The Services Revolution: Why Social Networks Turned Into an Instituion

Last month I gave a talk (pdf) on innovation timing at OpenWay Club. The presentation covered, among other topics, the unfolding technology revolution in services. The talk drew on several key sources, including the work of Oliver E. Williamson, a Nobel Prize winner in economics from UC Berkeley, Cesar Hidalgo's book "Why Information Grows", and our book with Max Shtein "Scalable Innovation."

My goal was to show that new technologies have fundamentally changed the nature of services because they commoditized "specificity" and "recurrence." (see figures below). That is, in a networked digital world knowing your customers and interacting with them on a regular basis is dramatically less expensive than in a "stand alone brick-and-mortar" world. To illustrate the main points, here's a screen shot of a relevant page from Hidalgo's book (with my annotations) and several slides from the talk.

(The recent purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon is another example of the shift to Groceries-As-Service model, where Amazon leverages its customer insights into recurring retail sales.)

Even more importantly, the new service models have become a major global institution because they addressed the fundamental issue that plagued service businesses since ancient times. Douglas C North (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1993), described the problem in game theory terms:

In the world of personal exchange (recurring-specific - ES), it pays for parties to an exchange to cooperate, because the parties have personal knowledge of the other players and there is the possibility for repeat dealings between the parties. But in a world of impersonal exchange, it pays for the parties to defect, ceteris paribus. With impersonal exchange, the world is one in which there is not an iterated game.... One does not know anything about the other players, and indeed there are a large number of players.

That is, in traditional transactions players on both sides have incentives to cheat because they don't know each other personally or through a personal network. Therefore, in 1999 North suggested that to make the global marketplace efficient and scalable a new model had to be invented:

...we are going to have to devise institutions de novo that attempt to confront and deal with worlds of impersonal exchange.

Remarkably, new service models, such as Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, Alibaba, Instaply and others provide a glimpse of the institutions to come. Since identities of sellers, buyers and recommenders are known, parties are less likely to cheat; therefore, the number and quality of transactions shows rapid growth.  Although the solution is not perfect, it is a lot more efficient than all attempts to introduce global regulations. It's exciting to see how social networking technologies are redefining the rules of commerce and provide a working alternative to law.

Creative Solution of the Day: the Publication Dilemma

Typically, inventors face a disclosure dilemma: on the one hand, you want to explain your idea to a potential investor or a customer; on the other hand, you don't want to explain it because the idea can be easily stolen. Researchers face a similar dilemma when they consider publishing their results that  might have valuable commercial implications.

In the 1840s, Samuel Colt used the US patent system to overcome the dilemma:

When Samuel Colt, of revolver fame, was trying to sell the U.S. government a system of naval mines, he had to establish that his device was original without giving away its secret. His imaginative solution was to submit the plan to the Patent Office, obtain a confirmation of its originality, and then withdraw the application before the patent was granted, thereby avoiding the publication of the patent specifications.*

The Colt's approach exemplifies a powerful problem-solving technique often called "Separation in Time." According to the principle:
- you perform the useful action first — in the Colt's case: explaining the invention via a patent application — at the time when your potential customer needs to be convinced;
- then you perform a reverse action — withdraw the patent application — at a different time, so that the competition doesn't learn about the idea.

Snapchat provides the most recent example of a successful application of the "Separation in Time" principle along the lines of Samuel Colt's solution. That is, a Snapchat picture or a post is published for a short period of time to a limited group of subscribers; then, the post disappears, so that the information doesn't leak out to the general public. Clearly, the technique can be used for a broad variety of "limited offers."

* Source: Alex Roland, "Secrecy, Technology, and War: Greek Fire and the Defense of Byzantium, 678-1204." 1992.

tags: dilemma, problem, solution, social, separation

Lunch Talk: Superintelligence

A panel discussion with leading AI experts and business leaders about the challenges and opportunities presented by Superintelligence.

