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Solid: When Bits and Atoms Dance

5/26/2014

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"We are at one of those huge inflection points in the industry. It’s funny—for some time everybody was thinking it is was mobile or maybe it’s wearables, but actually it’s way way bigger than that…There is the whole thread of  the Maker movement—people just getting interested in the hardware, figuring out how to make stuff. And then at some point it tips over from something that people are doing in their spare time that’s cool, just for fun, and turns into ‘Whoa, that’s the next big thing.’" 

— Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media


Welcome to the latest industrial revolution: software meet hardware. It is a full out paradigm shift with big time global economic implications rooted in play, driven by informal self-organizing networks, inspired by art and powered by math. It is the poster child for STEAM—science, technology, engineering, art and math—made possible, at least in part, by kids more interested in bragging rights for clever hacks than in grades. They didn’t set out to change the world or rewrite textbooks. They just did. 

O’Reilly’s Solid Conference, Maker Faire’s new more serious sibling, brought a crowd of hardware bootstrappers, software developers and industry players to San Francisco last week to show off new tech and talk about what’s next. The possibilities more than a bit mind-blowing: Materials infused with information. Mashups with synthetic biology. Machines chatting with machines. And, yes, replicating the Star Trek replicator. 

Several dozen videos of keynotes, interviews and primers are available on Youtube.It is worth surfing through the entire playlist, but these are some I found of particular interest: 

•••••••••••••••••••••••

BY THE NUMBERS

"It is getting progressively easier to go from a drawing on a napkin to a product on a shelf,"notes Renee DiResta of O’Reilly’s AlphaTech Ventures:

  • By 2016, enterprise-quality 3D printers will be available for under $2,000 
  • Arduinos and other cheap ready-to-use electronics platforms have vastly reduced the costs of functional prototyping
  • Crowdfunding has made it easier to develop prototypes and demonstrate proof-of-concept, in turn making it easier for hardware startups to find VC funding
  • Manufacturing costs are coming down due to competition between offshoring, reshoring, near shoring and "botsourcing" 
  • Accelerator and incubator programs for hardware developers have started to sprout up
The shift from Do It Yourself to Do It With Others is another significant trend, demonstrated by the explosive growth in community hackerspaces over the last 10 years. According to DiResto, there are over 1,500 such spaces in over 100 countries, increasing at a rate of 200 per year. About a third are in the US. There is a correlation between the number of hackerspaces and digital manufacturing startups. California leads the pack with nearly 90, which helps reinforce the kind of critical mass of talent attractive to large companies such as GE that are interested developing their own internal digital manufacturing hubs.

Beyond hackerspaces, there has also been an upsurge in online groups and off-line meet ups for hardware entrepreneurs. This is certainly something I have seen here Chicago where grassroots networks have gained impressive momentum over the last couple of years. Catalyze, the city’s first hardware co-working space, opened in February and almost immediately had to double in size to accommodate all the pent up demand. 

•••••••••••••••••••••••

THE THIRD DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s The Center for Bits and Atoms, is perhaps most widely known for his work developing Fab Labs: community workshops kitted out with open source software and off-the-shelf 3D printers, laser cutters and other tools designed as a ”technical prototyping platform for innovation and invention, providing stimulus for local entrepreneurship.” In short, a kind of startup for starting startups. Gershenfeld has also worked on machines able to build parts that could be assembled to build a copy of the parent machine. Now he has taken the same idea to the micro level, biomimicking ribosomes, the protein-making proteins found every cell, by finding ways to digitize information within materials. 

"…From molecules up to mountains, the insight is we’re finding that by discreetly assembling reversibly joined materials, you can get to these wild regimes you can’t get to with any other kind of fabrication process because the information is in the materials, not in the computer…

…This is developing structures where there is no machine, where the material itself is shape-changing…

…The end result is the Star Trek replicator. The Star Trek replicator isn’t a 3D printer. That’s a piece of plastic or maybe metal. The Star Trek replicator is coding the construction of functional materials from micro-scale on up “ 

•••••••••••••••••••••••

THE FUTURE OF HOW THINGS ARE MADE

In his grand arcing overview of where things are headed, Carl Bass, CEO ofAutodesk, makes three points especially worth noting:
  • Shape complexity is now free, meaning that is possible for anyone with minimal skills to design almost anything on a computer and print it out.
  • Infinite computing is now so cheap, it is close to free, meaning that design can now be objectives-based with computers tasked with sorting through countless combinations to present designers with the best options from which to work. 
  • Synthetic biology offers tremendous opportunities for manufacturing

Where Gershenfeld speaks metaphorically of modeling ribosomes, Bass is interested in efforts to literally print DNA, use DNA’s properties of self-assembly to create nano-robots, and even print out bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria), expanding the Autodesk software suite into the medical field. 

