Realtime Innovation

I have been seeing the buzz around Google's new instant search service called Google Realtime.  I hadn't tried it so I wandered over there this morning to see for myself.  The search box looks much the same as the standard Google search window but the results come from blogs, tweets, and other social networking sites and are displayed in near-realtime.

I typed in "innovation" and sat back to watch the action.  I wasn't disappointed.  A new posting containing the word "innovation" would pop up on average every three seconds.

 It was mesmerizing to see this flow of consciousness being spewed forth - all in the name of innovation.  Most of the torrent of returns were tweets - some from companies but many from bloggers who seem to be pushing innovation as a way to get consulting gigs.

The Google site itself is somewhat innovative but you get the same effect of watching the stream if you monitor Twitter or Facebook for a time.  But the effects of aggregation take Google Realtime to another level.

The question that I am struggling with is whether all of this gushing of web consciousness on innovation helps anyone become more innovative?  A debate team taking the Pro position might argue that this shows how much innovation is a part of our collective consciousness, how easily we can cross-pollinate ideas, or how much more easily we can find other people who can help us achieve some specific goal.  The team for the Cons would say this isn't dialogue, it is a monologue with people spewing forth tweets simply in an attempt to be visible, that the people who are really innovating aren't spending their time tweeting, they're actually innovating, or that the chatter actually contributes to less innovation because it is so distracting.

Having read quite a bit about this history of technology and innovation, I come away more on the side of the Cons than on the side of the Pros.  It seems to me that most innovators have a single-mindedness that shuts out all extraneous voices.  I think about John Fitch and the first steamboat, or Oliver Evans automating the first flour mill, or Henry Ford and his plan to put America on wheels with the Model-T, of even more recently, Steve Jobs bringing us a succession of "gotta-have" Apple products.  True innovators are tuning the noise out while they doggedly press forward against all the naysayers.

I remain convinced the we have many innovators today, just as we have had them throughout our history.  They just aren't getting carpal tunnel syndrome from overuse of their thumbs on their Blackberries, tweeting away constantly.  There is a place for all the latest tweets.  I write them myself on my companion Facebook and Twitter pages.  But this is more akin to journalism than it is to innovation.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have some tweets I have to get out.

Tech Almanac is on Facebook and Twitter

It might seem ironic for someone who writes about technology and innovation, but I have been resisting the use  of Facebook and Twitter.  Actually, I tried Twitter over a year ago but I quit because I found tweeting about what I had for breakfast to be a colossal waste of my time and boring to everyone else.  Facebook was a bit of a different animal.  I thought of Facebook as a semi-live chat for college and high school kids or maybe a good way to share pictures of the last vacation.  I have had a Facebook account for a year but have hardly used it.

Then I started following the Chicago History Journal blog.  Sharon Williams, who writes the blog, clued me in to the value of Facebook and Twitter as a way to enhance and connect a blog to a wider group of readers.  When I saw how interesting her own pages were, I took the plunge.

So if you don't know about it yet,  I have extended the Technology Almanac to Facebook here.  My Facebook page isn't the same as what you will find in the blog.  The blog links will show up there, of course, when they are posted but most of what is on Facebook are articles and links relating to topical stories about technology and innovation.  I follow the news pretty closely and when I see something that I think others might find interesting, I post it on my Tech Almanac Facebook page.

Similarly, I have a Twitter page for the Tech Almanac that more or less mirrors the Facebook page. They link back and forth so if you prefer one over the other, you can see what's up in stories relating to technology and innovation.  If you see a story that you think would be of interest, send it my way.

One of the things I have learned out of this experience is that Facebook and Twitter are more than tools to connect with friends.  The number of businesses and institutions that are on both of these platforms is astounding.  We are becoming ever more dependent on our social networking tools.  That is not to say that there isn't a lot of mindless clutter out there.  Arguably, the time that I spend minding the store on Facebook and Twitter might be more productively spent elsewhere.  But I do learn a ton by what I see passing by my Facebook and Twitter windows.

