Big Data: Culturomics and the Google Book Project

MIT Technology Review, February 27, 2012

The digitization of over five million books has created a huge dataset of cultural interest. Now researchers are beginning to tease it apart using powerful number-crunching techniques.

Plot the distribution over time of events like earthquakes, forest fires, wars, fashions, epidemics and so on and you'll get a power law, a mathematical relationship in which  frequency depends on some other quantity raised to a certain power.

That's a puzzling and profound discovery. It means that these real world phenomena occur in patterns that defy standard statistical analysis. It becomes meaningless, for example, to describe the 'average' time between forest fires or the 'average' size of an earthquake or the number of deaths in an 'average' war. The notion of average simply doesn't make sense.

One of the key factors driving work in this area is the availability of large datasets that scientists can crunch to look for power laws. That's relatively straightforward to get for many natural phenomenon such as earthquakes and forest fires, at least in recent history.

But traditionally, social phenomena have been much harder to measure. That's started to change in the last few years thanks to the vast databases built up since the advent of the internet. The study of the web has revealed no end of power laws in human behaviour and more recently, the data associated with mobile phone use has begun to reveal large scale patterns of human mobility and social intercourse.

Now the Google Book project triggered a new area of investigation. This program has scanned the contents of some 5 million books from 40 university libraries around the world. That's about 4 per cent of all the books ever published.

Last year, the Google books team and a few others published the first study of this database. These guys examined  the occurrence of n-grams, sequences of a certain number of words, this number denoted by n.

They concluded that their approach can produce unique insights into fields such as the evolution of grammar, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship and historical epidemiology. They even coined a word to describe this new area of science that spans the humanities and social sciences--culturomics.

Today, Jianbo Gao at the Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a few pals, take Google's idea and run with it. Or at least jog a few steps.

These guys have used the Google books database to study the occurrences of two types of words: those that describe natural phenomena such as earthquakes and hurricanes; and those that describe social phenomena such as war and unemployment.

In particular, they look at a mathematical quantity called the Hurst parameter which describes the likelihood of an event occurring again given that it has occurred in the past. The Hurst parameter is a measure of the way the past influences the future, whether the 'memory' of an event is long term or short term in the data.

In general, they say, words describing natural phenomena seem to appear in a way that has a long term memory while words describing social phenomena have only a short term memory effect.

That's interesting because it implies that the forces at work that determine when the occurrence of these words  are different. "Our analysis suggests...that social phenomena tend to follow different scaling laws than natural phenomena."

That makes sense and it's interesting to see the result come out of a single body of data.
But there are numerous complexities that make the result hard to fathom. Gao and co suggest that the use of words is driven by the occurrence of events themselves. So the word earthquake is used more often after a big earthquake, for example.

But there are other social phenomena at work that can mask this effect, such as the way news spreads, the use of censorship, cultural taboos and so on. It may be that these have a much more powerful effect on the use of certain words.

That makes it hard to draw strong conclusions from this study.

But it does make it all the more appealing to carry out more powerful analyses to tease apart the various cultural effects that are at work. Culturomics is clearly a discipline with a future, albeit one that hard to fathom for the time being.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1202.5299: Culturomics Meets Random Fractal Theory: Insights Into Long-Range Correlations Of Ssocial And Natural Phenomena Over The past Two Centuries

Management Education in the Age of Big Data

What's the Big Data,  February 24, 2012

What if business schools based their entire curriculum on the fundamentals of business analytics?

McKinsey estimates that the demand for “deep analytical positions” in the U.S. will exceed supply by 140,000 to 190,000 positions and that there will be a need for 1.5 million additional ”managers and analysts who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the analysis of big data effectively.”

Why assume that “the analysis of big data” will be some special skill performed by a select group of “managers and analysts”? I think that it’s plausible, even desirable, that in the future all managers will be able to speak the language of business analytics and that it will become an integral part of their job.

This goes to the heart of what a manager’s job is. Managerial hierarchies have always been hierarchies of information flows and a significant part of a manager’s job since the advent of the modern corporation has been to move information up and down the organization. It is a century-plus model that is still dominant in established enterprises and edgy start-ups alike. Dustin Moskovitz recently complained about his experience at Facebook: “At the end of a four-week cycle [of information going up and down the management chain], I would know what was going on the previous month.”

Managerial hierarchies are running out of bandwidth today. They can’t cope with the amount of information moving from one layer to the next. The solution may lie not in getting rid of the layers but in investing the power of analytics in each layer, so what moves from one layer to another is analysis, not information.

Existing management education is based on the old model of management hierarchies. In the age of big data, management education should evolve to reflect the new reality that all information is available to everybody in the organization. What all managers need to do is analysis. But U.S. business schools each year graduate more than 500,000 holders of Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees with little or no knowledge and understanding of analytics and analytical/scientific thinking.

Management educators should assist aspiring managers by teaching tools and techniques for developing models and testing them, not much different from the tools taught to aspiring scientists. They should show future managers how to be critical and skeptical. Currently, most business students hear about testing a hypothesis only in the required statistics course. They pass the exam and move on.

I’m not calling for business schools to produce even more “quants” or “financial engineers” than they already do. My analogy is science—the study of empirical reality—not the production of “elegant” mathematical models that have nothing to do with reality, their assumptions are never questioned, and “are too complex for you to understand.” Managers, in any industry, should never be in a position where they are told that just like they don’t know how their television works, they don’t need to understand how the analytical models driving their business work.

Business schools should revamp their curriculum with courses and hands-on practice in scientific methods, analytical tools, and data mining/programming. Yes, a little bit of coding will go a long way towards preparing students for management in the 21st-century, as will a general knowledge of statistical modeling tools, statistical programming languages, and relational and non-relational databases. I think it will be best to infuse these new knowledge strains and practical experiences in all the traditional courses—marketing, finance, accounting, operations—rather than have a separate “analytics track.” This will give business schools a new focus on a renewed understanding of what management is all about: using analytical methods to make better decisions.

Cookie Wars: How New Data Profiling and Targeting Techniques Threaten Citizens and Consumers in the “Big Data” Era

Chester, Jeff. "Cookie Wars: How New Data Profiling and Targeting Techniques Threaten Citizens and Consumers in the “Big Data” Era." European Data Protection: In Good Health? Springer Verlag, 2012. 53-77.


Abstract

Digital marketers have unleashed powerful and far-reaching data collection, profiling, and targeting technologies online, incorporating the latest developments in such fields as semantics, artificial intelligence, auction theory, social network analysis, data mining, and neuroscience. Consumers and policymakers, however, are largely unaware of how online advertising operates nor are they prepared to assess the impact of tracking technologies that monitor our travels on the Internet and generate information for digital targeting profiles.