"They were able to boot up a virus from a text file. They specified the DNA sequences, they made a bacteriophage, they injected it into e.coli and it attacked the e.coli… There was no breakthrough in science in doing this. Another team had done this before. What I found astounding about it is that  what it took in order to do that was a smart guy like Andrew, but 14 days and a mail order account to order DNA and a $1000. The age of synthetic biology for manufacturing things is right in front of us…

…I think the future is that many of the things that we make will actually be manufactured biologically.”


•••••••••••••••••••••••

THE INTERNET AS MATERIAL

Ayeh Bdeir, founder and CEO of littleBits, an open source library of modular electronics, also sees big potential in small things. 

"Part of the problem with all the technology, particularly in hardware, sitting in the hands of experts and of companies is they’re going to guess what are the needs that you have and there has to be a certain critical mass of these needs for a product to warrant existence"

So she set out to make it easier for non-experts to play and prototype in hardware. 

"Some of society’s most transformative technologies have started in the hands of experts and then someone or something came along, democratized them and made them accessible to everyone and they really had a chance to transform society… 

…How do we democratize hardware? For me there are four principles:
  1. Lowering the barrier to understanding 
  2. Lowering the barrier to iterating 
  3. Making it universal 
  4. Raising the ceiling of complexity"

There are dozens of modules in the littleBits library, color-coded for function and designed to pop together with magnets. Don’t let the candy colors fool you. This toy is capable of some serious play. The latest module is internet-enabled making it possible, for example, to hack together a version of the Nest thermostat, the company purchased by Google for $3.2 billion just a few months ago. It is absolutely gobsmacking how quickly a disruptive innovation can itself be disrupted. 

"Can we make the internet a building block? Can it become a building block that is empowering people to invent with the internet the way you would invent with light, with sound, with cardboard, with paper and really make it material?" 
•••••••••••••••••••••••

EVERYWHERE

Of the three words in the Solid conference’s tagline—”Software / Hardware. Everywhere”—it may be the last that is the most game-changing. Software and hardware, bits and atoms, have been circling each other for some time. The technology for RFID tags has been around for over 40 years (re the “internet of cows,” see time code 5:59 in Andra Keay’s talk, "Are Robots the New Black?"). The first human “wearable” was arguably a sensor-soaked, satellite-connected smartphone, capable of tracking our every move. 

Smart—or at least sensor-enhanced—things are everywhere and  spreading fast. By most estimates, the Internet of Things (IoT) club will include at least 50 billion members by 2020. Machines are routinely chatting with other machines (M2M), leaving us largely out of the day-to-day conversation altogether. 

Everywhere also refers to manufacturing. The tools to design and prototype products have become so cheap and accessible that given the talent, anyone can do it, no large company required. Autodesk has actually made its powerful cloud-based 360 software suite free for startups that haven’t made any money yet.

The economics of production are shifting as well. China’s cost-cutting rise to global dominance has come at a steep cost: an environment so trashed that a 2007 World Bank report estimated air and water pollution shaved off nearly 6% of GDP.  The situation has only gotten worse. An estimated one out of every five rivers are now too polluted to be of any use. Climate change has also taken a toll, contributing to a chronic water crisis in a country with 20% of the world’s population and only 7% of its surface freshwater. Predictions of rising sea levels will impact global shipping and ports scramble to adapt.

Fuel costs are another concern, increasingly tipping the scale toward nearshoring (hello Mexico!) and reshoring (made—again—in the USA!). It is a sign of things to come that China’s mega-manufacturer Foxconn is now looking to expand operations in America, in part to simplify supply chain logistics. Notably, Foxconn is also investing heavily in robotics as a way to stabilize or lower labor costs, another trend driving a more globally distributed manufacturing model. 

•••••••••••••••••••••••

SO WHY NOT HERE? 

Despite an evening playing field, some parts of the US are more equal than others when it comes to the new industrial revolution. Having an established tech sector and vibrant Maker culture are definite pluses, which tilt the scales toward the coasts—a reality evident in Solid’s speaker roster. 

But there is a third coast emerging as a player—Chicago—and I hope the team at O’Reilly considers staging the next Solid conference here.

