August 21, 2017
Navy Under Attack?
The Navy destroyer collided early today with an oil tanker off of Singapore.
10 sailors are missing and there is significant hull damage.
This is the 4th known accident just this year of our Navy vessels in Asia waters.
And previously I wrote incredulously about the last Navy collision with a massive container ship in June that resulted in 7 dead.
How do U.S. Navy ships with the most advanced sensors, navigation, weapons, and command and controls systems in the world--that are supposed to be protecting us--just simply collide with other ships like toys in a bathtub?
These Navy ships are a vital projection of U.S. might, and are supposed to be able to keep the worst foes away and keep our dedicated men and women warfighters safe at sea--whether from bomb-laden terrorist attack speed boats to anti-access/area denial missiles and all threats from on, above, or below.
Yet, they just keep crashing...
There was supposedly some buzz online about a stealthy new cyber weapon that is attacking our ships and making them useless and helpless pieces of (G-d forbid) floating junk at sea or perhaps enabling them to be hacked and electronically commandeered and controlled in order to crash them.
Either way, how many collisions does it take for this to become a concerning problem with our Navy's ability to manage the ships under their command and be ever war-ready.
Our ships are a major element of our national strength and security, and loss of control implies a potentially great risk to our nation.
We need our Navy and their tremendous people, assets, and expertise to safeguard our people, freedom, and democracy.
A few months ago, there was a hackathon to test the Navy's systems' security--and most certainly, this is a crucial type of test that we potentially face every day in real life.
These are challenging times for everything cybersecurity, so let's make sure we have all the capabilities we need and are fully up to the task to defend ourselves and take out our enemies--it's not just our Navy in the spotlight and at risk. ;-)
(Source Photo: With attribution to CNN and adapted from here)
May 17, 2013
Giving Voice to The Workers
A former Department of State employee, Kohl Gill, who I do not know, started the service.
LaborVoices collects information from workers by phone polling in the workers native languages.
The service anonymously records information about hazardous working conditions, product quality, and maintenance of equipment.
According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek (13 May 2013), LaborVoices aggregates worker responses and provides the results on a subscription basis through an online dashboard.
Unlike with onsite inspections, where workers can be easily coaxed, cajoled, or threatened to provide positive workplace feedback, the private polling by mobile phones provides for more accurate and timely reporting of workplace issues.
Problems that can be identified early can be remediated sooner and hopefully avoid defects, injuries, and illnesses from poor products and working conditions.
Giving voice to the workforce--anonymously, safely, and in aggregate can provide important information to companies, labor unions, government regulators, and law enforcement to be able to take action to protect people inside the workplace and to users outside.
Like an ever-present inspector general, internal auditor, or tip hotline, LaborVoices can help self-regulate industry, produce safer products, and protect the workers who make it all happen.
(Source Photo: here with attribution to UN Women Asia and The Pacific)
Giving Voice to The Workers
March 4, 2013
Seasaw, Yeah It's For Kids
There is an interesting new crowdsourcing application called Seesaw.
And like a seesaw goes up and down, you can take a picture and crowdsource decisions--thumbs up or down for what you should do.
Food, clothes, movies, more--I could imagine people even going so far as to use this for dating--Go out with them or not? Keep 'em or dump 'em?
While the possibility of having others chime in on your everyday life decisions is somewhat intriguing, social and fun...it also seems a little shallow and superficial.
Do you really need to ask your friends about everything you do or can you make simple day-to-day decisions yourself?
And when it comes to big decisions, perhaps you need more than a picture with a thumbs up or down to give the decision context, evaluate pros and cons, think through complex issues, and make a truly thoughtful decision--perhaps some genuine dialogue would be helpful here?
Finally, many decisions in life come at the spur of a moment--should I or shouldn't I--and you don't have the benefit of saying hold on "let me take a picture and get some of my friends opinions on this"--life waits for no one and timing is often everything!
It is good to get other people's opinions (i.e. the proverbial "second opinion") as well as to do what my father used to tell me which is to "sleep on it," because things look different over night and in the morning.
