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:
Singapore’s PM personally programmed C++ Suduko-solver
Sorry I haven’t coded lately, says Lee Hsien Loong, but when I retire I’ll learn Haskell
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/23/singapores_pm_personally_coded_c_sudukosolver/
Lots of politicians talk about the importance of wielding technology, but Singaporean prime minister Lee Hsien Loong has just put his money where his mouth is by revealing he’s upset that he doesn’t have time to code stuff any more.
The PM did so in a speech outlining the city-state’s many and enviable innovation. Along the way he explained that the minister in charge of Singapore’s Smart Nation Programme Office, Vivian Balakrishnan, “… used to be an eye surgeon but since he does not get to operate on eyes nowadays, he dabbles in building simple robots, assembling watches, wireless devices and programming apps.”
Loong said he envies Balakrishnan his coding time. “The last programme I wrote was a Sudoku solver in C++ several years ago, so I’m out of date.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The availability of financing is not attempting a problem, but the lack of innovation is a problem.
Universities investing in would correct this fault.
Source: http://www.iltalehti.fi/talous/2015042319567759_ta.shtml
Tomi Engdahl says:
Whether one likes it or not, it is the adult entertainment industry undoubtedly been one of the key developers of Internet Web development from the beginning.
1. Good: Online payment systems
2. Bad: Spam
3. Good: Streaming video and video chat
4. Bad: Malware and pop-up ads
5. Good: Broadband
6. Bad: Paris Hilton
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/2015-04-22/N%C3%A4in-porno-on-muuttanut-interneti%C3%A4—6-asiaa-3220372.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cold Fusion: Still alive & kicking (but perhaps without the fusion)
http://www.edn.com/design/power-management/4439235/Cold-Fusion–Still-alive—kicking–But-perhaps-without-the-fusion-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150423&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150423&elq=30a2c06451154e4ab71672375e1d0744&elqCampaignId=22684&elqaid=25518&elqat=1&elqTrackId=4ef8ec6fa61c4bfbb1e83ff82074e82a
The history of scientific discovery is littered with examples of “pathological science” – an area of research where experimenters are tricked into accepting false results by a combination of subjective effects, unrecognized experimental errors, and wishful thinking. The term was first used by Nobel-winning chemist Irving Langmuir in 1953. Langmuir described pathological science as an area of research that simply refuses to die long after it was given up on as false by the majority of scientists in the field. He called pathological science “the science of things that aren’t so”.
Enter Cold Fusion. From the initial spectacular announcement by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons (at a press conference, no less), to its equally spectacular flameout under the weight of irreproducible results, the lack of a theoretical framework, and scathing accusations of “incompetence and delusion” on the part of Fleischmann and Pons, cold fusion appears to have been consigned to the scientific landfill along with perpetual motion, polywater, and the canals on Mars.
Or perhaps not. Although mainstream science has long since turned its attentions elsewhere, Cold Fusion, these days known as Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), has been kept alive by a small but dedicated band of mostly fringe researchers, publishing in their own set of publications.
LENR effects have been observed in numerous experiments using a variety of methods, and theoretical explanations are beginning to take shape.
Based on current thinking, LENR – and not cold fusion – may in fact be the correct name for the phenomenon; the Widom-Larsen theory posits that the observed results aren’t due to fusion at all, but low-energy nuclear reactions that involve neutron formation from electrons and protons/deuterons, followed by local neutron beta-decay processes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Daniel Roberts / Fortune:
The dearth of women in Bitcoin mirrors tech as a whole, with some women actively involved, influential, and welcomed in the community
Think there aren’t women in bitcoin? Think again.
http://fortune.com/2015/04/24/women-in-bitcoin/
Rumors of the lack of women in the bitcoin industry have been greatly exaggerated.
The bitcoin community—the developers, executives, venture capitalists, policy wonks, academics, and even bloggers who work in, engage with, and support the decentralized technology and the digital currency—has a diversity problem.
It’s no worse than in the technology industry writ large, though some people disagree. Whatever the case, women are very much a minority in the business of bitcoin. But there are more of them than a Fusion piece this week would have you believe.
The bitcoin industry has what Brian Forde, director of digital currency for MIT Media Lab, calls a “pale male” problem.
“Is the Bitcoin community just young, white and male?” A separate survey from 2013 concluded that 96% of bitcoin “users” are male.
But there are quite a few women in the business of bitcoin—and while they may be heavily outnumbered by their male counterparts, they are hardly standing on the sidelines. “I might be a special case, but in my experience, I’ve only been welcomed and encouraged in this space,” says Andrea Castillo, an economic researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “I’ve never felt there were barriers presented to me because of my gender. If anything, I think people have been nicer to me because of it.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Basic University Research Key to Industry Progress
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1326437&
A basic, precompetitive research base is required to continue to advancement of the semiconductor industry, says SRC president.
SRC has served as an integral partner to the semiconductor industry as well as academia and government by sponsoring the basic university research responsible for semiconductor technology advancements. In turn, these advancements have led to today’s range of sophisticated computing devices and applications that support our everyday lives.
The fact that SRC has been in operation since 1982 means we are doing something right. We think we probably set the record for the longest running consortium in any industry, but our ongoing mission simply affirms the critical role that university research plays in the future of technology and the U.S. economy in general.
Indeed, the world-class U.S. university system built through decades of steady government support serves as a foundation for public-private partnerships such as SRC.
As semiconductor technology continues to shrink devices dimensionally, it begins to approach the same size of biological information managing systems. This provides the opportunity to learn from nature to further advance semiconductor technology.
Therefore, it is critical to understand that today’s technology-based economy depends on a robust university research enterprise.
Furthermore, the effective collaborative research model requires three major pillars: namely industry, academia and government to work in unison—take any one of these out of the equation and the likelihood for success significantly diminishes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple’s Next Frontier Is Your Body
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/15/04/26/1215234/apples-next-frontier-is-your-body
Amid the unveiling of the Apple Watch, Tim Cook’s wrist distracted from another new product last month: ResearchKit, an open source iOS platform designed to help researchers design apps for medical studies—and reach millions of potential research subjects through their iPhones.
How Apple Is Building An Ecosystem For Your Body
http://www.fastcompany.com/3045023/researchkit-healthkit-and-an-apple-for-your-health
As it embarks on a mission to strap its products to your body, CEO Tim Cook says health could be the company’s “biggest” frontier.
Tim Cook Calls Jim Cramer on ‘Mad Money’, Talks About Health, ResearchKit and More
http://www.macrumors.com/2015/03/12/tim-cook-jim-cramer-mad-money/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Next Generation of Medical Tools May Be Home-brewed
http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/04/28/2138224/the-next-generation-of-medical-tools-may-be-home-brewed
In the Little Devices Lab at MIT, Jose Gomez-Marquez builds medical tools using a DIY mindset. He’s designing cheap alternatives to existing hospital equipment to help spread high-quality medical care around the world. Gomez-Marquez is at the forefront of a large and often-unrecognized group of DIY medical tool builders. Together they are challenging the idea that staying healthy requires extraordinarily expensive, sophisticated equipment built by massive corporations. Harnessing this inventive energy, he argues, could improve the health of thousands of people around the world.
