6 Technology Articles You Must Read Today
Otto writes:
IBM announced
last week it has moved its cognitive computing system into the cloud to form
the Watson Discovery Advisor, allowing researchers, academics and anyone else
trying to leverage big data the ability to test programs and hypotheses at
speeds never before seen.
Since Watson
is built to understand the nuance of natural language, this new service allows
researchers to process millions of data points normally impossible for humans
to handle. This can reduce project timelines from years to weeks or days.
The ability to understand natural
language queries is a big deal. You can ask, for example: “I’m going to be in
Boston. I like basketball. What do you suggest, Watson?” You might get several
answers: Celtics tickets, Boston College tickets, Harvard tickets. Or
in the offseason, Watson may suggest you drive to the Basketball Hall of Fame
in Springfield (MA). Companies are already using Watson this way. Fluid, Inc.’s
Watson-based retail solutions deliver granular results to queries such as “I am
taking my wife and three children camping in upstate New York in October and I
need a tent.” Consider this: Watson has been taught to pass the medical boards.
Would you trust it to diagnose you and prescribe medication? What if you claim
to be in pain (e.g., back pain, migraines, depression) and Watson doesn’t
believe your subjective input? Here’s more food for thought: What if Watson
could learn to code? Why not? It’s hardly heretical to suggest that as Watson
works with developers, it will one day be able to generate solutions based on a
natural language query. That’s equally exciting and worrisome. Now if you want
to poke a little fun at Watson, read this Steve Lohr piece in The New York Times (2013)
about Watson in the kitchen. Just skim it — the kicker is at the end.
Ed Lane of BBC News wrote a fascinating article about how technology is changing disaster
relief. Alongside tents and drinking water, RAF planes dropped more than
1,000 solar-powered lanterns attached to chargers for all types of mobile
handsets to the stranded members of the Yazidi religious community below.
It is the
first time the lanterns have been airdropped in such a relief effort, but
humanitarian workers say it is part of growing efforts to develop technology
designed to make a difference in disaster zones.
Imagine a
solar-powered lantern that you might take camping with an umbilical cord to a
power source with connections to myriad types of phones. The inability to
communicate during crisis situations is debilitating, and becomes more so
within days (see below).
In a
separate project, Dr Paul Gardner-Stephen of Australia invented a “mesh
network” that lets people in emergencies communicate via mobile even if they
have no Internet connection. Users can send text messages, make calls and send
files to other users nearby, creating a mobile network through a web of users.
Why is this so important during times of crisis such as war zones or
earthquakes? Gardner-Stephen states:
You
typically have about three days to restore communications before the bad people
realize the good people aren’t in control any more.
He adds
succinctly, throwing down a gauntlet:
There’s
plenty of technology for rich white men. It’s the rest of the world that we
need to help.
As he introduces us to the Sunlite solar-powered
lantern, Lane provides a welcome reminder not only of the wonders of technology
being used in developing countries, but the need for even more innovation and
distribution of technology and knowledge worldwide.
Death by
distance. Roy Smythe, a Forbes contributor, argues the merits of healthcare delivered from a distance.
Fellow Forbes contributor Roy Smythe jumps right into the question posed above. He begins by citing
Hannah Arendt and referencing Stanley Milgram in support of his proposition
that we can become desensitized to death. That’s not new, and Smythe makes
clear that he’s not interested in that problem here. What’s interesting is
Smythe’s corollary argument that the distance between healthcare providers and
patients has become so great that healthcare delivery is at a “decisive turning
point in history that separate[s] whole eras from each other,” to quote Arendt.
Myriad
technologies create distance between patient and caregiver and all meant to
make it more efficient to heal the sick. Smythe reminds us of telemedicine
platforms and other forms of “virtual visits” or self-care tools. Such care
will be the norm much more quickly than most would like. He cites Dr. Rushika
Fernandapulle, the co-founder and CEO of Iora Health, for the position that
medical care is still fundamentally human. Fernandapulle writes:
The thing
that heals people is relationships – the problem is that technology has the
ability to actually facilitate relationships, but it can also get in the way of
them.