Unlike more traditional advertising, digital marketing watches us, relying on such techniques as data optimization, “self-tuning” algorithms, “intent” data, and “immersive” multimedia to enable personalized, highly targeted marketing. Such marketing has also been integrated into the core business models of social networks, mobile communications, gaming platforms, virtual worlds, and online video. With the repeated failure of industry self-regulation, strong privacy safeguards are urgently needed, including provisions that will fully apprise consumers of the privacy implications of contemporary digital data collection practices.

Transparency launches as 'Linux' of drug development

A virtual community of physicians, scientists, and patients is helping Transparency Life Sciences develop three drugs for  multiple sclerosis, peripheral vascular disease, and inflammatory bowel disease.
The site (transparencyls.com), which is being managed by a handful of staff members in New York City and Boston, has only been live for a few weeks. It has attracted about 30 patients, who have been actively trading notes about their experiences and making suggestions for clinical trials


Drug Developer Pursues an Open-Source Approach in Designing Clinical Trials


GEN News Highlights : February 24, 2012


Biopharma leaders have long needed greater transparency in the industry, though usually in the context of activity by government regulators and necessarily by companies themselves. Now, two industry veterans are testing the value of offering such transparency through an open innovation model for drug development.

Tomasz Sablinski, M.D., Ph.D., and Marc Foster, and launched Transparency Life Sciences (TLS) along with a beta version of a virtual community of physicians, scientists, and patients. Transparency is seeking input over the next 35 days from patients, physicians, and drug developers to help design clinical studies for three drugs.

·       the heparinoid Sulodexide for peripheral vasular disease
·       the ACE inhibitor Lisinopril, now used as a treatment for hypertension, for multiple sclerosis (MS)
·       a low dose of the opiate receptor antagonist Naltrexone (LDN) for Crohn disease
“Since there is considerable unmet medical need in Crohn’s Disease, and since there is a well-defined regulatory path for the approval of medicines for this disease, we have made the study of LDN in Crohn’s disease one of TLS’ highest priority projects,” Transparency states.

All three treatments in Transparency’s pipeline are repurposed generic drugs, though long-term plans call for the company to develop its own drugs, MedCity News reported. Transparency plans over time to either divest itself of those drugs or find development partners once it has “substantially increased their value through mid-stage development,” the company told Pharma Times, adding that it expects to grow by accessing “the many opportunities that exist to develop distressed drug assets that have been stalled primarily for nonscientific reasons."

Sablinski told Xconomy he got the idea for an open-source drug development company from an article about Linux, the open-source operating system that marked its 20^th year on the market last October: “If computer coders can do open source, so can drug developers,” he said, adding: “You have to add patients to the mix, because they’re really the reason you’re doing drug development.”

About 30 patients have joined Transparency, registering as users, then sharing comments about their experiences and making suggestions for the planned clinical trials. According to Xconomy, Sablinski hopes to multiply that population by having his company begin reaching out to patient advocacy groups in its disease areas of MS, peripheral vascular disease, and inflammatory bowel disease. Transparency asks users to answer sets of questions that vary depending on their status as patients or physicians. Patients can also make use of a forum for questions on diseases and treatments as well as the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages.
Sablinski, who is also the head of development at Celtic Therapeutics, co-founded Transparency and is its CEO, while Foster is the company’s COO, and was previously an executive at FoldRx Pharmaceuticals before its acquisition by Pfizer. The company employs a handful of staffers in New York City and Boston to manage its site.

As MedCity News noted, Transparency is one of several companies that are pursuing crowdsourcing to carrying out clinical trials. InnoCentive has offered a $30,000 prize for developing a protocol for the efficient recovery of bacterial spores (Bacillus subtilis/Bacillus atrophaeus) from prewetted surface sampling tools with handle. The winner won’t have to transfer their exclusive IP rights to the company but will instead grant a nonexclusive license to practice that protocol.

Foster also sees potential in using telemedicine for clinical trials, as Pfizer did last year, when it launched its first ever investigational drug trial with remote patient participation. The trial, known as REMOTE  (research on electronic monitoring of OAB treatment experience), is designed to assess the safety and efficacy of Detrol LA (tolterodine tartrate), a treatment for overactive bladder.
--
To read the story from Xconomy, click here.
For Pharma Times' article, click here.
And to check out MedCityNews' coverage, click here.

Schneier on Data Protectionism

 government, big data pose bigger 'Net threat than criminals

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, February 26, 2012

 As Bruce Schneier spent the past decade watching the growing rash of phishers, malware attacks, and identity theft, a new Internet threat has emerged that poses even greater risks, the security expert said.

Unlike the security risks posed by criminals, the threat from government regulation and data hoarders such as Apple and Google are more insidious because they threaten to alter the fabric of the Internet itself. They're also different from traditional Internet threats because the perpetrators are shielded in a cloak of legitimacy. As a result, many people don't recognize that their personal information or fortunes are more susceptible to these new forces than they ever were to the Russian Business Network or other Internet gangsters.

"Taken as a whole, there's a lot of things going on that affect our industry from outside our industry," Schneier, who is the author of five security books, said during a Wednesday keynote at the 24th General Meeting of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. "These are things that might be imposed on us. More capability, more usability, less control."
The first of three pillars propping up this outside threat are big data collectors, which in addition to Apple and Google, Schneier identified as Amazon and Facebook. (Notice Microsoft didn't make the cut.) The goal of their data collection is for marketers to be able to make snap decisions about the product tastes, credit worthiness, and employment suitability of millions of people. Often, this information is fed into systems maintained by governments.

Schneier didn't discuss the effect this unprecedented level of data scavenging has on individual privacy. Instead, he focused on how it ties the hands of people working at ISPs and software companies who work to secure their customers' personal information.

"We in security face enormous threats here because there are things we might want to do that we won't be able to do," he told about 400 people attending the three-day San Francisco conference. "You could see a law that limits what we can do about cookie deletion." Laws that require smartphones or other devices to be equipped with unique identifiers aren't a stretch, either, he said.

Schneier said the threat is often obfuscated by the tremendous technical advances the big data players have offered. Google mail is a safer alternative for average users because there's almost no chance they'll ever lose a message. Apple's iPhone is wildly popular because it's easy to use and to date has proved largely impervious to real-world malware attacks. But behind the security and reliability, there are threats many don't consider.

"I can't find a program that will erase the data on this thing to a reasonable assurance without jailbreaking it," he said, holding up his iPhone. "For me that's bad."

The age of feudal security
He called the new model "feudal security" in which Kindle Fire owners trust their security to Amazon, iPhone users trust their Apple, and so on. As a result, the devices no longer come with general-purpose capabilities. Open environments are increasingly being replaced with closed systems that are designed to give users less control.

In addition to the threat from big data—which Schneier coined "the risks of Layer 8 and Layer 9 attacks"—he said Internet users are being harmed by the surge in government attempts to redesign Internet infrastructure. As more and more of the world goes online, it's a given more crime will follow, he said. As a result, laws such as the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act—which mandated telecom companies redesign switches and other gears so law enforcement agents could tap them—are slowly being extended to Internet technologies, possibly such as Skype and Hushmail.