I'm not sure where all this is leading but I do know that the way we connect and communicate is undergoing seismic shifts.  I guess I want to go along for the ride.

The Chicago History Journal

I recently discovered a wonderful history website written by Sharon Williams called the Chicago History Journal. I have posted here in the past about George Pullman and his sleeping car empire.  Sharon very kindly asked if I could provide something for her website which you can find here.  Sharon also maintains the Chicago History theme on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.  Check them out and thank you, Sharon!

My earlier post on Pullman:

George M. Pullman: Force for Progress or Corporate Despot?

Image:

From Sharon William's Chicago History Journal

Bethlehem Steel Blues

I was browsing through a website called SnagFilms which hosts documentaries and I came across a three-minute film on the sad aftermath of the failure of Bethlehem Steel in 2003.  This short video is worth a look.

Watch more free documentaries

The deep sadness in this film piqued my curiosity about this very successful company and its namesake town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  Wikipedia has a great overview article on the company.  Fortune Magazine did a post-mortem on the company's demise back in a 2004 issue which was worth a quick read. 

The steel industry was once the bellwether of American industrial health.  Bethlehem Steel provided the steel for the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building, among a long list of other American icons.  It was not only one of the largest of the U.S. steel producers, it was also one of the largest ship-building and railroad car manufacturers in the country.  Now, the original steel mill site in Bethlehem is bare ground except for a new casino.  In some bitter twist of fate, the construction of the casino was delayed for a shortage of... you guessed it... steel.

What went wrong?  The answer is both complicated and simple.  The complicated answer involves the emergence of cheaper steel from newly-built mills in Japan and Europe following World War II, the dependence of U.S. industry on trade barriers for protection rather than reinvesting for innovation, arrogant management, huge legacy costs for retiree healthcare benefits, and a steelworkers union that refused to give an inch to a management that was equally obstinate.  The simple answer is that the steel industry ran its natural course and we no longer need to make steel.  That simple answer, like most simple answers, is also wrong.

Lehigh University has done a great job putting together a website called Beyond Steel that goes into many different aspects of the manufacturing and cultural history of the region.  I especially liked this picture of Bethlehem management taken in 1950.

You don't have to see any detail to know that this was an old, white guy's club. 

Unfortunately, we don't seem to learn much from the life cycles of companies and industries.  The early risk takers give way to the managers who drive up efficiency which leads to the management that pays itself enormous salaries for what seems like their God-given success which precedes the bankruptcy experts who dismantle the enterprise after it crashes.  We are seeing it now in banking.  The auto companies have also been recently knocked down a notch by their own arrogance.  The jury is still out  to see if they survive the long term.  After all, it took Bethlehem Steel almost thirty years to die.

But as the first film shows, often the biggest cost to a community is the disruption to families that have lived there for generations.  In the end, when a company fails, everybody loses.  Everybody.  If you look back at that picture of management, you can just make out five little statuettes on the back wall of the auditorium.  They represent the Customers, Employees, Management, Shareholders, and Suppliers.  Every one of them lost out. 

And we are left building casinos on old industrial sites which form a kind of scab on what was once the healthy corpus of our economy.  But, what the hell, this time around, the odds are with the house.

Sagan and the Symphony of Science

I came across a unique website via Discover Magazine's Discoblog, called the Symphony of Science.  A musician named John Boswell has put together a number of mashup videos on his website that use old science program footage, digital re-mixing, and auto-tuning software to transform spoken text into a sort-of singing.  One of the scientists he features prominently is Carl Sagan and his series, Cosmos, which I blogged about last year.  Other scientists who "sing" in his videos include Steven Hawking, David Attenborough, Neil deGrasee Tyson, Jacob Bronowski, Richard Dawkins, Richard Feynman, and many more.

Boswell got into this to try to combine his interest in electronica, music tools, and his love of science.  The results are very cool.  You can see his first (and most watched) video, A Glorius Dawn, below but click through to his website to watch the others.  They are all different, and all intriguing. Boswell deserves kudos for his creativity. Nicely done!

