little progress in diversity report, blames lack of available talent — Many observers say talent pipeline isn’t primary factor — Facebook Inc. said Thursday that it made meager increases in the number of women and minorities working at the social-network giant …
Facebook Blames Lack of Available Talent for Diversity Problem
Many observers say talent pipeline isn’t primary factor
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/facebook-blames-lack-of-available-talent-for-diversity-problem-1468526303-lMyQjAxMTA2NjE1NDMxNTQzWj
Facebook Inc. said Thursday that it made meager increases in the number of women and minorities working at the social-network giant, highlighting the difficulty large tech companies have in diversifying their workforces.
The share of Hispanic and black employees in the company’s U.S. workforce didn’t budge from a year ago, remaining at 4% and 2%, respectively. The percentage of women at Facebook inched up 1 percentage point to 33%.
Facebook blamed its problem on the “pipeline,” meaning the number of women and minorities entering the tech industry.
Many observers, however, say the pipeline of available talent for the tech industry isn’t the primary issue.
there are more black and Hispanic computer-science graduates than are offered jobs with tech firms in the U.S
Diversity is of particular relevance to the tech industry because it makes a team better at solving complex problems and increases innovation, Ms. Emerson said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s diverse emoji for women at work approved by Unicode Consortium
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/14/12189442/google-new-emoji-women-jobs-unicode-consortium
Back in May, Google proposed 13 new emoji meant to better represent women in professional fields, and now 11 of those emoji have been approved by the Unicode Consortium. The new emoji, including a chef, a graduate, and a David Bowie-like rockstar, will be available in both male and female versions, with all skin tones.
Google notes in blog post that the professional emoji for women were fairly limited before now, and included a bride and a princess, which are not actually career options.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Swedes better on innovation
The Swedes better on innovation – Read the report
Articles and reports
- 07/15/2016
Sweden is the best in innovation, told the European Union commissioned the latest innovation in the comparison. Finland and Sweden was third after Denmark. The fastest-growing innovator of Latvia. After Finland came from Germany and the Netherlands.
The European Commission published the 2016 European Innovation Scoreboard, the Regional Innovation Scoreboard
ndividual innovation in areas of the EU at the forefront of the following Member States: Sweden – human resources and the quality of academic research; Finland – financial environment; Germany – Private investment in innovation; Belgium – innovation networks and cooperation; Ireland – innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises.
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2016/07/15/ruotsalaiset-parempia-innovoinnissa-lue-raportti/
Report: http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/science-research-and-innovation-performance-of-the-eu-pbKI0415512/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Big Business is usually last to the party
Please Ms CFO, can we have some new hardware?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/29/why_big_business_is_usually_last_to_the_party/
Big businesses tend to be exceptionally risk averse. There’s a general reluctance to adopt new, bleeding-edge technology because the priority – understandably – is to be able to maintain productivity.
Small companies can live with the occasional glitch in systems – a couple of dozen people without email for a couple of hours is far from the end of the world. The same isn’t true if you have 10,000 people around the world relying on core systems, with thousands of pounds in lost revenue for every minute of downtime.
Actually, though, the avoidance of adopting a new system or technology “because it’s risky” is dumb. What’s sensible is the adoption of it because it’s too risky.
Yes, I understand the aversion of big businesses to changing something that’s not broken. Fixing a dead system is one thing, but replacing something that works just fine with something a bit unknown can be daunting. But big businesses have a fairly fundamental advantage over the rest of us when it comes to improvements, upgrades and replacements: they’re … well … big.
First of all, big businesses can afford proper development, test, staging and production environments for their systems. They can afford proper version management software, deployment systems that can roll new things in under strict control and which can roll back change in the event that something didn’t quite work correctly.
Big businesses can also afford quality, qualified staff to manage all stages of an improvemen
Big businesses also have more than an amorphous blob of people: they have locations, divisions, teams, departments, groups, … regardless of the structure there’s always some way to divide them into manageable chunks and hence manage the introduction of change in a controlled, piece-by-piece manner.
Getting back to the subject of change, and the risk thereof, you’re right to ask yourself the cost of something going wrong – both financially and reputationally. You also need to ask about the cost of not changing, though – or, more accurately, you need to stop dancing around change using weasel-words to hide what you’re up to.
If you’re looking for funds to replace a broken system, that system must have a value to the company. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t need to replace it. By not executing the replacement (which may be a like-for-like replacement, though often it’s a more modern alternative) you will incur a financial or reputational cost. And where you’re looking to case (b), the cost of not proceeding is Y-X – and were that difference not significant you wouldn’t be suggesting going to all that hassle.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fred Wilson / AVC:
Blockchain technology and crypto-tokens enable new business models for creating open protocols, financed by the tokens protocol creators retain at launch
The Golden Age Of Open Protocols
http://avc.com/2016/07/the-golden-age-of-open-protocols/
Open protocols are at the heart of many of the most important systems that we have. The Internet works because of TCP/IP. The web works because of HTTP. Email works because of SMTP. These are open systems that developers can build applications on top of. There are plenty of proprietary protocols out there too. But proprietary protocols tend to lock in users and drive value to the owners of the proprietary protocol, like Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.
This is super important because the more open protocols we have, the more open systems we will have.
But, as I have said many times here at AVC, I believe that business model innovation is more disruptive that technological innovation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will tying tuition payments to graduate earnings discourage STEM?
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/power-points/4442399/Will-tying-tuition-payments-to-graduate-earnings-discourage-STEM-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160721&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160721&elqTrackId=23f938b7ee444b95b69692840ece5380&elq=8ed98b30d3b64a41bae350c66d9bcd98&elqaid=33142&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=28971
College is expensive, and we regularly hear about plans to supposedly help students (and their families) pay for it. Somehow, getting colleges to reduce their operating costs and thus cost to students rarely seems to be in the solution set.