Another example is a push among governments in Europe to require ISPs to store logs of user activity for 12 months or longer in case the information is needed in an investigation."Here, we have an example of government coming in an effort they believe will make us all safer," he said. "I look at it and say it's much less safe because once you have that data you're going to have to secure it. And the securest thing you can do is to delete it. So again we're seeing people who are not Internet security people trying to push a security policy."

The third force of this outside, nontechnical threat is posed by a "cyberwar" arms race, in which countries around the planet develop weapons such as the Stuxnet worm, case each other's networks, and possibly even plant backdoors in case they're needed during a time of war.

"We're now living in a world where nations are stockpiling cyber weapons," he said. "The military industrial complex is alive and well and quite happy to spend lots of money on cyber weapons and cyberwar and cyber defense. This feels incredibly destabilizing to me. I'm not convinced these things couldn't go off by accident "

Schneier's hour-long talk barely touched on his newest book, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive, which was published earlier this month. He said Wednesday's talk was a preview of one he's scheduled to give next Tuesday at the RSA security conference.

HIMSS12: Officials Stump for Open Data, Consumer Health Tools

Kate Ackerman, iHealthBeat, February 24, 2012

LAS VEGAS -- Although most of the 36,526 attendees at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference on Thursday were focused on the release of the proposed rules for Stage 2 of the meaningful use incentive program, two big-name federal health officials -- U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin and HHS Chief Technology Officer Todd Park -- focused on other aspects of health IT.

Park discussed how open data can help spur innovation to improve health and health care, while Benjamin talked about how technology can "bring health to where people are."

Opening Up Federal Health Data

Park said the federal government's Health Data Initiative is "an effort to turn HHS and sister agencies into the NOAA of health data."

Three decades ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began making weather data available for download in electronic form at no cost. Entrepreneurs and innovators leveraged that data for weather newscasts, websites, mobile applications, insurance, research and more.

Similarly, the government in the 1980s made Global Positioning System data openly available, driving widespread private-sector innovations.
Now, HHS is looking to open up health data to "spur massive innovation" in health and health care, as well as to create new jobs.

Park said, "At the end of the day, it's not our data, it's your data," adding, "It's not the organization's data, it's the customer's data."

The Health Data Initiative includes three core activities:
·       Publishing brand-new data for public/external access;
·       Making existing data more accessible; and
·       Energetically publicizing federal data to innovators.
According to Park, HHS is "liberating" a variety of health information, including:
·       Community health data;
·       Provider directories and quality data;
·       Blue Button data;
·       Data for accountable care organizations;
·       Consumer product information; and
·       Medical and scientific knowledge.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has tasked each HHS agency with sending an updated "data liberation plan," Park said. As a result, the amount of data available on HealthData.gov is expected to double in the next six months, he said.

Park acknowledged that many of the people and organizations that are best positioned to use federal health data to develop innovative products were not even aware such information existed. In an effort to publicize its data to innovators across the U.S., HHS has held:
·       Challenges and "code-a-thons";
·       Innovator "meetups" and conferences; and
·       An annual National "Health Datapalooza."
Last year's Health Datapalooza, which was sponsored by HHS and the Institute of Medicine, showcased 50 innovations developed by companies to help consumers, care providers, employers and communities improve health and health care. Park said he was "overwhelmed by the response" and the quality of innovations.
He said, "All we did was take data that you already paid for" and make them accessible and usable. "American innovators did the rest."

Using Technology To Reach Patients 'Where They Are'

Noting that "health doesn't just occur in the doctor's office or the hospital," Benjamin told a group of reporters that information and technology tools can help patients reach their health goals.

The surgeon general launched a Healthy App Challenge to encourage innovators to develop mobile applications that can "get people more involved in being healthy." The winners, announced last week, include:
·       Lose it! In the category of fitness/physical activity;
·       GoodGuide and Fooducate in the category of nutrition/healthy eating; and
·       Healthy Habits in the category of integrative health.
Benjamin also detailed a program called "Fighting D in the D," in which personalized text messages are set up through the Text4Health program to help patients in the Detroit area manage their diabetes.

In another project, the surgeon general, HHS and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration have partnered with Facebook on suicide prevention. If someone sees a friend post a suicidal comment on Facebook, she or he can report the post by clicking a link next to the comment. Facebook then sends an email to the poster encouraging him or her to call a suicide hotline or chat online with a counselor, Benjamin explained.
She said that as of now there are no data to determine the program's success. But she added, "If it saves one life, then it was worth it, I think."

Benjamin recently started tweeting and a few weeks ago hosted her first Twitter chat with the American Heart Association, NIH and HHS. About 1,400 people participated in the one-hour chat on heart health, and Benjamin estimated the event made a total of 10 million impressions, after accounting for the reach of participants' followers. "We have to take our health messages to where people are," she said.

When asked what can be done to ensure that patients adopt and use health-related technology tools, Benjamin said, "We do have to make sure it's patient friendly." She added that developers should "make it easy" and start with simple apps. Once patients embrace those technologies, they likely will move on toward more complex tools like personal health records, she said.

Benjamin noted that "patients like things that make their lives easier." She said, "Our first challenge was to get the clinicians engaged. And, now it's time to get the patients engaged."

MORE ON THE WEB
·       HIMSS Conference
·       Health Data Initiative
·       HealthData.gov
·       Healthy App Challenge

Read more: http://www.ihealthbeat.org/features/2012/himss12-officials-stump-for-open-data-consumer-health-tools.aspx#ixzz1nKtPgExZ

Robot revolution driving global job creation

A cross-section of industries and advanced battery manufacturing plan to tap into the benefits robotics offer

Sandra Gittlen,  Network World US,   February 21, 2012

NASA recently launched Curiosity, the newest rover to explore Mars. Curiosity is a supercharged robot that can collect, analyze and transmit data about the experience on the Red Planet using environmental sensors, radiation monitors, chemistry instruments and more.

And although the project's price tag - $2.5 billion - might seem staggering, it's a clear statement to the world that the future is in robotics. A message that is not lost here on Earth.

According to the International Federation for Robotics (IFR), robots "will be a major driver for global job creation over the next five years." A study conducted by global research firm Metra Martech, released in November, credited the one million industrial robots currently in operation with being directly responsible for the creation of close to Metra Martech researchers also found that a cross-section of industries, including consumer electronics, food, solar and wind power, and advanced battery manufacturing plan to tap into the benefits robotics offer.

For instance, robots can be used in capacities that would be unsafe for humans, that would not be economically viable in a high-wage economy; and that would be impossible for humans, according to the report.

In sectors such as electronics, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, robots provide the required quality, precision, speed and traceability that cannot be achieved manually, the study found.

