Dana Blankenhorn

Balance in Internet Law and Enforcement

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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For digital activists, the Obama Administration has proven a bitter disappointment.

Rather than seeing the growth possibilities in unfettered access to the Web, the Administration has focused instead on the national security threat, and has been captured in turn by copyright extremists.

It's a slippery slope, but it's one liberty must navigate. It's one America itself has been navigating, sometimes with mixed results, since its founding. With the rise of the Internet, and its global impact on growth in every country, it's one we all must navigate.

Let's be clear here, because I'm hearing a lot of whinging from my side of the aisle. Activists for an open Internet are not powerless in this fight. Far from it. Because in our hands is growth – economic growth, human growth, intellectual growth. When people are forced offline, when they merely feel less than free, that has a profound, negative impact on growth.

It doesn't take a formal boycott. The action against SOPA/PIPA was merely an overt example of what happens every day, in billions of places around the world. By simply refusing to submit, by withholding the weapon of growth from governments, people demonstrate real power.

On the other hand, government must play a role as both guarantor of liberty and maintainer of order. We can't let the Internet be so open that a foreign government can hack it down. We can't let people steal from our own people and hide from justice. That's anarchy, not liberty. It may seem like a Randian paradise, but it will quickly end as all such paradises end, either in the dictatorship of the Moneytariat or a Somali wasteland.

Both sides must admit that there is a balance to be struck, but right now no one is standing in the middle and saying so. Thus we blunder on.

So let me stand in the middle and say so.

The Many Markets of Robotics

What's intriguing about robotics, as a market, is that it's not one market.

Robotics consists of many markets – toy markets, industrial markets, military markets, scientific markets, education markets. Which means all the trends currently taking place in computing and education can be brought to bear, profitably.

For example. Cloud computing gives robots a common platform in which to expand their internal knowledge. Social computing gives them a means with which to use all this, a way to self-program. A cloud database can give a robot artificial experience, and social computing algorithms let them share it.  The result is that computing intelligence quickly becomes something that passes for real intelligence as robots “learn” and “program themselves” based on other robots' experience.

This can be important when robots go into the field, literally. Japan wants to use robots to grow crops in the tsunami area, given the lack of young people in that country. and the high radioactivity in the area.

Industrial robots also benefit from what's happening in the renewable energy space. Microbial fuel cells could produce the low-power necessary to keep robots going on distant planets or in space.  We're talking tiny robots, and tiny robots could clear blood vessels of plaque from the inside.  Or reverse it, use robots to move a sail about the ocean that can make biodiesel out of algae blooms. 

Of course, what this whole thing really needs is a generation of young minds, like those who powered the PC revolution in the 1970s. We don't just have to reproduce MIT. We need kids playing with robots the way those in my generation played with electrical breadboards. This is what makes kits like Cubelets (above) so important. Like Little Bits these kits make the transition between playing and learning, the next step being doing.

So what you've got is a thriving industry, and a huge culture growing up into it. The real Susan Calvin may be attending an elementary school near you right now.

 

 

I Robot

I am not giving up on the War Against Oil. Far from it. I will continue following its progress, here and elsewhere, through 2012 and beyond crossover.

But I've learned something about myself. I live for the bleeding edge, for the technology frontier. Once things seem set, once the byways are established, I tend to lit out for the undiscovered country.

As a journalist, that's my “thing.” Always has been. I sought out the Internet starting in 1983, got into e-commerce in the early 1990s, covered the Internet of Things as early as 2002, and became an open source reporter in 2005, before moving to The War Against Oil a few years ago.

Each has represented a sea change in how we look at life and technology. The Internet is the biggest story of our time, by far, and e-commerce is a big part of it. The War Against Oil will be the biggest story of this decade, returning us all to prosperity and turning today's unemployment problem into tomorrow's labor shortage.

But what comes after that? What comes after is something I've dreamed of since I was a kid. Useful, commercial, consumer robots. Thus I call this section of the blog Asimov Ville. (Asimov wrote his short story The Last Question, in which the universe was created by a robot, in 1964.

The Hard Jobs Before Us

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 42 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I outlived Steve Jobs. And maybe you did too.

By that I mean I was born a few months before Jobs, also in 1955, and I'm still around while he is no more.

We were both born at the height of the Baby Boom. It peaked that year for boys, and two years later for girls. We've always been acutely aware of what that means. The culture of the boom was made by others, and we have lived feeling some responsibility for it, in a world not of our making.

We are 70s people, not 60s folks. We did some things in our youth, but most of us pulled away in time, and taught our children fearsome tales that have kept them from drawing outside the lines. Many of us – Steve included – have thus spent our lives in rebellions against ourselves, and our contemporaries.