Above all, Smythe doesn’t
want distant medicine to lead doctors to be desensitized by death. He draws an interesting
parallel — the use of drones in war. Without boots on the ground or vivid and
live battlefield images, death can become abstract and sanitized. Navigating a
drone to a drop site is relatively easy–and
we should all emphasize relatively–in terms of seeing and feeling the results of
war. By contrast, tossing a grenade over a wall, driving over an IED, engaging
in close quarter combat, and other critical military missions cannot bring one
any closer to both one’s enemy and the realities of death.
Climbing out of this
analogy back into the world of medicine can be difficult. When we do, however,
we find that “distance medicine” at first seems innocuous by comparison, and then every bit as
dangerous.
Rick
Delgado at Smart Data Collective contributed insights about potential hurdles for the
Internet of Things.
Two ideas
crossed my mind while reading this piece. First, Delgado makes the obvious-but-equally-important
point that being able to take advantage of the wealth of the Internet of Things
requires something we take for granted: access to the Internet. I’m not going
to belabor a rural electrification analogy. Many do not have Internet connectivity,
including in the developed world and the United States. It gets worse as
ignorance abounds. Delgado writes:
While
businesses may talk excitedly about the Internet of Things, consumers are
largely unaware of it. In a recent survey of 2,000 people, 87% of consumers
said they had never even heard of the IoT. While hearing about the Internet of
Things doesn’t necessarily signify a consumer would not use an item connected
to the IoT, the survey results show a lack of awareness and understanding about
what can be gained from it. If this lack of knowledge about the IoT leads to
lack of interest, a major driving force for widespread adoption will be
missing.
In one of
the worst tech predictions of all time, IBM President Thomas Watson stated in
1943: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Talk about
punching in the mouth the possibility of disruptive innovation at IBM. Watson
was misguided and incorrect, but hardly dumb. Whether we wish to believe it,
Mr. Watson, I suggest, knew far more about his industry at the time than
today’s experts know about the Internet of Things, which is in its infancy but
growing fast. According to Gartner, there will be approximately 25+ billion
sensors in the world by 2020. It’s not surprising that a whopping 87% of
consumers are unaware of the billions of sensors around the world. What would
(I would hope) be surprising is if we don’t follow in Google’s footprints to
widen Internet connection worldwide. That would be a Tragedy of the Commons
with a mean twist. We’re not depleting a resource. On the contrary, it grows
daily because we feed it. Our “just” not sharing precludes a global race to the
top of technology, which I’ll restrict here for the sake of argument to
non-military uses. Now that’s a race we should all want to enter.
Tracey Wallace over at the
Umbel blog (Truth in Data) writes about data-driven cities and the Internet of Things .
Wallace
describes how each city is turning itself into a data treasure trove and using
new technologies. Let’s look at a few:
·
Turning old phone booths into WiFi hot spots
(NYC);
·
All household waste is sucked directly from
individual kitchens through a vast underground network of tunnels, to waste
processing centers, where it is automatically sorted, deodorized and treated.
(Songdo, South Korea);
·
Wi-Fi provides city communities with hot spots
that promote city services such as water meters, leak sensors, parking meter
and other city services to operate on the same secure government network.
(Dallas); and
·
There are no light switches or water taps in the
city; movement sensors control lighting and water to cut electricity and water
consumption by 51 and 55% respectively. (Masdar, UAE).
These
initiatives are amazing. Think about what Masdar is doing. It’s like an
automatic, energy-saving Clapper (“clap on, clap off”). Consider their savings
and what it would mean for energy consumption if such a program were
implemented to the extent possible around the world. Wow. There’s certain
to be an enterprise wrapped around this as we speak. So . . . which of
you will be the first to sit on a bench at the edge of a park and use a nearby
phone booth across the street as your hot spot? That’s pretty cool.
Richard
Boire at the Smart Data Collective poses the following question: The Demise of
the Data Scientist: Heresy or Fact? The CEO of Williams-Sonoma certainly has an opinion.
Boire
comments on an article by an “IT leader of a well-respected U.S. organization”
whom he doesn’t name. Boire writes of this apparition:
[The
author] hypothesized that data scientists will in the future become like
switchboard operators: obsolete. The primary reason for this declining demand
according to the author was that increased automation and operationalization of
business processes will not require the technical skills of the data scientist.
Boire
takes the contrary position:
Consider the
efforts of the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force in distributing to refugees in
Northern Iraq the following: water; food; and the technology needed to
communicate — power for mobile phones. Lane describes the initiative:
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