Frank Tobe, owner and publisher of "The Robot Report" has observed growing interest in robotics around the globe and across vertical markets. "Robots appeal to an array of businesses, including agricultural, packaging and distribution, and medical," he says.

He believes a dramatic shift in how robots are made and perceived has sparked their broad acceptance. "People used to think of robots as expensive, monstrous, dangerous, clunky machines that had to have a cage around them. Today's robots are nothing like that - they are cheaper, lighter, agile, and equipped with sensors to make them safer so they can work alongside humans," he says.

For instance, robots now handle accuracy-dependent tasks such as polishing and sanding on consumer device assembly lines and automatically fill orders at fast-food chains.
"Some are even embedded into other form factors such as automobiles so they are essentially transparent." He points to the robotics used to power self-park features in newer cars as an example.

As robots themselves evolve, so do their controllers. Tobe predicts that tablets, smartphones and other handhelds will become a common mechanism for training and manipulating robots.

He also believes that although nowadays robotics technology is incredibly proprietary, it will soon open up. "As the marketplace broadens, robotic operating systems will become more open source and more capable," Tobe says.

Sensors and sensibility
In the past, the field of robotics was constrained by a pre-conceived notion of a specific form factor and function. Dictionary.com defines robotics as "any machine or mechanical device that operates automatically with humanlike skill."

In reality, robots are created to surpass humans in their abilities. Advanced robots have sensors, intelligence and can act with autonomy. For instance, Swoop Technology is developing embedded robotics to automatically keep vehicles, such as buses, within their lanes.

Carnegie Mellon University is studying the use of robots in tree and plant nurseries to automatically move containers around based on their optimal environments. 

Robots also are being tapped to improve medicine and, more specifically, surgeries. Peter Allen, professor of computer science at Columbia University in New York, is developing robotics to improve minimally invasive surgeries. The miniaturisation of essential components such as cameras and motors, sophistication of the software, and decrease in price make robotics attractive for single-port surgeries.

"You're soon going to see a whole class of small, disposable, inexpensive systems that will do simple surgeries such as gall bladder and kidney removal, and hysterectomies," Allen says. "The main impact will be fewer incisions and, therefore, less overall trauma to the patient." The camera-laden robots also increase visibility within the surgical area.

Already Allen has licensed a robotic device he co-created with a physician that, according to Columbia University, "pans, tilts, and zooms to generate 2-D or 3-D images, and tracks surgical instruments automatically."

He expects robotic technology to become an integral part of medical school curricula within the next five years.

Allen foresees robotics reducing the number of staff needed at each surgery and alleviating the overall strain on surgeons. "While it's doubtful that you'll ever take the tools completely out of a surgeon's control - you want humans in the loop in case of an error - surgeons can form a partnership with the technology," he says.

The Robot Report's Tobe agrees, noting university research, including studies at Stanford University, on operating rooms of the future. Some are testing replacement of scrub nurses, anesthesiologists and other ancillary players with robots while surgeons navigate robotic arms by virtually mimicking gestures.

Like many of his idols and peers, Tobe is convinced that the collision of biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics is bound to be life-changing.

Deep dive
At Boston-based Bluefin Robotics, System Engineer Mikell Taylor is singularly focused on pairing robotics with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) for enhanced surveillance at sea and in port.

The AUVs, being developed for defense, commercial and scientific applications, are intended to obviate the need for divers and dolphins to survey the risk of potential areas. For instance, AUVs equipped with robotics can ferret out unexploded mines in the middle of the ocean so a charge can be dropped to neutralise them. Also, AUVs can circle ships near dock, investigating their hulls and detecting danger. If there is potential for harm, officials can keep them away from shore.

Another mission: Surveillance runs. AUVs are capable of gathering gigabytes or more of critical data through sonar images, camera stills and other high-tech components. Data snippets and alerts can either be transmitted in real time over low-bandwidth acoustic modems, periodically from surface-to-satellite connections, or downloaded in full over high-speed links upon the AUV's return.

Unlike their brethren, predator drones and unmanned tanks, Taylor says AUVs won't be used in military engagements. "The robotic AUVs won't replace weapons such as torpedoes because they can't yet react to the environment. They're autonomous, but not intelligent," Taylor says.

Like Allen, she believes that projects like those she is working on are possible today because of the reduction in robotics costs.

Companies like Heartland Robotics and iRobot (maker of the infamous Roomba automated vacuum) continue their quest to commoditise robots by making them less expensive. Heartland Robotics, for instance, wants to offer a robotic manufacturing assistant for $15,000, according to Tobe. "Most businesses are smaller and if they can maximise the workforce they have by adding in robots, why not? It's a way to stay competitive," he says.

Microsoft also is focused on cost, aiming to get robotics operating systems to a broad community at an affordable price. The company recently released the fourth version of its Robotics Developer Studio platform. The goal for Microsoft, according to Robotics' Team Leader Stathis Papaefstathiou, is to create a comprehensive robotics platform that integrates with Microsoft Kinect camera and depth sensor, which is currently found in the Xbox 360, and the Windows Azure cloud service, which could be used to support large computations.

"Although there are a lot of developers writing robotics applications, they are not experts in that domain. So we want to provide the robotics development infrastructure that they will need," he says. For instance, some devices will have real-time operations and basic operations take place on the robot itself. However, if more sophisticated analysis is required, such as assessing visuals from the camera, cloud services could offer an assist.

Roger Arrick, owner of mobile robot maker Arrick Robotics, contends price will be a determining factor in the overall success of robotics. "Robotics will have the most impact where it makes the most financial sense," he says. He points to manufacturing and the military, both of which have high labor costs and liability. "Ultimately, we might see wars fought robots against robots. Already there are the beginnings of this with drones and remotely operated tanks," he says.

The battery barrier
There is one element, though, that still plagues the robotics field: batteries. Arrick says a high-energy density, low-weight, non-toxic battery with a fast charge time would constitute a major breakthrough. "This would change the world of robotics very quickly because current battery technology is very heavy and this has a chain-reaction effect upon design," he says. Updated batteries would result in lighter exoskeletons, longer lives for technology such as planetary rovers, and more air vehicles, he adds.

Battery life is just one of many obstacles that students participating in FIRST Tech Challenge, a head-to-head robotics competition, tackle. Ken Johnson, the programme's director, says FIRST, which comprises 250,000 students (mostly high-school age) and 90,000 volunteers, incorporates the myriad skills necessary to fully comprehend the complex world of robotics. 

"We force programming, design, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and other skills to come together in a real-life context. Where most of these areas are usually theoretical, robotics focuses on the practical," Johnson says.

He sees kids coming to the programme, which has been made popular by pop culture icons such as Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.I.Am, with a heightened awareness of robotics. "Students are interacting with robotics or automated subsystems in their everyday lives, such as automatic checkout lines," he says.

