The Army’s Maj. Keith Parker visited the GCN Lab this week to show how the Go Mobile program interfaces with the Army Knowledge Online (AKO) system .
It was an interesting meeting, with Parker explaining how the Army was using cell phones that soldiers were already carrying to create a secure network comprised of the Redfly companion, which is basically a dummy terminal without the cell phone brain, and a bunch of other things such as printers, projectors, goggles and even solar-powered charging kits.
As a technology guy, I was impressed with the types of devices that were shown, especially the tiny projector. But what impressed me more than anything was that every single application running in the Go Mobile Program was open source. Here we have the Army relying on open-source programs for a major network. Back when I was starting out at GCN in 1996 as a reporter, and later on in the lab around 1998, everything that I covered was pretty much custom-built for the military. I once attended a military simulation conference and they were showing huge computers that were built just for the military alongside some commercial off the shelf (COTS) equipment that was just coming into style.
The COTS equipment saved the military money because they were using commercial software to create military applications. But using open-source software is even better, because it’s free, assuming you can get some good applications built.
Parker said the troops themselves initiate a lot of the applications. Recruits going into the Army today are all very technically savvy, and many of them can even write advanced code, he said. With the military asking soldiers to contribute ideas for the AKO program, this just plays into that plan if soldiers can both suggest applications and also write them.
Moving from million-dollar customized applications to COTS was a big step. But as much ink as GCN has devoted to COTS over the years, this could be an even bigger move. When rank-and-file solders are able to write the very applications they are using, it kind of gives a new meaning to the Army of One. And it makes you respect our soldiers even more.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Google co-founder Sergey Brin wants more computers in schools
High school dropout Sergey Brin has a few ideas on how the educational system should be improved. Not surprisingly from a guy who co-founded Google, where he still serves as president of technology and one of the company's three key decision-makers, a lot of those ideas center on computers.
"It's important for students to be put in touch with real-world problems," Brin said. "The curriculum should include computer science. Mathematics should include statistics. The curriculums should really adjust."
He advocated putting all textbooks on computers, to make for easier access, and for putting high school students to work -- writing Wikipedia articles, and teaching technology to senior citizens and middle school students. In teaching, they will learn.
Brin spoke today at a conference on Google's campus, Breakthrough Learning in the Digital Age, which the tech company is co-hosting with Common Sense Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. By and large, speakers passionately spoke of the advantages of equipping schools with the latest in digital technology, and of engaging students on their home turf -- computers.
Google has been relatively quiet in the field of education, but the company is starting to make a splash. For the last three years, it has given schools the premium version of its Google Apps, enabling schools to run their business and provide teachers with e-mail and other tools that it typically charges corporations for. In part, the giveaway helps advance Google's plan of...
...providing universal access to all the world's information; in part it helps prepare the workforce of tomorrow; and it also is indoctrinating that workforce with the Google brand.
"The kids who are in school are our future business leaders," said Cristin Frodella, product marketing manager for the Google Apps, Education Edition. "If they like Google Apps now, they'll ask for it by name. There is a value there."
The presence of Brin at the conference, as well as Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and company vice president Marissa Mayer, speaks volumes to the company's commitment to education, said Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, an advocacy group. "It's a very positive symbolic role," Steyer said. "Google is serious about helping kids, particularly disadvantaged kids."
Brin, wearing some funky new Vibram FiveFingers shoes that fit the feet like a glove, told how his family enrolled him in a Montessori school from age 6 to 11, where he was able to explore his own interests in learning. "The school had an Apple II," said Brin, now 36. "When I was 9, my parents gave me a Commodore 64, which was fun. At the time, the opportunity to program your own computer was easier than it is today. Today there are significantly larger barriers because of the complexity built into computing."
After he left the Montessori school, Brin felt he was stuck in a 19th-century curriculum, and he ultimately quit high school after his junior year. He remains on leave from Stanford, where he was working on his doctorate when he and Larry Page hit upon the algorithm that led to Google, and turned them both into billionaires.
Brin had some other ideas for improving schools, most notably treating teachers better. His mother-in-law, Esther Wojcicki, who spoke at the conference, teaches English and journalism at Palo Alto High School, and many of his friends are teachers. "It's really a miserable job," he said. "They're not really paid a living wage."
Brin foresees computers getting cheaper and cheaper, and broadband access becoming more ubiquitous, which will make computers more a part of education than ever. A relatively new parent, Brin was asked by moderator James Bennet, editor of Atlantic magazine, what kind of technological world he envisions 15 or 20 years from now.