The latest plan being proposed by some schools is to lend the money to the students, then tie the repayments to a student’s income after graduation. A graduate who is barely getting by due to a major or course of study which leads to a low-paying job (hello, barista!) would pay significantly less than one who has reasonably well-paying job, such as an engineer or doctor.
The rationale for this scaled payment plan is simple, at least on the surface: those who study majors with greater income opportunity can afford to pay more than those who majored in subjects with less income potential. The school acts as the lender, and the re-payment is a function of income during a ten-year period.
While this concept of only insisting on paying in proportion to income may seem compassionate, I think it has the perverse effect of penalizing those who chose to work hardest and study the tougher subjects, while in some ways rewarding those who took an easier path, for whatever reasons. In fact, I wonder if it wouldn’t encourage taking it easy, since that “barista” student is getting a diploma from a well-known school, but at a sharp discount.
Some of the experts cited in the article note that this “go now, pay later” plan with a sliding scale has some other implications. First, it ties the school and the graduate together for the payback period (typically ten years) so they become “partners” in career choices and jobs.
The Other Debt-Free College Idea
Purdue University tries income sharing to finance higher education.
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/the-other-debt-free-college-idea-1460931141-lMyQjAxMTA2NzAxNzYwMTcxWj
Tomi Engdahl says:
Playing online games can improve teenage school success, while clinging to social network such as Facebook does not do it, australialaistutkimuksessa was told on Tuesday.
The study compared australialaisteinien 15-year-olds PISA results with respect to their on the internet to spend time on.
- The study showed that children who regularly used the Facebook-like social services were given worse results in mathematics, reading and academic subjects as those pupils who hardly ever used these services. On the other hand played online games were better PISA results, when all other variables remained the same, crystallized study, published in the International Journal of Communication magazine.
Source: http://www.aamulehti.fi/maailma/tutkimus-pelaaminen-auttaa-parjaamaan-koulussa-facebook-ei/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Opens EE Honeypot
New hardware lab aims to attract EEs
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1330259&
Facebook, of all companies, is becoming one of the hot new hardware spots in Silicon Valley. How do you like that?
I’ve been following Facebook for a while now thanks to its Open Compute Project which creates multi-vendor specs for everything from servers to switches to 100 Gbit/second optical interconnects and a GPU server.
Then along came Oculus and a smattering of moonshot research programs such as Aquila and OpenCellular, often related to its corporate initiative to spread Internet access (and thus Facebook advertising opportunities) to every end of the planet.
A Facebook blog on the new lab said it includes an EE lab and a prototyping lab. It described in lavish detail the cool gear the prototyping lab will contain including:
A 9-axis mill-turn lathe, used for making its custom two-axis gimbal for air-to-air and air-to-ground laser communications.
A 5-axis vertical milling machine, used to create parts associated with Terragraph, the companies 60 GHz system
A 5-axis water jet, capable of cutting full 10′ x 5′ sheets several inches thick of material, including aluminum, steel, granite, stone, etc.
Two sheet metal shear and CNC folder machines
A CNC fabric cutter
A coordinate measuring machine capable of reverse-engineering a part and turning it into a 3D computer model
An electron microscope – this is at Facebook! — and a CT scanner, used for examining components for failure analysis
Clearly, the company wants to make EEs around the world drool and scramble for their resumes. Strategically, I expect it hopes many of them leave GoogleX labs just a few miles away.
Meanwhile, welcome to the new Silicon Valley and electronics industry where work that used to get done at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC is now funded by advertising around cute cat videos and pictures of dinners people are about to eat.
Inside Facebook’s hardware labs: Moving faster with more collaboration
https://code.facebook.com/posts/561611824036387/inside-facebook-s-hardware-labs-moving-faster-with-more-collaboration/
Hardware engineering traditionally happens behind closed doors, in isolated labs. We fell into this pattern ourselves early on at Facebook, as we opened individual hardware labs to support new teams. Some of our first labs — including one in a repurposed mail room, in our old Palo Alto headquarters — were built for our Infrastructure teams to prototype custom racks, servers, storage systems, and network switches for our data centers. As new, hardware-oriented teams like Connectivity Lab and Oculus started to form, we built additional labs for those teams to design, prototype, and test. Today we have hardware labs all over the world — from our Oculus facilities in the Seattle area to our Aquila hangar in the U.K. to our laser communications lab in Southern California — as well as a number of custom labs in our Menlo Park office that are used by the Oculus, Connectivity Lab, and Infrastructure teams.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How To Overcome Procratination
https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/177458612
We sift through the world of science, studies, data and theories to uncover what we know about procrastination and to find out if it’s possible to conjure a cure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Electric plane design offers insight into design constraints
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/power-points/4442514/Electric-plane-design-offers-insight-into-design-constraints?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160811&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160811&elqTrackId=c33fd7f2ca214bcab482b0b5a04bf1f0&elq=5e8ca9f0b18d4e4a91efbe5f4ef3aeef&elqaid=33419&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=29204
It’s frustrating when someone with little or no understanding of the reality of engineering tradeoffs in a design makes casual, offhand comments, such as, “Why didn’t they just add this function?” That sort of remark tells me that they have no experience or insight into the realities of the situation. Design is all about making decisions within a square defined by parameters of power, performance, practicality, and cost at its corners. Some designs will do almost anything to be at one of those corners and are only lightly constrained by the other ones, but most designs strive to find an acceptable “sweet spot” somewhere within that box.