He expects current FIRST participants, who will be out in the workforce in five years or so, to have a better appreciation of how robots can complement human labour. "They'll succeed in the working world because they'll know how to marry processes with the technology," Johnson says. "Instead of thinking robots replace humans, they'll know that robots and automation can make humans more productive."

Woodie Flowers, a national adviser for FIRST and Pappalardo Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that the next generation of workers will have to be able to do something robots can't in order to succeed, something that can't be automated.

As an example, he envisions that someday, patients visiting their doctors will first be interviewed and examined by a robot that can collect verbal and visual signs and symptoms. The robot then will present that information, along with intelligence gathered from medical databases, to the doctor so that he can quickly home in on a diagnoses and consult with the patient on a cure.

"Five years from now robots will be far more ubiquitous and we'll depend on them in a much more fundamental way," Flowers says.

The Economics of Open - ReMade Documentary

TJ McCue, Forbes, February 22, 2012


Given the importance and growth of makerspaces to the U.S. economy, it seems especially apropos that a hackerspace team would undertake a documentary on the rebirth of the maker movement. A film partly funded via a Kickstarter project. In an exclusive first look at a documentary segment, The Makers, is sharing a glimpse of what’s to come in this cool and needed film.


“We are currently filming a documentary that explores the state and direction of the Maker and Hackerspace movement in America. We’re visiting hackerspaces and makerspaces across the nation in an attempt to show the incredible innovation, creativity, struggles and triumphs that exemplify these spaces. Our goal is to help everyone understand what hackerspaces and makerspaces are doing, how they are doing it and how the Maker Movement is changing the world.”
–from the Electromagnate website that is producing ReMade


It is a goal of this blog to see makers turn into companies that employ people and inspire even more makers, hackers, and inventors. This video looks at what Eric von Hippel mentions as the economics of open source (he is the author of a terrific book entitled Democratizing Innovation).


The video reminds us that if we open up, collaborate, and team up, we can change the world. It is further validation of the Standing on the Sun book by Chris Meyer and Julia Kirby that I reviewed this week. Capitalism may not be changing and adapting as fast as we think, or maybe hope, but it is changing. This short segment of the full documentary to come is a motivating look at what’s coming.  The opening shot is of a 3D printer. Without further ado, enjoy this short 5-minute scene from ReMade.


You can learn more about Electromagnate and the ReMade documentary.

New White House Report Highlights Wireless Broadband Benefits for Public Safety and Job Creation

Kendra Barkoff, The White House, February 21, 2012

Today, Vice President Biden met with law enforcement officials, firefighters and public safety groups in the Roosevelt Room and spoke to a couple hundred more first responders by telephone to thank them for their service and to discuss the new nationwide public-safety broadband network included in the Payroll Tax Extension legislation. 

Members of the audience included police chiefs and sergeants from the New York City Police Department, the International Association of Fire Chiefs, and the National Association of Police Organization, among others. The Vice President discussed the need to ensure the safety of first responders and the public,and announced a new report from the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) that discusses the positive benefits of wireless broadband for public safety as well as jobs, growth, and investment.

The report illustrates the economic impact of President Obama’s goal of doubling the amount of spectrum available for wireless broadcast over ten years, while adopting a nationwide inter operable wireless network. 

Vice President Biden said the expanded access “will enable new spectrum to be used for innovation, to speed wireless communication, and to fulfill a promise made to first responders after 9/11 that they would have the technology they need to stay safe and do their jobs.”

“I’ve been working on changing the way we allocate spectrum for a long time,” Vice President Biden said, “because a smarter system is good for our economy, good for innovation, and vital to keeping our communities as well as our cops, firefighters and EMTs safe.”

Kendra Barkoff is the Press Secretary to the Vice President

The Age of Big Data

Steve Lohr   The New york Times, February 11, 2012

GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.

Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.

To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.
The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. A 28-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, he combined math with political science in his undergraduate and graduate studies, seeing “an opportunity because the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive.” His research involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread.

The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”

Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.

Rick Smolan, creator of the “Day in the Life” photography series, is planning a project later this year, “The Human Face of Big Data,” documenting the collection and uses of data. Mr. Smolan is an enthusiast, saying that Big Data has the potential to be “humanity’s dashboard,” an intelligent tool that can help combat poverty, crime and pollution. Privacy advocates take a dim view, warning that Big Data is Big Brother, in corporate clothing.

What is Big Data? A meme and a marketing term, for sure, but also shorthand for advancing trends in technology that open the door to a new approach to understanding the world and making decisions. There is a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years, estimates IDC, a technology research firm. It’s not just more streams of data, but entirely new ones. For example, there are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air.

Link these communicating sensors to computing intelligence and you see the rise of what is called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Improved access to information is also fueling the Big Data trend. For example, government data — employment figures and other information — has been steadily migrating onto the Web. In 2009, Washington opened the data doors further by starting Data.gov, a Web site that makes all kinds of government data accessible to the public.

Data is not only becoming more available but also more understandable to computers. Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases.

But the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.

Those artificial-intelligence technologies can be applied in many fields. For example, Google’s search and ad business and its experimental robot cars, which have navigated thousands of miles of California roads, both use a bundle of artificial-intelligence tricks. Both are daunting Big Data challenges, parsing vast quantities of data and making decisions instantaneously.

The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing — a virtuous circle of Big Data. Machine-learning algorithms, for example, learn on data, and the more data, the more the machines learn. Take Siri, the talking, question-answering application in iPhones, which Apple introduced last fall. Its origins go back to a Pentagon research project that was then spun off as a Silicon Valley start-up. Apple bought Siri in 2010, and kept feeding it more data. Now, with people supplying millions of questions, Siri is becoming an increasingly adept personal assistant, offering reminders, weather reports, restaurant suggestions and answers to an expanding universe of questions.

To grasp the potential impact of Big Data, look to the microscope, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before — at the cellular level. It was a revolution in measurement.

Data measurement, Professor Brynjolfsson explains, is the modern equivalent of the microscope. Google searches, Facebook posts and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior and sentiment in fine detail and as it happens.
In business, economics and other fields, Professor Brynjolfsson says, decisions will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition. “We can start being a lot more scientific,” he observes.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of the payoff from data-first thinking. The best-known is still “Moneyball,” the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, chronicling how the low-budget Oakland A’s massaged data and arcane baseball statistics to spot undervalued players. Heavy data analysis had become standard not only in baseball but also in other sports, including English soccer, well before last year’s movie version of “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt.

Retailers, like Walmart and Kohl’s, analyze sales, pricing and economic, demographic and weather data to tailor product selections at particular stores and determine the timing of price markdowns. Shipping companies, like U.P.S., mine data on truck delivery times and traffic patterns to fine-tune routing.