Last February, UI Labs, a public / private / academic consortium made up of nearly 600 organizations, was awarded a $70 million grant from the Department of Defense (DoD) to create a digital lab for manufacturing. Another $250 million has been pledged from private source.

Why the DoD? Manufacturing becomes a national security issue when 40,000 parts contracts fail to attract any bids as happened in 2012. Pentagon bureaucracy no doubt played a role in the lack of manufacturer enthusiasm, but US factories were also not up to task, out of date, unable to ramp up quickly for comparatively small runs. 

UI Labs will open its doors this fall in the city’s Goose Island industrial district and serve as a kind of national lab for manufacturing with an applied research mission. Already it has served to energize and focus the region’s considerable assets which include an estimated 14,000 factories, a deep bench in product design, engineering, architecture and biotech and a range of universities: UIC, IIT, Northwestern, DePaul, Loyola, the School of the Art Institute, the University of Chicago.

At the fringe, though in its way no less important, is a strong and growing community of hardware bootstrappers along with grassroots efforts such asDesignHouse, a nonprofit startup that brings together teams of designers to develop product ideas to match the fabrication capabilities of small to mid-size manufacturers. 

•••••••••••••••••••••••

THEN AND NOW AND NEXT

We were born to make things. In fact, we evolved to make things better.  Toolmaking literally shaped our hands, something Darwin was the first to suspect. It shaped our brains, too. In a sense, it is the 10,000 hour rule writ over millennia, with accelerating change the only constant. It took hundreds of thousands of years to go from crude flints to well-crafted stone tools, but almost everything my kitchen was invented in just the last hundred years. In the last 10 years, smartphones and touchscreen tablets have changed how we learn, collaborate and communicate, providing platforms for tools and products we never knew we needed…until we had them. 

Software/Hardware Everywhere? I can’t wait to see what’s next. 

—J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED

• Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy / Amy Larkin /  Google Talk / video

• When China became the world’s workshop, it inherited the world’s air pollution, too  / Heather Smith / Grist



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Mulling Snow, Climate, Pain Points, Bootstrapping and Chicago’s Advantage

2/4/2014

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It turns out the snow pack they are so desperate for in California’s Sierra Nevada has instead landed, flake by elegant flake, right here in Chicago this year. It has been yet another shovel-in-hand weekend, with yet another 3 to 6 inches expected on Tuesday. Still, despite the misery and inconvenience, all this freak weather could play to Chicago’s competitive advantage in tech—and most everything else, too. 

Rarely does climate change figure into discussions about tech ecosystems. It should. Everything about tech, from developer talent to data storage to financing, can shift to greener pastures pretty quickly.  A special report on tech startups in the Economist magazine noted : 

"…This digital feeding frenzy has given rise to a global movement. Most big cities, from Berlin and London to Singapore and Amman, now have a sizeable startup colony (ecosystem). Between them they are home to hundreds of startup schools (accelerators) and thousands of co-working spaces where cafeinated folk in their 20s and 30s toil hunched over their laptops. All these ecosystems are highly interconnected, which explains why internet entrepreneurs are a global crowd. Like medieval journeymen, they travel from city to city, laptop, not hammer, in hand. A few of them spend a semester with "Unreasonable at Sea", an accelerator on a boat which cruises the world while its passengers code. Anyone who writes code can become an entrepreneur anywhere in the world, says Simon Levene, a venture capitalist in London…” (emphasis added)
 
California’s extreme drought could, according to experts, turn into a decades or even centuries-long megadrought. Meanwhile, rising sea levels on the East Coast mean even average storms can trigger billion-dollar disasters (see Sandy). This is not good news for anybody, but the most severe costs will be felt locally. Both New York and San Francisco are already dealing with an anti-tech blowback driven by spiraling housing costs ("These 2 cities are now exclusively for rich people","Tech’s growing problem in San Francisco") The impacts of climate change will make an already bad situation worse. 
There is hardly a spot on the planet that isn’t off-kilter weatherwise. Italy and France are dog-paddling through record floods (seriously not the moment to go Florence.). Australia is sweating through a record summer. The World Economic Forum now ranks extreme weather number 6 on its list of Global Risks, singling out Asia as being particularly vulnerable:

"…Japan’s Tokyo, Manila in the Philippines and China’s Pearl River Delta region—one of the most densely urbanized areas in the world—top Swiss Re’s list of cities most at-risk in terms of population. Only one non-Asian city, Los Angeles, made the top 10.
 