But while you should consider what others think--in a meaningful way--in the end, you need to trust your inner self and take responsibility for your own decisions. ;-)
Seasaw, Yeah It's For Kids
January 13, 2013
You Can Better The World
It looks a lot like Twitter but is focused on ideas to better the world.
Every Betterific starts under the heading of "Wouldn't it be better if" and you fill in the rest.
Whether you have ideas for improving products, companies, policies, or even the way we treat each other--this is a great way to get your ideas out there.
You also add tags (metadata) to make the ideas more easily searchable by others.
Like Twitter you can follow topics or other innovative people, friends, and family members.
A great feature is that you can actually vote--thumbs up or down--for the ideas, and through crowdsourcing great ideas can rise to the top.
There is also a bar at the top where you can look up better ideas by search term--so individuals, organizations, or brands can harvest this information and hopefully act on them.
One of the featured Betterifics when you sign in online is from someone who suggested that toilet seats come with a pedal lift lid (like a garbage can)--being a little germophobic myself, I vote definitely yes to this one!
I hope this type of app catches on so we can all innovate and get our ideas out there simply and clearly.
This has the potential to become a tremendous archive for great ideas that can be accessed, prioritized and most importantly implemented--so we can all really make a difference for the better. ;-)
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
You Can Better The World
November 26, 2012
Autocomplete: Do Zombies (What)?
Autocomplete suggests the rest of your search term based on the most popular things that others have asked for, so it speeds up your search selection by anticipating what you are looking for and by reducing spelling errors in your search terms.
Another advantage to seeing popular searches is to understand what the larger population is thinking about and looking for--this gives us insight into culture, norms, values, and issues of the time.
I did a simple google search of "do zombies" and as you can see the most popular searches are about whether zombies: poop, exist, sleep, "really exist," and have brains.
Even more disappointing than people asking whether zombies really exist is that the #1 search on zombies is about whether they poop--what does that say about our lagging educational system?
I would at least have imagined that the preppers--those infatuated with the end of the world and with preparation for survival--would at least be searching for terms like:
Do zombies...
pose a real threat to human survival?
have (certain) vulnerabilities?
ever die?
have feelings?
have children?
beat vampires (or vice versa)?
I suppose autocomplete is good at crowdsourcing search terms of what others are thinking about, but it is only as good as those doing the ultimate searching--our collection intelligence at work. ;-)
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Autocomplete: Do Zombies (What)?
July 3, 2012
Better A Rock Than A Pebble
Pebble is coming out with a Smartwatch that connects via wireless Bluetooth to either iPhone or Android devices.
It can be used for getting messages, including from Twitter and Facebook, as well as for caller id, music controls, GPS, and more.
And you can download more apps from the watch app store.
Pebble uses a high resolution ePaper display technology, has a vibrating motor, microprocessor, accelerometer, and the battery can run for up to 7 days.
It has been crowdfunded through Kickstarter website and has since April sold, pre-order, approximately 85,000 watches at a $115 pop.
While I like the idea of being able to get information in more convenient form factors whether as a watch, glasses (like Google is working on) or other device configuration, I think the Pebble has a way to go in terms of it's particular design.
Honestly. the Pebble looks cheap and chincy to me. The device looks too plasticy. The colors seem more geared towards kids.
Additionally, the screen looks way too small to be very useful except for the most basic alerts, but maybe this is all to make lighter and more mobile.
I plan to wait for something a little more substantial and with a larger screen.
A ruggedized version would be especially appealing including water, shock, and dust resistant and so on.
Perhaps the crowdfunding model has worked for this smartwatch for people looking to get the latest technology or even make a fast buck, but I think a little more crowdsourcing, in terms of customer requirements and feedback, would make an even better product for all.
Better A Rock Than A Pebble
December 25, 2011
Swarming For Social Order and Disorder
Swarms are powerful forces that we see in our society today in everything from the worldwide riots of 2011 to crowdsourcing on the Internet--to put it simply as they say, "there is power in numbers."
And swarms and their immense power dates back to the Bible, where the 8th plague sent on Egypt in Deuteronomy 10:14-15 was the plague of locusts:
"And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt...for they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees..."