Online dating services, like Match.com, constantly sift through their Web listings of personal characteristics, reactions and communications to improve the algorithms for matching men and women on dates. Police departments across the country, led by New York’s, use computerized mapping and analysis of variables like historical arrest patterns, paydays, sporting events, rainfall and holidays to try to predict likely crime “hot spots” and deploy officers there in advance.

Research by Professor Brynjolfsson and two other colleagues, published last year, suggests that data-guided management is spreading across corporate America and starting to pay off. They studied 179 large companies and found that those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.

The predictive power of Big Data is being explored — and shows promise — in fields like public health, economic development and economic forecasting. Researchers have found a spike in Google search requests for terms like “flu symptoms” and “flu treatments” a couple of weeks before there is an increase in flu patients coming to hospital emergency rooms in a region (and emergency room reports usually lag behind visits by two weeks or so).

Global Pulse, a new initiative by the United Nations, wants to leverage Big Data for global development. The group will conduct so-called sentiment analysis of messages in social networks and text messages — using natural-language deciphering software — to help predict job losses, spending reductions or disease outbreaks in a given region. The goal is to use digital early-warning signals to guide assistance programs in advance to, for example, prevent a region from slipping back into poverty.

In economic forecasting, research has shown that trends in increasing or de
creasing volumes of housing-related search queries in Google are a more accurate predictor of house sales in the next quarter than the forecasts of real estate economists. The Federal Reserve, among others, has taken notice. In July, the National Bureau of Economic Research is holding a workshop on “Opportunities in Big Data” and its implications for the economics profession.

Big Data is already transforming the study of how social networks function. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram of Harvard used packages as his research medium in a famous experiment in social connections. He sent packages to volunteers in the Midwest, instructing them to get the packages to strangers in Boston, but not directly; participants could mail a package only to someone they knew. The average number of times a package changed hands was remarkably few, about six. It was a classic demonstration of the “small-world phenomenon,” captured in the popular phrase “six degrees of separation.”

Today, social-network research involves mining huge digital data sets of collective behavior online. Among the findings: people whom you know but don’t communicate with often — “weak ties,” in sociology — are the best sources of tips about job openings. They travel in slightly different social worlds than close friends, so they see opportunities you and your best friends do not.

Researchers can see patterns of influence and peaks in communication on a subject — by following trending hashtags on Twitter, for example. The online fishbowl is a window into the real-time behavior of huge numbers of people. “I look for hot spots in the data, an outbreak of activity that I need to understand,” says Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell. “It’s something you can only do with Big Data.”

Big Data has its perils, to be sure. With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of “false discoveries.” The trouble with seeking a meaningful needle in massive haystacks of data, says Trevor Hastie, a statistics professor at Stanford, is that “many bits of straw look like needles.”
Big Data also supplies more raw material for statistical shenanigans and biased fact-finding excursions. It offers a high-tech twist on an old trick: I know the facts, now let’s find ’em. That is, says Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician at George Mason University, “one of the most pernicious uses of data.”

Data is tamed and understood using computer and mathematical models. These models, like metaphors in literature, are explanatory simplifications. They are useful for understanding, but they have their limits. A model might spot a correlation and draw a statistical inference that is unfair or discriminatory, based on online searches, affecting the products, bank loans and health insurance a person is offered, privacy advocates warn.

Despite the caveats, there seems to be no turning back. Data is in the driver’s seat. It’s there, it’s useful and it’s valuable, even hip.

Veteran data analysts tell of friends who were long bored by discussions of their work but now are suddenly curious. “Moneyball” helped, they say, but things have gone way beyond that. “The culture has changed,” says Andrew Gelman, a statistician and political scientist at Columbia University. “There is this idea that numbers and statistics are interesting and fun. It’s cool now.”

Steve Lohr is a technology reporter for The New York Times.

P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

A Revolution of Machines Quietly Hums

Chrystia Freeland,  Reuters, February 9, 2012

NEW YORK — If you want to get a finger-tip feel for one of the most important transformations in our world today, read “The Fear Index,” Robert Harris’s new thriller.

Mr. Harris has been widely praised for his adept portrayal of the hedge fund universe in which his novel is set. “The greatest pleasure of this book is that it gets the finance right,” cooed Felix Salmon, the Reuters finance blogger whose keyboard often oozes acid.

He is right that Mr. Harris’s hedgies are a welcome and realistic departure from the Masters of the Universe of most popular fiction. For one thing, these are the alpha geeks, the nerdy doctorate-holders whose testosterone is channeled into equations instead of frat-house swagger.

And Mr. Harris knows his super-rich. As they are being wooed to make a billion-dollar investment over a 1995 Latour in a fine Geneva restaurant, an international group of investors energetically discusses the ways that their national governments oppress them.

Dr. Alex Hoffmann, the billionaire hedge fund manager protagonist who is making the pitch for their cash, reflects: “He was remembering now why he didn’t like the rich: their self-pity. Persecution was the common ground of their conversation, like sport or the weather was for everyone else.”

But the most valuable intellectual take-away from this riveting novel is the element that has been widely dismissed by reviewers as familiar and unpersuasive: VIXAL, the intelligent machine at the heart of the story that torments its human creator and may be trying to rule the world. Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, gave “The Fear Index” a thumbs up, but deemed the machine takeover “silly and contrived.” VIXAL, the evil genius computer, “seems less like a plausible villain than like a metaphor for the greed and heedlessness that overtook Wall Street,” she wrote.

Ms. Kakutani’s dismissal of VIXAL as an unoriginal and uncompelling reworking of the Frankenstein template misses the most important point. VIXAL and the parallel world the computer program creates by interacting with other machines is worth reading about — but not for the usual pulp fiction pleasure of entering a vividly rendered imaginary world.

“The Fear Index” is fun to read because Mr. Harris is a great novelist, but VIXAL is worth getting to know not as a fictional character, but because so much of what it does is already happening in real life.

Futurists and fantasists have been dreaming about the rise of intelligent machines for centuries. Now it is actually starting to happen.

For a drier but in many ways even more astonishing account of what is going on, read “The Second Economy,” an essay in McKinsey Quarterly by W. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher at the Intelligent Systems Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center in California.

Mr. Arthur’s contention is that a second, machine-to-machine economy is emerging and that it will bring deep economic, social and political change comparable to the transformation wrought by the Industrial Revolution.

“Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically,” Mr Arthur writes. “They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital. On the surface, this shift doesn’t seem particularly consequential — it’s almost something we take for granted. But I believe it is causing a revolution no less important and dramatic than that of the railroads. It is quietly creating a second economy, a digital one.”

Mr. Arthur describes this economy as “vast, silent, connected, unseen and autonomous (meaning that human beings may design it but are not directly involved in running it).” The second economy is manifest in transactions as quotidian as checking in for a flight with a machine and as esoteric as the algorithm hedge funds of Mr. Harris’s thriller, which use information produced by machines to trade with other machines.

