RattlerGator Blog

Innovation Saved the Chilean Miners

Innovation that is the hallmark of capitalism, that is.

Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal has the interesting take on the rescue this morning.

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.

The profit = innovation dynamic is the path forward, and we caricature it (as President Obama is given to do) at our own peril.

On Moving Heaven and Earth . . .

. . . to save a life.

Michael Yon consistently shames our national media with on the scene reporting of genuine interest to Americans. His latest, Do Americans Care about British Soldiers?, may be one of his best (but I seem to think that on a regular basis). Here's his intro:

A gunshot ripped through the darkness and a young British soldier fell dying on FOB Jackson.  I was just nearby talking on the satellite phone and saw the commotion.  The soldier was taken to the medical tent and a helicopter lifted him to the excellent trauma center at Camp Bastion.  That he made it to Camp Bastion alive dramatically improved his chances.  But his life teetered and was in danger of slipping away.  Making matters worse, the British medical system back in the United Kingdom did not possess the specialized gear needed to save his life.  Americans had the right gear in Germany, and so the British soldier was put into the American system.

British officers in his unit, 2 Rifles, wanted to track their man every step of the way, and to ensure that his family was informed and supported in this time of high stress.  Yet having their soldier suddenly in the American system caused a temporary glitch in communications with folks in Germany.  The British leadership in Sangin could have worked through the glitch within some hours, but that would have been hours wasted, and they wanted to know the status of their soldier now.  So a British officer in Sangin – thinking creatively –asked if I knew any shortcuts to open communications.  The right people were only an email away: Soldiers Angels.  And so within about two minutes, these fingers typed an email with this subject heading: CALLING ALL ANGELS.

And the Angels responded. Quickly. Read the entire piece; when your tax dollars work best, this is part of what they accomplish.

Does This Make Me A Geek?

I was completely blown away yesterday by an 80-minute presentation on YouTube from the folks at Google, talking about a new open-source product they will be releasing to the general public later this year. This is the way the product was described at TechCrunch:

Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave.

Everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web now, but imagine if you could tie those two forms of communication together and add a load of functionality on top of it. At its most fundamental form, that’s essentially what Wave is. Developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon out of Google’s Sydney, Australia offices, Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff. Or as Lars Rasumussen put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

Having seen a lengthy demonstration, as ridiculous as it may sound, I have to agree.

Me too!

It was an absolutely incredible demonstration. If you've never watched an online video presentation for 80 continuous minutes, this is the time to do so. It boggles the mind to try and think of how this is going to change communications. I'm going to embed the video below:

The technological advances these days are coming in ever quicker cycles. You do have to wonder how we're going to handle it all -- or whether we can. I have faith that we can, and we will. That, too, might make me a geek.

“Duty, Honor, Country, Truth, God.”

Vanderleun! What a talented guy. With the Slipstream Media idea, he's attempting to lay out a path forward, a path many of us are seeking and have been seeking.

This needs to be remembered, I do believe:

Summary:

The Media is how America fights its civil wars. In this war at least half the country is both under-served and is painfully aware it is being under-served and lied to. In pop culture parlance, “We’re going to need bigger guns.”

Seen as the 4th branch of government, the unelected and self-selected Mainstream Media, in cultural and political collusion with the present government, knows this and – even as it dies – will do everything it can to prevent the arming of the people with more and better media.

To control the medium is to control the message. And control of the message means control of the hearts, minds, and votes of the people. To bring a better, clearer, and brighter message to the American people, we must have media that, like the Internet itself, “sees censorship as system damage and routes around it.” To accomplish this we must, in a network of small pieces loosely joined together, work to create a pervasive new media across America. Many of these pieces are already in place. Many more need to be created. All need to be joined in an affiliation. Mainstream media already knows how to do this and we must, to paraphrase Abby Hoffman, "Steal Their Book." Media not busy being born is busy dying.

This is the first in a series of articles on how to go about building a new American media; a media composed of newspapers, television, radio, film, music, publishing, and the multi-media capabilities of the Internet; an American media open to all and founded on the five bedrock principles of “Duty, Honor, Country, Truth, God.”