The insurer named the Pearl River Delta—which includes Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Macau and Guangzhou—as number one when looking at the number of people potentially affected by storm, storm surges and river floods…”

If you are looking for a “pain point,” climate change is the big one, affecting everything from supply chains to blood banks.

As high as Chicago’s snow piles and deep as its pot holes may be, our city may find itself in a better position than most to find opportunity in this rather bleak global weather forecast. Some of the same factors that made Chicago interesting to settlers two centuries ago are still in play today: Lake Michigan, a central location and nearby some of the best farmland in the world. Add to that a deep bench in manufacturing, engineering, architecture and design and a uniquely compelling picture emerges. Today, when it seems as if every city uses the same economic development playbook (accelerators! incubators! investors! universities!), competitive advantage requires a bigger picture perspective. 

BOOTSTRAPPING

Adrian Holovaty’s presentation on bootstrapping at the recent CEC Startup Showcase has sparked considerable discussion on the Built in Chicago blog—and beyond—about the city’s place in the tech universe and how best to measure success. (“Is Chicago’s tech community in search of a new identity?”) Is bootstrap culture our strength? Is it diversity as Matt Moog suggests? Should it be measured in VC investment dollars? 

Almost everything now is either a tech-driven or tech-enabled business,so what really counts is the blend. Positioning the tech sector as an economic savior is disingenuous. The real money in tech is as a value-add. Bits meet atoms. Google is in the thermostat business, while Tesla cheerfully disrupts the auto industry. 
 
Chicago’s budding bootstrap community, which includes hardware as well as software developers (with considerable overlap between the two) could serve as a much needed catalyst, strengthening the connections between the city’s manufacturing, engineering, design, architecture and tech sectors. In fact, a new co-working space set to open later this month called Catalyze Chicago in the West Loop will prototype a new kind of co-working space for product developers. Its list of advisors is impressive, including software and hardware heavyweights and a few Kickstarter veterans (As Catalyze grows, it would be wonderful to see some women industrial designers and product developers added to the mix.)
 
The more opportunity for these different worlds to connect, the more potential there is for productive and profitable collaborations. Ironically, the segregation of tech-haves and have-nots causing so much unease on the coasts is also a creative buzzkill. When the best and brightest are shuttled back and forth within the cushy confines of corporate buses and provided company-catered meals morning, noon and night, they end up silo’ed with an ever-narrowing vision of the world. Bootstrappers have to reach out and collaborate. It is their resilient edge. 
 
I would love to see a sector-bridging public lecture series in Chicago:  ”AIA night at 1871” “Urban Ag Night at 1871” “Kickstarter Night at 1871”  ”Theatre Tech at 1871.” There so much potential yet to be tapped.
 
Now, we just need someone to invent a self-healing pot hole-impervious asphalt and we’ll really be in business. 
 
— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews 
(reprinted from the Built in Chicago blog) 
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Beyond Measure: da Vinci’s Genius, Peripheral Vision, the Prepared Mind, Metric Traps and Hacking the Filter Bubble

8/16/2013

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…Leonardo da Vinci was the first in long line of scientists who focused on the patterns interconnecting basic structures and processes of living systems. Today, this approach is called ‘systemic thinking.’ This, in my eyes, is the essence of what Leonardo meant by farsi universale. Freely translating his statement into modern scientific language, I would rephrase it this way: ‘For someone who can perceive interconnecting patterns, it is easy to be a systemic thinker.

— Fritjoj Capra, author, The Science of Leonardo

While the best—which is to say the most privileged—minds of his generation were drilled into complacent conformity, studying for tests to prove they had interpreted the classics “correctly,” Leonardo, a bastard offspring denied entrance to university, was left to think for himself. 

Wandering the Tuscan hills, he learned about nature from nature. And when it was time to get a job, he took a position as a sculptor’s apprentice in Florence. Long before anyone had heard of STEM  (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)—much less STEAM (just add Art)—Leonardo’s self-directed education was steeped in it. He was Maker’s maker, an imaginative inventor, a visionary artist. 

Centuries later, we still marvel at da Vinci’s brilliance—and that of his polymath kindred spirits, from Ben Franklin to Buckminster Fuller to Steve Jobs. All intuitively understood the importance and serendipity of peripheral vision: an awareness of what’s happening at the edges. Theirs were the kind of “prepared minds” that chance so famously favors.  

You would think we would want to do everything we possibly could to follow in such fortunate footsteps. Instead, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction, led by ever-more powerful—and profitable—analytical tools designed to filter, slot, slice, dice, separate and blinder. Everything that can possibly be scored and ranked, including "Klout," has been. The metrics too often become the mission: the tail wagging the dog.