The Next Generation of Medical Tools May Be Home-Brewed
Innovation can be fast, cheap and outside corporate control
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-next-generation-of-medical-tools-may-be-home-brewed-830a753a1c58
Tomi Engdahl says:
One Doctor’s Quest to Save the World With Data
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/epic-measures/
In Rwanda, people have to deal with all kinds of threats to their health: malaria, HIV/AIDS, severe diarrhea. But in late 2012, Agnes Binagwaho, Rwanda’s Minister of Health, realized her country’s key health enemy was something far more innocuous. The thing causing the most harm to her people, the leading risk factor for premature death and disability, was inside their own homes: Dirty indoor air, from cooking food over burning dung and vegetation in poorly ventilated huts. Within weeks, Binagwaho announced a program to distribute one million clean cookstoves to the poorest households in the young, mostly rural country.
Binagwaho was able to improve millions of lives thanks to a new kind of medical record-keeping, only possible in this era of big data.
You might think that policymakers and health czars would jump at the chance to save the maximum number of lives with a minimum of investment. But it hasn’t always been easy going for Christopher Murray, the godfather of the approach
Those experiences shaped the rest of his life: “It gave me my primary question, which I continue to try to get the answer to,” Murray says. “What are people’s main problems and what can you do to fix them in a way that transcends individual clinical practice?”
More than 20 years later, as a leader at the World Health Organization (the United Nation’s health arm), Murray noticed that official reports and analyses of those main problems didn’t quite reflect medical reality. In fact, the numbers—many of which came from advocacy groups, seeking money and attention for specific causes—didn’t make sense. “If you added things up,” he says, “people were dying three times over.”
In 2000 Murray’s team released a new version of the global burden of disease data, analyzing world health between 1990 and 2000 and adding new insights.
The study’s current iteration, housed at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, analyzes global health data up to 2013. A super-computing cluster is busily whirring away at the University of Washington—supported by more than $100 million in funding from the Gates Foundation—crunching information from sources like hospital and police records to output more than a billion data points.
Tomi Engdahl says:
David Chang’s Startup Is a Restaurant Without a Restaurant
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/maple-david-chang/
While he was in business school, Caleb Merkl got to thinking about opening a restaurant. Everyone told him he was nuts, because restaurants are crazy expensive to run and mostly doomed to fail. Merkl knew they were right, of course. But now, he’s gone and done it anyway. Well, sort of.
Technically, Maple, which launched in downtown Manhattan today, is an app. But in almost every other way, it operates more like a restaurant. It’s got a kitchen staff of 22 who cook up a rotating daily menu of fresh meals, curated
The difference is, you can’t actually go to a Maple restaurant. In fact, they don’t even exist. Instead, the only way to enjoy Maple’s food is to order it through the app.
This approach distinguishes Maple from the dozens of startups trying to eke out a space in the food industry without actually having to get their hands dirty making and serving the food. There are restaurant delivery services like Seamless and Delivery.com that simply connect you with existing restaurants, and companies like Blue Apron and Plated that send you all the pre-portioned ingredients you need to cook your own meal at home. There are messenger apps like Postmates that let you order delivery from restaurants that don’t offer it themselves. There’s even Uber’s new food delivery service.
“Restaurants aren’t set up to do delivery well.”
It all starts in the kitchen. On any given day, Maple offers just three options for lunch, which costs $12 with tip and delivery included, and three options for dinner, which costs $15 all-in. Limiting variety allows the kitchen staff to focus on quality and speed
When the delivery team is actually on the road, Maple’s delivery app tracks them all the way, measuring their velocity to determine how much time they spend on the bike, how long it takes them to walk to the person’s door, which streets have the most traffic, and which buildings take longer to deliver to than others.
“Restaurants have that asset, but it rarely travels with delivery,” Merkl says. “We think it’s especially important to recreate some emotion around food, when we don’t have a physical space.”
there are also substantial obstacles to delivering on the promise of perfect delivery. For starters, Maple’s business model still requires a huge staff, only instead of waiters and waitresses, it’s a delivery team.
in order for Maple’s technology to be worthwhile, Maple needs densely packed routes.
But while Maple may not scale as quickly as the average tech company, Merkl says it will scale much more quickly and efficiently than the average food company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is AI the Killer App for Cancer?
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/ai-killer-app-cancer/
Remember Watson, IBM’s supercomputing Jeopardy! champ and gourmet chef? It’s growing up. Watson skipped university and took a career as a super-elite MD deploying AI software and predictive analytics for research trials at blue-chip healthcare institutions. Yet Watson still needs a whole lot of schooling before making independent decisions and in the meantime, nurses and physicians have the final say. IBM, spotting this opportunity, has said it is investing $1 billion in a new cognitive-computing business division called Watson Healthcare Cloud.
It’s no surprise that a tech goliath like IBM is betting big on AI in a huge marketplace like healthcare, but innovation tends to be bottom-up—and a number of startups are looking for novel ways that AI applications can improve patient outcomes and slash costs in America’s health-industrial complex. Some are exploring AI tools to design new structures for drugs based on the mechanics of the disease; others are tapping into terabytes of health data to make specific recommendations for individual patients.
Here are a few others worth keeping our eyes on
Tomi Engdahl says:
Industry Doesn’t Like Change
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1326472&
Change is inevitable in any industry, especially electronics. Leadership at the top can make companies successful, even amid constant change.
Technology continually changes, forcing managers at all companies to evaluate their present market position. New approaches that yield cheaper and more powerful solutions for customers that are might erode a company’s product offerings. These may come from established companies or from start-ups.
The future is, however, always murky. We never know which technology to put resources behind to expand a company’s product line. “Cannibalizing your product before someone else does” is the watchword that must drive any successful transition. Sounds good, but why do so many companies fail at it?
Tomi Engdahl says:
If Google Glass Was a Joke, Then the Joke Is On You
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/google-glass-joke-joke/
I don’t feel the following needs any elaboration, but for the sake of making my point I will do so anyway. When a device or software is in it’s beta phase it means that it is near completion.
Personally, I feel that to actually pre-release a product or software kind of goes against our natural urge, simply because it takes a lot of courage to do so. Whatever you release puts your reputation on the line.
Going against that natural urge to protect what you have with the goal to do better should, in my opinion, be celebrated and embraced.
The above is easily projected onto Google Glass, released February 2013. The fact that they did the price-psychology shuffle on early-adopters by making them pay a $1500 for the device can only be judged as a great marketing strategy.
Maybe it makes more sense to have a look at our level of expectation, so we can realize that we should applaud companies like Google, who stick their neck out, knowing that they will probably be slaughtered for it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Africa’s Mobile-Sun Revolution
http://recode.net/2015/04/29/africas-mobile-sun-revolution/
The transformative potential for mobile communications is upon us in every aspect of life. In the developing world where infrastructure of all types is at a premium, few question the potential for mobile, but many wonder whether it should be a priority.