Panelists: Bart Selman (Cornell), David Chalmers (NYU), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Jaan Tallinn (CSER/FLI), Nick Bostrom (FHI), Ray Kurzweil (Google), Stuart Russell (Berkeley), Sam Harris, Demis Hassabis (DeepMind).

Overview:
00:00. Yes, No, It’s complicated
03:10. Timescale (Elon at 5:45)
07:07. How to slow it down
14:04. Risks and mitigations (Elon at 32:14)
37:00. Upsides (Elon at 51:18)
Q&A
52:44. Democracy 2.0
54:14. Bad guys
56:43. Democratising AI (Elon)

lunchtalk, intelligence, problem, system,

From junk food to junk news

Remarkably, surrounded by an abundance of choices people chose what feels good, not what is good. With junk food, it's a combination of fat, sugar and salt that fools taste buds into craving for more. With junk news, it's the confirmation bias that fools brains into craving for more news that conform to their world view.

According to Buzzfeed, during the 2016 election cycle fake news outperformed real news.

Due the difference in feedback mechanisms, the situation with junk news is worse than with junk food. That is, after having a junk food diet for an extended period of time, people can at least use scales to discover that their weight has gone up. By contrast, after having a junk news brain diet, people can only get stronger in their opinions because their social network keeps rewarding them for consuming and sharing the junk.

Can we solve the problem without resorting to censorship? One way to look at it would be to consider the situation from a point of view widely adopted in another domain - money and finance. That is, today's fake money is easily detected and discarded, so that the society doesn't fall into the trap of the Gresham's Law. Similarly, fake news can be detected by a variety of technologies, including a BitCoin-like approach that verifies authenticity of the news and news sources. Fake news, like fake coins should be taken out of circulation. Otherwise, our brains get stupid by consuming junk news, just like our bodies can get fat, by consuming junk food.

Stanford CSP 74 Principles of Invention and Innovation (BUS 74). Session 2 Quiz 1

In a recent MIT Technology Review article, Antonio Regaldo describes a new genetic engineering approach that promises to eliminate malaria:

Malaria kills half a million people each year, mostly children in tropical Africa. The price tag for eradicating the disease is estimated at more than $100 billion over 15 years. To do it, you’d need bed nets for everyone, tens of thousands of crates of antimalaria drugs, and millions of gallons of insecticides.
...
A gene drive is an artificial “selfish” gene capable of forcing itself into 99 percent of an organism’s offspring instead of the usual half. And because this particular gene causes female mosquitoes to become sterile, within about 11 generations—or in about one year—its spread would doom any population of mosquitoes. If released into the field, the technology could bring about the extinction of malaria mosquitoes and, possibly, cease transmission of the disease.

Question 1: Using the "Divergeng-Exploratory-Convergent" thinking technique,
a) list lots of benefits and problems that the new approach creates;
b) create an explicit criteria for selecting top benefits and problems;
b) according to your criteria, what are the most important short- and long-term benefits/problems (at least one each)?

Question 2 (optional): What dilemma did the researchers solve, while trying to create their genetically modified mosquito?

Question 3 (optional): What's the difference between system levels that the existing and the new malaria solutions target?

A creativity technique from science fiction

I'm reading Rainbows End, by Vernon Vinge. The novel takes place in a future where security spooks play mind games with social, neurobiological and genetic threats. As usual, I pay attention to nuggets of creative wisdom. Here's one of them:

For Robert Gu, real creativity most often came after a good night's sleep, just as he roused himself to wakefulness. That moment was such a reliable source of inspiration that when he was having problems with writing he would often go the pedestrian route in the evening, stock up his mind with the intransigencies of the moment ... and then the next morning, drowsing, review what he knew. There in the labile freshness of new consciousness, answers would drift into view.