Economists and novelists aren’t the only people musing about the rise of the machine-to-machine economy and its transformative potential.

Yuri Milner is one of the savviest technology thinkers in the world; he was a pioneering investor in Facebook, a bet that was wildly vindicated last week.

Mr. Milner has a presentation in which he describes the nine most important changes in the world today. Three of them are about what Mr. Arthur has dubbed the second economy: the rise of what Mr. Milner calls “the Internet of things,” or the machine-to-machine economy; the growing power of artificial intelligence; and the emergence of a “global brain,” which is the network of all of the people and the machines in the world and their connections to one another.

The one aspect of “The Fear Index” that is tired and familiar is its depiction of the rise of the machine-to-machine economy as murderous and menacing. That time-worn worry that the smart machines will turn on their creators isn’t one I share. I am a fan of the machine-to-machine economy and of all the ways it makes my human life cheaper and easier.

But I am concerned about something Mr. Harris only hints at. At the end of “The Fear Index,” VIXAL changes its hedge fund’s mission statement. The first lines of the new, machine-written version, read: “The company of the future will have no workers.”
I’m not afraid our smart machines will try to exterminate us, but I do worry that the second economy may be a jobless one.

Mr. Arthur doesn’t offer much comfort on that score. In an exchange with a reader after his essay was published, the economist wrote: “Since the second economy began, in the early and mid-1990s, we’ve had wave after wave of downsizing and layoffs, and now we have ongoing structural joblessness. I hope jobs will be created, and maybe they will. More likely, the system, as so many times before in history, will have to readjust radically. It needs to find new ways to distribute the wealth.”

Chrystia Freeland is global editor at large at Reuters.

Walter Russell Mead : The Power of Infostructure

Beyond Blue Part Three: The Power of Infostructure

Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest, February 5, 2012 

The quest for a new social model has to start with economics. America could survive without growing prosperity and rising standards of living, but it would not flourish — and it would not be living up to its potential to create a better life not only for Americans but for people all over the world.  Green dreamers and communitarians disagree, often eloquently but always futilely; the drive for economic prosperity is deeply planted in American politics and society.  When the economy isn’t performing well, politicians lose their jobs while the public looks for alternative ideas.

The quest for economic prosperity helped make the blue social model, and the failure of that model to deliver continuing prosperity in contemporary conditions is both a symptom of and a leading reason for its decline. The mass prosperity of “Fordism” depended on economic conditions that no longer hold. High paid manufacturing jobs and many clerical and middle management positions are disappearing. Some jobs are outsourced to cheaper foreign countries; others disappear as automation increases productivity and decreases the number of people needed to accomplish various tasks. The stable oligopolies and monopolies that once dominated the American economy have disappeared in the face of heightened international competition and accelerated technological change. As formerly large and stably profitable corporations had to scramble to survive, they no longer could afford lifetime employment, friendly relations with strong unions, and generous health care and retirement benefits.

Cars on an assembly line

Economically, the decline of the blue social model presents Americans with some urgent questions: how can we generate a rising standard of living for our citizens in a post-Fordist world? If manufacturing and stable oligopolies won’t underpin lifetime employment and rising wages for new generations of Americans, what are we going to do instead?

To start answering these questions we have to think about whether the United States enjoys any comparative advantages or can we develop some that, wisely deployed, could provide us with the kind of rising living standards that we have enjoyed in the past?

It’s clear that many such advantages exist and some are even becoming more prominent and useful. In the energy sector, homegrown shale gas and shale oil plus large new discoveries in the western hemisphere suggest that 21st century America will enjoy secure access to an abundant and varied mix of fuel from nearby and friendly neighbors. Blessed by a favorable climate and rich soil, our agricultural productivity will continue to astound. Our geographical location, which gives us access to both of the world’s greatest ocean trading basins while protecting us against invasion by other great powers, remains a tremendous advantage. The language we speak continues to develop as the global lingua franca, giving every American citizen and American business a significant boost.

The container ship SS Mayaguez

These are advantages we have enjoyed for centuries and they are likely to loom larger in the 21st century even than in the recent past. We have grown proficient at using and enhancing these advantages and we need to continue to do so moving forward. Just based on these factors, fears that we are sinking back to some kind of dystopian, third world future are, I think, overblown. But our greatest advantages are cultural and political and it is to these that we must ultimately look for the prosperity we want in the decades to come.

I’ve written about these advantages at some length in God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World, and I won’t repeat those arguments here.  The upshot is that among all the countries in the world, the United States and a handful of English speaking societies have some unique strengths. We do better at combining rapid innovation with social and political stability than others do. Since 1688, the English speaking world has seen only two successful violent revolutions, and even the American Revolution was largely non-violent with royalist governors peacefully replaced until the British army arrived to reconquer the colonies.

(The other successful violent revolution was the secession of Ireland from the United Kingdom in 1919.) The UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, since independence, Ireland have had remarkably stable political histories and show great continuities in culture even as they have remained at the forefront of economic and technological change.

Despite a history of booms and busts from the South Sea Bubble to the 2008 meltdown, their financial histories have also been more stable than those of other countries; since the establishment of the Bank of England in the late seventeenth century, the political stability of the English speaking world has contributed to economic stability. Investors have been able to buy long term bonds in the English-speaking world with confidence since the 18th century. No other significant global economic or political centers have this kind of track record, though the Dutch come close. (Ugly budget pictures today in Ireland, the US and the UK tell us that we should not take these economic advantages for granted. Fortunately, in all three countries there seems to be some real political will to turn things around.)

The English-speaking world has been at the heart of the process of modernization with all the upheaval and uncertainty this process brings in train, but through it all these countries have somehow remained more stable and reliable than others. We change faster than others do in response to new opportunities and new technological possibilities — but we don’t lose our balance in the process.

Joseph Addison described the behavior of Winston Churchill’s famous ancestor the Duke of Marlborough at the battle of Blenheim in a way that captures this ideal of calm in the midst of frenzied activity:

The dreadful burst of cannon rend the skies,
And all the thunder of the battle rise.
`Twas then great Marlborough`s mighty soul was prov`d,
That, in the shock of charging hosts unmov`d,
Amidst confusion, horror, and despair,
Examin`d all the dreadful scenes of war:
In peaceful thought the field of death survey`d,
To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid,
Inspir`d repuls`d battalions to engage,
And taught the doubtful battle where to rage.
So when an angel by divine command
With rising tempests shaks a guilty land,
Such as of late o`er pale Britannia past,

Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleas`d th` Almighty`s orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.

This angel in the whirlwind quality means more now than ever before. The 21st century is shaping up to be an age of upheaval; change is coming at us from so many directions and at such a pace that cultures and countries around the world are being shaken to their foundations. Those who can keep their calm and balance in the midst of the whirlwind have a serious advantage — and they should use it for all it is worth.