Peripheral vision, by its nature, is metric-defiant, specializing in kismet connections, collections of stray facts, flashes of insight and epiphanies that can be years in the making. It is the how and the why a college dropout—Jobs—could sit in on an obscure calligraphy class and, years later, draw on the experience to spark a revolution in digital publishing. 

Peripheral vision is also the key to solving the nine-dot puzzle which inspired the term, “thinking outside the box.” It is the essence of "think different." 

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LOST IN (ALGORITHMIC) SPACE

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," famously noted former Facebook data scientist Jeffrey Hammerbacher in a 2011 BusinessWeek interview. “That sucks.” 

Well, yes, it does. It may be a slight step up, perhaps, from the the test-cramming so prevalent in Leonardo’s day, but still a rather disappointing, though lucrative, use of talent.  

"Search Engine Optimization"—SEO—has become a multi-bazillion dollar industry, a never-ending keyword-and-ad-based competition to capture the top, most-clickable spots on a Google search page. 

Each click online contributes to our individual profiles, analyzed constantly by social media sites and search engines for targeting ad sales. Bizarrely, so detailed has the profiling become that two people using the same identical search terms are likely to pull up two different lists of links. We have become trapped in "filter bubbles" of an algorithm’s making. 

Quite literally—and scarily—we are no longer on the same page, nor are we free to see all there is to see. A wall of metrics has blocked the view. 

A BRIEF DIGRESSION ON BURSTING BUBBLES, SCALING WALLS & THE TRACKERNEWS PROJECT…


A few years ago, I developed a news aggregator as a demo project for a small, independent spin-off of Google.org called InSTEDD (named for Dr. Larry Brilliant’s TED wish—a double pun on TED and Early Disease Detection). 

The TrackerNews Project’s beat covered health issues (microbial to planetary), humanitarian response and technologies relevant to both. Its mission was to bring a multidisciplinary perspective. For example, since most infectious diseases are zoonotic (affecting multiple species, including humans), most public health crises have a veterinary component. A country’s demographic profile has huge implications for its economy. Extreme weather affects food supplies. And, of course, climate change affects everything. 

Working with a small budget as a side project to the organization’s main mission—developing digital tools to improve public health and disaster response--TrackerNews was perfectly positioned to experiment. In the era of Digg, we didn’t care how many hits a particular link tallied. Popularity wasn’t our guiding metric: context and connection were. 

The site was loosely modeled after one of the first major news aggregators, The Drudge Report: three columns with news stories snaking up and down as they cycled through. Instead of singleton articles, suites of related links would cycle through together. A breaking news story might be paired with research papers, videos, archival articles, interviews, relevant technology websites and book links. 

Long before Pinterest, we included small photos and short content descriptions with each link. Each link tagged for a searchable database. Later, we added overview blog posts to provide another way to access the information.

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We also experimented with a personal aggregation tool, where it was possible to generate as many categories and sub-categories as needed; move elements by drag’n’drop anywhere on the page; and clone individual links for slotting into multiple categories.

While TrackerNews was focused on bridging silos, the personal aggregation tool was designed  for special projects and collaborations: a kind of public bookmarking, providing context, in a format designed to maximize at-a-glance utility. 

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TrackerNews put the human algorithm back into the mix. Search engines are programmed to skew toward content that either new, popular, cleverly tagged for SEO or flat out paid for. That doesn’t always line up with what may be the most relevant and useful information. Unless or until Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-champion computer, comes online, it takes human insight to bring contextual value. There is still a filter bubble, but the metrics are determined by human users, rather than calculated for them by machines. 

Although TrackerNews developed a loyal following of UN’ers, NGOs and energy wonks—and I developed a bit of a reputation as a general “go to” reference—the project was more proof-of-concept than a game-changer. I kept the twitter feed going after we closed down the demo, and shifted the blog into this tumblr, which is now more of a personal blog. 

DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

I have never really stopped thinking about the issues that TrackerNews tried to address: contextual utility, bridging disciplines, the human algorithm, collaboration, peripheral vision, poking holes in search engine filter bubbles. 

In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I created a spin-off blog--For the files--as a kind of TrackerNews Lite to try make  some sense of all the stray links piling up in myPocket account. Daily forays through aggregators Zite and Flipboard, various social media, news sites and searches had left me with digital ADD. This, I thought, would be a way to connect some dots: each post a mini-bibliography of two to five links. 