I use a similar technique to get an insight into most difficult problems. During the evening, or several evenings in a row, I do a lot of background work on analyzing the problem, exploring its system aspects, trade-offs, dilemmas, etc. often, when I wake up in the morning, I go over my analysis again and discover a new idea that was not there before.

This experience is consistent with the earlier Lunch Talk video in my blog where neuroscience professor Vincent Walsh recommends to become obsessed with a problem in order to come up with a creative solution. I would add that system analysis techniques really help with getting obsessed in a right way, especially when you have to do it for an inter-disciplinary group of creative people.

Learning computer science - a new priority and a new problem

According to a new Gallup-Google poll,

Nine in 10 parents say offering opportunities to learn computer science is a good use of resources at their child's school, and about as many (91%) want their child to learn more computer science in the future.
...
Most parents say computer science learning is at least as important to a student's future success as required courses such as math, science, history and English.

The figure above shows an "implementation gap" between parents and school superintendents. Somehow, superintendents need to fit a new subject into an existing school curriculum, hire teachers, and provide accreditation. Since school budgets are practically fixed, computer science would have to replace another important subject - a typical trade-off situation, which will not lead to a breakthrough. Unfortunately, Gallup didn't ask parents which subject they want their children to stop learning.

An alternative solution would be to introduce an entirely new curriculum based on the online education model. The 21% of the parents is a good initial market. In the future, we should see an emergence of private high schools with emphasis on online STEM + CS.

tags: education, computer, science, trade-off, problem

Lunch Talk: Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck) | Alison Ledgerwood

Alison Ledgerwood joined the Department of Psychology at UC Davis in 2008 after completing her PhD in social psychology at New York University. She is interested in understanding how people think, and how they can think better. Her research, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, investigates how certain ways of thinking about an issue tend to stick in people's heads. Her classes on social psychology focus on understanding the way people think and behave in social situations, and how to harness that knowledge to potentially improve the social world in which we all live.


tags: lunchtalk, psychology, problem

Lunch Talk: (MIT) Problem Solving Process

This short video from an MIT engineering course provides a good example of a structured problem solving process when a problem situation is relatively simple.



tags: lunchtalk, problem, solution, process

Scalability Problem of the Day: Neural Networks

Deep Learning is the next frontier in computer science. After some initial breakthroughs, scientists and engineers are running into a major scalability problem: increasing the number of neurons doesn't improve a neural network's performance.

(MTR, 5/21/14) We found that if you put a lot of GPUs [specialized graphics processors] together we could make a much bigger neural network—10 billion nodes, with 16 machines instead of 1,000.

We used that same benchmark [images from YouTube videos] that the Google team did. But even though we could train a much larger neural net, we didn’t necessarily get a better cat detector. Right now we can run neural networks that are larger than we know what to do with.

This is a typical situation in Silicon Valley (I described in an earlier post). We are at a point where Machine 1 (exponential growth in computing power) is ahead of Machine 2 (Applications). Most likely, the next S-curve, i.e. a new growth cycle, will begin within the next 5-7 years.

tags: problem, scalability, constraint, machine1, machine2, silicon valley,

Invention of the Day: Teleprompter

The teleprompter made live TV programs possible because it allowed news anchors and performers to deliver long speeches without spending days and weeks memorizing them.

According to a Smithsonian article:

“For those that had been either in theater or the movies, the transition to television was difficult, because there was a much greater need for memorizing lines,” says Christopher Sterling, a media historian at George Washington University. “At the time, there was a lot more live television, which many people today tend to forget.” Instead of memorizing the same batch of lines over the course of months, Barton was now expected to memorize new lines on a weekly or even daily basis. Cue cards were sometimes used, but relying on unsteady stagehands to flip between them could sometimes cause catastrophic delays.

Here, we can see how a new media technology — "the TV world" — lead to a 10X increase in demand for live content. During radio broadcasts, announcers could read long texts from a written or typed page. By contrast, live television required direct eye contact with the audience. In short, a successful TV program required the best of both worlds: lots of fresh content to compete with the radio, and direct contact with the audience like in the traditional theater. The invention of the teleprompter solved this problem.