Many years of visiting the developing world have taught me that, given the tools, people — including the very poor — will quickly and easily put them to uses that exceed even the well-intentioned ideas of the developed world. Poor people want to and can do everything people of means can do, they just don’t have the money.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Engineers have actually won the battle,” Updegrove told EE Times. The legal community has been playing catch-up with the engineers since the late 1980’s when “free software” activists like Richard Stallman wrote the first version of GNU General Public License.
Modern high-tech industry groups want to recruit for their cause the best engineering talent available in the world, said Updegrove. They recognize that it isn’t wise to cross talented engineers who adhere to the engineering community’s own code of ethics. As Updegrove explains it, this value system requires that you can use, study, distribute and modify free and open software but you don’t steal from the community. If you improve the code, you give it back to the community.
Source: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326527&
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sharon Begley / Reuters:
IBM’s Watson to guide cancer therapies at 14 centers, analyzing tumors’ genetic make-up with the findings of scientific papers and clinical trials
IBM’s Watson to guide cancer therapies at 14 centers
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/05/us-ibm-cancer-idUSKBN0NQ1YQ20150505
Tomi Engdahl says:
Computing Needs a Reboot
Old techniques running out of gas
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1326520&
Engineers need to explore new computing paradigms to fuel future performance advances.
An estimated $200 million in economic activity was lost in New York City during the blizzard of 2015. One reason that snowstorm was not predicted correctly that got lost in the debates and finger pointing: computers are not getting faster.
For years, it’s been true that about every year and a half, computers in general doubled in speed. It used to be due to Moore’s Law, the observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the semiconductor industry was increasing the density of transistors per unit area every 18 months.
Over time, the architecture of computers started to be the limit. Around 1995, the industry started to execute programs in parallel. This was the era of instruction-level parallelism and its standard bearer, the superscalar microprocessor. This kept computers doubling in performance for the same cost every 18 months.
These tricks hit a roadblock in 2005.
This so-called speculative execution meant that higher performance was tied directly to higher power
We ended up with power densities in excess of 200 watts per square centimeter, roughly the same power density as an operating nuclear reactor core! The costs shifted to cooling, but moving beyond the standard fan and heat sink cooling approaches proved to be far more expensive.
The industry reacted by putting on the same die multiple computers, christened cores by marketing. In order to light up all of the cores, the burden shifted from hardware to the programmer.
But things got even worse for the computer industry. The trend that Gordon Moore observed, that transistors per unit area doubled every 18 months, was coming to an end.
And so here we are today: microprocessors are not getting faster for the same price. Building larger and larger computer systems to solve problems such as weather prediction have become exceedingly expensive. It looks as if it’s the true end of the road for computing itself: a technology that has fueled major advances in science, healthcare, drug development, engineering, entertainment, transportation…the list of computing’s impact is nearly infinite.
In late 2012, we began an initiative under the auspices of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
We called this initiative “Rebooting Computing” and held three summits, one in Washington, DC, and two near Silicon Valley.
What emerged were several potential approaches to getting back to the historic exponential scaling of computer performance. Each of these is radical.
For example, one approach leverages randomness and allows computers to produce approximate results rather than computing to the 100th decimal point. The human eye does this
Another approach mimics the structures of the brain
Such a computer is good at recognizing patterns
A third approach is based on the observation that power in a computer is only consumed when the result is picked from a list of potential results– the longer you can keep the list around, the better the chance of not burning power needlessly.
Each of these approaches is considered lunatic fringe by the industry. One may be the way forward, but we do not know.
Current approaches to weather prediction use computing concepts unchanged from the early days of computers. As such, they also inherit the same limits modern computers have.
Rebooting Computing
http://rebootingcomputing.ieee.org/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Carly Fiorina: 85-95% Of What We Do Online Is Superficial And Useless
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/05/carly-fiorina-85-95-percent-of-what-we-do-online-is-superficial-and-useless/
Former HP CEO and current presidential candidate Carly Fiorina took the stage at Disrupt NY today to talk about her campaign, experience at HP and the role of technology in politics.
“We are in a different time for a whole host of reasons. There were some artificial things pushing the last boom. It wasn’t sustainable,” she noted. “But I do think we’re in a rather frothy time.” Specifically, she noted that a lot of the money today is going into applications and not into manufacturing.
Talking about current tech fads, Fiorina also noted that she believes that we are still trying to find the balance between what we can do and we should do.
“I’m willing to bet that 85 to 95 percent of what people spend doing on their technology today is pretty superficial and useless.” Instead of using our tech to vote for American Idol and The Voice, why aren’t we using it to more effectively engage with our politicians, she wondered.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How 3-D Printing Is Saving the Italian Artisan
Italy’s craftsmen turn to a new tool in their competition with cheap products from China
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-05-05/how-3-d-printing-is-saving-the-italian-artisan
In the 1960s, farmers in the region began setting up small family-owned businesses, each specializing in just one small part of a finished product. Within a generation, many of these companies became world leaders in their respective fields, and small Italian cities thrived as manufacturing hubs. The town of Montebelluna, north of Venice, once produced about three-quarters of the world’s ski boots, with different companies specializing in buckles, plastic shells, and foam linings. About 70 percent of Europe’s chairs were designed and manufactured by the 1,200 small outfits centered around Manzano, near Italy’s eastern border with Slovenia—with each part of the production process handled by a different highly specialized company.
Like much of the rest of the country, however, the region has fallen on hard times. Italy’s craftsmen have been undermined by competition from China and other parts of Asia.
A few years ago, in an effort to diversify his company’s offerings, Pomini teamed up with Selvaggia Armani, an artist and designer. The two began working on a series of lamps designed by Armani and manufactured to order on Pomini’s 3D printers.
The project was a surprising success: Pomini now works with more than a dozen designers; he introduced 3Dprinted jewelry in 2012. “This is the beauty of this technology,” says Armani, 47. “You can build things that are impossible.”
Techniques such as the 3D printing used by Pomini and Armani have helped turn northeastern Italy into an unlikely hothouse of innovation. Last year growth in the region was positive for the first time since 2007, at 0.5 percent. Exports rose by 3.5 percent in 2014 and are expected to keep climbing.
Zago and Cinti still use the old Heidelberg presses, but they’ve integrated them into a manufacturing process that includes modern marketing, design, and computer-controlled production. “What the printers of Verona never understood is that in this world, it is no longer enough to work hard,” Cinti says. “You have to understand the new market, the new dynamic.”
New production processes are not the only technologies leveling the playing field for Italy’s small-scale producers. The connecting power of the Internet opens the possibility for small manufacturers to rapidly find new markets, even as Italian demand remains low.
Recently, Segalin introduced a decidedly more modern technology, at a cost of €15,000: laser foot scanners. Using them, Segalin can create a 3D computer model of a customer’s foot, providing him with exact measurements to work from.
