Technology – Page 24 – artdiamondblog.com

Use of Floppy Disks Shows Slowness of Government

(p. A14) WASHINGTON — The technology troubles that plagued the HealthCare.gov website rollout may not have come as a shock to people who work for certain agencies of the government — especially those who still use floppy disks, the cutting-edge technology of the 1980s.
Every day, The Federal Register, the daily journal of the United States government, publishes on its website and in a thick booklet around 100 executive orders, proclamations, proposed rule changes and other government notices that federal agencies are mandated to submit for public inspection.
So far, so good.
It turns out, however, that the Federal Register employees who take in the information for publication from across the government still receive some of it on the 3.5-inch plastic storage squares that have become all but obsolete in the United States.
. . .
“You’ve got this antiquated system that still works but is not nearly as efficient as it could be,” said Stan Soloway, chief executive of the Professional Services Council, which represents more than 370 government contractors. “Companies that work with the government, whether longstanding or newcomers, are all hamstrung by the same limitations.”
The use of floppy disks peaked in American homes and offices in the mid-1990s, and modern computers do not even accommodate them anymore. But The Federal Register continues to accept them, in part because legal and security requirements have yet to be updated, but mostly because the wheels of government grind ever slowly.
. . .
. . . , experts say that an administration that prided itself on its technological savvy has a long way to go in updating the computer technology of the federal government. HealthCare.gov and the floppy disks of The Federal Register, they say, are but two recent examples of a government years behind the private sector in digital innovation.

For the full story, see:
JADA F. SMITH. “Slowly They Modernize: A Federal Agency That Still Uses Floppy Disks.” The New York Times (Sat., December 7, 2013): A14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date December 6, 2013.)

Kits Let Model T Owners Transform Them into Tractors, Snowmobiles, Roadsters and Trucks

“OFF ROAD; Kits to take the Model T places Henry Ford never intended included tractor conversions, . . . ” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) WHEN Henry Ford started to manufacture his groundbreaking Model T on Sept. 27, 1908, he probably never imagined that the spindly little car would remain in production for 19 years. Nor could Ford have foreseen that his company would eventually build more than 15 million Tin Lizzies, making him a billionaire while putting the world on wheels.

But nearly as significant as the Model T’s ubiquity was its knack for performing tasks far beyond basic transportation. As quickly as customers left the dealers’ lot, they began transforming their Ts to suit their specialized needs, assisted by scores of new companies that sprang up to cater exclusively to the world’s most popular car.
Following the Model T’s skyrocketing success came mail-order catalogs and magazine advertisements filled with parts and kits to turn the humble Fords into farm tractors, mobile sawmills, snowmobiles, racy roadsters and even semi-trucks. Indeed, historians credit the Model T — which Ford first advertised as The Universal Car — with launching today’s multibillion-dollar automotive aftermarket industry.

For the full story, see:
LINDSAY BROOKE. “Mr. Ford’s T: Mobility With Versatility.” The New York Times, Automobiles Section (Sun., July 20, 2008): 1 & 14.
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “Mr. Ford’s T: Versatile Mobility.”)

Kerosene Creatively Destroyed Whale Oil

“The whale-oil lamps at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum are obsolete, though at one time, whale oil lighted much of the Western world.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 20) Like oil, particularly in its early days, whaling spawned dazzling fortunes, depending on the brute labor of tens of thousands of men doing dirty, sweaty, dangerous work. Like oil, it began with the prizes closest to home and then found itself exploring every corner of the globe. And like oil, whaling at its peak seemed impregnable, its product so far superior to its trifling rivals, like smelly lard oil or volatile camphene, that whaling interests mocked their competitors.

“Great noise is made by many of the newspapers and thousands of the traders in the country about lard oil, chemical oil, camphene oil, and a half-dozen other luminous humbugs,” The Nantucket Inquirer snorted derisively in 1843. It went on: “But let not our envious and — in view of the lard oil mania — we had well nigh said, hog-gish opponents, indulge themselves in any such dreams.”
But, in fact, whaling was already just about done, said Eric Jay Dolin, who . . . is the author of “Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America.” Whales near North America were becoming scarce, and the birth of the American petroleum industry in 1859 in Titusville, Pa., allowed kerosene to supplant whale oil before the electric light replaced both of them and oil found other uses.
. . .
Mr. Dolin said the message for today was that one era’s irreplaceable energy source could be the next one’s relic. Like whaling, he said, big oil is ripe to be replaced by something newer, cleaner, more appropriate for its moment.

