New Florence. New Renaissance.

“In politics, the era of big data has arrived”

Time (sub required) on the quants and data crunchers who drove the Obama re-election campaign from their secretive Chicago "cave"

“The magic tricks that opened wallets were then repurposed to turn out votes. The analytics team used four streams of polling data to build a detailed picture of voters in key states. In the past month, said one official, the analytics team had polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone — a whopping sample that composed nearly half of 1% of all voters there — allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment. This was a huge advantage: when polls started to slip after the first debate, they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not.

It was this database that helped steady campaign aides in October’s choppy waters, assuring them that most of the Ohioans in motion were not Obama backers but likely Romney supporters whom Romney had lost because of his September blunders. “We were much calmer than others,” said one of the officials. The polling and voter-contact data were processed and reprocessed nightly to account for every imaginable scenario. “We ran the election 66,000 times every night,” said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama’s odds of winning each swing state. “And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources.”

Internet of Things + Big Data + Future of Work = Massive Payback

I witnessed an awesome panel today at the GE Minds+Machines event in San Francisco. Moderated by Chris Anderson of Wired, executives from 4 industries described the opportunities (and some of the challenges) that come from advanced analytics and smarter workforces.

Deborah Butler, CIO of Norfolk Southern, described the promise of more optimized, automated dispatching, the fuel efficiencies from smarter locomotives and the preventative maintenance from track side sensors which monitor for problem wheels (as with Union Pacific I wrote about here)

Michael Niggli, president and COO of San Diego Gas and Electric described with smart meters and other innovations they now have 900 x more data on consumer usage compared to 3 years ago.This is allowing them to “gamify” reductions in kilowatts of power consumption. He described “smart transformers”  which will allow for more optimal scheduling of nighttime charging of electric vehicles across the customer base. He talked about the payback from growing renewable fuels (up to 21% now)

Gary Beck, VP Flight Operations of Alaska Airlines, described their success with Required Navigation Performance (see my post here), the efforts with the Green Skies over Seattle project and the opportunity to spread similar efficiency/lower emissions across the country. He talked about how the massive data that aircraft already create – performance, Gs related to turbulence etc could be shared across the air grid rather than being summarized today via air traffic controllers.

Wayne Keathley, President of Mount Sinai Hospital, talked about being at the verge of massive breakthroughs in medicine with advances in genomics and pathogenesis and with an extremely skilled workforce. However, the economics of the industry are under severe pressure, and the hospital model needs to move from individual patient focus to population awareness with plenty of services being delivered outside the traditional hospital walls. He also talked about hotspots with massive data availability

Here’s the kicker. GE believes that just 1% improvements in each of these industries can generate massive payback as the slide below shows. I could have listened to the 5 go on all day long.

BTW Chris did a superb job moderating this wide panel of executives, and I complimented him afterwards. In turn, he signed a copy of his new book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution  :)

I will post a video of the session when available.

The Slingshot Water Purification System

The Coca-Cola Company announced a global clean water partnership with DEKA R&D to bring water purification systems to communities in Africa and Latin America, where potable water access is limited. Using DEKA President Dean Kamen's "Slingshot" technology, one Slingshot unit can purify up to 300,000 liters of water each year. It produces 10 gallons of clean water an hour while consuming less than 1 kilowatt of electricity (less than what it takes to run a standard handheld hair dryer).

 

 

 

 

MRAPs

“The Pentagon has offered varying statements over the years about the protection offered by the truck, whose trademark V-shaped hull helps deflect the force of roadside bombs away from the troops inside. Former Defense secretary Robert Gates, the MRAP's chief patron who credits learning about their safety from reading about them in USA TODAY, has said they were 10 times as safe as a Humvee in a blast and have saved thousands of lives. Another Pentagon estimate went further, putting the number of lives saved at 40,000. Since then, the military has ratcheted back, adopting Gates' estimate.

The figures cited by Carter, he said, are based on examining data from roadside bomb blasts in Iraq and Afghanistan, examining the crater, the damaged truck and the wounds to those inside. Data have also been collected from blowing up 200 MRAPs containing dummies at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.”

USA Today

Photo Credit

Made for TV Terrorism

For decades now, terrorists have used TV coverage to amplify their grievances. This Sunday I saw the gruesome HBO documentary  “Terror in Mumbai” on the 4th anniversary of the massacre.

While the show is sickening, it is also fascinating from a technological POV. Indian intelligence had managed to feed several traceable SIM cards to terrorist groups in Pakistan, and 3 of those were activated on the day of the attack. This allowed Mumbai police to intercept over 250 conversations between the mobile phones of the terrorists and the IP phones of their “controllers” in Pakistan.

Add to that all the video feeds described below and it is impressive how much technology documented the attack.

The Huffington Post “Narrator Fareed Zakaria describes the documentary as a "360 degree view of terrorism." His description makes perfect sense; the coverage of the terror is so complete it almost feels invasive. CCTV footage, recorded phone calls, news reports shot by rolling TV crews, grainy footage shot by amateurs on mobile phones and posthumous interview footage from the survivors are all combined. Documentary makers could never hope for more raw footage. It makes for a terrific viewing, but a terrifying concept.”

The show also brings out the  utter incompetence of the Mumbai police force. Against the backdrop of the sophistication of the conversation surveillance and the amateur phone camera footage, their low tech weaponry and response coordination look even more appalling.

It is a disturbing show, but with enough clues that the bad guys can be outwitted and outgunned in future incidents. 

Fascinating video interview with Dan Reed who describes the making of the documentary. Zakaria’s introduction to the show starts around 10.40.