So it is with the all-electric airplane. Regardless of your views on the wisdom, desirability, and near-term practicality of such a craft, it’s a fascinating design exercise. This was made clear in the recent article “How I Designed a Practical Electric Plane for NASA”
How I Designed a Practical Electric Plane for NASA
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-i-designed-a-practical-electric-plane-for-nasa
To win a competition, a Georgia Tech student devised a fuel-cell plane to rival today’s best-selling small aircraft
Submitted to a NASA competition for students, the design for this electric aircraft had to meet certain requirements, the most important of which was that it could be manufactured within five years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Improve your answer resolution and unleash innovation
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/measure-of-things/4442505/Improve-your-answer-resolution-and-unleash-innovation?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_weekly_20160811&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_weekly_20160811&elqTrackId=a8fc80e4701c4c03b438c148aae76859&elq=96676eedaad14984844633b496545976&elqaid=33425&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=29209
Let’s generalize the concept of resolution to answers. Sure, it’s quite an abstraction, but we abstract things all the time—grunting and whining became language became symbolic text became mathematics, and somewhere along the way, we laughed too. In every instant we are confronted with queries, mostly unconscious ones: what’s that smell, that sound, that vision, that sensation? Answer resolution is our ability to distinguish concepts and understand how they’re connected.
In my articles on idea prejudice and the business case for diversity, I described the pattern predicting categorizing nature of our brains. When we confront something—any perception, sensation, or concept—we put it in a category with similar things that we’ve already experienced and predict how it will affect us. Pattern recognition by categorization is a fast way to make sense of the world, but it cuts corners.
To improve the resolution of an eye, you make the pupil larger. To improve the resolution of a mind, you give it more categories of patterns and more correlations among them. Lateral thought finds the relationships between patterns. You experience lateral thought every time you laugh at a joke. Jokes connect disparate ideas with a common theme and if you laugh, that common theme is both absurd and harmless. Answer resolution combines the ability to recognize tiny differences among highly similar concepts with the ability to find relationships among highly dissimilar concepts—intense focus along with equally intense lack of focus—to light your insight bulb.
High resolution categorization is more of a left brain process and finding the relationships and correlations between categories is more of a right brain process. Innovation requires both halves on deck.
The most perceptive genius has a unique category for every single thing that she encounters and an exhaustive catalog of the possible relationships between them. Since she has to examine every sensation, find its nuances, how it relates to everything she already knows, and then create a unique category for it, she takes forever to do anything and can’t get away from tigers and snakes. Mother-in-laws love her.
At the opposite end, the stupidest among us, puts everything in two categories, overlooks every fascinating characteristic, and denies any possible relationships between the two.
Most of us fall somewhere between the slow genius and the fast bonehead.
The most effective way to improve your answer resolution is to immerse yourself in subjects where you’re uninformed. Read books that you might otherwise pass by, go to seminars on topics of which you’re ignorant, dive into the deep end of areas that catch your interest, and wade into issues that have never intrigued you. Wandering around museums is a quick way to trigger curiosity. The signal-to-noise problem of the Internet requires careful, conscious curating of content.
Since breadth of education (education in its most general sense!) almost always accompanies great innovations, it seems to me that an engineering degree is incomplete without a strong background in literature, history, and art just as a degree in the arts is incomplete without a foundation of mathematics, science, and engineering.
Finally, the easiest way to improve answer resolution is to hold fewer opinions. Our opinions help us separate signals from noise. On careful examination, most opinions—anyone’s opinions (mine too)—more effectively inhibit us from entertaining vast regions of idea space than perform the desired role of a noise filter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
You can’t think out of a box built of TLAs
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/measure-of-things/4441760/You-can-t-think-out-of-a-box-built-of-TLAs
You’re in a meeting and the presenter uses as TLA that you don’t recognize. Do you:
Stay quiet, pretend that you know the TLA because everyone else seems to.
Risk being called out as the ignorant novice by asking the speaker to define the TLA.
Recognize that if you don’t know the TLA, at least 20% of the others don’t either, so you ask the speaker to define the TLA so the meeting isn’t a waste of time.
Ask for a definition of the TLA and tell the speaker to avoid industry jargon and other NIH symptoms so that the company geniuses, like you, can unleash their creativity.
Since it happens so often, most of the time we go with (a) Just ride it out and hope that you decipher what the TLA means before you’re called out.
Do you believe that if someone doesn’t understand the jargon of your field that this person can’t contribute?
It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially for those who have just learned the language.
In the 21st century, every profession and nearly every vocation relies on the ability to innovate. If we know one thing about creativity and innovation, it’s that innovation emerges when concepts from one field are introduced to a disparate field; when established methods from one discipline are modified for a different discipline
In other words, lateral thought is the birthplace of innovation and creativity and it tends to happen when people switch fields.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to switch fields, especially if your new field has a particular affection for TLAs—of course, every field likes its own jargon. Job descriptions for every profession end with a litany of TLAs. The beautiful irony is that human resources software filters resumes that contain the desired TLAs and HR officials might know what the TLAs stand for but rarely know what they mean.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What’s Holding Back Analog?
http://semiengineering.com/whats-holding-back-analog/
Tools and methodologies are outdated, which limits innovation.
The uneasy relationship between digital and analog, coupled with tools that are either ineffective or outright ignored by the analog community, may be limiting the growth potential and technological advances in that market.
That certainly doesn’t mean analog isn’t growing. In fact, analog is an increasingly critical component of ICs and the electronic devices they inhabit. The global electronics market is set to incorporate more than 127.5 billion analog ICs this year, according to Semico Research. This equates to several analog chips per device, with anticipated sales of $8 billion by 2020. But Semico also points to an inflection point on the horizon.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Mitchell / Wall Street Journal:
Tech companies are increasingly hiring students from coding boot camps but doubt whether such academies can replace the four-year computer science degree — Employers are increasingly hiring graduates from nontraditional schools like Flatiron — NEW YORK—In a graffiti-splashed classroom …
Coding Boot Camps Attract Tech Companies
Employers are increasingly hiring graduates from nontraditional schools like Flatiron
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/coding-boot-camps-attract-tech-companies-1470945503-lMyQjAxMTE2ODE2MTUxMzE4Wj
In a graffiti-splashed classroom in lower Manhattan, students are learning to write computer code at a private academy whose methods and results have caught the eye of Silicon Valley and the Obama administration.
