Off Course-On Target

In the Next Industrial Revolution Atoms Are the New Bits - Wired and WITII?

As you've been reading here in many of my previous posts, one of the best examples of the Snowflake Effect and my constant quest around the theme of What if the Impossible Isn't? (WITII?), is that of the extreme mass personalization of the manufacturing process.  This is essentially democratizing manufacturing and therefore most of our physical world of human designed and made "things".  This all ties in nicely or is part of the often called the "Internet of Things".

Of course this is pure delight for me as The Snowflake Effect hits manufacturing and represents a huge surge forward in the transformation from mass production to mass customization.

IMHO, the importance and the long term effects of this new industrial revolution will be no less than and likely more than that of the previous.  Consider that most of our society, our education systems, our design models, our assumptions and our way of life are indelibly permeated by a mass production orientation and the influences of the initial industrial revolution.  Imagine, as I do, this is changing and doing so exponentially rapidly.  The future is a much more “Do it Yourself” DIY model, based on groups of individuals, access, collaboration, crowdsourcing and centered around great ideas.  Brace yourself for the future, it is already here.

I can therefore heartily recommend that you spend the time to read this recent Wired article in its entirety, watch the video and click on some of the many links in the article to learn more and likely convince yourself just how real and how big this coming revolution is. I’m confident you’ll agree it is a good use of your time.

The video is below and below that I’ve pulled a few quotes out which caught my mind’s eye.

Atoms Are the New Bits

Added: January 25, 2010

In an age of open source, custom-fabricated, DIY product design, all you need to conquer the world - and to profit - is a brilliant idea. Welcome to the next Industrial Revolution.

Some other significant out takes from the Wired article include:

"Within minutes, you have a whole new physical object: a rip, mix, and burn of atoms."

“Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.”

“Now the same is happening to manufacturing — the long tail of things.”

“Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.”

“Hardware is becoming much more like software,”

“As Cory Doctorow puts it in his new book, Makers, “The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.””

“For a lens into the new world of open-access factories in China, check out Alibaba .com, the largest aggregator of the country’s manufacturers, products, and capabilities. Just search on the site (in English), find some companies producing more or less what you’re looking to make, and then use instant messaging to ask them if they can manufacture what you want. Alibaba’s IM can translate between Chinese and English in real time, so each person can communicate using their native language. Typically, responses come in minutes: We can’t make that; we can make that and here’s how to order it; we already make something quite like that and here’s what it costs.”

Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder

As you can see from the graphic, we added a new rung, "Conversationalists". Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn't much of a conversation.

Conversationalists intrigue me. They're 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they're among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

The data from this survey continues the trends from the last two years -- Spectators are maxing out at around 70%, Joiners are still growing rapidly, and Creators are still growing slowly

via blogs.forrester.com

Interesting new analysis from Forrester of the use of "social technology" and observations about the changes within these groupings.  You can compare this to the original ladder from April 2007.  The executive summary of this original report read:

Many companies approach social computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed – a blog here, a podcast there – to achieve a marketing goal.  But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes social computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term "Social Technographics" to describe analyzing a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other company pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers' Social Technographics first, and then create a social strategy based on that profile.

Most noteworthy perhaps is the need to create a new group for "Conversationalists", those who post updates on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. and to note that this group has the highest percentage of women at 56% and that 70% of conversationalists are over 30.  

As with a few others who commented on this new study, I would have put Critics above Conversationalists on the ladder as it seems to me that being a "critic" requires more work, thought and contributes more, but the groupings and the changes within them in the last two and a half years is very helpful for understanding some of the changes going on in the online world and beyond.

Posted via web from Learnativity

Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed - ReadWriteStart

Both the original  list of "5 Social Media Secrets for 2010" from Slideshare and the "connected" list from Dana Oshiro at Read Write Web are well done and well worth your time to read and reflect upon.

Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed

Written by Dana Oshiro / January 12, 2010 4:30 PM 

Presentation company Slideshare recently released its list of "5 Social Media Secrets for 2010". While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we'd connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy.

via www.readwriteweb.com

10 Levels of Intimacy in Today's Communication - Ji Lee

I'm a visual person so the great graphic below from Ji Lee really appeals to me, but however you choose to process it I thought this was worthy of some time to reflect upon.  

While there is certainly a difference in the levels of intimacy between many of these forms of communication, in my experience the intimacy can vary greatly within any one of them.  So I'm not sure I see these as levels of intimacy so much as a reasonably comprehensive list of the choices we currently have for communicating with each other, mostly one to one in these examples.  