When dinosaurs die large opportunities for growth bloom within the ecosystem. The death of the old media is such an opportunity. It affords a wide range of possibilities to create a new media, a media that runs to the side of the mainstream media, but ultimately supplants it by slipping by it. For now I call it, The Slipstream Media.

By “The Slipstream Media” I mean the use of all forms of media currently in use to inform and persuade the public that "There is another system."

This series of articles will be composed of theoretical and practical observations on the content, forms, principles, funding, and business structures involved in creating a new media network in the rapidly changing marketplace of today and the foreseeable future. It will focus on, in Lenin’s phrase, “What is to be done,” as well as what can be done, and how the creation of the Slipstream Media might be accomplished.

What is to be done.

The Premise: Better ideas require not only better arguments, but also better means of distribution.

To survive and thrive, better ideas also require funding, a sound business model based on the realities of the present, and a path to positive cash flow.

Now, what about that -- huh? Go read the rest, and keep his website near to your thoughts. The man is on to something.

Food for Thought: Last Week of September 2008

[1] Home Theater Personal Computers (HTPCs)

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A Home Theater PC (HTPC) or media PC is a convergence device that combines the functions of a personal computer and a digital video recorder. It is connected to a television or a television-sized computer display and is often used as a digital photo, music, video player, TV receiver and digital video recorder.

The general goal in a HTPC is usually to combine many or all components of a home theater setup into one box. They can be purchased pre-configured with the required hardware and software needed to add television programming to the PC, or can be cobbled together out of discrete components as is commonly done with Windows Media Center, MythTV, GB-PVR, SageTV, Famulent, or LinuxMCE. The traditional HTPC concept in its purity is becoming less popular, being replaced by other devices.

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For an example of just such a new device, take a look at the next link.

[2] New media on the horizon

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Nero today announced LiquidTV, a combination software and hardware product that brings the entire TiVo experience out of the living room and onto Windows PCs. Offered as a mix of TiVo software and a handful of unique features, LiquidTV brings a handful of integration and even video-exporting features to a home theater setup or on-the-road TV enthusiast. LiquidTV won't be available until October 15, but Ars Technica spoke with Nero and took a demo unit for a spin to see how well TiVo's PC liberation went.

The basics

LiquidTV is a two-part product: the TiVo PC software that runs the show and a WinTV-HVR-950Q TV tuner card from Hauppauge. This package sells for $199—which includes a one-year TiVo subscription—but you can also purchase the TiVo software by itself for $99 if you own a compatible TV tuner card. Along with the included tuner card, Nero provides a branded TiVo remote, IR transceiver, portable digital TV antenna, and an RCA input cable for the card.

Setup, as one would expect from a product with "TiVo" on it, was pretty simple. The TiVo PC software is compatible with Windows XP and Vista (we're using the latter), and it warned us about TV tuner-aware applications that could cause conflicts, such as Windows Vista Media Center. The process walked us through getting the tuner card installed, picking a local cable operator, and entering subscription credentials to download TiVo's two-week programming guide. For the record, we're using our home cable line with Nero's included TV tuner card on a quad-core 2.66 Mac Pro with 6GB of RAM, running Vista natively.

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I am amazed at the speed by which all of this is converging.

[3] James Bowman

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Now Fareed Zakaria thinks it clever to pretend that he wants someone to "please put Sarah Palin out of her agony."

You’d think these people could remember that they’ve tried this before. On the same page on which Howard Kurtz tells his readers of what a mess Governor Palin made of the Couric interview, he notes with disapproval that Paul Begala was unrepentant about having described the current president as a "high-functioning moron." Now President Bush isn’t running for anything this year. Such absurdly hyperbolical insults have become a mere tic, a habit that they can’t break for those on the left — which is why, as Mr Begala told Mr Kurtz, "You cannot imagine the positive feedback I've gotten." Oh yes I can! He acts as though the rest of us haven’t been reading the bumper stickers for the last eight years. He wouldn’t have said it if he wasn’t getting a lot of positive feedback.