As usually the case with major innovation, teleprompter was rejected by the convention professional thinking:

Although Schlafly, Barton and Kahn pitched the device to 20th Century Fox, the company was not interested. They promptly quit the company and started their own, founding the TelePrompTer Corporation.

A major refinement of the original invention came from Jess Oppenheimer, who invented an in-camera teleprompter.

Since then, the teleprompter's been a fixture in television, movies and political speeches. It'll be with us until, probably, somebody invents a brain-machine interface suitable for imitating direct human speech.

tags: invention, innovation, 10X, trade-off, dilemma, problem, solution

Invention of the Day: High-Speed Roller-Coaster

Inventor and entrepreneur J.A. Miller (Mueller) started working on roller coaster designs and implementations in 1893, when he was just 19. During his entire career, he kept creating installations that provided greater and greater thrills to the riding public. At a certain point, he hit a problem: the more exciting the curves of the coaster are, the less safe the roller coaster becomes for the riders. On vertical curves especially, the more abrupt the turn, the greater the chances that the ride will fly off the rails, injuring or even killing the thrill-seekers.
Here's how the inventor describes his challenge:

...vertical curves on pleasure railway structures have been limited on account of centrifugal force, the curves being` confined within limits which will permit gravity to overcome centrifugal force sufficiently to keep the cars on the rails and the passengers in their seats. More abrupt vertical curves will be more sensational as it will give the passengers the feeling of being lifted off their seats as the cars take the incline.

It seems like the only way to provide for user safety is to reduce the acceleration on the curve and the thrill, which would be a typical trade-off. As with many other breakthrough inventions, Miller found a solution that allowed a roller-coaster designer to escape the trade-off: the car would stay on a sharp vertical curve, held on the rails with three pairs of wheels: two vertical and one horizontal.

Before the Miller's solution, the force of gravity was not strong enough to hold the car in place when it accelerated along sharp curves, either vertical or horizontal. After the new side and bottom rollers were introduced, the car would stay on rails, compensating for centrifugal acceleration. Today, many roller-coasters use the 90 year-old solution to give the riders as much fun as they can bear.

tags: invention, trade-off, solution, problem

Solving the Life vs Glory dilemma - 2

Recap: In my earlier posts I described and analyzed in detail a typical dilemma situation: a person faces mutually exclusive choices. For example, the ancient Greek hero Achilles has to choose between dying young with eternal glory or living a long, uneventful life. The modern hero Neo from the Matrix has to chose between the Red pill and the Blue pill.

In art, heroes choose dilemmas. In real life, we try to get away from them by picking a reasonable trade-off - "the middle way." A fundamental characteristic of a dilemma or trade-off situation is the existence of "The Box." The Box represents a set of constraints, either visible or invisible. The first step to think outside the box is to discover what the box is.

In the Achilles example, we've established that he is locked in the box of personal mortal combat with an opposing fighter - Patroclus. Even if Achilles wins today, sooner or later a new fighter will be born to kill him. That is, once you've entered the dilemma box, the choices are unavoidable: Achilles wins some great battles, but he is eventually killed by Paris, who, in turn, dies in combat later.

At the first glance, the Achilles' Life vs Glory dilemma seems to have no happy outcome. On the other hand, we've established that another Greek Hero - Odysseus - had found a breakthrough solution: he reached eternal glory AND lived a long, fulfilling life. How did he do that?

First, let me say that the Achilles' box is version of a theoretical construct created by economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth in the 19th century. It serves as a foundational principle for the modern economics of free markets, where people make rational choices about allocation of limited resources. That is why the first principle of economics is often stated as "Everything is a trade-off."

