http://frrl.wordpress.com

Don’t have a SDR of your own?  Why not play with someone elses SDR over the Internet?

After playing with a few of these I get the idea that … why should I buy hardware if I can use these on-demand?  Have you heard of using OPM (Other People’s Money)?  How about OPR? – Using Other People’s Radios.  The audio is clear, the interface is very easy to use.  Never listened to Ham Radio? – here is your chance.

With the popularity of “the cloud” maybe this should be called “SDR in the Cloud” or “SDR Cloud Services”

Go here to access about 20 SDR’s all over the world - http://websdr.org/
(Click on light spots in the activity waterfall to listen)

Check out who’s on now and where - DX-Sherlock

Get the technical scoop on the basics of SDR -
http://frrl.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/the-basics-of-software-defined-radio/

Watch Burt Fishers (K1OIK) review of the FlexRadio 1500
http://frrl.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/burt-fishers-review-of-the-flex-radio-1500/

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

Albert Einstein Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. (1879-1955)

So. The supercomputer Watson “shellacked” a couple of human beings in Jeopardy. Not just any human beings – Watson shellacked a couple of champion Jeopardy players – Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Maybe Watson is on the way to the Singularity (read) but it has a far way to go.  They say knowledge is power.  That may be true.  But real power, as Einstein points out, is imagination.

You can only get so far with a collection of facts – Watson has a store of 14 terabytes of reference data and 2,880 processors to pick though all that reference data to find the particular fact that it needs in response to a particular question that it is asked.  You can only get so far with simple deductive inference, if Watson is capable of that  -  “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.”  Didn’t you already know that?  Wasn’t that “new” fact liberated by the slight of hand of syllogistic exegesis already embedded in the knowledge store you already had?  So what’s new?  Nothing.

aspiration, imagination, and passion

Having your hands on all the facts and simple logic is not the key that creates the future.  What is going to get you someplace is imagination.  There have been three killer collective attributes that differentiated man from machine and differentiated individuals from each other throughout history: aspiration, imagination, and passion.

These are truly the differentiators of individuals.  Have you every encountered people where “nothing ever occurs to them”?  They have no ideas.  Can’t think of a better way to do things?  Can’t come up with a vision of the future that is not an endless replication of the present?  My take is that this inability to have an imagination is an artifact of the spectacular success of the Industrial Age mindset epitomized by the famous quote of Henry Ford: “Why, when I ask for a pair of hands, does a brain come attached?” 

Those born digital – those born in the post industrial age – do not harbor this legacy.  And that’s not all

What is new in the globally connected digital age is networks of intellectual capital.  What happens when aspiration, imagination and passion meet in nearly frictionless global collaboration among like-minded people?

Read the rest of this entry »

Keep your eye on Watson – The Singularity is Near

IBM supercomputer Watson closed the pod-bay doors on its human competition Tuesday night in the first round of a two-game Jeopardy match designed to showcase the latest advances in artificial intelligence. The contest concludes Wednesday…

Read more – http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/watson-game-one

TED Event – Thursday Feb. 17, at 11:30am EST.

http://blog.ted.com/2011/02/16/live-on-ted-com-tomorrow-ask-an-ibm-insider-about-watson/

IBM’s language-savvy computer Watson has been dominating against humans on the game show Jeopardy! for the past two nights, and makes his final appearance this evening. And tomorrow, live on TED.com, IBM is hosting an insider’s conversation about Watson with Watson’s principal investigator Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow Kerrie Holley, and Columbia professor of clinical medicine Dr. Herbert Chase, hosted by Man v. Machine author Stephen Baker.

The big question: Now that Watson has succeeded on a game show, the team is digging in to develop real-world products based on this exciting technology. They’ll be asking: What’s next?

And you can ask these panelists a question too: Between now and 10am EST tomorrow, tweet your questions, and tag them #askwatson or #ibmwatson to have your tweet considered by the panel. Then watch live to see if they answer.

Tune in for the live webcast on TED.com tomorrow, Feb. 17, at 11:30am EST.

What’s Next? Indeed!

Related Posting – The Singularity is Near: IBM takes on the Jeopardy Challenge

Google’s announcement comes as Egypt’s last standing ISP is disabled. Noor Group, a DSL provider, managed to remain online last week as the Egyptian government ordered ISPs to pull the plug. Unfortunately, Noor’s traffic appears to have trickled to a halt. “As of approximately 20:46 UTC, Noor is no longer reachable from outside of Egypt,” reported Renesys, an Internet monitoring firm.

Read a related article: Amateur Radio – When all else fails
Get on the air in your community – The Local Community Radio Act 2011

We are very dependent on the Internet for just about everything.  What happens when a government pulls the plug on their country’s Internet connections effectively disconnecting their citizens from the outside world?