But that’s just the trouble: the Begalas of the world have cried wolf too often and too frivolously. The force of the complaint, even if it were true, has been dulled by sheer repetition. It’s the same with their promiscuous and bogus charges of "lying" against the President. Now that they’re trying out the same accusations against Senator McCain, they’re finding it harder and harder to get any traction out of it. People may or may not believe that either President Bush or Senator McCain have in fact lied about something, but they are most unlikely to connect that belief, one way or another, with such charges from their political opponents. They’ve heard them too often before. So with Sarah Palin’s intelligence. She may be as thick as two short planks, as Princess Diana once said of herself, but no one not already disposed to believe so is likely to be persuaded of the fact by people for whom it is second nature to cast aspersions on the intelligence of Republicans.

Doubtless such people really do believe in their own superior intelligence, and that of the politicians who think as they do, but it’s pretty hard to point to any time in the past when Americans — as opposed to Britons — have been impressed by that argument, even if they thought it were true.

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[4] Mark Steyn

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Peter, I always enjoy hearing Burke's admonition that a member of parliament owes his constituents his judgment rather than a spasmodic jerk to the latest opinion poll. But isn't it the case that we're in this mess because US politicians previously subordinated "the general reason of the whole" to "local interests" and "local prejudices"?

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"As a general proposition, when told by unanimous elites that a particular course of action is urgent and necessary to avoid disaster, there's a lot to be said for going fishing."

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Roger that, Mark Steyn, roger that.

Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less

There is a movement stirring out in the country, just in the nick of time. The "Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less." campaign seems to be catching on and not a minute too soon.

I recall having an argument at friends house with one of his friends in 2006 or so; the friend of the friend was a particularly resolute Democrat who absolutely hated everything associated with Dubya and had a penchant for insisting the Iraq War was about nothing -- nothing -- but oil. So at one point during the evening I finally relented and stated to him, "let us presume you are correct for the sake of argument. Okay? Are you willing to pay $5 a gallon for oil?"

He insisted he would be fine with that.

The Barack Obama crowd, ever so European, kinda sorta seem disposed to insist the same.

Imagine how pleased I am to see that this single issue may be the one that puts the Republicans over the top in the November elections. Additionally, think of how pleased I am to find that my good friend the rabid Democrat (and his ilk) may be the responsible parties for handing the issue to Republicans on a silver platter.

And it won't have a damn thing to do with the race of Barack Hussein Obama. That, my friends, is supremely sweet.

Taking the Twitter Plunge

I like to venture far afield at times and review the websites of folks who at some distant point in the past may have grabbed my curiosity at times. Robert Scoble is one such person. On his Scobleizer website, he recently listed these reasons to explain why the secret of Twitter (a micro-blogging technology tool that allows users to send character-limited updates known as tweets related to what they're doing, discussing, or reading, etc.) is not how many folks follow you via that tool but, conversely, how many folks you follow. In Scoble's opinion:

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1. Getting followed just means you’re popular. Yes, that’s cool, but it hardly will make you interesting. Paris Hilton will have more Twitter members than I will, when she joins.
2. Getting followed a lot might mean you’re using it for a publishing system. If all you have is followers what makes that different from owning a newspaper, a radio station, a TV station, or, even, a Web site? Hint: nothing.
3. If you’re just trying to get followed you’re probably just needing attention or you might be Jason Calacanis.

But what does following a lot of people say?

1. You’re trying to learn more.
2. You’re trying to meet more people.
3. You’re trying to be a better listener.
4. You’re communicating to the world that you’d like to be listened to (golden rule: treat people how you’d like to be treated).
5. You’re trying to find out about more stuff. More events. More stories.

Now, who would you rather hang out with? A person who only talks and doesn’t listen? Or a person who listens to as many people as he can?

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Listen to as many people as you reasonably can, of course.

But . . . so many technological revolutions, so little time to get acquainted. It's hell getting old! And although I'm sure I'll be something of a fish out of water, I've taken the plunge and signed on. You can find me at this link:

RattlerGator on Twitter

I'm hopeful I can take the time tomorrow (Wednesday) and play with it a little bit. I thought I was going to be attending to family business in Tampa for the next few days but that has been delayed for a couple of days at least.