The Flatiron School’s 12-week course costs $15,000, but earns students no degree and no certificate. What it does get them, at an overwhelming rate, is a well-paying job. Nearly everyone graduates, and more than nine in 10 land a job within six months at places like Alphabet Inc. ’s Google and Kickstarter. Average starting salary: $74,447.
Employers are increasingly hiring graduates of the Flatiron model—short, intensely focused curricula that are constantly retailored to meet company needs. Success, its backers say, could help fuel a revolution in how the U.S. invests in higher education, pushing more institutions toward teaching distinct aptitudes and away from granting broad degrees.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Partners with Pharma Giant on ‘Bioelectronic’ Med
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330307&
The company formerly known as Google Life Sciences LLC and GlaxoSmithKline plc (Brentford, England) have agreed to form a joint venture to develop bioelectronics including such technologies as implanted neurostimulators.
Galvani Bioelectronics Ltd. will be headquartered in the UK and GSK will own 55% and Verily Life Sciences LLC, previously Google Life Sciences, will own 45%. The two parent companies are contributing existing intellectual property and plan to invest up to $700 million (about £540 million) in Galvani over the next seven years subject to the company meeting discovery and development milestones, GSK said.
GSK has been active in bioelectronics since 2012 and said it believes that chronic conditions such as arthritis, diabetes and asthma could potentially be treated using electronic stimulation of nerve pathways.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Unicorn Hedge
There’s a Bubble… but it Ain’t in Tech
https://500hats.com/welcome-to-the-unicorn-hedge-2fd3c6b50f89#.qqtck9bol
Abstract: the press have been whining “there’s another bubble in tech!” for years but it hasn’t happened (yet)… meanwhile VC-funded startups continue to raise capital, drive innovation, and disrupt incumbents. While some claim the recent downturn in unicorn financings and valuations is proof they were right (finally!) they couldn’t be more wrong — valuations have calmed down, but tech entrepreneurs and investors aren’t going anywhere. In fact, that ugly little asset class called Venture Capital is poised for monstrous growth as thousands of startups aim to disrupt EVERY public company, and since VC fund returns have risen over the past decade they don’t completely suck as much as they used to.
Tomi Engdahl says:
TechCrunch:
Y Combinator Summer 2016 Demo Day 1: 44 startups and a focus on consumers, developer tools, security, hardware, marketplaces, and nonprofits
All 44 startups that launched at Y Combinator S16 Demo Day 1
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/22/y-combinator-demo-day-summer-2016/
Farm drones, autonomous security guards and next-generation tampons were among the products presented at today’s Y Combinator startup accelerator Summer 2016 Demo Day 1.
Today’s startups were focused on consumer, developer tools, security, hardware, marketplaces, and non-profit. We’ll see a different set tomorrow concentrated around enterprise, B2B, biotech, edtech, and fintech.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vale, LOGO creator Seymour Papert, who taught us that code can be creative play
Arduino-fiddling kids, and the rest of us, owe Papert a debt of gratitude
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/25/vale_logo_creator_seymour_papert_who_taught_us_that_code_can_be_creative_play/
Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and I was a kid, I received the gift of a “100-in-1 Electronics Kit” that taught me the basics of electrical circuit design as I strung pre-cut wires between springy posts. At the very centre of this kit – its beating heart – a single transistor could be wired to work in an amplifier, or AM radio, or tone generator.
All of these projects, detailed in the accompanying instructional guide, really only served to whet my appetite. I quickly ditched that book because I’d learned enough to be dangerous and try wiring my own circuits.
A lot of these self-designed projects never worked. But that didn’t matter, because every failure taught me something else: current can only flow this way through the diode; DC won’t flow across a capacitor and; you can make the transistor very hot if you connect it directly to a 9V battery.
Those hours of experiments left me with a lifelong passion for electronics, and I still enjoy assembling a circuit on a breadboard.
Just over a decade ago some clever folks in Italy put together the Arduino, a credit-card sized board powered via USB and programmed with an IDE that borrows a lot from Processing, a programming language designed to make it easy to write interactive applications. As soon as I heard about Arduino, I ordered one, and not very long after Arduino number 435 arrived, I had it blinking an LED – the ‘Hello, World’ of hardware.
Over the last decade probably two million Arduinos have been manufactured – the actual total is unknowable because they released their designs as open source, leading to a range of Arduino clones.
If there’s a device that can talk to a computer, chances are that someone has figured out how to connect it to an Arduino, written the code to control it, then blogged both the circuit design and the code. It’s gotten to the point where – most of the time – you simply need to Google ‘How to connect $THING to Arduino’ to find detailed instructions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Legalist’ Startup Automates The Lawsuit Strategy Peter Thiel Used To Bankrupt Gawker
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/08/25/0017241/legalist-startup-automates-the-lawsuit-strategy-peter-thiel-used-to-bankrupt-gawker
“Two Harvard undergraduates have created a service called Legalist that uses what they call ‘data-backed litigation financing,’ analyzing civil lawsuits with an algorithm to predict case outcomes and determine which civil lawsuits are worth investing in,” reports Gizmodo. The process is very similar to what billionaire Peter Thiel did when he secretly funded a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan against Gawker Media.
One of Peter Thiel’s fellows created a new startup that will fund your lawsuit
http://www.businessinsider.com/legalist-will-fund-your-lawsuit-if-it-thinks-you-have-a-good-shot-at-winning-2016-8?r=US&IR=T&IR=T
It’s a startup idea that looks like it’s ripped straight from the headlines.
This summer, Forbes revealed that tech luminary Peter Thiel had secretly been backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. It was a wake-up call that people could fund a lawsuit bent on destroying a business — and that it’s perfectly legal to do so.
A new startup, Legalist, is looking to make money from the practice of bankrolling lawsuits. The startup plans to fund those that it calculates has a chance to win.