It’s interesting that Amateur Radio has positioned itself as the communication resource of last resort.  It could be that Google is the penultimate communication resource of last resort – at least for the current situation in Egypt.

If we do get to Amateur Radio as truly the communication of last resort for an entire country I wonder what the world would look like in that scenario.

Read the article from Reuters…

(Reuters) – Google Inc launched a special service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by dialing a phone number and leaving a voicemail, as Internet access remains cut off in the country amid anti-government protests.

“Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground,” read a post on Google’s official corporate blog on Monday.

The service, which Google said was developed with engineers from Twitter, allows people to dial a telephone number and leave a voicemail. The voicemail is automatically translated into an audio file message that is sent on Twitter using the identifying tag #egypt, Google said.

Google said in the blog post, titled “Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard,” that no Internet connection is needed to use the service.

It listed three phone numbers for people to call to use the service.

Internet social networking services like Twitter and Facebook have been important tools of communications for protesters in Egypt who have taken to the streets since last week to demonstrate against the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

Internet service has been suspended around the country and phone text messaging has been disabled.

A source familiar with the matter said Google, whose corporate motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” was not taking sides in the crisis in Egypt, but was simply supporting access to information as it has done with other services such as video website YouTube.

YouTube has been streaming live coverage of Al Jazeera’s broadcasts of the events in Egypt.

Dozens of the so-called speak-to-tweet messages were featured on Twitter on Monday. The messages ranged from a few seconds to several minutes and featured people identifying themselves as Egyptians and describing the situations in various parts of the country.

“The government is spreading rumors of fear and of burglary and of violence,” said one of the messages from an English speaker. “The only incidence of theft and burglary are done by the police themselves.”

Google listed the following numbers for people to use the service: +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed.  Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve…

…it doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.

Remix

Heard that story a thousand times before?  This story has been told over and over for decades to motivate teams, groups, organizations, divisions, and just about any group of people.  The message is clear: no matter who you are – from the corporate executives to the mail room clerk – every day you have to run.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a few people talking about this story.  People are amazingly creative.  They took this story and remixed the meaning of it.  Quite remarkable – at least to my way of thinking.  But, perhaps typical – read on.

One of the people talking about the story of the Lion and Gazelle made an astute observation.  The observation being  that a gazelle really doesn’t have to run faster than the fastest lion as the story would have you believe - a gazelle only has to run faster than the slowest gazelle in the pack.

Remarkable!

So, lets see what some of the implications would be to this type of thinking and reinterpretation of the traditional story of lions, gazelles, and running to survive. 

First the story of the lion and the gazelle pits a gazelle against a lion.  In the remix by the astute observer the gazelle is compared to other gazelles - not a lion.  Gazelles are not competing against lions – they are competing against other gazelles.  So, your aspiration as a gazelle is not to be faster than the fastest  lion just faster than the slowest, most feeble, and lame member of the gazelle pack in which you run.  Nice!

Second, good for lions.  Gazelles in the remix interpretation of the story have reset their standards downward.  Once our astute gazelle spreads the idea to other gazelles and gets their acceptance of this new interpretation their aspiration won’t be to be  faster than the  fastest lions just one click better than the most broke-down gazelle.  With lower aspirations, and lower achievement of gazelles, Lions may just have an easier time taking down Gazelles in general.

And third – think about this – a sort of butterfly effect.  With lower Gazelle standards lions might get lazy.  Since gazelles only run as fast as the most broke-down gazelle not as fast as the fastest lion then their prey is less competitive.  If the prey is less competitive then lions have less incentive to be at the top of their running game.

So, it starts with one gazelle who changes the game from running against the fastest lions to competing against the slowest gazelle in the pack.  What is the net effect on the ecosystem of lions, gazelles, running, and the competition for survival?

America – The State of the Union 2011

On January 25,2011 President Obama gave the State of the Union Address.  Here are a few excerpts…

Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became the home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer.

So, yes, the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real. But this shouldn’t discourage us. It should challenge us. Remember — for all the hits we’ve taken these last few years, for all the naysayers predicting our decline, America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world. (Applause.) No workers — no workers are more productive than ours. No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs. We’re the home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any place on Earth…

The future is ours to win. But to get there, we can’t just stand still. As Robert Kennedy told us, “The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.” Sustaining the American Dream has never been about standing pat. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age.

Connecting the dots

Read the rest of this entry »

About every three years I get a new corporate laptop.  Highly secure; “don’t mess with me – strictly business”; the corporate standard.  This is simply to say that this laptop and me is something like an arranged marriage.  Or, a shot-gun wedding.  Not my choice but I’ll “learn to love it”.  Maybe.