Brin said he hoped that the increasingly powerful access to information would free people up to become more capable individuals. But he did see a downside.
"When I was growing up, I always knew I'd be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence," he said. But now that studens can see beyond their own school or hometown, they see that "there are always going to be a million people better than you at times, or someone will always be far better than you. I feel there's an existential angst among young people. I didn't have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb."
"It's important for students to be put in touch with real-world problems," Brin said. "The curriculum should include computer science. Mathematics should include statistics. The curriculums should really adjust."
He advocated putting all textbooks on computers, to make for easier access, and for putting high school students to work -- writing Wikipedia articles, and teaching technology to senior citizens and middle school students. In teaching, they will learn.
Brin spoke today at a conference on Google's campus, Breakthrough Learning in the Digital Age, which the tech company is co-hosting with Common Sense Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. By and large, speakers passionately spoke of the advantages of equipping schools with the latest in digital technology, and of engaging students on their home turf -- computers.
Google has been relatively quiet in the field of education, but the company is starting to make a splash. For the last three years, it has given schools the premium version of its Google Apps, enabling schools to run their business and provide teachers with e-mail and other tools that it typically charges corporations for. In part, the giveaway helps advance Google's plan of...
...providing universal access to all the world's information; in part it helps prepare the workforce of tomorrow; and it also is indoctrinating that workforce with the Google brand.
"The kids who are in school are our future business leaders," said Cristin Frodella, product marketing manager for the Google Apps, Education Edition. "If they like Google Apps now, they'll ask for it by name. There is a value there."
The presence of Brin at the conference, as well as Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and company vice president Marissa Mayer, speaks volumes to the company's commitment to education, said Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, an advocacy group. "It's a very positive symbolic role," Steyer said. "Google is serious about helping kids, particularly disadvantaged kids."
Brin, wearing some funky new Vibram FiveFingers shoes that fit the feet like a glove, told how his family enrolled him in a Montessori school from age 6 to 11, where he was able to explore his own interests in learning. "The school had an Apple II," said Brin, now 36. "When I was 9, my parents gave me a Commodore 64, which was fun. At the time, the opportunity to program your own computer was easier than it is today. Today there are significantly larger barriers because of the complexity built into computing."
After he left the Montessori school, Brin felt he was stuck in a 19th-century curriculum, and he ultimately quit high school after his junior year. He remains on leave from Stanford, where he was working on his doctorate when he and Larry Page hit upon the algorithm that led to Google, and turned them both into billionaires.
Brin had some other ideas for improving schools, most notably treating teachers better. His mother-in-law, Esther Wojcicki, who spoke at the conference, teaches English and journalism at Palo Alto High School, and many of his friends are teachers. "It's really a miserable job," he said. "They're not really paid a living wage."
Brin foresees computers getting cheaper and cheaper, and broadband access becoming more ubiquitous, which will make computers more a part of education than ever. A relatively new parent, Brin was asked by moderator James Bennet, editor of Atlantic magazine, what kind of technological world he envisions 15 or 20 years from now.
Brin said he hoped that the increasingly powerful access to information would free people up to become more capable individuals. But he did see a downside.
"When I was growing up, I always knew I'd be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence," he said. But now that studens can see beyond their own school or hometown, they see that "there are always going to be a million people better than you at times, or someone will always be far better than you. I feel there's an existential angst among young people. I didn't have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb."
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
The computer engineer who thinks we're doomed
It was a fullish moon when I picked up a new book called "The Lights in the Tunnel," thinking that the title was sure to lift my spirits on All Souls Day.
Perhaps I should have picked me up some Dostoyevsky.
It's not that "The Lights in the Tunnel" isn't thoughtful or interesting. The author, Martin Ford, is a computer engineer who has clearly spent many hours considering the true effects of technology on society.
It's just that a rough summation of those effects might be described as "really bloody terrible."
Essentially, he believes that technology is the direct cause of job losses that will never return. In fact, his fear is that even in those industries that are currently still labor intensive, job losses are inevitable. Which just might mean that there will be vast numbers of people all over the world who will have no money to spend at Zara. Not even at Old Navy.
Naturally, Ford has found himself in a spirited debate with economists who seem to think his arguments border on loonism.
A chap named Robin Hanson seems rather hurt that Ford isn't in the thrall of economists' thinking--you know, the optimistic stuff about how technology will always produce more jobs and more wealth because we humans are, well, so clever.