This past year, we saw the power of swarms in the riots around the globe--from Tahir Square to Occupy Wall Street. In the case of Egypt, Mubarak was deposed after ruling for 30 years and in the case of Wall Street, the Occupy movement sparked protests around the globe lasting for many months.
Similarly, swarms are being put to the test in multiple military applications from the Army's Future Combat System (since renamed) that envision brigades of manned and unmanned combat vehicles linked via an ultra-fast network creating a highly coordinated and maneuverable fighting force to DARPA's iRobot Swarm Project creating a mesh network of mobile robots with sensors that can coordinate and perform surveillance and reconnaissance gaining dominance over the battlefield.
The power of the swarm is not just a physical phenomenon, but also a virtual one where crowdsourcing is used online to do everything from building incredible sources of knowledge like Wikipedia to soliciting citizens ideas for solving national problems such as on Challenge.gov.
Traditionally, the power behind the swarm (in nature whether bees, ants, or locusts) was the collective behavior of so many to attack an enemy, build a colony, or ravage the landscape. Today however, the swarm is powerful because of its collective intelligence--whether in pooling information, vetting ideas, or just coordinating activities with such sophistication that the group can outwit and outmaneuver its opponents.
Wired Magazine has an article for the new year (January 2012) called "Crowd Control" in which the riots of 2011 are viewed as both "dangerous and magnificent"--they represent a disconnected group getting connected, a mega-underground casting off its invisibility to embody itself, formidably, in physical space."
"Today's protest, revolts, and riots are self-organizing [and] hyper-networked"--and just like a swarm, individuals deindividuate and base their ideas and actions on the shared identify of the group and therein, a social psychology takes hold and with basic communication and social technology today, they can spontaneously form potent flash mobs, "flash robs," or worse.
The age old phenomenon of swarming behavior is intersecting with the 21st century technology such as smartphones and social media to create the ability of individuals to gather, act decisively, disperse into the crowds, and then reconvene elsewhere to act again.
The power of this modern swarm is no longer about "sheer numbers," but about being interconnected through messaging, tweets, videos,and more.
Many today are finding the power of the swarm with both friends and foes. Friends are using swarming to try to accomplish new social and scientific feats. While foes such as Al Qaeda are utilizing swarming for hit and run terrorism--moving agilely between safe havens and targeting their victims with tools of terror such as IEDs, car bombs, and other flash attacks.
Swarming is not just a behavior found in the animal kingdom any longer, today it is a fundamental source for both social order and disorder.
Swarming is now a strategy and a tactic--we need to wise up and gain the edge with social swarming behavior and technology to "outwit, outlast, and outplay" those who want to threaten society, and instead use it to improve and secure it.
(Source Photo: here)
Swarming For Social Order and Disorder
November 5, 2011
Dilbert Shows The Way to User-Centric Government
Dilbert Shows The Way to User-Centric Government
September 24, 2011
Have Your Voice Heard
Have Your Voice Heard
August 6, 2011
The World Peaceularity
The World Peaceularity
July 22, 2011
When The Cheapest Task Is Too Expensive
- You, the "Sender", go online and name and describe the task, including when and where you want it done as well as the maximum you are willing to pay.
- "Runners" are alerted and bid the minimum that they are willing to accept to do the job.
- You review the bids and select one.
- The runner performs the work.
- You review, rate, and reimburse for the work.
When The Cheapest Task Is Too Expensive
May 26, 2011
Educating The World
- Mathematics
- Science
- Economics
- Finance
- History
- Statistics
- And more
Educating The World
April 29, 2011
A Place for Answers
First there was Wikipedia and now there is Quora.
A Place for Answers
March 14, 2011
Watson Can Swim
Watson Can Swim
March 11, 2011
Power To The People
Power To The People
April 20, 2010
The Editable Society
If you’re using a book reader like the Kindle or iPad and are downloading books to read, they are just like real paper books, except that the written word is now dynamic and the text can be changed out.
Wired Magazine, May 2010, has an article by Steven Levy called “Every Day They Rewrite the Book.”
“When you are connected to an e-reading device, the seller does have the capability to mess with the content on your device, whether you ask it to or not.”