In a presentation at Y Combinator’s Demo Day on Tuesday, Shang argued that litigation funding is poised to become an “explosive asset class.” The startup has funded one lawsuit for $75,000 and expects a return of over $1 million once the case is over. That money will then be reinvested in other lawsuits, and the process will repeat itself.
“It’s a niche field that you don’t really think about,” Shang said.
Most cases will require between $50,000 and $500,000 from Legalist, and the company will negotiate for up to 50% of the settlement.
The key to Legalist’s success will be in its algorithm that calculates the odds of winning the case and the time scale in which it would finish.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tech fails miserably in Forbes’ most innovative companies
But don’t worry, the methodology is suspect to say the least
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/26/tech_fails_miserably_in_forbes_most_innovative_companies/
The tech industry feeds off its reputation for being innovative but, according to Forbes at least, it may not be warranted.
In a new list of the “World’s Most Innovative Companies,” the business magazine has ranked the top 100 companies. Aside from Tesla, which could arguably be listed as a tech company and took the coveted top spot, the tech industry had to wait until number 11 and Amazon.com to get into the list.
In fact, it what appears to be a distinctly anti-tech list, just eight out of the 100 companies listed are tech companies and there is no mention of Google, Apple, Facebook, Uber and other household names that have brought enormous changes to society in recent years – although it does include their Chinese counterparts in Baidu and Tencent.
If you were to believe Forbes, by far the most innovative industry in the world is pharmaceuticals – with an extraordinary six of the top 10 companies from that industry.
Forbes also only included companies that had more than seven years’ worth of public financial data and a market value of over $10bn – thereby removing 99 per cent of the companies that do the bulk of the innovation in the world. Facebook didn’t make it to the list because it “only” IPO’d in 2012.
11. Amazon.com
12. ARM Holdings
15. Netflix
25. Red Hat
29. Baidu
36. Adobe Systems
48. Tencent Holdings
58. Expedia
It then gives a fair amount of information into how its algorithm worked, digging into return-on-investment and reinvestment rates. But the whole list is fundamentally flawed from the outset, given the limited dataset.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbes.com/innovative-companies/list/&refURL=http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/26/tech_fails_miserably_in_forbes_most_innovative_companies/&referrer=http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/26/tech_fails_miserably_in_forbes_most_innovative_companies/#tab:rank
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dyslexic Designers Just Think Different—Maybe Even Better
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/dyslexic-designers-just-think-different-maybe-even-better/
Called Dyslexic Design, it’s an exhibit of, in case you haven’t guessed, work from dyslexic designers. London-based industrial designer Jim Rokos curated it in the hopes of getting other people to see what he already can: that people with dyslexia aren’t suffering from a so-called learning disability. Rather, they’re highly creative problem solvers who think in ways that make for killer designs.
Dyslexia forces you to interpret the world differently. It’s typically recognized as a disorder characterized by difficulty reading, writing, and spelling due to variations in the way the brain processes language. But as Rokos sees it, people with dyslexia can identify solutions to problems that others might overlook. And he’s using the exhibit as evidence.
A few factors cloud Rokos’ theory. The first and most obvious is that a designer doesn’t need dyslexia to do good, unique work. The second is that approximately one in five people have dyslexia, but it often goes unidentified—especially in schools. That makes it harder to draw a straight line between dyslexia and creativity.
That said, a link exists. It’s just not that linear. “People who are dyslexic seem to have an abundance of creative thought,”
Put that way, dyslexic thinking sounds like big-picture thinking—a frame of mind that certainly benefits designers. And approaching dyslexia from that angle could have two positive outcomes. One, it could help schools create more inclusive curriculae. Two, the world could become more user-friendly for everyone.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Book Review: The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=31&doc_id=1330341&
The great thing about this tome is that it provides a balanced and nuanced view about both the technology and the people behind the technology.
All of which leads us to the most recent Isaacson offering I just enjoyed: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
Book Review: The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/max-unleashed-and-unfettered/4442588/Book-Review–The-Innovators-by-Walter-Isaacson
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg:
Hospitals experimenting with VR as a pain management tool as studies find sensory overload distracts the brain
Hospitals Try Giving Patients a Dose of VR
With the price of hardware falling, VR equipment has become a more affordable option for doctors
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-29/hospitals-try-giving-patients-a-dose-of-vr
The 13-year-old was set on fire when a bonfire exploded on her and her friend. To prevent infection, burn victims need their bandages changed and dead skin scraped away. Sometimes, even morphine isn’t enough to make that tolerable.
At the Shriners Hospital for Children in Galveston, Duke’s doctors gave her a virtual reality headset. Slipping it on, she was immersed in “SnowWorld,” an icy landscape where she got to lob snow at snowmen and igloos. The Texas hospital is one of the few trying out virtual reality to relieve pain.
“I’d never heard of it so I was a little surprised,” she said. “When I first tried it, it distracted me from what they were doing so it helped with the pain.”
It’s still a new and experimental approach, but proponents of virtual reality say that it can be an effective treatment for everything from intense pain to Alzheimer’s disease to arachnophobia to depression. And as Facebook Inc., Sony Corp., HTC Corp. and others race to build a dominant VR set, the price of hardware has fallen, making the equipment a more affordable option for hospitals looking for alternatives for pain relief.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Obama Polishes High Tech Legacy
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1330377&
We’ve got ObamaCare. This October its ObamaCon, an event in Pittsburgh that is the latest high tech initiative from the White House.
The White House Frontiers Conference announced today is something of a swan song and a coda for the Obama Administration’s long string of technology efforts.
The one-day event is organized around topics that will hearken back to the President’s work in areas from climate change to revitalizing NASA, manufacturing and brain initiatives and improving STEM education. Obama will even serve as guest editor on an issue of Wired related to the event.