Back in Trento, Pomini recently introduced customizable sunglasses, round frames with interchangeable accessories that can be clipped on and off.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Volunteer Bob Paulin Turns Kids on to Tech with Devoxx4Kids (Video)
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/05/06/1943207/volunteer-bob-paulin-turns-kids-on-to-tech-with-devoxx4kids-video
A motto on the group’s website says, ‘Game programming, robotics, engineering for kids in a fun way!’ And that’s what the group is all about, as Bob says in this video
Chicagoland organizer of Devoxx4Kids.org
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft-Backed Think Tank: K-12 CS Education Cure For Sagging US Productivity
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/05/09/1558242/microsoft-backed-think-tank-k-12-cs-education-cure-for-sagging-us-productivity
On May 6, notes think tank Brookings, the Department of Labor released labor productivity data showing that output per worker fell by 1.9 percent during the first quarter of 2015. But fear not — the Metropolitan Policy Program of [Microsoft-backed] Brookings says K-12 computer science education is the cure for what ails U.S. productivity: “So how can the United States reverse this trend? First, states, metropolitan areas, and school districts must recognize that basic digital literacy is no longer sufficient preparation for the 21st century workforce. Familiarity with higher-level skills such as coding will be critical as the role of technology continues to grow. The 60-plus school districts that have partnered with [Microsoft-backed] Code.org have already begun to move in this direction.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why is labor productivity so low? Consider investments in skills
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2015/05/08-labor-productivity-low-skills-andes-lee
On May 6 the Department of Labor released labor productivity data showing that output per worker fell by 1.9 percent during the first quarter of 2015. Many economic analysts and reporters interpreted this decline either as evidence of a sluggish economic recovery or as an anomaly due to temporary factors like bad weather and a strong dollar.
While these interpretations are compelling, neither fully explains the long-run decline in U.S. labor productivity. Over the last decade labor productivity grew annually by 1.4 percent—half the rate of the previous decade. This slower growth is surprising given that during the recession labor productivity improved as firms aggressively reduced their workforces and compelled remaining workers to do more with less.
There is no shortage of explanations why labor productivity over the last decade did not keep pace with the prior decade, but one key factor that affected the prior decade’s growth was information technology.
Between the mid-1990s and 2000s, increasing use of IT helped make labor productivity grow quickly.
Today the situation has changed. The basic digital skills that once provided a productivity edge now represent the minimum requirement for many jobs.
The current landscape has inspired new perspectives on how best to improve productivity. Those in the secular stagnation camp often argue that investments in technology are too low to maintain productivity growth. Less frequently discussed is whether investments in skills are too low.
So how can the United States reverse this trend? First, states, metropolitan areas, and school districts must recognize that basic digital literacy is no longer sufficient preparation for the 21st century workforce. Familiarity with higher-level skills such as coding will be critical as the role of technology continues to grow.
Second, education and training providers and area employers can work with intermediary organizations to align education and workforce development ecosystems with industry labor needs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: Moving To an Offshore-Proof Career?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/15/05/09/2036259/ask-slashdot-moving-to-an-offshore-proof-career
Either:
1. Do something someone else can’t do
2. Do something that someone else won’t do
Example of #1: Be the best darn $LanguageDeJour expert. But this requires lots of functioning brain cells
Example of #2: Work in places that others would turn down. This only requires lots of guts.
The question in TFS is another way of asking “How can I spend my whole working life doing the same thing without risk of change?” It’s not much of an aspiration.
Better questions might be:
How can I organize my life for the greatest variety?
How can I reduce repetitive work to a minimum?
What’s the best profession for visiting new places?
How might I work for myself instead of for others?
Can I live a fulfilling life without the work treadmill?
And there’s another several hundred good questions along those lines. How to avoid your employment being outsourced is not one of them. Your life deserves greater ambitions than planned stagnation.
Service industry jobs cannot be offshored.
What do you want to do?
If you are in a job that can be offshored, your best bet is networking
Being afraid that your job will be taken away by “overseas workers,” besides its vaguely racists and xenophobic connotations, is just the latest flavor of a very old fear.
Back in the days of the industrial revolution, it was automation that was going to take away the jobs. And in a sense, it did.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dean Kamen says tech needs superstars
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/now-hear-this/4439382/Dean-Kamen-says-tech-needs-superstars?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20150508&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20150508&elq=e96066c1db9b40a6858015d76abdb1c8&elqCampaignId=22919&elqaid=25798&elqat=1&elqTrackId=ab19eaf89aba4c58b45eb76bb33c99ae
Rather than submitting to the populous view that America has an education crisis, Kamen remarked that the country is suffering from a cultural crisis that puts sports and entertainment at the apex of youngsters’ lives. Looking at the popularity of the NBA, NFL, and Hollywood, he told the capacity crowd, “We need to put STEM in an exciting, sports-like context, take sports and wrap it around technology,” he said. “Tech needs superstars like sports need their superstars. I need superstars to show how cool, fun, and accessible tech is.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tomorrow’s Advance Man
Marc Andreessen’s plan to win the future.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man?currentPage=all
Venture capitalists with a knack for the 1,000x know that true innovations don’t follow a pattern. The future is always stranger than we expect: mobile phones and the Internet, not flying cars. Doug Leone, one of the leaders of Sequoia Capital Partners, by consensus Silicon Valley’s top firm, said, “The biggest outcomes come when you break your previous mental model. The black-swan events of the past forty years—the PC, the router, the Internet, the iPhone—nobody had theses around those. So what’s useful to us is having Dumbo ears.” A great V.C. keeps his ears pricked for a disturbing story with the elements of a fairy tale. This tale begins in another age (which happens to be the future), and features a lowborn hero who knows a secret from his hardscrabble experience. The hero encounters royalty (the V.C.s) who test him, and he harnesses magic (technology) to prevail. The tale ends in heaping treasure chests for all, borne home on the unicorn’s back.
At pitch meetings, Andreessen is relatively measured: he reserves his passion for the deal review afterward, when the firm decides whether to invest. That’s where he asks questions that oblige his partners to envision a new world. For the ride-sharing service Lyft: “Don’t think about how big the taxi market is. What if people no longer owned cars?”
Andreessen is tomorrow’s advance man, routinely laying out “what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years,” as if he were glancing at his Google calendar.
Doshi’s board, reported that the entrepreneur had e-mailed to say that he’d love for his company to be valued at a billion dollars—an assessment that would set the price for the portion of it that a16z might now buy. However, Doshi would sell the firm ten per cent of his company for eighty million, suggesting a valuation of eight hundred million dollars. Andreessen said, “The dogs are fucking jumping through the screen door to eat the dog food. And he hasn’t done any marketing yet. And he’s profitable!”
Horowitz exclaimed, “How old is he, twenty-four? God damn it, let’s give him all our money!” A16z provided Doshi all his B-round funding—sixty-five million dollars—for a further 7.5 per cent of the company, which was thus valued at eight hundred and sixty-five million dollars.
