technoist at play

Mullainathan's focus is on social challenges, such as under adoption of critical medical advances, etc, due to human factor issues. That is, with known technologies in place, we often fail at the last mile. Consider diarrhea in India or diabetes in the 'Western' world. There is a surprising lack of compliance with known remedies, technologies or medicines due to “human factors”. Mullainathan recommends the use of psychology, marketing, and “the scientific method” to test what actually works to get things adopted. This is critically important, world changing, life changing “stuff”. An excellent talk.
It's also relevant to every organization offering a new technology, whether a fire starting widget, or a high tech enterprise computing solution. Whether provided by startup or enterprise - or indeed for altruistic or rapacious motives.
Once you’ve watched the video, what are your answers to:
1. Making your innovation easy to adopt?
2. Reducing friction for day to day use?

Mindsets and Achievement
Many students believe that intelligence is fixed, that each person has a certain amount and that's that. We call this a fixed mindset, and, as you will see, students with this mindset worry about how much of this fixed intelligence they possess. A fixed mindset makes challenges threatening for students (because they believe that their fixed ability may not be up to the task) and it makes mistakes and failures demoralizing (because they believe that such setbacks reflect badly on their level of fixed intelligence).

It is the belief that intelligence can be developed that opens students to a love of learning, a belief in the power of effort and constructive, determined reactions to setbacks.

Other students believe that intelligence is something that can be cultivated through effort and education. They don't necessarily believe that everyone has the same abilities or that anyone can be as smart as Einstein, but they do believe that everyone can improve their abilities. And they understand that even Einstein wasn't Einstein until he put in years of focused hard work. In short, students with this growth mindset believe that intelligence is a potential that can be realized through learning. As a result, confronting challenges, profiting from mistakes, and persevering in the face of setbacks become ways of getting smarter.

Keeping kids motivated at school, no doubt also effective with many adults ...

Back on the tech angle - we develop where we're challenged and undertake focused practice. For many today, that's computer games. So where do deep skills in massive multi-player, avatar based computer games, hand-held internet gadgets, multi-tasking and instant connectivity to anyone, anywhere take us. What sort of "collective mind" are we developing?

Article via @andragy

Great example of a technology that fits expectations and world view of its target market -- and appears likly to make a concrete difference. (Unlike too many emerging economy do good offerings (such as OLPC - cool but not meeting immediate needs)).

Over the past twelve months, deployment of OK Labs solution has doubled from 250 million mobile devices into more than 500 million devices. OKL4 now ships on cutting-edge smartphones such as the HTC G1 and G2, the HTC Hero, the Motorola Droid and Cliq, the Palm Pre, and the Toshiba TG01OK. Moreover, the OKL4 Microvisor now powers the world's first and only commercially-available fully-virtualized smartphone, the Motorola Evoke QA4.

OK Labs (http://www.ok-labs.com/) is a Citrix strategic partner; we're doing some work with them in Citrix Labs around Android functionality; AND ... we have a webinar coming up on realizing the Citrix Nirvanaphone with the OK Labs Microvisor. For more info: http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1861783
(timing not great for Aussies, but there will be a recording)

Creating the future.

One of the most alarming conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a widely respected organization established by the United Nations, is that glaciers in the Himalayas could be gone 25 years from now, eliminating a primary source of water for hundreds of millions of people. But a number of glaciologists have argued that this conclusion is wrong, and now the IPCC admits that the conclusion is largely unsubstantiated, based on news reports rather than published, peer-reviewed scientific studies.

Minor exaggeration?

"The error has been traced to the fact that the IPCC permits the citation of non-peer-reviewed sources, called "grey literature," in cases where peer-reviewed data is not available."

PC maker ASUS has plans to develop and build an educational robot for kids, the EeeBot, that would run on the open-source Android operating system from Google. According to a Wednesday report, the project will be sponsored by the Taiwanese government to promote Android. A government website describes the project as an affordable robot, with all hardware and software tweaking performed by ASUS.

Robots are the new new thing. Combines robots, one of my favorite PC appliances (the EEE), and the mobile phone revolution. I'm in geek heaven -can't wait for Christmas in two years ...

Food for thought on the future of the desktop experience - beautiful hand crafted desktop themes. Seems a shame to even think about running applications ... unless equally elegant.

Would any of these play well/poorly in a 'virtual desktop' world, or are they so different to the traditional windows/OSX desktop that they just fail?

http://lifehacker.com/5429064/most-popular-featured-desktops-of-2009

'Neat' advance in robot vac state of the art. Whereas roomba uses the minimalistic approach pioneered by Rodney Brookes, the Neato uses a much more traditional 'big robotics' approach, with laser positioning and explicit mapping. For an overview see the Wired Gadget lab article at: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/neato-vacuum-cleaner

Interesting to compare the 'gadget geek' article in wired with the press release from an undoubtedly more technical background - talking with enthusiasm about use of the SLAM algorithm, http://www.neatorobotics.com/pr_12_16_2009.html "The Neato XV-11 is the first mapping robot with intelligent path planning and cleaning. Using RPS Technology, the Neato XV-11 has a 360-degree view of a room, allowing it to map the details including walls, furniture, doorways and other obstacles up to four meters away. Unlike other cleaning robots that randomly bounce around a room, the Neato XV-11 maps the room with its RPS Technology. It then methodically cleans floors using SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) technology and path planning algorithms to outline the area to clean and then fully clean within the space in a back-and-forth pattern."

The Australian Conference on Robotics and Automation (http://www.araa.asn.au/acra/acra2009/) had a bunch of papers on extending/applying SLAM. I also understand that these lasers and presumably SLAM were heavily used (pioneered?) in the DARPA autonomous vehicle challenges.

... But there's one cliche in particular that annoys Danah Boyd: the "digital native".

"There's nothing native about young people's engagement with technology," she says, adamantly.

The Microsoft researcher, who has made a career from studying the way younger people use the web, doesn't think much of the widely held assumption that children are innately better at coping with the web or negotiating the hurdles of digital life. Instead, she suggests, they're pretty much like everyone else.

"Young people are learning, they're learning about the social world around them," she says. "The social world around them today has mediated technologies, thus in order to learn about the social world they're learning about the mediated technologies. And they're leveraging that to work out the shit that kids have always worked out: peer sociality, status, their first crush."

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/09/interview-microsoft-researcher-danah-boyd#)

What other common, but incorrect, views do we hold about the internet?
How else does the technoutopian view miss the mark?

Important questions for anyone who cares about the longer term.

This is an interesting approach to the mobile device, ergonomics over all other considerations - will be interesting to see market response.

Is this a continuum from Else (elegant ergonomics and basic smartphone), though iPhone (emotional appeal and apps, but additional UI complexity to deal with apps) up to Android (mixed levels of UI/device elegance, but with higher levels of freedom to customize, applications).

Regardless ... I _need_ all three.