Priorities for Technology and Innovation?

If I could choose our country's top five strategic priorities for technology and innovation, they would be:

1. Diversify the energy ecosystem
2. Transform human transportation
3. Open more government data
4. Boost resurgence in manufacturing
5. Transform farming practices

Diversifying the energy ecosystem means that we diversify production and consumption.  Diversifying production means that we increase the number of different means for producing energy in terms of both type and scale; everything from storing the energy you produce in your exercise machine up to expanding nuclear.  If they ever figure out the photosynthesis model of using the sun then we're literally set for life.  Diversifying energy consumption means that we increase the number of different kinds of energy a consumer can use and decrease the amount of energy the consumer requires in order to be effective.  There will always be both high energy and low energy systems that have purpose and value.  Efficiency of consumption still matters.   Ideally we will produce and require less energy to do more.  This is not a pipe dream.  This is innovation and efficiency.

Transforming human transportation means that we change the way we think about how people move around geographically.  We need to look at the logistics of national and local transportation free from the constraints of mode.  When it comes to moving people, we will also place great emphasis on the preferences of the individual.  These might be combined into the notion of demand.  Given an understanding of demand (past, present, future?) we can make better decisions among biomotive, automotive, locomotive, hydromotive, and aeromotive modes of transportation (most of which are not English words, by the way).  I'm not sure I have good answers, but I'm certain transportation is A) complex and B) broken.  That usually tells me we need to turn the problem on its head and look at it sideways to recognize what will work.

Opening more goverment data means that local, state, and federal governments and their agencies commit to putting all information already in the public domain online in standard, ubiquitous formats that are easy to publish, syndicate, transform, integrate, and view.  Governments should spend less time and money on applications (analysis and visualization tools, websites/portals).  Governments should spend more time and overall less money on opening up our data vice building applications.  Naturally, government-internal uses of data will require tools and applications.  But in all cases better tools and applications will emerge when data is open.  This may be the easiest and least costly priority to implement.

Boosting resurgence in manufacturing means that we recreate and reinvigorate our strength and ingenuity as skilled manufacturers.  More specifically, we invest in:

1. High-tech, lightweight manufacturing; tools, devices, sensors, robotics and the like
2. Transportation manufacturing; planes, trains, and automobiles 

Maybe farming equipment becomes an emerging market (see priority 5).  Obviously auto manufacturing needs a new direction.  Flying is a horrendous and toxic experience on many levels.  And trains are poised for a comeback here in the U.S.  Clearly transportation of goods is important and deserves attention.  But I think transportation of goods is largely solvable while transportation of people seems nearly, but not quite, intractable.

Transforming farming practices means we find the middle ground between niche farming and factory farming.  Niche farming is not efficient or practical and is more costly than Americans will endure.  The factory farming model is failing in the current environment.  There is entirely too much land not being farmed in an effort to control prices and trade, yet prices are high and trade is poor.  Some argue that cheap food is gone.  I'm not so sure.  The reason sited is the high cost of transportation undercutting the (tightly) controlled production practices that created cheap food in the first place.  I agree those practices should end.  But as long as we are purposely not farming land I don't know how we can make accurate determinations about price realism in food.  Here in Virginia and in southerly neighbor North Carolina we have acres and acres of underutilized, fertile farmland.  Whether it is land that goes unused because a mid-sized farmer can't compete in a factory-farm environment or old tobacco farms that must transform or die, a new strategy for farming can make use of that land, uplift local economies, keep choices up and prices low.

Then again, what do I know?  This is more feeling than fact.  I could be terribly, terribly wrong.  Clearly I'm short of specifics.  What I'm after is strategic priorities.  This feels like what matters.

"Information Technology Support" is an Oxymoron

The purpose of technology is to help people perform tasks. Isn't it ironic that we need so much human support for managing technology? Or maybe oxymoron isn't quite right. "Technology support" is redundant. It's support for support, is it not? I mean, is technology doing its job if it needs lots of ancillary support to keep it going?

Is Google Search Appliance Appropriate for Government and Corporate Enterprises?

Question to Ponder (QTP)

Google's smarts are based on Page Rank, which is tied to popularity. Popularity on Google is heavily influenced by financial and other driving incentives. Google's strengths are based on Gi-normous machine clusters and on huge critical mass of the widest diversity of users, who are mixing it up and providing feed back into the system explicitly and implicitly by way of their behavior.