Venture firms rarely do an entire follow-on round themselves, for fear of losing sight of a company’s true market value; as Andreessen put it, “You can be thinking your shit smells like ice cream.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ignite 2015: New solutions fuel innovation
and transformation for IT pros
http://news.microsoft.com/ignite2015/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ariana Eunjung Cha / Washington Post:
As fitness wearables and sensors become more pervasive, important questions remain about privacy and the usefulness of health data tracking
The Human Upgrade
The revolution will be digitized
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/05/09/the-revolution-will-be-digitized/
Spearheaded by the flood of wearable devices, a movement to quantify consumers’ lifestyles is evolving into big business with immense health and privacy ramifications
Smarr, an astrophysicist and computer scientist, could be the world’s most self-measured man. For nearly 15 years, the professor at the University of California at San Diego has been obsessed with what he describes as the most complicated subject he has ever experimented on: his own body.
Smarr keeps track of more than 150 parameters. Some, such as his heartbeat, movement and whether he’s sitting, standing or lying down, he measures continuously in real time with a wireless gadget on his belt. Some, such as his weight, he logs daily. Others, such as his blood and the bacteria in his intestines, he tests only about once every month.
Smarr compares the way he treats his body with how people monitor and maintain their cars: “We know exactly how much gas we have, the engine temperature, how fast we are going. What I’m doing is creating a dashboard for my body.”
Once, Smarr was most renowned as the head of the research lab where Marc Andreessen developed the Web browser in the early 1990s. Now 66, Smarr is the unlikely hero of a global movement among ordinary people to “quantify” themselves using wearable fitness gadgets, medical equipment, headcams, traditional lab tests and homemade contraptions, all with the goal of finding ways to optimize their bodies and minds to live longer, healthier lives — and perhaps to discover some important truth about themselves and their purpose in life.
In the aggregate data being gathered by millions of personal tracking devices are patterns that may reveal what in the diet, exercise regimen and environment contributes to disease.
Could physical activity patterns be used to not only track individuals’ cardiac health but also to inform decisions about where to place a public park and improve walkability? Could trackers find cancer clusters or contaminated waterways? A pilot project in Louisville, for example, uses inhalers with special sensors to pinpoint asthma “hot spots” in the city.
“As we have more and more sophisticated wearables that can continuously measure things ranging from your physical activity to your stress levels to your emotional state, we can begin to cross-correlate and understand how each aspect of our life consciously and unconsciously impacts one another,”
The idea that data is a turnkey to self-discovery is not new.
Most extreme are “life loggers,” who wear cameras 24/7 , jot down every new idea and record their daily activities in exacting detail. Their goal is to create a collection of information that is an extension of their own memories.
At the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in January, new gizmos on display included a baby bottle that measures nutritional intake, a band that measures how high you jump and “smart” clothing connected to smoke detectors. Google is working on a smart contact lens that can continuously measure a person’s glucose levels in his tears. The Apple Watch has a heart-rate sensor and quantifies when you move, exercise or stand. The company also has filed a patent to upgrade its earbuds to measure blood oxygen and temperature.
In the near future, companies hope to augment those trackers with new ones that will measure from the inside out — using chips that are ingestible or float in the bloodstream.
Some physicians, academics and ethicists criticize the utility of tracking as prime evidence of the narcissism of the technological age — and one that raises serious questions about the accuracy and privacy of the health data collected, who owns it and how it should be used.
Critics point to the brouhaha in 2011, when some owners of Fitbit exercise sensors noticed that their sexual activity — including information about the duration of an episode and whether it was “passive, light effort” or “active and vigorous” — was being publicly shared by default.
“Health and fitness have become the new social currency, spawning a ‘worried well’ generation,” he wrote in an opinion piece in the April issue of BMJ, the former British Medical Journal.
“Getting the data is much easier than making it useful,” said Deborah Estrin, a professor of computer science and public health at Cornell University.
Until about three years ago, it was nearly impossible for ordinary people to get a readout about the state of their bodies on a regular basis.
Now dozens of biosensing wearable technologies with names such as the Fitbit Surge, Misfit Shine and Jawbone UP have exploited the miniaturization of computer components and the ubiquity of cellphones to create an industry that is expected to reach $50 billion in sales by 2018, according to an estimate by Credit Suisse.
The research firm Gartner forecasts that 68.1 million wearable devices will be shipped this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reinventing philanthropy, with a Silicon Valley blueprint
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-leadership/reinventing-philanthropy-with-a-silicon-valley-blueprint/2015/02/12/f0fc77b8-85fd-11e4-b9b7-b8632ae73d25_story.html
Many of Silicon Valley’s young stars who are just starting out with their philanthropy have come to you for advice. What do you tell them?
Philanthropy is at its most meaningful when people are actualizing one of their greatest personal passions — whether it’s intellectual, emotional or spiritual.
Why do you think so many have directed their philanthropy at science and medicine?
Those are the fields we grew up feeling at home in, and they are of great intellectual interest because they are incessantly evolutionary, and that’s what Silicon Valley is all about.
What are some other big areas where technologists are directing donations?
The use of technology — to democratize access to so many things people in this country have the blessing to call our basic human rights, whether that’s freedom of expression, access to education [or] medical care, knowledge or being a part of the global economy. There is great interest in Silicon Valley in how we can use technology to break down the barriers to access that so many billions of people in the world face.
You’ve advocated for more transparency in philanthropy. Why do you think this is important?
We in the philanthropic sector need to operate not just with glass pockets but glass skulls.
What I mean by that is we need to be transparent publicly about where it is we are giving our money. But that’s only the first step. Of equal, if not even greater, importance, we need to be transparent about why we made the decisions we made so that other people can benefit from that research as well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Studying the Roots of Individuality
http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/05/12/2112220/studying-the-roots-of-individuality
An anonymous reader sends an article from Quanta Magazine about research into individuality — how behavior varies (or doesn’t) when genetics and environment are as similar as possible.
Animal Copies Reveal Roots of Individuality
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150512-fruit-flies-individuality/
Genetically identical fruit flies raised under the same conditions are creating a biological map of what makes individuals unique.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Estonian President Ilves: mathematics and technology education strengthened or jobs that will be lost
The rapid development of new digital services technology threatening to take away jobs if schools do not lay down mathematical and engineering science education for children from the Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said Industrie 4.0 event in Tallinn, Estonia.
Ilves said that the revolutionary labor services and technologies such as Uber-taxi services and self-steering trucks, the impact on jobs is not yet known.
“Technology will be taught in addition to the people to see these hidden potential.”
Ilves said that the change will affect both industry and consumer services jobs.
Ilves believes that, especially in mathematics and programming of Estonia as well tuition is increased.
“The danger is that people are divided into those that are able to keep up with developments and to those who are unable to do this.”
Ilves of Estonia thought that strength of courage to do things in new ways rather than sticking to the old stick.
Industrie 4.0 event in Tallinn locals as well as German and Nordic companies and research institutes will present practical industry Internet (IoT) projects experiences.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/2015-05-13/Viron-presidentti-Ilves-Matematiikan-ja-tekniikan-koulutusta-vahvistettava-tai-ty%C3%B6t-katoavat-3221636.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Startup’s Search Engine Matches Experts to Projects, Globally
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326569&
Founded in 2011, French startup ideXlab has developed a very specialized search engine, one that shifts through patents, academic papers, specialized industrial databases and even social networks to establish expert profiles and match them to your projects.