Mr. Levy tells how “people were shocked to discover this last summer when Amazon, realizing that it had mistakenly sold some bootlegged copies of George Orwell’s 1984, deleted all of them from customers’ Kindles.”
Since them, Amazon “notifies customers of an update to the book they purchased; if a buyer wants the changes made, the company will replace the old file with the new one. In other words, the edition you buy remains fixed unless you agree otherwise.”
Changes on the fly—with the owner’s consent—is a positive thing when for example, publishing mistakes get corrected and new developments are updated, as Levy points out.
I guess what is amazing to me is that things that we take for granted as always being there…like a book, a song, a document, a video, a photo are not static anymore. As bits and bytes on our computers, e-readers, iPods, smartphones, and so on, they are every bit as dynamic as the first day they were created—just go in and edit it, hit save, and voila!
Documents and books can be edited and replaced. Songs, videos, and photos can be cropped, spliced, touched up and so on. There is no single timeless reality anymore, because all the material things that is being digitized or virtualized are subject to editing—or even deletion.
On the one hand, it is exciting to know that we live in a dynamic high-tech society, where nothing is “written in stone” and we can change and adapt relatively easily, by just logging on and making changes.
On the other hand, living in such a malleable electronic wonderworld means that with some pretty unsophisticated and common tools these days, pictures can be doctored, books can revised, and history can be literally rewritten. For example, just think about how anyone can go on Wikipedia and make changes to entries; if others don’t cry foul and undo the revisions, they stick.
It seems to be that with the technology to quickly and easily make changes electronically, comes the responsibility to protect what is true and historically valuable. No one person should decide what is fact or fiction, a valid change or a distortion of reality—rather it is a mandate on all of us.
I think this is where the importance of democracy and things like crowdsourcing comes into play—where as a society we together direct the changes that affect us all.
It is a frightening world where files can erased or doctored, not just because your own work can be changed, deleted, or destroyed, but because everyone’s work can be—and nothing is long-lasting or stable anymore.
I may be particularly sensitive to this being the child of Holocaust survivors, where the notion of a world where holocaust deniers can just “edit” history and pretend that the holocaust never happened is a scary world indeed.
But also a world, where malevolent people like hackers and cyber terrorists or dangerous devices like e-bombs (electromagetic pulses or EMPs) can damage systems and storage devices, means that electronic files are not secure from change or erasure.
We’ve become a society where everything is temporary—our marriages, our jobs, our stock portfolios, our homes, and so on—everything is disposable, changeable, and editable. We have truly become an editable society.
We need to balance our ability to edit with the necessity to create order and stability, and like Amazon learned, not change out files at random (without notifying and getting permission).
In IT, this is the essence of good governance, where you plan a structure that can breathe and adapt as times change, but that is also stable and secure for the organization to perform its mission.
The Editable Society
July 23, 2009
Cutting the Budget the Easy Way
Cutting the Budget the Easy Way
June 20, 2009
Who Says Car Companies Can't See?
Check out the concept for the new "Local Motors" car company:
- "Vote for the designs you want. If you are a designer, you can upload your own. Either way, you help choose which designs are developed and built by the Local Motors community. Vote for competition designs, Checkup critiques, or portfolio designs.
- Open Development, sort of like open source. Once there is enough support for any single design, Local Motors will develop it openly. That means that you not only choose which designs you want to drive, you get to help develop them - every step of the way.
- Choose the Locale During the development process, help choose where the design should be made available. Local Motors is not a big car company, we are Local. The community chooses car designs with local regions in mind; where will this design fit best? You tell us. We make it happen.
- Build your Local Motors vehicle Then, once the design and engineering is fully developed you can go to the Local Motors Micro-Factory and build your own - with our help, of course. See the "Buy" page for purchase and Build Experience details.
- Drive your Local Motors car, the one you helped design and build, home."
I like this user-centric approach to car design and development. This is how we really put the user in the driver's seat.
The is the type of opportunity where we go from Henry Ford's one car for the masses approach to a more localized implementation.
While I don't know the specific economics of this approach for a car company, it seems like it has bottom-line potential since they will only proceed with car development once they have enough demand identified.