When you consider how recent many of these ways are you can see why I expect the growth of our communication choices will continue to be exponential.  So one of the critical competencies we need to develop and improve is our ability to match the communication "medium" with the context of any given need and situation.  When is a Tweet the best choice, or an Email or a hand written letter or a phone call or when do you need to go talk to someone in person?

via pleaseenjoy.com

Personal projects are often worth more than professional ones. What's stopping you? - Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

The Snowflake Effect is all about extreme mass personalization for every person every day.  Making things uniquely matched to ourselves and our context so they fit us just right  This often involves the personalization of products and services but what about the personalization of the person?  The Snowflake Effect enables us to be our authentic selves and THAT may well be the most exciting and powerful result of a world full of snowflakes.

Check out the post from Ewan McIntosh's edu.blogs.com and the video of Ji Lee telling the story of how he Snowflaked himself by putting his personal projects in front of his professional ones and ended up having them become one and the same.

Personal projects are often worth more than professional ones. What's stopping you?

It's all too easy to relegate our personal projects to the bottom of the pile until "the day job" is complete. The result? We nearly always end up having to leave creative, fun, new projects behind in the interest of ticking someone else's boxes, when those same personal projects could be the very innovation that make the difference.

Ji Lee was fed up with his life as an ad exec when he decided to engage the public in parodying that very same world, printing out 50,000 speech bubble stickers and placing them over ads around New York City. Over time, the public took the lead in inventing political or comical speech to make the parody. The ultimate parody in this project is, of course, that ad agencies used them to further promote their products. He spins a good yarn in his 99% video.

via edu.blogs.com

Augmented Identity & Reality = Augmented Cognition

Below is a nice combination of postings from Ewan McIntosh on face recognition based Augmented Reality (AR) apps and some thoughts from David Truss on the applications and implications of this when used in education.

I'm delighted and encouraged by the questions and issues Ewan and David raise as I see the implementation of AR as one of the many examples of exponential rates of change.  I'd also suggest you see through the clumsy use of "screens" and displays such as those on cameras and phones and instead think of these disappearing through the use of eye glasses, contact lenses and implants such that the notion of a screen or a display goes away and everything is just sensory input, visual in this case, to our brains, and what is being augmented is our cognitive capabilities more so that "reality".

Augmented Identity

Augmented Reality (AR) has been around for a while. Fans of Monday Night Football have always had the television advantage of ’seeing’ the first down line conveniently added for their viewing pleasure. A more advanced version of augmented reality can be seen here, where you can see information about all the nearest subway locations in New York superimposed onto your iPhone’s camera view.

And now from Ewan McIntosh I’m introduced to this application of Augmented Reality, possible due to face recognition software.

Ewan says, “…In a schools context this could be seen as lethal.” And then he asks:

“But there are some amazing potential side effects – what would yours be?”

via pairadimes.davidtruss.com

It's Not What You Do, It's Why You Do It - ReadWriteStart

Motivational speaker and author of the book Start With Why Simon Sinek believes he has found a way to map out the way inspiring leaders and innovators think. Young entrepreneurs who may think they aren't up to snuff with the big boys of innovation should be encouraged by Sinek's theories which seek to break down inspiration into an easily replicated formula.

He calls his concept "The Golden Circle," a series of three concentric circles that represent the different ways we think about a product or goal. The outermost circle, labeled "What," represents, for instance, a company's product. The next circle, "How," would be the technology behind this product, and the innermost circle represents "Why" the company makes the product.

The crux of Sinek's ideas lie within this center "Why" circle When he talks about why a company makes a product, he doesn't mean "to make money," because that's the result of the "What." Instead, the "Why" represents an innovator's beliefs and passions that drive them toward success.

In a TEDx speech in Puget Sound, Wash., Sinek repeated a mantra several times to the audience throughout his presentation that sums up his "Golden Circle" theory.

"People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And what you do serves as the proof of what you believe," he said

via readwriteweb.com

My favorite kind of models; simple and powerful. Worth your consideration and reflection. Note in particular the context Sinek uses to define "Why" as being " an innovator's beliefs and passion that drive them toward success".

Matches with my experiences and observations. Yours?

Posted via web from Learnativity

‽ the person formally known as Wayne

Since I became aware of it many years ago, the interrobang (examples below) has been my favorite punctuation mark.  

So much so that if we were to change to using symbols instead of names for ourselves the interrobang would be at the top of my list of a symbol for "the person formally known as Wayne Hodgins".

A fun exercise perhaps to consider this use of symbols rather than words for people's names?  What punctuation mark or sign would YOU choose?