Securing financial support through the European Union’s Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP), ideXlab has just launched OPENISME, or the Open Platform for Innovative SMEs (Small & Medium Enterprises).
With this platform, the company aims to create the new tools necessary to support and facilitate innovation among European SMEs, helping them establish new collaborative projects with universities and research centres.
Tomi Engdahl says:
QR code attached to the frequency converter helps the diagnosis of it
cneider Electric has expanded its industrial AC drives in its product offering. New devices are Altivar 900 drives Process and Process Altivar Drive Systems
In order for users to continue to facilitate maintenance and troubleshooting, as well as reduced downtime and lower costs arising from his office, they can access with their own mobile devices access technical documentation and support, as well as diagnostic information. Device error codes created a dynamic QR code can immediately access the extensive support material that helps solve the problem situations effectively on the ground.
In addition, the user can Marked drives QR-codes may contact directly the Schneider Electric customer service. QR code provides the user with the network found on the support material.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2807:qr-koodilla-kiinni-taajuusmuuttajan-diagnostiikkaan&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intuitive innovation in wireless power transfer, Part 1
http://www.edn.com/design/power-management/4439298/Intuitive-innovation-in-wireless-power-transfer–Part-1?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_review_20150501&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_review_20150501&&elq=aa3ac8b830e44339b4ddf363f0192401&elqCampaignId=22804&elqaid=25657&elqat=1&elqTrackId=591f4f5f279648cdb0dbcf17ae981337
Whenever a new technology starts to take off, there is an inevitable flurry of activity around it
Most of the first wave of fortune seekers will eventually fall to the wayside. They will follow Xerox (inventor of Ethernet, the mouse and the laser printer), Commodore (home computers), Olivetti (the first PC ever), Atari (video game consoles), Palm (portable wireless devices) and IBM (personal computers) into the setting sun. These were companies that failed to adapt or to understand the essence of innovation, despite their once daunting size and resources. And history will repeat itself all over again — issuing forth yet another reminder about nurturing new technologies: that it’s not about the scale of investment, or “running a tight ship”; it’s not about outsourcing, cost-cutting, layoffs, lowest quotes, 14 nm wafers, “think tanks”, “war rooms”, logistics or even conventional planning. It’s about innovation: pure and simple. And that unfortunately doesn’t come neatly packaged in a brown cardboard box, delivered on our doorsteps by OnTrac. Or we’d all be rich, ha!
Steve Jobs had rightly declared: “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have.”
“Certainly not those who created a network of silos under the belief that somehow, it embodied corporate efficiency, and would inevitably open the glistening doors to innovation, prosperity and immortality. Not so fast buster!
Indeed: intuition, like any powerful weapon, needs to be used wisely. It’s a double-edged sword.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Leaders admit: “We are not prepared to digital in the future”
Gartner and IDC, by 2020, more than seven billion people and at least 30 billion units are produced by 44 trillion gigabytes of data.
It quickly lead to a situation where almost all the issues relating to people’s lives are controlled information. Talking about the emergence of the digital generation.
Although companies know that all this information would be possible to get the business benefits of fresh Information Generation: Transforming the Future, Today survey, half of the respondents admit that their attempts to know what should be done.
70 per cent of the respondents says that he gets new views of the data, but only 30 percent will be able to operate on the basis of this information.
Slightly more than half admit that they do not take advantage of the available data efficiently, or that they perish information overload.
Only a quarter of respondents says his company to be very good to change the data useful, therefore, for information.
“Roughly estimated, the situation in Finland is pretty much the same way with the rest of the world. That is, there is still much to do.”
Forced to change
In companies it is seen that adolescence is necessary due to the requirements of information generation.
For businesses to revolutionize the market itself instead of that they will be out of control into the hands of upheaval, they have to know how the following five things:
They have to anticipate new opportunities in the market, be transparent and reliable, as well as innovate with agility. In addition, they must take a unique and personalized experience and to act in real time.
Although company executives recognize the importance of these issues, they admit the same breath that only a very small number of the company’s operations, they realized very well and the whole organization-wide basis.
Only 12 per cent of companies able to anticipate new opportunities, by nine per cent to innovate with agility, 14 per cent provide transparent and reliable impression by 11 per cent to take individual lessons and 12 per cent in real time.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/2015-05-04/Johtajat-my%C3%B6nt%C3%A4v%C3%A4t-%E2%80%9DEmme-ole-valmiita-digitaaliseen-tulevaisuuteen%E2%80%9D-3220976.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Programming Talent Myth
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/05/05/0134242/the-programming-talent-myth
Jake Edge writes at LWN.net that there is a myth that programming skill is somehow distributed on a U-shaped curve and that people either “suck at programming” or that they “rock at programming”, without leaving any room for those in between. Everyone is either an amazing programmer or “a worthless use of a seat” which doesn’t make much sense. If you could measure programming ability somehow, its curve would look like the normal distribution.
The truth is that programming isn’t a passion or a talent, says Edge, it is just a bunch of skills that can be learned. Programming isn’t even one thing, though people talk about it as if it were; it requires all sorts of skills and coding is just a small part of that. Things like design, communication, writing, and debugging are needed. If we embrace this idea that “it’s cool to be okay at these skills”—that being average is fine—it will make programming less intimidating for newcomers.
The programming talent myth
http://lwn.net/Articles/641779/
Mediocrity
When he said that he was a mediocre programmer, some in the audience probably didn’t believe him, he said. Why is that? The vast majority of those in the audience have never actually worked with Kaplan-Moss, so why would they assume his coding ability is exceptional? In the absence of any other data, people should assume that he is solidly in the middle of the curve. Part of the problem there is the lack of a way to even measure coding ability. “We are infants in figuring out how to measure our ability to produce software”, he said. What are our metrics? Lines of code—what does that measure? Story points? “What even is a story point?”, he wondered.
Programmers like to think they work in a field that is logical and analytical, but the truth is that there is no way to even talk about programming ability in a systematic way. When humans don’t have any data, they make up stories, but those stories are simplistic and stereotyped. So, we say that people “suck at programming” or that they “rock at programming”, without leaving any room for those in between. Everyone is either an amazing programmer or “a worthless use of a seat”.
But that would mean that programming skill is somehow distributed on a U-shaped curve. Most people are at one end or the other, which doesn’t make much sense. Presumably, people learn throughout their careers, so how would they go from absolutely terrible to wonderful without traversing the middle ground? Since there are only two narratives possible, that is why most people would place him in the “amazing programmer” bucket. He is associated with Django, which makes the crappy programmer label unlikely, so people naturally choose the other.
But, if you could measure programming ability somehow, its curve would look like the normal distribution. Most people are average at most things. This is not Lake Wobegon, most people are not above average, he said.