Interesting Use of Google Docs and How News Should be Presented Online

I ran across and interesting website run by Bill Dunphy (The Idea Factory -- WebU) while reading Dave Winer's blog (the post was "How Internet News Should Work") when I stumbled upon a basic presentation Dunphy apparently put together using Google Documents.

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In addition to the online collaboration, the tool offers an embeddable, simple flash-based slide show player, which I'm using here.

Let me know what you think.

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I thought it was very interesting and wanted to present it here:

Not bad, not bad at all. Also, the two initial links in this post are worth reading in their own right and (in my estimation) fit within the four corners of this post. For example, this was the comment by Dunphy that originally grabbed my attention:

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I'm a print journalist who's been pulled out of his newsroom (www.thespec.com) to launch and manage my chains WebU, a digital and web technology training center we're putting our entire news and advertising staffs through for a week apiece.

I couldn't agree more - newspapers online need to shake off their print shackles and understand the powerful attraction a river of news has for readers - and advertisers (repeat visits throughout the day). But I'd add a couple of important wrinkles.

What I've really been struck by is the realization that online news is a LOT more like radio than print. It lives in time as well as space on the web "page". Carry the world's news and local news as it happens - get it into that stream as quickly as you can - but that accounts for only maybe 1/3 of the stories told by the average news staff. The rest - the features, the columns, the how-to's , the recipes, the advice columns, the editorial cartoons - should be prorgrammed throughout the day to meet readers needs as they change during the day.

First thing in the morning, I want the weather, maybe traffic. I want to know what's happened over night that I should now about. Equip me to walk out that door. But my lunch time, maybe I want something more entertaining, diversionary. By 3pm I might be looking for what to do that night, or what to cook etc.. The stream changes as the day grows old. AND I'd not only thread conversations and comments from readers with the relevant story - I'd pull the best and drop them into the stream along with the journalists work.

It seems like such a simple, obvious, easy to maintain, model. On top of that you can offer customization, feeds etc. I'd tag each item for search and retrieval purposes and I'd give it a specific kind of shelf life in the main stream (3 hours? 4?) before it flows off the page and drops into the "News Museum" - a daily, sorted archive that would look remarkably like most of the damn dead online news sites look like right now.

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That's an insight -- online news is a lot more like radio than print. True, true, true. Best of all, it sounds like a winning business model.

U.F.'s Integrated Situational Awareness System

I visited Gainesville earlier this week and one of my stops was to call on my favorite Florida professor, Dr. Ronald Foreman. Now retired, and Professor Emeritus in the African American Studies program at U.F., he stepped into the breach when my father passed away during my freshman year. While catching up on things, we happened onto a discussion of the wonders of modern technology (his son apparently gave him a satellite radio) and I was reminded of that discussion today when I stumbled upon information concerning Florida's Integrated Situational Awareness System.

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The University of Florida is seeking a commercial partner to commercialize an Integrated Situation Awareness System to enhance decision-making effectiveness when managing potentially life-threatening situations. Many situations in civil, military, commercial or public safety context unfold dynamically in an uncertain environment. Such situations require the deployment and management of a wide variety of different resources in order to bring the situation to a successful conclusion, or at least to mitigate the consequences that can be caused by such incidents. The decision makers, responsible for deploying and managing various resources in these situations receive inputs from a myriad of sources. This gives rise to the need for a system and method for combining inputs received from diverse sources, and utilizing the combined input to augment a decision maker’s situational awareness. Researchers at the University of Florida have designed such a system that combines a variety of inputs, including live video feeds, federated databases, security systems, and satellite imagery, simultaneously, to augment the decision maker’s situational awareness. Essentially, this Integrated Situation Awareness System (ISAS) is designed for public safety, wide-area environmental monitoring, law enforcement, and anti-terror purposes.

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I presume it is a collaboration with CIMAR and many other disciplines on campus. There is a desire at U.F. to use that ISAS technology as the foundation to develop something they are pitching to the state as a "Real-time Awareness, Decision-making And Response (RADAR) system" with incredible utility across any number of platforms.