For the full story, see:
PETER APPLEBOME. “OUR TOWNS; Once They Thought Whale Oil Was Indispensable, Too.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., August 3, 2008): 20.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title, “OUR TOWNS; They Used to Say Whale Oil Was Indispensable, Too.”)

Dolin’s book is:
Dolin, Eric Jay. Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007.

Not All Environmentalists Reject the Refrigerator

(p. D4) MANY environmentalists — even many who think nothing of using recycled toilet paper or cut the thermostat to near-arctic levels — see fridge-free living as an extreme choice or an impractical and excessive goal.
“The refrigerator was a smart advance for society,” said Gretchen Willis, 37, an environmentally conscious mother of four in Arlington, Tex., who recently read about the practice on a popular eco-themed blog, thecrunchychicken.com, and was astounded.
“I never would have thought of it,” Ms. Willis said, explaining that although she’s committed to recycling and using fluorescent bulbs, she draws the line at any environmental practice that will result in great expense or inconvenience. Living without a refrigerator, she said, qualifies on both counts: she would have to buy more food in smaller quantities because of spoilage, prepare exact amounts because she couldn’t refrigerate leftovers, and make daily trips to the grocery store.
“It’s silly not to have one,” she said, “considering what the alternative is: drinking up a gallon of milk in one day so it doesn’t spoil.”
Deanna Duke, who lives in Seattle and runs the site Ms. Willis visited, said that taking a stand for or against unplugging has become “a badge of honor” for those on either side. “It’s either ‘look how far I’m willing to go,’ or ‘look how far I’m not willing to go,’ ” she said. For her part, Ms. Duke may refrain from watering her lawn in an effort at conservation, but she’s firmly in the pro-refrigerator camp. “I can’t think of any circumstances, other than an involuntary extreme situation, that would make me unplug my fridge,” she said. “The convenience factor is too high.”
. . .
Marty O’Gorman, the vice president of Frigidaire, said an 18-cubic-foot Energy Star-rated Frigidaire refrigerator uses about 380 kilowatt-hours a year — less than a standard clothes dryer — and costs a homeowner $40, or about 11 cents a day.
. . .
. . . , Mr. O’Gorman said downsizing from a standard model to Frigidaire’s smallest minifridge would result in only about $6 in energy savings over a year.
It’s this sort of practical calculus that has led many who advocate sustainable living to view unplugging the fridge as a dubious practice. They point out that it is likely to result in more trips to the store (which burns more gas, for those who drive) and the purchase of food in smaller portions (thus more packaging).
“It’s easy to look at your bill and say, ‘I’m saving energy,’ ” Ms. Duke said. “But you need to look at the whole supply chain.”

For the full story, see:
STEVEN KURUTZ. “Trashing the Fridge.” The New York Times (Thurs., February 5, 2009): D1 & D4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 4, 2009.)

Better Batteries Would Be a General Purpose Technology (GPT)

Economists of technology have been thinking about General Purpose Technologies (GPT) for the last 10 years or so. As the name implies, a GPT is one where there are broad applications, and new applications are invented as the price of the GPT declines. My plausible guess is that a breakthrough in battery technology would be a very important GPT. The progress sketched below is probably not a breakthrough, but progress is good.

(p. C4) People take batteries for granted, but they shouldn’t. All kinds of technological advances hinge on developing smaller and more powerful mobile energy sources.
Researchers at Harvard University and the University of Illinois are reporting just such a creation, one that happens to be no bigger than a grain of sand. These tiny but powerful lithium-ion batteries raise the prospect of a new generation of medical and other devices that can go where traditional hulking batteries can’t.
. . .
Jennifer Lewis, a materials scientist at Harvard, says these batteries can store more energy because 3-D printing enables the stacking of electrodes in greater volume than the thin-film methods now used to make microbatteries.

For the full story, see:
DANIEL AKST. “R AND D: Batteries on the Head of a Pin.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 22, 2013): C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date June 21, 2013.)