As its name suggests, organizers say the conference also will point forward to “building U.S. capacity in science, technology, and innovation, and the new technologies, challenges and goals that will continue to shape the 21st century and beyond.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Working For Elon Musk
http://hackaday.com/2016/08/31/working-for-elon-musk/
So what’s it like to work for Elon Musk at Tesla or SpaceX? Most of us have read articles about him, and much that he’s written himself, as well as watched some of his many interviews and talks. But to get some idea of what it’s like to work for him I greatly enjoyed the insight from Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk – Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. To write it Vance had many interviews with Musk as well as those who work with him or have in the past. Through this we get a fascinating look at a contemporary mogul of engineering.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inventable Releases Improved X-Carve CNC Router
http://hackaday.com/2016/09/01/inventable-releases-improved-x-carve-cnc-router/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Feeds Open Software
VC rides open source startups
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330391&
The annual geek fest aims to encourage software developers to contribute to and collaborate on open source code. Walking the talk, Facebook described code it plans to release for everything from stabilizing 360-degree videos to improving data compression and machine learning. However, the event also showed Facebook’s openness has its limits.
“There is so much happening in the open and we can solve problems faster working together,” said Jay Parikh, head of engineering and infrastructure at Facebook in a keynote talk, noting an estimated 1.5 million engineers follow open source projects.
Companies building products based on open code, many with “proprietary software wrapped around it to make enterprise ready” will make up some of the largest tech public offerings in the next few years, Li said, claiming more than 75% of business users are adopting open source code.
“Open source is a development and licensing model with many flavors, but open adoption software is a broader business model shift in how code is developed, used and monetized, like Salesforce pioneered a new way of delivering software — this is the same thing,” he said. “There’s no way a 12-person R&D shop is going to out innovate this room, so customers are turning toward the networking effect,” he added, pointing to the audience of several hundred developers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Schuman / New York Times:
Dream Town, an incubator for 710 startups that was built by the government of Alibaba hometown Hangzhou, shows how China is trying to fuel tech growth
Venture Communism: How China Is Building a Start-Up Boom
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/business/international/venture-communism-how-china-is-building-a-start-up-boom.html
In Dream Town, a collection of boxy office buildings on the gritty edge of this historic city, one tiny company is developing a portable 3-D printer. Another takes orders for traditional Chinese massages by smartphone. They are just two of the 710 start-ups being nurtured here.
Anywhere else, an incubator like Dream Town would be a vision of venture capitalists, angel investors or technology stalwarts. But this is China. The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t trust the invisible hand of capitalism alone to encourage entrepreneurship, especially since it is a big part of the leadership’s strategy to reshape the sagging economy.
Which is why the government of Hangzhou — a former royal capital that has been a major commercial hub for more than a millennium — built Dream Town and lavishes resources on start-ups. The businesses here get a slate of benefits like subsidized rent, cash handouts and special training, all courtesy of the city.
“From the central government all the way down to local governments, we have seen a lot of warm support,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Where do Clinton and Trump stand on tech?
https://fcw.com/articles/2016/09/06/clinton-trump-tech-itif.aspx
With the presidential election fast approaching, technology-minded groups are delving into the agendas put forth by the presidential candidates. According to a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Democrat Hillary Clinton has been more specific in outlining her positions than her Republican counterpart Donald Trump.
Put more simply, Clinton has a policy while Trump, by and large, does not.
Clinton vs. Trump: Comparing the Candidates’ Positions on Technology and Innovation
https://itif.org/publications/2016/09/06/clinton-vs-trump-comparing-candidates-positions-technology-and-innovation
From R&D and advanced manufacturing to the Internet and digital economy, Trump focuses more on reducing government barriers while Clinton focuses more on engaging government as an active partner alongside industry.
Technological innovation has long been and will continue to be critically important to both income growth and national competitiveness. So it is important that we examine the 2016 presidential candidates’ policy agendas through that lens.
In each of the last two presidential elections, ITIF has released a report examining the two major candidates’ positions on a host of technology and innovation policy issues.
In past elections, both parties’ nominees generally articulated positions on nearly all of the policy areas ITIF identified as key priorities for promoting innovation. This is generally not the case in 2016. While Clinton has stated her positions on most, if not all, of the issues areas tracked by ITIF, Trump has been much vaguer, offering few detailed positions—and, in many cases, none at all. Nevertheless, we believe it is important to clearly document what the two candidates have said (or not said) about these critical innovation issues, as their positions serve as the best-available guide to the next administration’s policy priorities—and the lack of a stated position may indicate which issues would be low priorities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Book Review: Electronics for Kids by Øyvind Nydal Dahl
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=31&doc_id=1330441&
The title notwithstanding, this is a book that will appeal to readers of all ages — anyone who wishes to dip their toes in the electronics waters.
One of my great interests is getting younger folks enthused by anything to do with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). As part of this, I like seeing how other people go about teaching these topics. In fact, I just finished reading Electronics for Kids by Øyvind Nydal Dahl. I have to say that I find myself somewhat disgruntled, because it turns out that this is the book I wanted to write myself.
This is another brilliant offering from the folks at No Starch Press (see also my reviews on Learn to Program with Minecraft by Craig Richardson, The Maker’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse by Simon Monk, and Junkyard Jam Band by David Erik Nelson).
In the case of Electronics for Kids, the author has pulled off a tremendous balancing act by creating a book that is fun and interesting, that has the reader building things and making stuff happen right from the get-go, and that manages to explain the underlying theory without talking down to the audience.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kurt Wagner / Recode:
Facebook buys Nascent Objects, a startup with tools for rapidly prototyping hardware ideas
Facebook just bought a small hardware startup called Nascent Objects
The company will join Facebook’s new top-secret hardware lab, Building 8.
http://www.recode.net/2016/9/19/12974572/facebook-nascent-objects-acquisition
Facebook has acquired Nascent Objects, a small Bay Area startup that offers what the company calls a “modular electronics platform” — essentially a software program to help expedite the process for building physical gadgets, including 3-D-printed hardware.