Kevin Kelley on Technology's Epic Story

Kevin Kelley is something of a technology guru.  He was the first executive editor of Wired magazine.  Kelley spoke to the Amsterdam TED conference last year on "Technology's Epic Story".  He has some interesting things to say (although I am not sure I would agree with his entire thesis).  If you haven't looked at the TED Talks before, check out their website.  They have many interesting speakers addressing a broad range of topics.

The Power of the Web: We Are the World 25 for Haiti

If you read my last post on the Invisible Web, give a listen to this terrific example of what the web can do to bring people together to deal with some really big, tough problems - in this case the earthquake in Haiti.  The music in this video begins at about the 1:00 minute mark.  If you want to help, you can buy the music video or the music file at iTunes and all the proceeds go to Haiti relief.

Enjoy.

Our Amazing and Expanding Universe

I am a fan of Open Culture, a blog on all things about learning out of Stanford University.  Yesterday's post was entitled 10,000 Galaxies in 3D and it is an amazing video that is well worth watching.  I encourage you to click over to Open Culture but I have provided the video below if you prefer to see it here.



The video is a terrific look at the Hubble Telescope's Ultra Deep Field Project.  The power of Hubble is truly staggering.  And to think Hubble would have been rendered much less useful if it hadn't been repaired by the Space Shuttle astronauts four times over the years (the last time less than a year ago).  This is a great example of why it is important to keep moving forward with manned space flight.

Open Culture picked up the 10,000 Galaxies' video from the very interesting astronomy website, DeepAstronomy.  This is also worth a look if you have any interest in the night sky.

All of this reminded me of one of my favorite Monty Python songs, The Galaxy.  I found a version of the song on YouTube.  The cleverness of the song is at least partly how well Eric Idle incorporates the science of cosmology into the song.  Give it a listen.

Job Voyager: The Work We Do

I came across a very interesting graphic at the Design Age blog on the Fast Company website.  This graphic shows in a nutshell the occupations of U.S. workers from 1850 to 2000.  The graphic is called Job Voyager and was put together by the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.  Here is a static shot of the overall data (click on the link to see the full graphic):

The occupations shown in blue are male and the ones in pink are female.  What struck me immediately was the decrease in the proportion of people employed in farming, farm labor, and labor.  You can also easily see the much-increased diversity of occupations in which we are now employed as well as the increasing role of women in the workforce.

The Job Explorer site has a search box where you can type an occupation and get an expanded view of all related occupations.  For instance, here is the data for engineering-related occupations.

Engineering has not only been dominated by men until recent times, but it has also grown substantially as a recognized occupation since the early 20th Century. 

It is fun to speculate on what this graphic will look like in another 150 years.  Surely, it will change dramatically.  What will be the occupations that disappear as surely as farming has almost disappeared in the last 150 years?  

The Book Wheel and the Origin of Technology Books

I love books.  I have piles of them sitting on my desk and in my family room in various stages of being read.  I came across the Book Wheel and thought how cool it would be to have one.  As real as it looks, the Book Wheel was never built.  It was a "paper invention" of the Italian military engineer, Agostino Ramelli (1531 - 1600).  The illustration was published in 1588 in a book entitled, The Various and Ingenious Machines of Agostino Ramelli.  

The book belongs to a genre called Theater of Machines.  These late Renaissance books were some of the first printed books with detailed technical illustrations.  The term Theater of Machines comes from the first book of this type published in 1571 or 1572 by Jacques Besson (1540 - 1573), a French mathematician and failed clergyman. His book was entitled Theatrum Instrumentorium et Machinarum (Theater of Instruments and Machines, hence the name of the genre).  The Smithsonian has a copy of both Besson's and Ramelli's book in their Dibner Library.  You can flip the pages of the books virtually using the hotlinks.