A dangerous myth
This belief that programming ability fits into a bi-modal distribution (i.e. U-shaped) is both “dangerous and a myth”. This myth sets up a world where you can only program if you are a rock star or a ninja. It is actively harmful in that is keeping people from learning programming, driving people out of programming, and it is preventing “most of the growth and the improvement we’d like to see”, he said to a big round of applause.
Just skills to be learned
The truth is that programming isn’t a passion or a talent, it is just a bunch of skills that can be learned. Programming isn’t even one thing, though he had been talking about it as if it were; it requires all sorts of skills and coding is just a small part of that. Things like design, communication, writing, and debugging are needed. Also, “we need to have at least one person who understands Unicode”, he said to laughter.
There are multiple independent skills, but we tend to assume that someone is the minimum of their skill set. Sure, you might be a good designer, speak and write well, and be a great project manager, but you don’t know how a linked list works, so “get out of the building”. Like any other skill, you can program professionally, occasionally, or as a hobby, as a part-time job or a full-time job. You can program badly, program well, or, most likely, be an average programmer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Quest for the Brain Chip
A revolution is needed
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1326549&
Alan Turing insisted human brains and modern computers share the computational model that bears his name, whereas von Neumann believed brains are fundamentally different from the architecture that bears his. What if they are both right?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy / Re/code:
Survey of 100 women tech entrepreneurs shows 84% not from STEM background, 67% perceived bias in workplace, mentorship from men key for most, more
http://recode.net/2015/05/13/tech-women-choose-possibility/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nellie Bowles / The California Sunday Magazine:
Inside the almost-adult, insular lives of ambitious teenagers flooding into Silicon Valley to join tech startups
http://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-06-07/real-teenagers-silicon-valley
Tomi Engdahl says:
About Zappos Culture
http://www.zappos.com/d/about-zappos-culture?zlfid=2&PID=7099101&AID=4048741&utm_source=2617611&zpsrc=Skimlinks&splash=none&zhlfid=208&utm_medium=affiliate&zpch=affiliate
These are the ten core values that we live by:
1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble
Inside Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s radical management experiment that prompted 14% of employees to quit
Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/tony-hsieh-zappos-holacracy-management-experiment-2015-5?op=1?r=US#ixzz3aPvq9XYX
As he was growing Ternary, he said, it became clear just how limited the management-hierarchy system was.
“It wasn’t agile. It wasn’t adaptable. It was crushing the ability in people to actually contribute and use their gifts,” Robertson said.
Forms of “self-management,” where employees make most decisions without the approval of a manager, have been practiced for decades. But Robertson was most inspired to create his management style by the agile software development movement of the late ’90s, which advocated a workflow that allows engineers to develop ideas without the direction of a manager.
Robertson studied as much self-management theory as he could, drawing lessons from a variety of techniques and philosophies.
The initial transition at any company is always “painful and uncomfortable,” Robertson said, and it was no different at Zappos. In weekly coaching sessions, there was plenty of “resistance, frustration,” and “people upset and angry” at having to rescind the power and workflow that in some cases they had spent long careers developing.
Generally, some managers refuse to help their former employees after adopting the system, citing their newfound freedom, while others flail about, frightened and confused by the idea of self-management.
At Zappos, there was a turning point three months in, Robertson said. Weekly meetings had become times to vent complaints and work through challenges regarding Holacracy, but this one was different.
“Instead of people challenging it, they were sharing what they were learning — they were talking about how they liked it,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
5 ways to think big, any day of the week
https://blog.asana.com/2014/10/workstyle-5-ways-think-big-day-week/?utm_source=techmeme&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=think_big
“How do I make sure I’m thinking about the big picture, when I’m always working on a lot of small things that seem to take up all my time?”
This was a question a product manager once asked me when she felt lost in the weeds, and one you may have asked yourself.
How can you empower yourself to step back and look at the big picture so you can lead your team more effectively?
Allocate time to thinking
Buddy up
Choose specific goals
Identify first steps
Ground yourself in reality
Tomi Engdahl says:
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Responds In Nepal
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/05/18/2047227/humanitarian-openstreetmap-team-responds-in-nepal
An anonymous reader writes with news about the efforts of the The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to help in the aftermath of the earthquake in Nepal. The team asks those living in the affected areas to help out by reporting which buildings are damaged, which are still standing, and where fissures and other quake damage is located.
OpenStreetMap responds in Nepal
http://opensource.com/life/15/5/nepal-earthquake-hfoss
Since the devastating earthquake in Nepal, there have been responses from all over the world from relief agencies, governments, non-profits, and ordinary citizens. One interesting effort has been from the crowdsourced mapping community, especially on OpenStreetMap.org, a free and open web map of the world that anyone can edit (think the Wikipedia of maps.)
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), an NGO that works to train, coordinate, and organize mapping on OpenStreetMap for humanitarian, disaster response, and economic development, has mobilized volunteers from around the world to help map since the Haiti earthquake in 2010. HOT’s global network has played an important role in events like Typhoon Haiyan and the Ebola crisis in Africa. The mapping data that gets created is often vital for responses to crisis: It is used by first responders such as the Red Cross, United Nations, local groups, and others for planning, logistics, identifying needs, and a lot more. It’s safe to say the OpenStreetMap data (and volunteer mappers) play a key role in many responses.
Tomi Engdahl says:
When STEM becomes STEAM
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/engineering-the-next-generation/4439476/When-STEM-becomes-STEAM?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150519&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150519&elq=71dcfcb5292140a781b0b62f8de6b858&elqCampaignId=23049&elqaid=25952&elqat=1&elqTrackId=8203a48dc41c40eeb00a0f3f88e1c451
Home> Community > Blogs > Engineering the Next Generation
When STEM becomes STEAM
Bill Schweber -May 18, 2015
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You are probably familiar with some of the many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) programs which have been under way in the past few years. The goal is to interest young people in these topics; Dean Kamen’s FIRST robotics program is among the oldest and best known of these programs, which has involved thousands of students in exciting projects and competitions.
But what does bother me is that the apparent success and interest in the STEM program has already had a “slipstream” effect. This is the attempt by some in arts education to expand STEM to become STEAM, http://stemtosteam.org/ with that A added for “art.” To this I say, “hey, stay away, please.” Art-related education is nice — it has its place, it’s a good thing — but please give the technical community some space of its own.
Is STEM a good thing or not? The data is mixed, from various things I have seen—plus, it is hard to accurately quantify this sort of evaluation.
Even if they realize that STEM is not for them, it will hopefully give some of them some scientific “literacy” along with an appreciation of the core challenges of engineering. This is not a new problem; C.P. Snow addressed it in his useful but very hard-to-read book “The Two Cultures” way back in the 1950s.