Perhaps I paraphrase a touch, but economists such as Hanson tend to believe that economic inequality might be a politically difficult thing, but it doesn't portend economic disaster: because, as Hanson says, "producers can focus on giving the rich what they want, and innovation and growth is just as feasible for elite products as for mass products."
Now of course, I'm not going to argue with economists about human behavior because it's generally akin to arguing with a hockey color commentator about creme caramel.
However, Ford, the techie whom economists dismiss, has a very interesting solution to his rather bleak human scenario. He seems rather keen on a consumption tax, or a direct tax on business that would attempt to capture the income that people would have earned if they had had a job. Then he would incentivize the unemployed to contribute to society according to their own talents and society's needs.
You need a strong heart and stomach to read Ford's book, but some small part of me cannot help but wonder whether his rather miserable prognostication might have some truth to it.
"Glenn Beck would scream," Ford told me in an e-mail. Which made me immediately wonder why his publishers hadn't put that quote on the book cover.
Strangely, Ford isn't some sandal-wearing socialist wagging his finger at the money lenders.
"Capitalism has worked out fairly well for me, and I'd like to keep it around. If the ideas in the book are correct, then I really wonder if the system will be sustainable without some type of intervention," he told me.
Here is a computer engineer who's genuinely worried about, well, human beings.
"If that underclass increases relentlessly over time, and if you start seeing more educated people getting dragged into it, then we are going to have a huge problem. I think that may happen as machines and computers keep getting better until eventually they can do the jobs of even people with lots of education and training. At that point I think you have to do something," he added.
Unfortunately, the history of the world doesn't necessarily offer too much hope for the implementation of the kind of intervention that Ford is suggesting.
So one day, you, me, Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Liv Tyler might be seated in a devastated landscape muttering: "How were we to know we were supposed to listen to bloody Martin Ford? He was just some computer engineer."
Perhaps I should have picked me up some Dostoyevsky.
It's not that "The Lights in the Tunnel" isn't thoughtful or interesting. The author, Martin Ford, is a computer engineer who has clearly spent many hours considering the true effects of technology on society.
It's just that a rough summation of those effects might be described as "really bloody terrible."
Essentially, he believes that technology is the direct cause of job losses that will never return. In fact, his fear is that even in those industries that are currently still labor intensive, job losses are inevitable. Which just might mean that there will be vast numbers of people all over the world who will have no money to spend at Zara. Not even at Old Navy.
Naturally, Ford has found himself in a spirited debate with economists who seem to think his arguments border on loonism.
A chap named Robin Hanson seems rather hurt that Ford isn't in the thrall of economists' thinking--you know, the optimistic stuff about how technology will always produce more jobs and more wealth because we humans are, well, so clever.
Perhaps I paraphrase a touch, but economists such as Hanson tend to believe that economic inequality might be a politically difficult thing, but it doesn't portend economic disaster: because, as Hanson says, "producers can focus on giving the rich what they want, and innovation and growth is just as feasible for elite products as for mass products."
Now of course, I'm not going to argue with economists about human behavior because it's generally akin to arguing with a hockey color commentator about creme caramel.
However, Ford, the techie whom economists dismiss, has a very interesting solution to his rather bleak human scenario. He seems rather keen on a consumption tax, or a direct tax on business that would attempt to capture the income that people would have earned if they had had a job. Then he would incentivize the unemployed to contribute to society according to their own talents and society's needs.
You need a strong heart and stomach to read Ford's book, but some small part of me cannot help but wonder whether his rather miserable prognostication might have some truth to it.
"Glenn Beck would scream," Ford told me in an e-mail. Which made me immediately wonder why his publishers hadn't put that quote on the book cover.
Strangely, Ford isn't some sandal-wearing socialist wagging his finger at the money lenders.
"Capitalism has worked out fairly well for me, and I'd like to keep it around. If the ideas in the book are correct, then I really wonder if the system will be sustainable without some type of intervention," he told me.
Here is a computer engineer who's genuinely worried about, well, human beings.
"If that underclass increases relentlessly over time, and if you start seeing more educated people getting dragged into it, then we are going to have a huge problem. I think that may happen as machines and computers keep getting better until eventually they can do the jobs of even people with lots of education and training. At that point I think you have to do something," he added.
Unfortunately, the history of the world doesn't necessarily offer too much hope for the implementation of the kind of intervention that Ford is suggesting.
So one day, you, me, Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Liv Tyler might be seated in a devastated landscape muttering: "How were we to know we were supposed to listen to bloody Martin Ford? He was just some computer engineer."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
pendifuyoo1971