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Latest Read: Invisible Women

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez. Caroline is an award-winning and bestselling writer and campaigner. She is a graduate from Oxford University.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez

The role of a data gap is certainly male leaning. The most difficult task is addressing the data gap bias in cultural diversity across many countries.

What this reveals to me is a bit more complex requirement. The data gap must be aligned within the geographic region and time stamped cultural practices. This will provide much deeper insights.

The opening two chapters address Daily Life. Chapter One is addressing how plowing snow in Sweden is sexist. In America by comparison snow plowing priority is quite different.

The Public Works departments of cities and towns clear roads primarily to keep large traffic patterns clear of snow. The priority does change when winter weather advisories are issued.

When the midwest is hit with large snowfalls that cause delays in public transportation, obviously due to the lack of passable roads, the downstream effect can be delays in various organizations (arts, health, education) and ultimately a prioritization will be to clear roads so the delivery of the US mail can continue.

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Education Globalization Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria. We are certainly living through a transformational period of human history. So, is the pandemic’s aftermath within American control? Regrettably this is unquestionably not a pressing American issue. Yet Fareed offers simple plain advice via a global historical lens.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Firstly, this is not another book about the pandemic. Fareed is focusing on how the global economy is shifting. COVID-19 is unquestionably light years from the 1918 flu pandemic’s impact on our economy.

Indeed America found itself confronting a truly horrific event in an analog world. Today’s impact is certainly global on a digital internet.

Secondly, he is addressing a post-pandemic world. Fareed sees common sense lessons from the 1916 flu pandemic. Can one even imagine responding to COVID during a world war?

America was just entering Europe’s battlefields as the great flu pandemic was also ravaging our country. On the contrary, today’s digital wars with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are aggressively playing out on internet-based battlefields. Yet, America’s initial response to COVID began presenting new challenges:

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote in April 2020. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

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COVID-19 is accelerating our responses to contain the spread. Fareed identifies key issues that are changing the fate of humanity as we learn of incredible infection rates across both emerging and third world countries.

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Education Flat World Globalization IoT Network OpenSource Reading Technology

Latest Read: Thank You for Being Late

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Tom Friedman. This is just one of his many books that I have read. And from time to time he reflects upon his best sellers: Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded. All focus on the impact of globalization.

thank you for being late

Looking back it can be confusing to see why Tom stopped writing books at exactly the precise moment the world changed. The year was 2007 and some very significant events developed. Call it The World is Flat v4.0, when behavior capitalism began.

Consider the introductions of the iPhone, Hadoop and GitHub. Add the launch of Twitter and Facebook. Then Google’s purchase of YouTube should provide the clearest indication of how rapidly technology changed the internet.

Don’t forget Amazon released the Kindle while Airbnb was launched. IBM also launched Watson and Intel launched new non-silicon microchips.

As Tom suggests in his last example, DNA sequencing may have been the most overlooked. The price dropped from $100 million in 2001 to only $1,000 in that magic year of 2007.

So how is anyone supposed to know what all that meant to them 13 years ago? I think many family and friends would say Hadoop and GitHub are names of their pets.

This book is perfect for many, including my family and friends who do not see technology changes coming so quickly. Nor are they used to the fast pace of change. This is where Tom explains very well, for a wide audience where the world is at today. He gives you in this book the permission to slow down and reflect…

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Design Education Flat World Globalization Innovation IoT Maker Milwaukee OpenSource Reading Technology

FarmBot: Open­source precision farming

FarmBot is an open­source and scalable automated precision farming machine and software package designed from the ground up with today’s technologies. The world’s population is growing and is projected to surpass 9 billion inhabitants by 2050. As a result farms must increase production by about 60 percent to meet demand which is stunning since many believe we have reached the limits of traditional farming.
FarmBot

In comparison to desktop digital 3D printers and CNC machines FarmBot extends the idea of X, Y, and Z directions and applies it to plows, seed injectors, water and sensors in order to accurately and efficiently grow plants and soil. I think that I would like to try this out in my own backyard.

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BMW Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Innovation Network Technology

Introducing the AWS IoT cloud

The emerging IoT developer community received a much anticipated jolt of news when Amazon finally announced new enterprise services dedicated to the AWS IoT cloud launch at their 2015 re:Invent conference.
AWS IoT Cloud PlatformThis new AWS IoT cloud service will permit web based interfaces to manage IoT events from various devices: sensors, wearables, drones, and of course mobile tools and apps around an established AWS ecosystem.

The AWS IoT cloud emerges as Amazon’s long term platform following the SalesForce Thunder platform announced last month. Both vendors look to establish key IoT cloud solutions in the corporate enterprise space. They join Cisco’s IoT, Microsoft’s Azure IoT, Oracle’s Movintracks along side GE’s energy launch of Current IoT. The race is now on to process millions of data events from light bulbs to dishwashers and cars over the MQTT protocol and process those messages in their respective clouds.

Amazon is leveraging 11 services around their IoT Cloud strategy to include existing AWS services: Kinesis, Redshift, S3, SNS, SQS, ML, DynamoDB and Lambda. A key investment to this strategy was the recent acquisition of 2lemetry, a IoT enterprise company tuned for transforming raw data from IoT devices onto their ThingFabric platform.