Why build cars that no one wants or likes and why pay for internal design and market research studies, when people will willingly participate for free in order to get what they really want?
Finally, this is a terrific example of open source development and crowdsourcing--getting the masses to contribute and making something better and better over time. More minds to the task, more productivity and quality as a result.
Who Says Car Companies Can't See?
April 4, 2009
Social Media Can Free Us All
Given a little more time to make a decision, people have found that there is not only strength in numbers, but also wisdom. In other words, vetting a decision among a diverse group and hearing different sides to an issue, generally yields better decisions than an individual could make alone. Colloquially, we often here this referred to as “two heads are better than one.”
Now, with the power of the Internet, we are able to employ collective decision making en masse. Through Web 2.0 tools like Wiki’s, Internet forums, social networks, and other collaboration tools, we can reach out to masses of people across the social, economic, and political landscape—anywhere in the world—and even from those orbiting the planet on the International Space Station. Soon enough, we will take the power of the collective to new extremes by reaching out to those who have traveled and reside on distance worlds—I think that will probably be in Web 4.0 or 5.0.
What’s amazing is that we can get input from anyone, anywhere and in virtually limitless numbers from anyone interested in participating and providing their ideas and input.
When we open up the discussion to large groups of people like this it is called crowdsourcing, and it is essentially mass information sharing, collaboration and participation towards more sophisticated and mature ideation and decision making.
The concept of participatory thinking and intelligence, to me, is an outgrowth not just of the technologies that enables it, but also of the freedom of people to choose to participate and their human right to speak their minds freely and openly. Certainly, this is an outgrowth of democratization and human rights.
While the Internet and Social Media technologies are in a sense an outgrowth of freedoms that support our abilities to innovate. I believe that they now will be an enabler for continued democratization, freedom, and human rights around the world. Once the flood gates are opened a little for people to be free virtually (to read new ideas online, to vote online, to comment and provide feedback online, and to generally communicate and share openly online), a surge of freedom in the traditional sense must soon follow.
This is a tremendous time for human civilization—the Internet has connected us all. Diversity is no longer a dirty little word that some try to squash, but a strength that binds us. Information sharing no longer cowers behind a need to know. Collaboration no longer hides behind more authoritative forms of decision making. People and organizations recognize that the strengths of individuals are magnified by the power of the collective.
The flip side is that voices for hate, chaos, and evil can also avail themselves of the same tools of social media to spread extremism, crime, terrorism, and anarchy. So there are two camps coming together through sharing and collaboration, the same as through all time—good and evil.
The fight for truth is taking a new turn through technology. Social media enables us to use mass communication and collective intelligence to achieve a high goal.
Social Media Can Free Us All
August 8, 2008
Prediction Markets and Enterprise Architecture
Google, for example, has for three years been using employee bets (over 80,000 so far) to predict market technology. “And Google has found that its employee bets are usually right.”
“Forrester Research Inc. suggests that other companies can benefit from putting in place prediction markets to more effectively tap employee opinions on topics ranging from if a store will open on time to picking specific features for a new product.”
Oliver Young, a Forrester analyst, says that “One of the biggest struggles that most companies have—not surprisingly—is predicting the future. Simple things like project updates are full of politics, full of meetings. One of the biggest values of prediction markets is you get a lot more people looking at these major questions.”
Other companies like Best Buy, Corning, HP, and Qualcomm are using predictive markets for sales projects, product evaluations, estimating project delivery, and assessing market conditions.
In predictive markets (a.k.a. crowdsourcing), “employees operate as traders to earn points--and potential prizes and other recognition--for correctly predicting future events…for example, a person who has been good at predicting how new products will be received can be invited into meetings where new product designs are discussed.”
While betting is typically associated with greed and vice and people ending up losing their shirts, in predictive markets, employee betting is used in a positive way to capture information from a broad spectrum of people and thus, enable better governance/decision making.
Predictive markets are an affirmation of the need to bring people in the planning and decision making process. Information needs to be captured from across the enterprise , for example, using predictive markets or other collection techniques.
The more information served up in a user-centric way, the better the decisions.
Prediction Markets and Enterprise Architecture