So, since it’s sitting here I thought I would write a short review.

Background

This is now my third ThinkPad.  My first one was a T41, the second one was a T60, and now the T410.  The T41 had the IBM logo on it.  Then IBM sold the PC Division and the ThinkPad brand to Lenovo.  When Lenovo took over ThinkPad I noticed a decrease in the quality of this line of laptops.  The T41 seemed much more of a solid machine, it had a better display than the T60, and a much better keyset.  The basic design and layout of the ThinkPad has remained essentially unchanged through these three models with the exception of the biometric device with is on the T410.  What has persisted is that “red eraser gizmo” stuck between the G and H keys.  Who uses that?  Let’s all agree that that that “pointing device” was a mistake.

The machine came with Windows 7 and it’s the pretty standard stuff. 

General Observations

1. Price.  The price for this laptop seems very high compared to other models with the Intel Core I5 chip and similar size hard drive and memory.  For example, the Gateway, ASUS, and HP have models that are priced in the $600-$700 range where the Levono 41o is about $1,000.  (price and specs)
2. Keyset.  To people who use a computer all day the feel of the keyset is very important.  The keyset on the Lenovo ThinkPad T410 sounds hollow when you type on it.  When I buy a laptop an important consideration is the feel of the keyset.  I have two HP Laptops, a DV6 and DV7, and I prefer the feel of these keysets.
3. Screen.  The Lenovo ThinkPad T410 has a LED backlit screen.  Very sharp and clear.  In fact, it’s so bright that I have to tun the brightness down from the maximum brightness.
4. Ports.  The Lenovo ThinkPad T10 has plenty of ports.  Four USB ports. eSATA, Firewire, and VGA

Unique features of the Lenovo ThinkPad T410

Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled across a paper from the School of Advanced Military Studies entitled: Effects of Groupthink on Tactical Decision-Making.  (You can find a link to this paper at the end of this posting)

The really cool thing about watching decision-making by all sorts of corporations, organization, teams, and groups is how easily they fall into common, well-known, and avoidable decision-making traps.

The second really cool thing is that few people learn from the past or study the past of flawed decision-making.  For those who do learn from the past all they can do is stand back and watch the inevitable train wreck of yet another avoidable mistake.

To the point, here is a quote from  Major Phillip M. Johnson – the author of this Monograph

This conclusion is based on a review of all Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) databases and published CTC trends and lessons learned periodicals (fiscal years 1995-1999). Only one reference about groupthink was found in CALL Newsletter 90-8, Winning in the Desert I: Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for the Maneuver Commander (pg 24). The publication gave the following advice to commanders: “Do not fall victim to ‘groupthink!’ Widespread agreement among the staff is not necessarily a healthy sign. It could mean that the desire to find agreement is overriding critical thinking…”

Being aware of flawed decision-making based on Group Think is pretty important when it comes to military decision-making – it literally is life and death of individuals from one to hundreds of thousands or more. There are case studies in the Monograph which show the effect of the Group Think flawed decision-making in global and tactical scenarios.

Birds of a feather flock together…

Like people associate with like people.  This may be a psychological comforting thing (we can all agree with each other; we all think alike; there is no dissent) but this is exactly what leads to a certain “blindness” in optimal decision-making and critical thinking.

At the end of the monograph Major Phillip M. Johnson writes this:

In times of stress there will be a natural desire to reduce that stress by increasing group harmony and ignoring problems. Be alert for groupthink and when you suspect it is occurring, take a devil’s advocate position and actively find the flaws that everyone is missing.”

Cass Sunstein

“We’re from the government and we are here to help you..”.  Read this posting for background.  Cass Sunstein knows about Group Think and this is why in his book Nudge he advocates this – which, of course, most people don’t like.

Sunstein would impose mandatory “electronic sidewalks” on the internet. These “sidewalks” would display links to opposing viewpoints, a concept described as a “Fairness Doctrine for the Internet” by Adam Thierer, senior fellow and director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom at the Progress and Freedom Center. “Apparently in Sunstein’s world, people have many rights, but one of them, it seems, is not the right to be left alone or seek out the opinions one desires.”

“ it seems, is not the right to be left alone or seek out the opinions one desires..”  On the road to Group Think?  Would the Fairness Doctrine for the Internet help you or harm you?  Psychological upsetting at the expense of better decision-making?  What is more important?