Better than Beating the Aggies

I've never understood the obsession among Texas colleges over winning football games.

I read Sports Illustrated's profile of TCU coach Gary Patterson with interest and, in the end, with revulsion. Not because Patterson's a bad guy. He's a great guy, a real ambassador for the sport. It was the article's description of all the money pouring into his program – for facilities, for salaries, for amenities. TCU is not a school with an enormous endowment, yet it's spending millions of dollars turning kids into billboards (I liked the uniforms they had that were given a look like scales), and thinking that's a good use of education money.

It's not. It's just a bid for political influence. It's influence peddling.

I went to Rice, and when I went there we played in the old Southwest Conference. That conference disappeared in a welter of corruption and greed in 1994, and the school now plays in something called Conference USA. We lose $10 million a year. I wish we didn't, but I also know the only way to reduce the loss is to kill the program. So I keep my mouth shut.

Still, like most Rice alums, I'm a lot happier about news like this than I ever could be about beating Texas A&M. It's a paper in the journal Physical Letters by Prof. Rui-Rui Du (left, above) and his graduate student, Ivan Knez (right, above), describing a "quantum spin Hall topological insulator." This is a device needed to create a quantum computer, a gate for a device that would operate on a sub-atomic level. Instead of using “bits” of on-and-off, it would use base four, the spins possible in a particle.

What an Open Source Process Can Do: Solve AIDS

While most in the media are talking about how video gamers solved a long-standing problem in AIDS research, correctly identifying the structure of a virus, I think the open source angle matters a lot more.

Because this was open source science. Instead of holding the problem within a small community, a proprietary approach favored by both universities and corporations, the problem was let out into the wild, through a video game system called Foldit, and solved within 10 days.

Credit goes to the Foldit Contenders Team, wrote a player named "mimi" who journalists were trying to give credit for the final solution. "It was the changes made by my colleagues that enabled mine to work, so it was very much a team effort," she wrote.

Hope For Open Amid the Ruins

These are tough times to be for open source.

Patent and copyright extremists are wrecking havoc, from technology markets forced to pay patent trolls and giant companies grabbing rights to the future through patents with absurd claims, to Europe extending copyright to 70 years in the name of a few living artists (and their long-dead managers).

But there continues to be ample evidence that copyright and patents need not strangle the future, and folks putting money behind the idea.

The UK's decision to ignore the extremists who put royalties into the European Interoperability Framework, insisting on Royalty Free standards for the goods they procure  is a little marker on the road.

Sure, it's entirely self-serving – governments strapped for cash don't want to pay the patent ransom – but if governments shouldn't be force do do so, what about the rest of us?

9-11 And Urban Transformation

This week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg hopes to turn the 10th anniversary of 9-11 into a celebration of New York's rebirth.

But it's not a rebirth.

It's a reinvention. And it's happening across the country, unobserved and often unremarked upon.

The Downtown Alliance, which advocates for the area, notes that lower Manhattan has added 56,000 residents, calling that a mark of its progress. But that was never the benchmark before.

Since the Second World War, the benchmark for the health of a downtown was the amount of commercial space it had available, and how much of that space was rented. Downtown was the commercial center, the office center, it was where the elite went to work.

But even absent 9-11, that has been changing. Why? Because the engine of a city's growth is no longer its commercial heart. It's no longer about moving money, about financial commerce, about planning. It's about exchanging ideas, about intellectual property.

And, unknown to those who make our policy regarding intellectual property, the nature of that has changed as well. We're used to thinking of it as property, something to be controlled by patent and copyright. It's not. It's the raw material for new discoveries. It's the steel, not the car.

The Education Revolution

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 37 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Since before my own kids entered school people have been trying to use technology to revolutionize education. (To the right, a hallway where one of my kids went to school.)

They have failed, for two reasons:

1. Desktop FAIL. Before teachers could learn the tool the tool was obsolete.

2. Politics

Blah Blah Blog

I'm speaking today at Blah Blah Blogs, an afternoon for the Washington digerati asking the question, “Should your organization blog, and if so how?”

The simple answer is it depends. Blogging is publishing, just like a newsletter is publishing. Who is your audience, what can you do with that audience if you have their attention, and can you turn that attention into something of value, are the key questions to ask.

The answers to these questions become the business case for your blog. Some groups have millions of members they may want to activate on an issue, or give money. Others may just have 100 decision makers they want all singing the same tune.

In all cases, don't just post a blog. You want an RSS feed. You want to announce posts on Facebook, and Twitter, and Google Plus (a tool like Tweetdeck can hit several of these services at once). You want it going out as an email, to your core list, and you can measure how well you're hitting that target based on whether the email read and how many unsubscribe. (A good email marketing service can always tell you if emails have been opened.)