So is a Google search appliance a smart recommendation for government or corporate enterprise? I don't know exactly but last good info I had was that they cost about $150K per appliance rack that could search 2 or 3M items.  [Update 01.14.2009 - new box searches 10M docs]  One NASA center has two racks and found they chewed up 4-6M items in no time. I don't know what percentage that was, but I do know that they were want for more racks. Last I talked to them they were getting good at setting up filters to weed stuff out. (Weeding the garden is probably not a bad thing in any event.)

Now, I suppose you could - antitrust laws and fear not withstanding - scale Google's model to apply to the whole of the US federal government's information infrastructure and we'd approach some aspect of critical mass. Popularity behavior would surely be different than the commercial advertising model (I think). But that's not necessarily bad, if true.

It actually might not cost a lot of money in terms of federal budget scales. The way I figure, 1 billion records would cost $50M at full retail cost, i.e., no negotiated discount:

1,000,000,000 items/3,000,000 items per rack = 333 racks : 333*150,000 = 50,000,000

Tack on 20% to implement? +10M gets us to $60M
20% per year for maintenance? +10M per year * 10 years and we're at $160M

Double it all for 2B items. $320M. Even with no write downs for discount that's a rounding error in the federal budget.

To avoid monoply and other sticky issues with a deal like this, the government should buy Google's intellectual property and arrange a reseller license agreement so the government can contract out to the fairest qualified bidders (plural) the secure right to implement the IP on hardware on the government's behalf. Google could even be forbidden from competing in that way for some number of years. Government then leases time on the GIG to cover the bandwidth resources consumed by the huge clusters serving this purpose. (Ooh - is that in the cost?) Government already has the ability to secure this at multiple levels of security (Is that in the cost?). It is essentially, if perhaps not trivially, a matter of organizing search clusters to operate within NIPR or within SIPR or within JWICS firewalls.

[Update on 11 April based on conversation with Katharine: It might not be one big Google search farm pointed at these networks, at least not without a radical change in policy that may be intractable due to politics. There are many, many organizational firewalls. But at least get the bulk purchase order in, get a huge discount...for taxpayers, and place clusters where they need to be to get the biggest bang for those bucks. The essence is to take a strategic approach to search for the whole of government information. Search is so very fundamental that it deserves this kind of treatment.]

Ok...that demon thought is expelled now. I'm writing too many proposals. Approaching temporary burnout threshold. My brainstorming synapses may be totally misfiring at this point.

[Update 3 December 08:  2B searchable items is nary a drop in the bucket, I reckon.  Are we talking about 2 trillion?  200 trillion?  Large numbers that sound obscene when spoken?]

Visualization Doesn't Matter

Sense-making matters. I've always been cognizant of the fact that people without sight have exactly zero use for visualization. (Probably not 100% true, I bet.) The point is that there is nothing presumptive about visualization that makes sense-making possible. It is the human mind that makes sense-making have even meaning enough to give way to possibility. Communication matters, too. Certainly visualization makes communication possible by providing an entire medium/channel/wavelength such that when we lack it our communication may likely be impeded.

Obviously I think there is value in visualization. So why do I say it doesn't matter? Because visualization is never more than a means to an end. That end could be to have fun or it could be to make an important decision or it could be to send a message. But in any case, there can be 1001 means to achieving those ends and visualization is never more than one of them.

Why is this point worth understanding and remembering?

Selling. Working for customers. Providing a service to people. I am a computer scientist and a technologist and a visualization "guy" but my work and my business are all about people. Sometimes people forget what the word "technology" means.

And so when I'm talking to a customer about visualization and I find that we are talking too much about visualization then something is not right. We should be talking about the customer's wants, needs, pains in intellectual terms that are not constrained by any one means of achieving an end. It's up to me to decide how, where, why, and when visualization matters. That's what I'm getting paid to do.

Ok, so enough with the hand-waving. What is a practical example?

I have a customer who wants and needs to make an investment in visualization and part of his information technology capability. I know going in that the reason I am doing business with this customer is because he values visualization and knows he needs help integrating it into his IT portfolio. So I'm sitting down in front of him and giving him his first brief on what I am doing for him. Most of the hour long presentation (demonstrations, actually) is/are in terms of how visualization is used to present and interact with his domain data. He finds that all well and good in about 5 minutes, but what he really wants to know is "which of my problems does it solve?" And that's where it gets tricky. Because the answer is that visualizing domain information doesn't solve any problems de facto.

So do you want to talk about my visualization services or do you want to talk about your problems? What matters? I'm happy and comfortable discussing either. But in my business, people solve problems and it just so happens that my people are skilled at using visualization as a means toward that end.