Participants in STEM programs may also come to understand that engineering design is often largely about balancing tradeoffs in the face of constraints. While it is easy to criticize and complain “why didn’t the designers of my latest gadget add such-and-such?” there are often considerations such as size, power, and cost which people without any technical exposure can’t even begin to grasp. That’s why any understanding of the engineering-design process is especially useful, since I am sure these students will not be reading Samuel Florman’s excellent and readable book “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering” later in their schooling.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Bricking” Microcontrollers in LEGO Motivates Young Programmers
http://hackaday.com/2015/05/19/bricking-microcontrollers-sparks-interest-in-programming/
Back when he was about seven years old, [Ytai] learned to program on an Atari 800XL. Now he has a seven-year-old of his own and wants to spark his interest in programming, so he created these programmable LEGO bricks with tiny embedded microcontrollers. This is probably one of the few times that “bricking” a microcontroller is a good thing!
The core of the project is the Espruino Pico microcontroller which has the interesting feature of running a Java stack in a very tiny package. The Blocky IDE is very simple as well, and doesn’t bog users down in syntax
Electro-Legos
http://ytai-mer.blogspot.fi/2015/05/electro-legos.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Interesting comparisons:
Mao Zedong & Little Red Internet
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1326658&
I saw a slide, projected on large screens in a conference room, that read “Internet Philosophy vs. Mao Zedong Philosophy”.
Following is a rough translation of listicles on Internet philosophy vs. Mao’s Philosophy:
Focus on “middle to lower class” (Internet) vs. focus on “farmers” (Mao)
Creation of “fans” (Internet) vs. creation of “party members” (Mao)
Battle over “moral values and functions” (Internet) vs. “internal fight over direction” (Mao)
“Must-have” mentality (Internet) vs. “fight with lords to appropriate farmland” (Mao)
“Down-to-earth” language that values authenticity (Internet) vs. “the vernacular of the masses” (Mao)
“Quick comebacks and counter attacks” (Internet) vs. “surround the city from the countryside” (Mao)
“The user is always the center” (Internet) vs. “serve the people (Mao)
Fanatical focus on “faster iterations” of new products/technologies (Internet) vs. “Win or lose, take decisive action first, win the battle long term” (Mao)
Belief in “perfection” (Internet) vs. faith in pure “communism” (Mao)
Promotion of “Big data” (Internet) vs. the “planned economy” (Mao)
“Close the loop” (Internet) vs. “united front” (Mao)
“Trial and error” (Internet) vs. the national experiment of “Cultural Revolution” (Mao)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mobiles at school could be MAKING YOUR KID MORE DUMBER
Instant messaging and Candy Crush Saga in class creates learning not-spots
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/21/kids_without_mobes_in_school_do_better/
Restricting smart watch and mobile phone use can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequalities. This is the conclusion of a report by Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy working at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance (pdf) and Louisiana State University.
Prof Beland told El Reg: “Whilst we cannot know for sure which students are distracted by the phones the most, this implies that low-achieving students were most disrupted and distracted by the presence of phones, while high-ability students are not impacted. If we think that the distractions affect everyone equally, even those not using the phone, then we might expect an equal response across all ability groups. These results imply that only those using the phones are distracted.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Zuckerberg: Let your kids play video games
http://uk.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-let-your-kids-play-video-games-2015-5
those games gave Zuckerberg much more than just the instant gratification of having a virtual snowball fight: They got him into computer programming.
And it’s why Zuckerberg believes more kids need to be allowed to play video games if they want.
“I do think this dynamic around kids growing up, building games, and playing games, is an important one because I think this is how a lot of kids get into programming,” Zuckerberg said. “I definitely wouldn’t have gotten into programming if I hadn’t played games.”
And that can go a long way to solving the gender and racial imbalance in tech, Zuckerberg added.
“It’s why questions on gaming is important. Most of the engineers I know, who are some of the best engineers in the world, are self-taught,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
How does digital affect Canadian attention spans?
http://advertising.microsoft.com/en/cl/31966/how-does-digital-affect-canadian-attention-spans
“We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention” – Satya Nadella
The average human attention span in 2000 was 12 seconds, but by 2013 it was only 8 seconds (1 second shorter than a goldfish!).
With news reduced to 140 characters and conversations whittled down to emojis, how is this affecting the way consumers see and interact with their worlds?
Are they doing what people have done for thousands of years – evolve and adapt to new realities?
This innovative new research uses neuro science to understand the changing nature of attention in the context of Canadians’ increasingly digital lives and offers advice to help brands and advertisers better engage connected consumers. The good news? The outlook is better than you may think!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Learn About The Technology Education And Literacy in Schools Program (Video #2)
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/05/20/1736231/learn-about-the-technology-education-and-literacy-in-schools-program-video-2
TEALS is now in 130 high schools and has 475 volunteers in multiple states but still has a long way to go (and needs to recruit many more volunteers) because, Kevin says, fewer than 1% of American high school students are exposed to computer science, even though “Computer science is now fundamental in these kids’ lives.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
With every industry going digital, it’s clear that value has shifted from hardware to software and services. As new digital goods and services emerge – Internet of Things for example – digital marketers are facing an ever-changing set of monetization challenges aimed at building long-term, recurring revenue relationships. – See more at: http://www.avangate.com/lp/webinar-idc-winning-pricing-strategies-2015.html?utm_source=techmeme&utm_medium=sponsored%2520post&utm_content=idc%2520pricing%2520strategies&utm_campaign=techmeme#sthash.qLsgTGRA.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
DevOps Isn’t a Job. But It’s Still Important
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/devops-isnt-job-still-important/
Traditionally, companies have at least two main technical teams. There are the programmers, who code the software that the company sells, or that its employees use internally. And then there are the information technology operations staff, who handle everything from installing network gear to maintaining the servers that run those programmers’ code. The two teams only communicate when it’s time for the operations team to install a new version of the programmers’ software, or when things go wrong.
Instead of speaking only occasionally, both the development and operations team would collaborate on the entire process of conceiving, building and maintaining software. The idea of creating such unified teams is called “DevOps.”
The important thing was, he says, getting away from the mindset of software projects as ever being complete. Instead, they should be thought of as ongoing processes that continue long after an application has been delivered to the user. That means thinking about updates, security fixes, and maintenance in a more holistic way.
“It’s as fundamental a shift in the way build technology as it was when we went from a hunter-gathering society to a farmer society,” he says. “We stop viewing as a one-and-done and think of it as a series of cycles over the entire lifecycle.”
The DevOps movement grew out of a related idea called agile software development. In 2001, a group of programmers published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development,
Since the term was first coined for an event in 2009, DevOps has become a trendy buzzword. The term has always been fraught with controversy
“The problem with ‘learning DevOps’ or ‘doing DevOps’ is that the word means different things to different people,” he tells WIRED in an email. “Even the guy who came up with the term chooses to leave it without a solid definition, so the legion of ‘thought leaders’ surrounding it have twisted it every which way—usually to promote a product or e-book or certification program.”
How To Prepare for a Career in DevOps
DeGrandis says DevOps isn’t really a job, it’s an organizational strategy. Goerlich agrees.
That said, there are skills that tech professionals can learn that will help them adapt to a DevOps way of thinking. Goerlich suggests IT operations staff get started by learning about automation tools like Puppet, Chef, and Microsoft’s PowerShell language. “Then use the time that frees up to spend more time with developers and end-users to understand what they’re doing and why,” he says.