Interrobang:

A sentence ending with an interrobang asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question.

For example:

• How much did you pay for those shoes‽
• You're going out with whom‽
• They did what‽

Use of an interrobang may be considered somewhat redundant, considering the same effect is captured in standard English by ending a sentence with both an exclamation point and a question mark, the order of which is determined by whether it is more rhetorical/excited or more interrogative.

via en.wikipedia.org

Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy | h+ Magazine

Developments such as this are of interest and value for seeing trends & directions relative to WITII? (What if the impossible isn't?).  While I would  not pretend for a moment to understand any of the details of DNA level work, what I do see is how advances in nanotechnology are continuing at an every increasing pace and penetrating new levels of scale.  The quote below summed it up nicely for me:

"The advances in DNA nanotechnology keep coming, and many observers are wondering if this will be the path that leads us to the next Industrial Revolution. Only time — and many more experiments — will tell."

Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy

Written By: Michael Anissimov

Date Published: January 12, 2010

Until the mid-1990s, the term "nanotechnology" referred to the goal of creating vast arrays of nanoscale assemblers to fabricate useful human-scale products from scratch in an entirely automated process and with atomic precision. Since then, the word has come to mean anything from stain-resistant pants to branches of conventional chemistry — generally anything involving nanoscale objects. But the dream of a new Industrial Revolution based on nanoscale manufacturing has not died, as demonstrated most vividly by the work of NYU professor of chemistry Dr. Nadrian Seeman.

Schematics (a) and Atomic Force Micrographs (b) of the Origami Arrays and Capture Molecules. Panel i of (a) illustrates the origami array containing slots for the cassettes and a notch to enable recognition of orientation; the slots and notches are visible in the AFM in (b). Panels ii show the cassettes in place; the color coding in (a) used throughout the schematics is green for the PX state and violet for the JX2 state; the presence of the cassettes is evident in the AFM image in (b). Panels iii illustrate the PX-PX state which captures a triangle pointing towards the notch in the schematic (a) and in the AFM image (b). Panels iv illustrate the PX-JX2 state (a), containing a triangle that points away from the notch, which is evident in the AFM image (b). Panels v illustrate the JX2- PX state which captures a diamond-shaped molecule (a); its shape is visible in the AFM image (b). Panels vi show the linear molecule captured by the JX2-JX2 state, both schematically (a) and in the AFM image (b).

via hplusmagazine.com

Printers that Print Printers? WITII?

If you've been reading some of my posts over the past few months you know of my ongoing asking of the question What If The Impossible Isn't? or WITII? as I've been abreviating it.  This arose from my previous observation that we are living in a world of exponential change and the purpose of this theme of WITII? is to show that much, perhaps even most of what we assume to be impossible is actually now, or is about to be, possible.  And possible in this context is not so much that something has just been invented or accomplished in some research laboratory.  Possible in my the WITII? context is about products, services and capabilities that are available, affordable, accessible and usable for "the rest of us".

One of the more fun and significant examples of my ongoing quest for examples of "What if the impossible isn't?" (WITII?) and the Snowflake Effect of extreme mass personalization is that of 3D printers; machines that can create or "print" fully functional or "real" objects and assemblies.  3D printers are a good WITII? example in that they are not new, but they are beginning to reach a price point, availability and a functionality that can put them on your desktop on your budget and enable you to make things that you would want.  The application of this technology is also expanding dramatically as demonstrated by my previous post on the MIT Cornucopia project which looked at a 3D printer for food!

However as fun and exciting as these developments are, one of the most profound changes which 3D printers are ushering in is that of machines which can self replicate.  Simply put, you can buy a 3D printer which can "print" a copy of itself (some assembly required). 

Pause and think about that for a minute ...............  

Better yet, watch this video that will show you a recent example, the RepRap (short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper) self replicating 3D printer.  Well worth 8 minutes of your valuable time to see this in action and have Adrian Bowyer, the originator of the RepRap project explain it.

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

As per the video and the RepRap site:

“ This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn't even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €350). 

Not counting nuts and bolts RepRap can make 50% of its parts; the other parts are designed to be cheaply available everywhere.That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machineyou can use it to make another and give that one to a friend.

Talk about exponential rates of change!  This not only affects the rate of change for making these kinds of machines, it equally changes things like business models, sharing of designs and actual parts and machines.

I don't know about you but that sure get's me excited and has my head reeling!  See what I mean about "What if the impossible isn't?", what was once just something you read about in science fiction novels and movies is now on your desktop! 

I'll let you think on it a bit more and be back to you in future posts with both more examples and implications.