Gates on Income Inequality.

Read this article in Fortune regarding Bill Gates view on income inequality.

True, Piketty's approach is not perhaps fine tuned enough. Some people are using their wealth to good purpose, better than government could ever re-purpose. The parble of the three servants can be seen as a long surviving anecdote regarding that. But found approach by Gates largely futile too. There needs to be at least some qualification.

What kind of business investment is "good"? An arms manufacturer or a pure commodity harvester (oil, tar sand, mining) are far less socially redeeming than something which actually directly helps or enriches people. Both jobs and output must be considered. Global direct education or communications seem to have both redeeming qualities in jobs and output... think microfinance. It is not a given that an entrepreneur is doing socially good work.

Charity is the same in reverse. A charity that promotes some sort of idealistic crusade (that squashes one group in favor of another, or promotes an idea or group without useful social output) is also not redeeming to the world at large. Again the goal has to be examined.

That consumption is bad is not always clear, even conspicuous consumption ala Veblen. Consumption for consumptions sake, of things that neither have nor produce lasting value (effectively destruction), is bad. But one could say the great projects of the New Deal or the Great Pyramids were an excellent way to consume resources - in a way that was socially "uplifting" and made a lasting mark. A car or a yacht are not (generally) lasting marks, nor is the average McMansion. BUT the mansions at Newport transcend. The great railroad empires transcend. Museums endowed (consumed) by benefactors transcend. {And it is disingenuous to call such a charity BTW}.

That the rich consume into channels of lasting value that build infrastructure and businesses is a good thing. A tax on pure capital misses the point. A progressive tax on magnitude of consumption misses the mark too. It is more about an independent social view of what is, and is not, worthwhile for society writ large. The question is how to get the capital out to something with lasting or ongoing value. Sorry not to have a good answer.

Direct voluntary giving to the poor has a better chance of working than any of the above. Shame on all of us if we know how (or have the means to know how) to give back well - yet never do.

Chromecast Yanks Input Feature.

Playing with Google Chromecast over holiday season. Looking at all the apps to cast. The Chromecast has a nifty feature of grabbing the HDMI input on our Toshiba TV. That HDMI-CEC feature alone is useful. Read on.

Our Toshiba like many TVs has about ten inputs. It has has a standard input selector (pressing "input" switches to next input source). But the loop of ten types of inputs (and their respective timeouts for signal detection) make it almost impossible to loop through to the desired input. And though it has an option to select input by number, that numeric option apparently works only through the Toshiba remote and not universal remotes.

Enter Chromecast: Hook it to the first HDMI input (usually grouped together) immediately before the most interesting input or group of inputs. In the in-laws-TV case just before the main composite input of interest (cable box or other).  In Toshiba case HDMI-1 just before cable box on HDMI-2. Basically hook it up to the input in the loop as close as possible and before the desired/main TV input source (apart from Chromecast itself of course *grin*).

One simply gets the right input for Chromecast by invoking a cast application (like YouTube or other). To get back to other main most-used inputs one can simply push the input button once or twice (not six or seven times).

Actually wish the DVD players and TV set top box had this HDMI-CEC "yank" feature built in (linked to menu or play - NOT volume or channel change - for obvious contention reasons). Then there would be no more pressing input at all. When target device was accessed via remote, it would simply grab an HDMI port.

Brings up idea of an HDMI selector box with four inputs and one HDMI output and built in HDMI-CEC control feature. Button on top for "emergency" manual select. "Yank" by ability to sense HDMI control.

Chromecast itself is well worth it alone just as HDMI "yank" input.

RF Tracking and Fencing.

Have blogged before on RF tracking
http://albertputnam.blogspot.com/2013/11/wifi-tracking-any-rf-tracking.html.

NFC and BLE and Beacons... interesting things from Nordic Semiconductor and their allies (like Estimote).

Apart from straightforward inventory... engenders ideas about geo-fencing as an augmentation of other systems like access control.

MassTLC IoT at PTC - Smart Connected Products Transforming Competition - HBR.

IoT has had much discussion lately. Went to a great MassTLC sponsored seminar at PTC on November 4. How Smart, Connected Products are Transforming Competition. Went hand in hand with article in Harvard Business Review. Lay of land for Smart Connected Products. Ten questions businesses should ask themselves. Very appropriate.  Looking at steps

1. 1. Monitoring.
2. 2. Control.
3. 3. Optimization.
4. 4. Autonomy.

Could not help but think about the roots of IoT in tracking/viewing things. The order should perhaps still be

1. 1. Monitoring.
2. 2. Optimization (based purely on what is monitored and outside of any actual IoT programme).
3. 3. Autonomy.
4. 4. Control - Control is last because one should understand the situation before taking action.

And in many cases there are limits (safety, regulatory, privacy, moral, etc.) on what can be controlled. Most of the value is in monitoring and optimization. Some situations never get to control.

 

There were questions during discussions about..

When will industries standardize? What are we waiting for?

1. Leadership from Apple, Amazon, Google and so forth were cited for consumer.
2. Leadership by the main players are often cited in commercial industry. But there is a commercial incentive for non-standard approaches (differentiators) in many situations.
3. Cooperation and collaborative openness. There are examples of collaborative standardization. There are ecosystems which makes it easy to exchange, normalize, coordinate, aggregate and analyze data.

Examples of collaborative standardization:

• BACnet in buildings.
• Sunspec in renewables.
• MTConnect in factory systems.
• OPC (XML DA) in automation.

And the following too - if an ONLY if the mapping/schema is well known... the universally accepted schema is the heart of the matter

• Modbus in industrial. The depth and of Modbus (all the way to sensors), and the breadth of its install base, should not be ignored.
• SNMP in IT.
• RESTful exchange in commerce.
• Any XML in any domain.
• MQ (message queuing) in any domain.

SQL is often hauled out as an exchange method. There is no universal public schema for any database system. Such a schema would be orthogonal to the performance needs of a database.
 
And as a final word. Smart connected things without goals and analytics are fruitless. And goals need not be set in stone, as they are generally informed by analytics. Tactical drives the strategic and vice versa. They are two sides of the same coin. Planning is essential but plans are useless.

 

Machines, Capital.

Two books have come up consistently in discussions lately:

The Second Machine Age - Brynjolfsson and McAfee - Washington Post Review.

Capital - Piketty - Bloomberg Article.

Probably not to be ignored by any serious amateur in economics and business looking at where we have been and where we are headed.

Analysis Defined.

Dictionary definition: Examination of structure as a basis for interpretation.

As an action: Data -> Results.
Or more richly: Inputs and Ideas -> Decisions and Deliverables.

Methodologies: 7C's:

Traditional: Three "Chi"s:

• 1. Chance - guess.
• 2. Cheat - know the answer before one starts.
• 3. Chestnuts - rules of thumb with unknown basis, gut.

Systematic: Four "K"s:

• 4. Coordination - statistics and regression for projection - functions of independent variables against well understood dependent varaiables like time and position.
• 5. Correlation - aka coincidence - any available variable against any other variable... including methods used in Big Data.
• 6. Crowd - wisdom of the masses (large numbers) - human and others - emergence.
• 7. Core - models based on reality - physical and observed.

The first six are all about getting to the seventh - building a model of reality. The key is a platform and framework for getting to the core.

Intellectual Ventures - Longterm.

Little late, but read Bloomberg article about Intellectual Ventures. All thought provoking. Most of the criticism seems to come from large entrenched players. Wonder what the long play really is? What is in the mind of Nathan Myrvold?
[Probably same as wondering about Amazon, Google, IBM and so forth.]