Safe in their opinions… confirmation of beliefs already held…

Is it that people want to be safe in their opinions and therefore they listen only to people who express the same opinion as theirs?  Why do people listen to Rush Limbaugh?  To confirm beliefs already held?  People like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are “one-man Group Thinks” influencing millions of people into a Group Think replete with “Mind-Guards” who protect the group from adverse information and demonize people who do not share their views (see below) .  What about the larger stage of politics?  What about the Group Think of Nazism?  How could it happen?  Group Think works so well that those inside can’t recognize, what might be called, “cultural insanity” by those who are outside the Group Think.

State Controlled Media

Group Think is also somewhat related to state controlled media.  You only get to hear one side.  Do you remember Baghdad Bob from the Gulf War?  As the american coalition tanks were rolling in, Baghdad Bob said the american were not in Baghdad (quotes).  At the time of this writing there are riots in Egypt.  State controlled media has ejected all the foreign journalists and the cameras.  What remains is a single camera and a state controlled news person telling the tale from the ruling powers perspective ( read more  ).  This is also how those in power can also  influence elections  ( read more )

Symptoms of Group Think

In all the cases above what attributes of Group Think could apply … (Overestimation of the Group)  Illusion of Invulnerability, Belief in the Inherent Morality of the Group, ( Closed-Mindedness) Collective Rationalization,  Stereotypes of Out-Groups, (Pressure Toward Conformity) Self-Censorship, Illusion of Unanimity, Direct Pressures on Dissenters, and Self-Appointed Mind-Guards to protect the group from adverse information that could threaten the group’s shared complacency and to keep others in line with the supposed consensus.

Read the rest of this entry »

While you are watching the video read this…

In 2005 Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called: The Singularity is Near

Here are the four basic postulates of the book:

1. A technological-evolutionary point known as “the singularity” exists as an achievable goal for humanity.
2. Through a law of accelerating returns, technology is progressing toward the singularity at an exponential rate.
3. The functionality of the human brain is quantifiable in terms of technology that we can build in the near future.
4. Medical advancements make it possible for a significant number of his generation (Baby Boomers) to live long enough for the exponential growth of technology to intersect and surpass the processing of the human brain

Kurzweil predicts the Singularity will occur around about 2045

At this point …

1. $1000 buys a computer a billion times more powerful than the human brain. This means that average and even low-end computers are hugely smarter than even highly intelligent, unenhanced humans.
2. The Singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on; thus the machines, acting in concert with those humans who have evolved into postbiological cyborgs, achieve effective world domination. The machines enter into a “runaway reaction” of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of A.I.s appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted.
3. The Singularity is an extremely disruptive, world-altering event that forever changes the course of human history. The extermination of humanity by violent machines is unlikely (though not impossible) because sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded humans.

So, how are we progressing toward the Singularity?  Enjoy the video and the related links below…

From the IBM web site cited below…

A computer system that can directly and precisely answer natural language questions over an open and broad range of knowledge has been envisioned by scientists and writers since the advent of computers themselves. Consider, for example, the “Computer” in Star Trek. Taken to its ultimate form, broad and accurate open-domain question answering may well represent a crowning achievement for the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Read the rest of this entry »

So, what’s the probability that the 1 Terabyte drive on which you store your digital life will fail… in 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, or 5 years?  What are the factors the decrease the useful life of a disk drive?

If a drive operates in a high temperature environment will that increase the likelihood that the drive will fail?  What about the effect of  Vibration?  Should you leave you drive spinning all the time or shut it down at night?  How does the number of power on/off cycles affect failure rates?  How does a drive fail?

If you had an infrastructure with over 100,000 drives, and you collected self-monitoring signals from each drive, and you analyzed all that data over time, what would you find?

This is exactly what Google did.  What did they find out about failure rates of disk drives?

It is estimated that over 90% of all new information produced in the world is being stored on magnetic media, most of it on hard disk drives. Despite their importance, there is relatively little published work on the failure patterns of disk drives, and the key factors that affect their lifetime. Most available data are either based on extrapolation from accelerated aging experiments or from relatively modest sized field studies. Moreover, larger population studies rarely have the infrastructure in place to collect health signals from components in operation, which is critical information for detailed failure analysis…

We have built an infrastructure that collects vital information about all Google’s systems every few minutes, and a repository that stores these data in timeseries format (essentially forever) for further analysis The information collected includes environmental factors (such as temperatures), activity levels and many of the Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) parameters that are believed to be good indicators of disk drive health. We mine through these data and attempt to find evidence that corroborates or contradicts many of the commonly held beliefs about how various factors can affect disk drive lifetime…

Read the Google study and find out -
http://frrl.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/google_diskdrivefailurestudy.pdf

Bonus – from a previous posting on this site
The nitty-gritty on hard drives…  “Danger Will Robinson“… This set of videos is for hard core tech folks only…
See the YouTube links in this posting -
http://frrl.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/hacker-conferences-what-is-shmoocon/