In Sclalable Innovation (Prologue), we show that great innovations often happen when people break trade-offs and dilemmas, instead of strengthening them. Odysseus is no exception. As a creative individual, he sees outside the Achilles' box. In his thinking, a 3-rd dimension exists - gods and other people (fig below).

When Odysseus encounters a tough challenge he leverages this dimension to generate a broad variety of coordinated actions. During the siege of Troy, he finally defeats the enemy city by getting one group of Greeks build the Trojan Horse, another group to hide inside it, yet another to rush the city when the Horse is inside, etc. This pattern of problem solving repeats when Odysseus runs into trouble on his way back home to Ithaca. For example, he uses the help of his team to defeat the Cyclops and escape from the cave. (Even the Cyclops' sheep act as "members" his team.) Odysseus accomplishes the impossible feat of listening to the song of the Sirens and surviving it too. (I posted about his solution in detail in 2011). Odysseus returns home to Ithaca and restores himself as the rightful king, by craftily creating a coalition of players and arranging the circumstances to benefit his cause. As the result of his adventures, Odysseus achieves eternal glory AND ensures that he has a long life.

In short, Odysseus is a 3D strategist, while Achilles is a 2D tactician. Achilles thinks inside the box, while Odysseus thinks outside it, by discovering dimensions of the situation that Achilles cannot see. In these dimensions, he finds opportunities for novel actions and their novel combinations. To motivate his allies, he uses certain psychological effects, which I'm going to cover later.

tags: creativity, problem, solution, dilemma, trade-off, separation, breakthrough, luck, control

Solving the Life vs Glory dilemma - 1

In my earlier post, I quoted Achilles' dilemma from the Iliad. He has a difficult choice between 1) a short, but glorious life of a mortal combat hero; and 2) long, but uneventful life of a provincial king. I also noted a similar choice that Neo, the main character of the Matrix, faces in the virtual world of the all-powerful Mr. Smith(s). Morpheus, another rebel hero, offers him the choice between the Blue and Red pills. Neo chooses the Red pill, which leads him to a dangerous fight with the intelligent machines that rule his world.

Here's how we can diagram the dilemma. The horizontal axis is length of Life; the vertical - Glory. The curvy line is a typical trade-off trajectory, which can take extreme positions: Red = Eternal Glory and Early Death; Blue = Long Life and No Glory.

After posting the dilemma, I went on our regular evening dog walk with Dolce, the Giant Schnauzer. As we were walking, I started to think about Achilles' choices. Neither one of them felt really attractive. Nevertheless, I was sure that the dilemma must have a solution. That is, solving trade-offs and dilemmas is the bread and butter of the TRIZ methodology, which I studied back in college and still practice in my invention work.

The key principle we need to apply here is "Think Slowly!" That is, instead of making a quick choice based on intuition, we have to carefully consider the problem situation. Luckily, a dog walk is perfect for unhurried thinking.

The first step is to get rid of simple, meaningless labels.  For example, the phrase "Blue pill or Red pill" makes the choices easy to perceive in movies, but it tells us nothing about the nature of the situation. The contrasting colors can describe a conflict between all kinds of situations: from chess, to sports teams, to countries, etc. Since we don't know the relevance of colors, when offered the Blue or Red pill, we should say "Neither" and think hard.

How to think about dilemmas? Usually, a trade-off or dilemma is a sign of a constraint that we take for granted. It acts as a box that limits our choices. To solve the dilemma, we have to think outside the box. But how? First, let's try to identify the Achilles' box.

To find the box, we need to see the situation from a different perspective. We know that Achilles is the ultimate mortal combat fighter. He achieves his eternal glory by fighting other heroes to death. In the Iliad, he challenges a famous Trojan warrior - Patroclus. Therefore, we need to add a Patroclus' perspective to the picture (above). Now, we can see the box! Achilles and Patroclus are locked in mortal combat. If one lives, another dies.