Nascent Objects will join Facebook’s Building 8, the company’s new top-secret hardware lab run by former Xoogler Regina Dugan, who used to run Google’s advanced technology and products team that did things like 3-D mapping and modular smartphones.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why I Teach Kids to Code
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1330482&
A former Microsoft engineer talks about how she became the founder of a company teaching programming to middle-school girls.
“Oh honey, girls don’t do math.”
Although I was only 12, I will always remember this response from my math teacher when I asked him what type of careers would be available to someone who liked math. Many years later, when my 12-year-old daughter asked me if it was weird to like math, I decided I would act.
I learned that high school is too late to be inclusive. By that time, many kids have already self-selected out of tech, especially girls
TKPJava courseware consists of 70 coding lessons grouped into 8 courses
Teaching Kids Programming
TKPJava Courseware for middle or high school teachers
http://teachingkidsprogramming.org/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reflections on a Career in Engineering
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=182&doc_id=1330487&
From a world without embedded to it being everywhere. What a career!
A 17th century farmer’s life was likely no different from that of an agrarian several thousand years earlier. For most of human history one’s life was pretty much like that of one’s great-grandparents.
Until now.
The industrial revolution took place yesterday, considering humankind’s long presence on this planet. Starting in the mid-18th century it moved people from the land into factories and created all sorts of consumer goodies. But people remained largely poor; I read (somewhere) that in 1810 94% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty compared with 10% today. (Interestingly, in absolute numbers, roughly the same number of people remain in that unenviable lot today and two centuries ago).
In my family, in the course of three generations, this technology has gone from unattainable to routine. Except that today’s devices don’t resemble those of 1910, 1950, or even 1980 at all; they are battery-powered computers that just a few years ago would have been impossible to imagine.
http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/break-points/4442717/Reflections-on-a-career
One of our early 8008 products required 4KB of program space (in 16 EPROM chips!), yet it did floating-point linear regressions and took data in real time at tens of microseconds rates.
That 8008 was about $650 each (just for the chip) in today’s dollars.
Now, 40+ years later, programs are often megabytes in size. Microcontrollers offer complete computers, memory and all, on a single chip for less than a buck. The $5000 five MB hard disk (with a removable 14” platter) we used in the early 70s has been replaced by a $50 terabyte drive.
How things have changed!
Yet many professions have not. One of my brothers sells jewelry to stores. He claims that the business is just like it was four decades ago, except that the number of stores has declined due to on-line shopping. Another is a philosopher who uses modern tools to expound on ancient ideas.
Electronic engineering is a field where change is the only constant. Some wags claim the field is reinvented every two years, a silly notion considering just how much of our knowledge base remains unchanged. Maxwell’s Laws, Kirchhoff, De Morgan, transistor theory (at least most of it) and so many other subjects foundational to our work are pretty much the same as in our college years. But the technology itself evolves at a dizzyingly pace. The mainframe shown above could now exist on a single fleck of silicon no bigger than a fingernail. Instead of costing millions, today they are so cheap they’re used as giveaways.
It’s hard to point to any bit of our tech that is unchanged. The lowly resistor is now an 0302 thin-film device. Supercaps offer farads of capacitance. Where a four-layer PCB was once unimaginable, today it’s not rare to see layers stacked tens deep. Buried vias? Who would have dreamed of such a structure 40 years ago?
Embedded software has changed as well. In the 1970s it was all done in assembly language. C and C++ are now (by far) the dominant languages. One could argue that C took over around 1990 and has stagnated since, but the firmware ecosystem is nothing like it was a years ago. Today one can get software components like GUIs, filesystems and much more as robust and reasonably-priced packages. Static analyzers find bugs automatically while other tools will generate unit tests. Where we used to use paper tape for mass storage when developing code, patching binaries rather than reassembling to save time, now fantastic IDEs can graphically show what tasks execute when, or capture trace data from a processor furiously executing 100 million instructions per second.
Embedded systems have always suffered from being the neglected kid in town; all the tech glory goes to iPads and PCs.
We’re at a singular point in history, at least embedded history. Today cheap yet very powerful 32-bit MCUs that include vast amounts of memory and astonishing arrays of peripherals, coupled with their extremely low power needs and widely available communications I/O and infrastructure, are redefining the nature of our business. And don’t forget the huge number of sensors now available – a gyro used to be big, power-hungry and expensive. Now you can get one for a couple of bucks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Focus on Innovation
https://www.mentor.com/products/electrical-design-software/techpubs/download?id=92974&contactid=1&PC=L&c=2016_09_23_capital_no_interaction_promo
Freeing engineers to focus on innovation means removing distractions so that they can achieve strategic immersion to fully enable them to innovate. It means providing immediate and responsive feedback as they make decisions. It also means removing as many tedious and mundane tasks as possible.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Geek gene’ denied: If you find computer science hard, it’s your fault (or your teacher’s)
And you find it easy, it’s through hard work – not a ‘gift’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/28/geek_gene_denied/
Assume for the sake of argument that computer science grades are bimodal: there’s a distinct group of students who excel at the subject, and then there’s everyone else in another group.
Computer science researchers at the University of Toronto – namely, Elizabeth Patitsas, Jesse Berlin, Michelle Craig, and Steve Easterbrook – argue that while people commonly believe there are two such groups – the naturally gifted and the non-gifted – those people are just plain wrong.
In a freshly published paper [PDF], the researchers describe how they analyzed the distribution of 778 sets of final CS course grades at a large research university, and found only 5.8 per cent of the distribution curves were distinct enough to qualify as bimodal or multimodal.
In other words, there’s no separation in terms of grade data between those who can and those who cannot. In most cases, graphs of student grades fit a normal statistical pattern.