For the files posts are really quite fun to write, a daily wander among the peripheral in all its non sequitur serendipitous glory. So far, it’s covered everything from a climate-changing Pleistocene asteroid, Chinese language apps, a Robot-a-looza and Woody Allen’s prescient take on the Internet of things.

But the limitations of the format, a tumblr blog, quickly made me long for theTrackerNews aggregation tool that never made it beyond prototype.

Sure, few of us will ever match Leonardo’s gifts as a great systems thinker, but with the right tools to help organize information, it would be at least a little easier to see patterns and bask in the glitters of insight. 

Pinterest, Evernote and my much adored Pocket all have their charms for gathering, organizing and sharing digital treasure, but there is still room for improvement. My specs wish list for an aggregation tool:

• generates as many categories and sub-categories as required, each with its own shareable url within a master template

• accommodates all types of digital data  

• Individual links, sub-categories and categories can be moved by drag’n’drop

• individual links can be cloned for inclusion in multiple categories

• no limit for descriptive copy 

• discussion threads

• maximum at-a-glance utility 

• content scraping for a Flipboard / Zite-style presentation on tablets

• public and private options 

• ???

"IF IT’S FREE, THEN YOU’RE THE PRODUCT"

The above quote has been cited so often, it has become a meme. From Google to Twitter to Facebook to Tumblr, personal data are regularly traded for services. The fairness of the deal, however, can become murky when data are used to determine access to content and opportunities. The line between the convenience of personalization and unfairness of segregation can be a fine one.

Machine learning tools are designed to tailor content to an individual’s interests. Past choices determine future selections. Incremental changes, however, can quickly add up to distortions. For example, the Zite account on my iPhone delivers more tech news than the one on my iPad, which “thinks” I am more interested in renewable energy stories. It is a daily reminder that people identifying the same set of interests don’t always access the same information. 

Metrics, of course, can only measure what they have been designed to measure. There is much that is simply beyond measure. Yet the relentless competition for “clicks,” combined with data mining and the linearity of machine learning have led us down a narrow path where focus trumps vision.

Anatomically, the area of focus is just 3% of the visual field. The other 97% is peripheral vision, providing both awareness and context. Why would limit ourselves to such thin slice of all there is to see and know? 

To quote Leonardo: 

“Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses- especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

— J. A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews

____________________________________

RELATED:
• When in Roma…On the Way to the Piazza Navona: China, Africa & The Lessons of Leonardo / J. A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews blog

• STEM TO STEAM / RISD (website)

• 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says / text of Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement address

• The Information Diet: You Are What You Read…Really (so read this) / J. A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews blog
• Who Owns the Future? / Jaron Lanier (book) 
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    Background

    Dot to Dot grew out of the TrackerNews Project, a demo news aggregator developed for InSTEDD, an independent spin-off of Google.org's humanitarian practice that focused on health issues, humanitarian response and technology.
    — J.A. Ginsburg
    


    Archives
    
    • Bats, Trees And Bureaucrats: Ebola And How Everything, Positively Everything, Connects


    • Scrubba Dub Carlos and the Big Bad Enterovirus: Why Sneeze When You Can Sing? 

    • Ebola, Bats and Déjà Vu 
    All Over Again

    • Scaling Good: Project Frog’s Buildings And The Kitchen Community’s Learning Gardens

    • Thumbs Up And High Fives: Evolution, Hands And 3D Printing

    • Legos, Makers, Molecules, Materials And The Very Big Business Of Small Things

    • Solid: When Bits and Atoms Dance

    • Science Hack Day Chicago 2014: Reinventing The Space Suit, Cosmic Biomicmicry And The Joy Of Thinking Different

    • The Motors of August Cicadas

    • Mulling Snow, Climate, Pain Points, Bootstrapping And Chicago’s Advantage

    • Glass, Tech And Civilization: The Material That Makes Just About Everything Better

    • A Tale Of Two Maps And Why You Can’t Teach An Old Grid New Tricks

    • When Bad Things Happen To Good Content: Form(At), Function, Perspective And Possibilities

    • The Sum Of Its Parts: Autozone Meet Autodesk (Please) / On Supply Chains, Carbon Footprints And How 3D Printing Can Change The Game (Again)

    • It Takes An Economist: Tallying Natural Capital

    • Beyond Measure: Da Vinci’s Genius, Peripheral Vision, The Prepared Mind, Metric Traps And Hacking The Filter Bubble

    A Solstice Encore: Imaginary Carl Sagan, A Holiday Mix Tape And The Tannahill Weavers



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