Besson started something big with his Theatrum Instrumentorium.   These Theater books were showpieces that were designed to impress the reader with the technical sophistication of the author.  Almost all of the illustrations are fanciful inventions that were never built - and might not even have worked.  But for the first time they provided clear illustrations of mechanisms, gears, and other mechanical devices that were later incorporated into truly useful machines.

Before the Renaissance, almost all technical work was done by craftsman who passed their knowledge down orally from master to apprentice. Most of these skilled craftsman were illiterate or at best, sub-literate.  Moreover, the skills they taught were often quite literally "trade secret", the means by which they protected their business.  There was no other practical means of legal protection of intellectual ideas.

Everyone knows that Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) kept extensive notebooks of his ideas for machines.  But Leonardo kept his notes secret.  He even wrote in a code (he taught himself to write in the mirror image of script) that was only intelligible when viewed in a mirror.  He did not disclose these works during his lifetime.  Another Renaissance Man, Fillippo Brunelleschi (1377 - 1446), who built the dome on the cathedral in Florence, deliberately left no records at all of how he achieved his engineering masterpiece.

The Theater of Machine books were very well received.  But books like these were rarely produced before the advent of moveable type printing in the mid-1400's.  They also needed the invention of linear perspective drawing (another Brunelleschi invention of around 1425) and the availability of copper engraving plates around 1500.  The copper engravings showed much more detail than previous woodcuts.

In the 1600's, there was a veritable explosion of technology books.  Many were plagiarisms of the Theater books and other texts but the result was the same:  technical knowledge began to diffuse to other countries and other craftsman to be incorporated into new machines.  Drawings became ever-more refined with details describing dimensions, tolerances, materials, and processes for fabrication.

In 1790, when patents finally emerged as a means of protecting inventions in America, the Patent Office required a drawing, a written description, and a working model.  The latter was because drawings still did not convey the essence of how mechanical details might work.  The model requirement was dropped in 1880, partly because drawings had improved but mostly because the Patent Office ran out of room to store the models.

What put me on to all of this was an entry in a book I am reading entitled, Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution 1790 - 1860, by Brooke Hindle and Steven Lubar (published by the Smithsonian in 1986). Hindle and Lubar described the Theater of Machines books which led me (via Google) to a wonderful blog named BiblioOdyssey which focuses on illustrations from books of all ages.  This blog is well worth a visit for the diversity of books and illustrations that are presented.

Now, if I just had my Book Wheel...

Timelines of History at the British Library

The British Library has just released a new animated timeline of (not surprisingly) British history.  The timeline has a subcategory for medicine, science, and technology.  The graphics and implementation are very well done as you can see in the screenshot below.  Check it out.  It is worth the visit.

Invention and Technology

One of the magazines that has been publishing well-researched articles on the history of technology is American Heritage magazine's, Invention and Technology.  American Heritage has gone through some rocky times but it is back in print again.  Invention and Technology has also suffered in recent years as its sole advertiser, General Motors, pulled out because of its own financial problems.   But Invention and Technology is back and the magazine still provides excellent articles on the history of technology.

American Heritage has made all of the past articles from Invention and Technology available free to the public on their website.  You can find them here.  It is well worth your time to browse some of these stories.  Better yet, buy their magazine on the newsstand.  You won't be disappointed.

[Disclaimer: I have no stake, financial or otherwise in American Heritage or Invention and Technology.]

140 University

Jane Hart has a blog I like called E-Learning Pick of the Day.  She just started a very interesting little service she calls 140 University which offers a variety of educational nuggets every day on a whole variety of topics.  You might want to check out a few topics including Engineering, Technology, and History.

Basically, these nuggets are 140 character snippets that can be received either via Twitter or Facebook and contain a URL link that takes you to a webpage that expands on the nugget.  You can also read them right on the home page at 140 University.  For instance, the Engineering entry for January 19th was:

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a British engineer, was the creator of the Great Western Railway and numerous bridges http://bit.ly/5ywEGf

Her concept goes under the heading of "I Wish I Had Thought of That".  Kudos to Jane.