In the Iliad, Achilles kills his adversary (the red circle in the figure above). Patroclus dies, but he achieves the eternal glory because he fights valiantly. In the mortal combat dilemma, he gets the Red pill. Although the Patroclus situation is clear, Achilles appears to escape his predicament. He gets the best of both worlds: 1) eternal glory for killing the best Trojan hero; 2) long life after the combat. Achilles lives with glory!

Unfortunately, the career of a mortal combat fighter doesn't end at the last fight he wins. On the contrary, it ends when he eventually looses to the next great hero. In the Iliad, Paris (the guy who stole Helen from the Greeks) shoots and kills Achilles with an arrow. Remarkably, the arrow hits Achilles in the heel, the only unprotected part of his body (thus, the expression the Achilles' Heel).

As the result, the original prophesy is fulfilled: Achilles dies and earns eternal glory (the red circle in the figure above). Given the mortal combat box, it's easy to predict the fate of Paris too.
The Achilles dilemma strikes again: Paris dies in combat, earning for himself eternal glory and, in the process, causing the eventual destruction of Troy.

By the time Dolce and I are halfway through our walk, the original dilemma looks totally unsolvable. Nevertheless, as we continue our problem analysis, we recognize that our favorite hero Odysseus, "the man of twists and turns," manages to escape the fate of Achilles and other mortal combat heroes. That is, he earns eternal glory and lives a long, fulfilled life. Moreover, his method of problem-solving is consistent throughout the Iliad and Odyssey. In each dilemma, he finds a way to think outside the box. How? I'll try to cover his method of problem solving tomorrow. Now, it's time for a dog walk.

Lab Notebook: the meaning of Bitcoin

Money has been around for thousands of years. Amazingly, people keep reinventing it over and over again. Money innovation (not invention!) is always a telltale sign of a deep, underlying change in large-scale commercial systems. It serves two vitally important tasks: value exchange and information diffusion. The growing acceptance of Bitcoin sends a loud and clear message:

Dear Government, we the People, no longer trust your ability to manage our money (The Fed). We also don't trust your shameless handling of our privacy (NSA). Therefore, we are going to create an alternative mechanism for commercial transactions and sharing information about them. The new computing and communication technologies give us the power to do so. 

In the 6th century BC, Lydians developed silver and gold coinage, which made them incredibly rich and powerful. In the 21st century AD, the first respectable government that will support a new trusted currency will have a once-in-a-thousand-years chance to create an economic miracle out of, practically, nothing. I hope it will be an American government.

tags: invention, innovation, deontic, payload, problem, money, solution, growth, economics, commerce

The Odyssey: a 3,000-year-old techno thriller.

When people encounter new technologies they tend to create horror stories how the technology is going to mess up their lives. The Matrix provides a good example of a recent scare.
Stanley Kubrik's Space Odyssey 2001, filmed in 1968, goes further. It takes two new technologies — space navigation and artificial intelligence (AI) — and shows an astronaut on the brink of death caused by a combination of techs. The latest movie hit, "Gravity," is based on a similar premise.

As I read Homer's The Odyssey, the original 3,000-year old classic, I see a similar portrayal of the sea navigation technology, which the Ancient Greeks developed during the Homeric times. Odysseus, the main character of the story, cannot get home for 10 years because he upset Poseidon, the main sea god. He barely escapes Poseidon's wrath and all his crew dies in a shipwreck.

Another key character, King Menelaus, has his ship blown off course multiple times. He has to spend years in Egypt instead of Greece, unable to communicate with his loved ones. In most stories told by the Odyssey, seafarers are smashed by the rocks, swallowed by the waves, and torn to pieces by the winds. The danger is everywhere, and only the smartest and luckiest ones, like Odysseus himself, survive and prosper.

Eventually, the Ancient Greeks mastered sea travel and turned into a dominant force in international war and commerce. Few centuries later, they got overrun by the Romans, who developed a major innovation in transportation - the permanent road paved with stone. (Remember the old saying: All roads lead to Rome.)