GoPro or Go Amateur Videographer

GoPro cameras allow action-sports enthusiasts to take professional-quality videos. Of the million or so HD Hero2 cameras the company sold in 2011, many were purchased by consumers who don’t have thrill seeking on their minds. Couples are leaving them on tables at weddings instead of disposable cameras. Elizabeth Henriquez, a physics teacher at Bergen County Technical Schools in New Jersey, puts GoPros on blindfolded kids and asks classmates to guide them through an obstacle course to give her students a sense of what it’s like to operate the Curiosity rover on Mars. Fire departments use them for training purposes, marine biologists use them for undersea research, and the U.S. Army uses them in tests of the damage to Humvees from roadside bombs.

On Oct. 17, Woodman Labs introduced a new model called the HD Hero3 that’s 25 percent lighter and 30 percent smaller than its predecessor. It offers better resolution, clearer audio, and slower slow-mo.

BusinessWeek

“Proton Jeff”

In the GE case study in The New Polymath (excerpted below) I wrote

His predecessor, Jack Welch, earned the nickname “ Neutron Jack ” for his focus on efficiency; Immelt will likely go down in history as “ Proton Jeff, ” as he encourages positive vibes toward all kinds of technology. GE Global Research (GRC) is organized into 10 technology competencies: energy and propulsion, chemical technologies and materials characterization, material
systems, biosciences, power conversion systems, electronic systems and controls, computing/decision sciences, imaging, micro and nano structures, and ceramics and metallurgy.

Walking out of the GRC (I was there in 2009 during my book research) I just knew Immelt had groomed GE into a technology juggernaut, even if GE is not classified as such by Wall Street, media and analysts. 

I have since keenly followed GE’s technology road maps and product directions and this blog catalogs many of the innovations that are launched through GE’s wide range of business units and country locations.

This morning GE emailed me a paper on what it calls the “Industrial Internet” (available here).

“The Industrial Internet will help eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of wasted time and resources across critical industries by combining Internet-connected machines, product diagnostics, software, and analytics to make business operations efficient, proactive, predictive, and strategically automated.”

Its definition includes 3 components

Intelligent machines : New ways of connecting the word’s myriad of machines, facilities, fleets and networks with advanced sensors, controls and software applications.
Advanced Analytics: Harnessing the power of physics-based analytics, predictive algorithms, automation and deep domain expertise in material science, electrical engineering and other key disciplines required to understand how machines and larger systems operate.
People at work: connecting people, whether they be at work in industrial facilities, offices, hospitals or on the move, at any time to support more intelligent design, operations, maintenance as well as higher quality service and safety.

The potential payback is huge

• Connecting machines and the Internet could potentially eliminate $150 billion in waste across major industries, driving a productivity revolution

• Just 1% increase in efficiency can mean savings of $30 billion in aviation, $66 billion in power generation and $63 billion in healthcare over 15 years

Immelt, and the authors of the GE paper are presenting on the GE vision of the Industrial Internet this Thursday at its Mind+Machines event in San Francisco. I will plan to be pretty close to the front.

Download GE Case Study New Polymath

The Outside Office evolves

I wrote most of The New Technology Elite in my “outside office” in FL. I often wondered why it was not commonplace and figured weather, ambient noise and other factors conspired. Jonathan Olivares, furniture designer, provides a more incisive analysis

“Working only indoors goes back to the paperwork explosion from 1850 to 1960. It was so dominant and pervasive, and paper doesn’t like the outdoors — it blows around, it blinds the eye. Heavy metal filing cabinets were also essential to office work, and they couldn’t possibly be brought outdoors. Now, with a laptop or iPad, you can do serious work outside. We just need the right spaces.

A few years ago, I realized that there isn’t any professional outdoor office furniture. It wasn’t a topic that even existed. You’d google ‘outdoor office’ and find pictures of people sitting at a picnic table, telecommuting from their backyard. It’s not much better today, but it’s starting to become part of the public conversation. The idea for this project was to design and develop what an outdoor office might actually look like.”

Smart Planet

Photo Credit

Next-generation magnets

New Scientist (sub required)

McCallum's work focuses on introducing atoms of elements into the structure that are sufficiently foreign to make the cerium atoms less profligate with their electrons. Even if that succeeds, cerium is never going to make magnets as good as Neo - but then it doesn't have to. "If you look at the difference between rare earth magnets and non-rare earth magnets, there is a tremendous gap," he says. Any magnet made of friendlier materials that sits anywhere in the gap will take some of the heat from neodymium - and above all from dysprosium.

Constantinides has a similar goal. "We don't need to replace Neo," he says. "We need other materials with a complementary price, performance and ability." His company is following two broad approaches. One is to use computational muscle to try out tweaks to existing non-rare-earth magnets such as Alnico. The other is what he describes as a greenfield approach, using complex algorithms to mix up nature's limited library of magnetic elements in different structures and analyse the results for magnetic stardom. "We've had nickel, iron and cobalt for a long time, but the question is how we can combine these elements in a clever way and come up with something really good," he says. He is by no means assured of quick success: "It takes a lot of teraflops."New Scientist (sub required)

Census report on home workers

Interesting factoids in this analysis from the US Census Bureau

• The percentage of all workers who worked at least 1 day at
  home increased from 7.0 percent in 1997 to 9.5 percent in 2010.
• The population working exclusively from home increased from
  4.8 percent of all workers to 6.6 percent.
• Home-based work in computer, engineering, and science occupations
  increased by 69 percent between 2000 and 2010.
• Nearly half of home-based workers were self-employed.
• In 2010, the Boulder, Colorado, metropolitan area had among
  the highest percentage of workers who worked from home
  most of the workweek with 10.9 percent.