Silicon Valley Is Open to Creative Destruction, But Tired of Taxes

(p. A15) Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.
When the howls of creative destruction blew through the auto and steel industries, their executives lobbied Washington for bailouts and tariffs. For now, Silicon Valley remains optimistic enough that its executives don’t mind having their own businesses creatively destroyed by newer technologies and smarter innovations. That’s an encouraging lesson from this newspaper’s recent All Things Digital conference, which each year attracts hundreds of technology leaders and investors.
. . .
In a 90-minute grilling by the Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook assured the audience that his company has “some incredible plans that we’ve been working on for a while.”
Mr. Cook’s sunny outlook was clouded only by his dealings with Washington. He was recently the main witness at hearings called by Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, who accused Apple of violating tax laws. In fact, Apple’s use of foreign subsidiaries is entirely legal–and Apple is the largest taxpayer in the U.S., contributing $6 billion a year to the government’s coffers.
Mr. Cook put on a brave face about the hearings, saying, “I thought it was very important to go tell our side of the story and to view that as an opportunity instead of a pain in the [expletive].” Mr. Cook’s foul language was understandable. “Just gut the [tax] code,” he told the conference. “It’s 7,500 pages long. . . . Apple’s tax return is two feet high. It’s crazy.”
When the audience applauded, Ms. Swisher quipped, “All right, Rand Paul.” A woman shouted: “No, I’m a Democrat!” One reason the technology industry remains the center of innovation may be that many technologists of all parties view trips to Washington as a pain.

For the full commentary, see:
L. GORDON CROVITZ. “INFORMATION AGE; Techies Cheer Creative Destruction.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 3, 2013): A15.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs added; italics in original; ellipsis, and bracketed words, within next-to-last paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 2, 2013.)

Google’s Bathrooms Showed Montessori Discipline

(p. 124) You could even see the company’s work/ play paradox in its bathrooms. In some of Google’s loos, even the toilets were toys: high-tech Japanese units with heated seats, cleansing water jets, and a control panel that looked as though it could run a space shuttle. But on the side of the stall–and, for men, at an eye-level wall placement at the urinals–was the work side of Google, a sheet of paper with a small lesson in improved coding. A typical “Testing on the Toilet” instructional dealt with the intricacies of load testing or C + + microbenchmarking. Not a second was wasted in fulfilling Google’s lofty–and work-intensive–mission.
It’s almost as if Larry and Sergey were thinking of Maria Montessori’s claim “Discipline must come through liberty…. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself.” (p. 125) Just as it was crucial to Montessori that nothing a teacher does destroy a child’s creative innocence, Brin and Page felt that Google’s leaders should not annihilate an engineer’s impulse to change the world by coding up some kind of moon shot.
“We designed Google,” Urs Hölzle says, “to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free.”

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

Frank Lloyd Wright Loved Cars

“In the early 1920s, Wright bought a 1929 Cord L-29, which he praised for its sensible front-wheel drive. Besides, “It looked becoming to my houses,” he wrote in his book “An Autobiography.” He seemed to have a special bond with the Cord. “The feeling comes to me that the Cord should be heroic in this autobiography somewhere,” he wrote.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 9) Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect whose birth in 1867 preceded the gasoline-powered automobile’s by about 20 years, was an early adopter of the internal-combustion engine and an auto aficionado all his life.
He was also eerily prophetic in understanding how the car would transform the American landscape, and his designs reflect this understanding. Wright often designed both for and around automobiles, and his masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, owes its most distinctive feature, the spiral of its rotunda, to his love for the automobile.
. . .
Wright was seduced by the combination of beauty, power and speed, whether powered by hay or by gas. He owned horses, and his first car, a yellow Model K Stoddard-Dayton roadster, was the same model that in 1909 won the very first automobile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Called the Yellow Devil by his neighbors, this was a 45-horsepower car capable of going 60 miles an hour. Wright and his sons seemed to enjoy that horsepower with abandon: “Dad was kept busy paying fines,” his son John observed. So enamored was Wright of his automobile that he installed gas pumps in the garage of his home and studio in Oak Park, Ill.
. . .
In the early 1920s, Wright owned a custom-built Cadillac and later bought a 1929 Cord L-29, which he praised for its sensible front-wheel drive. Besides, “It looked becoming to my houses,” he wrote in his book “An Autobiography.” He seemed to have a special bond with the Cord. “The feeling comes to me that the Cord should be heroic in this autobiography somewhere,” he wrote.
Wright’s Cord can be seen today at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Ind.