Back to the modern times, it bothers me that we haven't had any good new technological horror movies lately. Are we running out of breakthrough innovations?

tags: innovation, distribution, control

Creativity quote of the Day: Elon Musk on problem-solving

"Ask them about the problems they worked on and how they solved them. If someone was really the person who solved the problem they would be able to answer on multiple levels... Anyone who struggled hard with a problem never forgets it." (Business Insider, December, 2013).

For once, I agree with Elon Musk. We should not confuse the feeling of an "aha" moment with real-life problem solving.

Lab Notebook: Strange connections between baseball and Netflix

I discovered another repeating pattern for problem solving in baseball scouting and ... movie classification. In baseball, scouts and managers have to process a lot of vague information about many prospects. Nate Silver writes how Billy Beane ("a phenom in baseball management" and the main character in Moneyball, one of my favorite movies about sports) addressed the problem:

...when we have trouble categorizing something, we’ll often overlook it or misjudge it. This is one of the reasons that Beane avoids what he calls “gut-feel” decisions. (The Signal and the Noise. 2013.)

In short, Beane developed an elaborate system and a large number of explicit categories that his brain could rationally handle instead of relying on subconscious, gut-feel decisions. Using lots of  categories enabled him to pick the right player among many candidates.

Where do people experience a similar problem? In "scouting" movies on Netflix! To help users solve the problem, Netflix engineers developed a detailed content categorization system with thousands of fine distinctions, so that people can select the right movie among lots of candidates. Here's an example of their movie subjects:

Source: Alexis C. Madrigal. How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood. The Atlantic. Jan 2, 2014.

A couple of learning points:
- In Scalable Innovation (Chapter 5), we talk about the concept of "Aboutness" - an element that facilitates decision making in systems. The Netflix chart above would be a great way to show how generating movie aboutness helps solve detection problems for the users.
- "Gut-feel" decisions are a poor substitute for systematic thinking about the problem. Fundamentally, they are limited by our working memory and don't scale to handle complex choice situations.

tags: aboutness, problem, solution, detection, control, pattern

Lab Notebook: Google Glass and 360-degree vision

Google Glass (or a similar connected, hands-off presentation device) should make a big difference in situations that require body-eye coordination and [related] learning of psycho-motor skills. For example, if I wear sensory clothing that talks to the device I should be able to see myself from any angle. The device might also provide an 3- or 4-D image of the desired position and help me adjust my posture closer to the ideal. Boys and girls would learn easily how to keep their backs straight and walk like models! :) Should also help the elderly to be aware of the need to exercise and improve their motor skills.
Eventually, it will become indispensable in sports, wellness, and all other applications requiring spatial dexterity, including surgical procedures.

In general, great innovations create new space and time (either real or virtual). The Google Glass (GG) project has a chance to do just that. In system terms (see Scalable Innovation, Chapter 2),

GG - Tool
sensor network - Source
reference db - Source
(wireless) communications  - Distribution
application - Control
brain - Control
encoded position info - Packaged Payload

tags: invention, space, time, problem, solution, innovation, pattern, system

US healthcare reform disaster: California edition

The state of California set up and trademarked(!!!) its own website to handle the healthcare reform, Covered California (TM). There's also a new program for small businesses called SHOP:

Covered California’s™ SHOP is a new, online health insurance marketplace developed for small businesses with one to 50 eligible* employees.

 When you click through the SHOP links you eventually get a message that the program will be available in mid-November:

OK, the program was supposed to start on Oct 1, but the message says it's being delayed for 1.5 months. Well, today is November 15, which is mathematically speaking is mid-November, but the program is still not available. Instead of shopping online for plans, Covered California (TM) advises you to talk to your health insurance broker or visit websites of individual insurance companies. WTF! After 3+ years in the making, the state of California, including Silicon Valley, can't deliver a website on time. Unbelievable.