Yet belief persists that some people have the “geek gene” and some don’t.
Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal
https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/09/27/icer_2016_bimodal.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
MesoGlue will not replace solder
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/anablog/4442738/MesoGlue-will-not-replace-solder?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20160923&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20160923&elqTrackId=e3a539608ddb4d79aa1619393c112b74&elq=03fe442e9be54fe99993f2c65e778018&elqaid=33998&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=29722
There has been a minor media frenzy over some very good scientific work at Northeastern University. Researchers discovered that you can put well-spaced silver nanowires on two surfaces you want to bond; one set of nanowires has an indium coating, and the other set has a gallium coating.
Now you have a room-temperature conductive metallic interface. Better yet, the indium and gallium will continue to diffuse until the alloy moves off its eutectic point, and then it becomes a solid at room temperature.
The non-technical media are ranting that this will replace soldering. This is what happens when PR departments and media treat a scientific breakthrough as an engineering breakthrough. It starts as a slick glossy abstract (PDF) by the researchers, no doubt with an eye out to department budgets and commercialization. Then the Northeastern University press office gets a hold of it and it might replace solder. A materials trade-paper (23M PDF) picks up on the press office release, and there is a bit more amplification on how this will change the world. Pretty soon the mainstream media pick up the story and its breathless headlines: “Will This Fancy Metallic Glue Kill Soldering?” I love the comment to one fan-boy article, “This seems like a game changer.” No, not really.
As a writer, I note that stories go from scientific jargon laced with passive voice to click-bait titles asking a rhetorical question. All are no-nos in good technical writing.
Engineering is science intersected with economics. That is why engineering is harder than science, and that is why it pays better. Engineering is also a continuum of solutions. We already have conductive silver-filled epoxy, and conductive nickel-filled epoxy, and I assume the boffins have whipped up conductive carbon nano-tube epoxies. Scientific papers don’t provide the context for the application.
Apparently, the researchers do not plate or deposit the indium and gallium.
There is little detail in this, I assume since they are furiously trying to patent anything they can. Universities are not bastions of pure research anymore. They are start-up incubators.
This also raises the engineering concern of process control. You have to ensure that the silver wires are the proper size and proper spacing
To the credit of the team at Northeastern, they use the process for the application of CPU cooling.
They state that the MesoGlue is 10- to 20-times more thermally conductive than thermal grease.
This CPU cooling application raises its own engineering questions.
There are a lot of good engineering principles on display here. After decades in the industry, I was astonished to learn that the thermal conductivity of copper is 8 times better than tin-lead solder. That is the brilliance of MesoGlue. It lets silver wires carry the heat, and the wires present a lot of surface area to the indium-gallium alloy to transfer the heat from one set of wires to the other.
Glue is great, no doubt. Glue is replacing spot-welds in cars.
With engineering, it’s always some complex interrelated set of compromises and tradeoffs. It’s another reason I consider engineering to be harder than science.
While I applaud the science of MesoGlue, it’s still not ready for primetime as an engineering breakthrough. When I can order it from Digi-Key or Arrow, and when its cost will justify the improvement, then it’s of interest to engineers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Human Error Causes Most Engineering Disasters
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=281622&cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20160926.tst004c
When you dig into the details of most engineering disasters, human error shows up again and again. Recently, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich analyzed 800 cases of structural failure in which 504 people were killed, 592 people injured, and millions of dollars of damage occurred. When engineers were at fault, the researchers classified the causes of the failure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Coding as a spectator sport
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/about-embedded/4442743/Coding-as-a-spectator-sport?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160927&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20160927&elqTrackId=0a6047e153714401b85d7ce8fa5adb59&elq=5bf020b22b2040de82eb81bcb16b2321&elqaid=34035&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=29755
With the rise of low-cost platforms like the Arduino and growing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT), a new category of embedded developers is arising. Many of this new cadre are not coming from electronics or computer science backgrounds, but are forging their own approaches to development unbound by tradition or academic methods. Some are even learning to code not by study, but by watching others write code.
One example of this online learning approach is Twitch TV. Although this site looks on the surface to only be a means of sharing video game excursions, there is more available if you dig a bit. In the Creative channels, search for Programming and you’ll come up with a list of videos on the topic. Some are recordings of presentations, while others are a kind of tutorial. The tutorials take the form of “looking over the shoulder” as the video creator narrates their activity. When originally created, these are streamed live, and have a chat line open for real-time question-and-answer. The recorded version then gets archived for latecomers’ use.
Another learning resource that uses the same “over the shoulder” video format as Twitch is LiveCoding. Unlike Twitch, however, Live Coding focuses exclusively on coding. It is also more organized in its approach to offering instruction than Twitch. LiveCoding organizes its content by programming language (Java, Python, Ruby, C/C++, etc.), some with tens of thousands of videos available. Within each of those language categories, the site offers a choice of beginner, intermediate, or advanced level topics.
There also seems to be a social aspect to this method of knowledge transfer. Alongside the streaming presentation there is a chat box, which allows real-time viewers to post comments, ask questions, and the like.
Perhaps this approach is a natural extension of an increasingly online existence, or a way for developers who live and breathe coding to connect and interact with like-minded cohorts, but coding as a spectator sport simply doesn’t appeal to me. And I worry that participant are exchanging only random tidbits of information and failing to see things in an overall context and structure. Such fragmented knowledge transfer is fine for play and prototyping but, I fear, falls short of providing the kind of instruction needed to achieve reliable, production-ready design.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nat Levy / GeekWire:
Amazon unveils “Alexa Prize”, an annual university competition to advance conversational AI; first challenge is to build a bot conversing coherently for 20 mins
Amazon’s $2.5M ‘Alexa Prize’ seeks chatbot that can converse intelligently for 20 minutes
http://www.geekwire.com/2016/amazon-award-2-5m-quest-alexa-chatbot-can-converse-intelligently-20-minutes/