America is good at change. We absorb immigrants better than most. We like new things and like to try them out. We have an optimistic streak in our nature; we believe that change is basically good and that being open to new things will make us happier and better off. Our religious sensibility is future-oriented and believes that God is working through the chaos and uncertainties of life.  Our national religious tradition is profoundly influenced by the dynamic vision of a God who calls humanity into an unknown future.  While the religious cultures of some parts of the world look back to a real or imagined utopia in the far distant past, or instruct the faithful to resist change and cling to the ancient ways, American religion tends to see the hand of God behind the winds of change.  We pursue God into the future, rather than hunting for him in the far-distant past.

America’s critical comparative advantage in the 21st century will be its ability to respond quickly to change: to recognize and exploit new opportunities faster than others, to retool its core institutions and practices to fit the emerging shape of the new world, and to do all that while retaining its political and social equipoise: to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm.

We were the first to build the blue social model and we can be the first to get to the next stage and reap the enormous rewards that come from reaching a more productive and efficient form of social organization before the competition.

Nanogears, a NASA project

No doubt many new opportunities will emerge during the 21st century; nanotechnology and biology look to provide revolutions at least as profound as anything to be found in the IT revolution now transforming the world. But until these new developments come more fully on line, the biggest opportunity and the greatest challenge that faces all the leading economies will be to harness the full power of IT to social needs.

All About Friction

In particular, this means competing with other countries not by the cheapness of our wages or the laxity of our environmental regulations, but by building on our ability to increase the productivity of both capital and labor through the power of IT to reduce the cost of friction in society. The first challenge of the 21st century will be the race to build infostructure — a mix of hardware, bandwidth, software, and government and corporate practices that deliver the greatest possible benefits of IT in ways that dramatically reduce costs and delays throughout the economy. A lot of this will be about friction.

Readers of Clausewitz know that friction was his word for the inexorable entropic pressure that disrupts any plan of campaign. Bad weather, diseases in the camp, miscommunication of orders, the absence of good information, the hazards of a night march: all these could be examples of the kind of friction with which every commander must struggle.

In civilian life as well as military affairs, friction has often been caused by distance: moving people, goods and information through space costs money and time. We will continue to build and repair physical infrastructure in the future, but the cutting edge of society’s effort to reduce frictional costs in time and money will lie in the development of “infostructure” rather than infrastructure: the mix of institutions, practices, hardware, software and bandwidth that allow the inherent productivity of information technology the fullest possible scope to transform the way we do things.

Take the legal system. The legal system arose in order to solve disputes; it consumes a great deal of time and money and is itself one of the great sources of friction in our society, but it is much better than anarchy would be. Yet as society becomes more complex, we need more legal service and not less, and the question of how to make the legal system fast, efficient and cheap grows more important all the time.

Let us imagine how the legal system might work some years down the road with the right kind of infostructure. Some changes are already under way. Routine matters like basic, simple wills, taxes and incorporations can be handled using cheap commercial software.  Clearly, this software is going to get better and smarter, and more and more matters can be handled by people working on their own. Governments should be working to facilitate this shift, changing laws where necessary and advisable. Perhaps one day most routine marriage and divorce, residential real estate transactions, and many other activities that historically required lawyers can be done by individuals using software or at most with paralegals. More and more of this will move into the “cloud”; less and less time and money will be chewed up by routine legal affairs.

That is all first stage reform. Deeper change and greater savings will come as more sophisticated software and new institutions and practices that take full advantage of these capabilities transform the inner workings of the legal system. It’s impossible to foresee how this would work out in practice — any more than someone in 1895 could predict how the modern chemical industry would develop over time. But develop it will. One possible way things could go: Every court decision ever given, every brief ever filed and every journal article ever written will some day be available in a single database; intelligent software could sift the facts of any given case and the arguments of both sides against this material to make some predictions about how a given case might come out.  Given access to the records and decisions of the judge appointed to hear a particular case, it would be possible to see how this particular judge would be likely to view this particular case with a fair degree of probability. That information would be available to both parties in the case, making a fast settlement a much more likely outcome. Many fewer cases might go to trial; decisions would in any case come much more quickly.

A courthouse in Washington County, Arkansas

Smart policy would speed this transition. Investing in the infostructure that moves the state’s legal system as far into the future as quickly as possible would attract new investment and jobs and enhance the profitability of business already in the state.

Research into ways to use IT to accelerate the speed of legal proceedings while reducing their cost is the kind of thing government should support. Land grant colleges supported agricultural research in the age of the family farm; we developed a host of ways to support research into improved industrial and factory productivity in the age of Fordism. Now it is time to shift to the next stage, for universities and government to move into the kind of research that will transform our social infostructure.

While infrastructure will remain important to the smooth functioning of society, infostructure will likely surpass it. Governor Jerry Brown’s successors may think less about building $100 billion high speed rail programs than about radical restructuring of the way California’s government works so that a much smaller and cheaper government is able to do more and do it much quicker. A superfast and supercheap legal system would dramatically enhance the productivity of capital invested in the state.

Government would work better and faster and cost less; taxes would fall even as services improved. (There is no real reason why many government services can’t improve the way personal computers and software have done: each year they get cheaper and each year they do more.)

The war on friction is one of humanity’s oldest challenges, and it inevitably becomes more important as society becomes more complicated and more interdependent. A small village can handle everything quickly; a modern megalopolis must have a much better developed government. Good infostructure can dramatically reduce the costs and complexities of modern governance.

America’s Secret Weapon

In all societies vested interests will resist efforts to reduce friction.  The mule drivers didn’t like the canals and the canals hated the railroads. Pettifogging lawyers will hate the transformation of their profession, and every vested interest in the country will be touched one way or another by the kinds of transformations of our core social institutions that will take place as we build out the infostructure of the 21st century.

This is where America’s advantages count. That process can and should happen faster here than in other places.  We have fifty states who compete with one another and the federal government to do things faster, quicker, better. Best practices and new ideas spread. Bureaucrats are less powerful here, and state employees are less well-placed to block changes they don’t like. The public is readier to try new things and take risks for the sake of progress. Our government, our legal system, our health system, our educational system: all of these can be radically and greatly improved by the right infostructure, and Americans are more willing and able to push this process ahead than people in other parts of the world.

The critical advances of the next generation involve the development and construction of a radically new infostructure that will change the way government, the law, education, medicine and many other institutions and industries work. The new infostructures will so dramatically enhance the efficiency of the societies able to build and install them that they will enjoy huge advantages over those who cannot.

America needs to rebuild its infostructure. The alternative to a race to the bottom, to trying to compete on the basis of lower wages or laxer regulations, is a race to the front: to the cutting edge of human progress. 

This is a race to build the new kinds of infostructure that advances in communications and information technology have made possible.  This is a race that we can win and that is worth winning. America can get to a faster, more efficient future faster than other people, and it is on that basis that we can prosper and raise our living standards in the coming years.