For the full story, see:
INGRID STEFFENSEN. “Frank Lloyd Wright: The Auto as Architect’s Inspiration.” The New York Times, SportsSunday Section (Sun., August 9, 2009): 9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date August 6, 2009 and the title “The Auto as Architect’s Inspiration.” There are some small differences between the print and online versions, although I think the sentences quoted above are the same in both.)

Wright’s autobiography, mentioned above, is:
Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Horizon Press, 1977.

Why IT-Savy Companies Are More Profitable

Dr. Peter Weill, Chair of the Center for Information Systems Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Source of caption information and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. R2) DR. WEILL: The IT-savvy companies are 21% more profitable than non-IT-savvy companies. And the profitability shows up in two ways. One is that IT-savvy companies have identified the best way to run their core day-to-day processes. Think about UPS or Southwest Airlines or Amazon: They run those core processes flawlessly, 24 hours a day.

The second thing is that IT-savvy companies are faster to market with new products and services that are add-ons, because their innovations are so much easier to integrate than in a company with siloed technology architecture, where you have to glue together everything and test it and make sure that it all works. We call that the agility paradox–the companies that have more standardized and digitized business processes are faster to market and get more revenue from new products.
Those are the two sources of their greater profitability: lower costs for running existing business processes, and faster innovation.

For the full interview, see:
Martha E. Mangelsdorf, interviewer. “EXECUTIVE BRIEFING; Getting an Edge From IT; Companies need to think strategically about their tech investments.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., November 30, 2009): R2.
(Note: bold in original.)

Yahoo Execs Complained that Google Did Yahoo Searches too Well

(p. 45) Even though Google never announced when it refreshed its index, there would invariably be a slight rise in queries around the world soon after the change was implemented. It was as if the global subconscious realized that there were fresher results available.
The response of Yahoo’s users to the Google technology, though, was probably more conscious. They noticed that search was better and used it more. “It increased traffic by, like, 50 percent in two months,” Manber recalls of the switch to Google. But the only comment he got from Yahoo executives was complaints that people were searching too much and they would have to pay higher fees to Google.
But the money Google received for providing search was not the biggest benefit. Even more valuable was that it now had access to many more users and much more data. It would be data that took Google search to the next level. The search behavior of users, captured and encapsulated in the logs that could be analyzed and mined, would make Google the ultimate learning machine.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Silicon Valley May Be Insulated from the Jobs Ordinary People Need to Get Done

A long while ago I read somewhere that in his prime Bill Gates deliberately tested Microsoft software on the limited hardware that mainstream customers could afford, rather than on the cutting edge hardware he himself could easily afford. I thought that this gave an important clue to Gates’ and Microsoft’s success.
Christensen and Raynor (2003) suggest that the successful entrepreneur will think hard about what jobs ordinary people want to get done, but are having difficulty doing.
The passages quoted below suggest that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are insulated from ordinary life, and so may need to work harder at learning what the real problems are.

(p. B5) Engineers tend to move to the Bay Area because of the opportunity to get together with other engineers and, just maybe, create a great company, Mr. Smith said. But in a region that has the highest concentration of tech workers in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the bars, restaurants and other haunts of entrepreneurs can be an echo chamber. The result can be a focus on solutions for mundane problems.
. . .
. . . too often, says Jason Pontin, the editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review, . . . start-ups are solving “fake problems that don’t actually create any value.” Mr. Pontin knows a thing or two about companies that aren’t exactly reaching for the stars. From 1996 to 2002, he was the editor of Red Herring, a magazine in San Francisco that chronicled the region’s dot-com boom and eventual collapse.

For the full commentary, see:
NICK BILTON. “Disruptions: The Echo Chamber of Silicon Valley.” The New York Times (Mon., June 3, 2013): B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 2, 2013.)

The Christensen and Raynor book that I mention above, is:
Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.