Here is the pitch that stresses the incredible potential of the system:

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A fully developed RADAR system will enable high-level decision makers (ranging from campus and local law enforcement officials to the Office of the Governor) to make functionally-enhanced decisions in times of stress and potential crisis. The ISAS research team has already succeeded in bringing together Interactive Media Systems Designers with Agricultural and Biological engineers, Mechanical and Aerospace engineers, Urban Planners and other faculty from the College of Design, Construction and Planning. The original ISAS concept was being developed to augment critical decision-making by our nation’s military and security forces. But as a result of working with various UF researchers in the initial development phase, Digital Worlds [RattlerGator: an incredible collaboration at Florida between the engineering college and the arts, utilizing the tools of         digital technology and culture] realized that an integrated interactive media system could also be applied effectively to a much broader scope of activities including campus and community security.

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What does it all add up to: network-centric operations meets homeland security meets domestic emergency management, presuming you or I or even they can grasp all of that. Take a look at this very interesting (and ambitious) video:

MAV's??? Micro Air Vehicles??? Man, this world is really moving fast. There are phenomenal changes on the horizon that are going to boggle our mind.

Cars Will Be Free in the Future!?!

I don't think so, but that may be entirely a result of my lack of imagination on the subject. I do admit, however, there may be some European scenario where this actually comes to pass. I read a post by Chris Anderson at The Long Tail on a personal friend of his named Shai Agassi. Anderson linked to an entry on Agassi's blog, The Long Tailpipe (as I said, they're friends) discussing oil prices and the launch of "Project Better Place," self-described in this manner:

Project Better Place:

"How to make the world a better place?" One electric car at a time. The planet is running out of natural resources and we are also running out of time - Project Better Place has the vision, plan, investors and the partners to make scalable electric transportation a reality on a global scale and reduce the world's dependency on oil.

The New York Times, quite naturally, had a positive article on this development last month:

Reimagining the Automobile Industry by Selling the Electricity:

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 28 — Shai Agassi, a Silicon Valley technologist who was in competition to become chief executive of SAP, one of the world’s largest software companies, has re-emerged with a grand plan to reinvent the world’s automobile industry around battery-powered all-electric cars. Others are developing green cars, like the Tesla and Chevrolet Volt. However, Mr. Agassi is not planning to make cars, but instead wants to deploy an infrastructure of battery-charging stations in the United States, Europe and the developing world. The new system will sell electric fuel on a subscription basis and will subsidize vehicle costs through leases and credits.

These alternative energy people always strike me as earnest as hell, definitely well-intentioned, but somewhat intolerant with the ways of mankind (that's just a speculative thought, no big deal to me). However, there was an interesting (and skeptical) comment on Anderson's blog:

A Kuiper:

I think Shai hit the nail right on. In Europe, Roadpricing is imminent. Now the gasoline price already is about three or more times the fuel cost in the USA, because of heavy duties. [Compound] that with large taxation costs of yearly ownership of the car - and in most countries a surcharge on the cost of the car (a kind of sales-tax on vehicles; in Holland this is 30%, in other countries this can be 50%). So most costs are static and hidden, paid upfront or yearly without [reflecting] actual use. Only gasoline is a variable cost. The future: Taxes will be [variabilized] so car drivers will pay per kilometer. Now some highways are toll roads - example, the French Péage. But in Germany and other countries trucks have to pay for actual use on all highways. Consumers will have that 'fate' within [ten] years, all over Europe, is my prediction. The state registers the km actually [traveled] and the type, is it on (sub)urban roads or on highways, and the state will charge a toll amount on this actual usage-base. So what is the scale of these variable costs then? The new variable taxes will outweigh the costs of gasoline (about 1.5: 1 to 2:1) depending on the country, the type of car and the type of road. This makes Shai's argument more compelling. When the costs are made variable from state regulation, it will be even more an incentive to just bundle the cost in a charge per km. The cost of the 'iron' (the car itself) fades to the background. It becomes compelling to do the [exercise] to have a small monthly fee and even 'rent' the car for an all-in price per km. If that is charged in the fuel, that could be a model; charge it in a contract from a supplier. [This] is just another business model of the same [fluidization] that can take place 'in the long tail'.

Skeptical as I am, something tells me that the comment is correct and this dude is on to something, even as applied here in America. Good luck to him.