I received many responses to my "Wish List" article of October 20th. This message excerpts some of the responses that might be useful to others. I have heavily edited them, both for length and to suppress people's identities. I have refrained from responding, with one exception: the person whose comment on wish list item (10), "a book that explains the adult world to children", persuaded me that my analysis was obnoxiously screwed up. My intended meaning was this: scaffolding by parents and teachers is already one of the major ways that children learn, and we should invent artifacts that amplify the effect, with the goal of giving kids a clearer participatory understanding of the adult world. The point, again, is not that parents aren't raising their kids the right way, but that with new cultural artifacts we can do better. The analytical error in my piece was one that I often warn against here: I presented the new technology as supplying something that is missing in the world, when in reality it would be amplifying something that already happens. Finally, a general comment that applies to several of the ten items. I should have made clearer that my "wish list" looks forward to the expected state of technology ten years from now, not what we can do today. (1) Personal Access Guide. Yvan Leclerc of SRI has invented the basis for your Personal Access Guide. It's called GeoWeb and you can read more about it at http://www.geoweb.net/ and http://www.geoweb.org/. GeoWeb uses a global meta-directory to call up online information relevant to any point on the globe. It provides filters to produce just the information that you're looking for (assuming it exists on the Web). Unfortunately, the .geo TLD was not approved by ICANN. Sheffield Green Map http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cs/greenmap/ (2) Real-time water quality indications at beaches (and automatic sensing of other invisible things). Southern California Beach Report Card: 2001 Summer In Review http://www.healthebay.org/brc/2001summer/default.asp Studies Find Many More Sources of Coastal Pollution http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-000084899oct25.story For five years (1996-2001), EPA program funded a program called EMPACT (Environmental Monitoring for Public Access and Community Tracking). Here's the website: http://www.epa.gov/empact/. They are no longer giving funds to try new methods (thank you Mr. Bush) but they are promoting the spread of the technology. The program is supposed to promote both technology for real-time information and community organizing to interpret that information. The program has wrestled with some degree of success in finding ways to resolve the problem of different expectations for information. The program in Boston made a difference here b/c it allowed organized local folks, the Charles River Watershed Association (www.crwa.org), to pay for the installation of a system to monitor the river in real time. Real-time information about bacteria counts is currently not feasible because the best method to determine the amount of bacteria in water is to culture a sample of water in a lab. This takes 24 hours, trained staff and controlled conditions. The City of Somerville, MA; the Mystic River Watershed Association and Tufts University have received one of the very last grants from EPA EMPACT to test a model that would use a statistical analysis of several parameters to estimate the bacteria counts real-time. It will be in operation in 2002. You asked for a "thermometer" that tells what is happening in the electromagnetic spectrum in a given place. Here's what NTIA uses for that purpose: http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/home/programs/rsms/ There are "suitcase" versions but they're limited in the frequency range and level of emission that they measure. (3) Self-diagnosing public address equipment (and Internet gear). Color coding is a huge step forward as far as computer cables go, and it's becoming standard. It would be a huge help and a good start if people would actually READ the instructions that come with their computer. Also, there is free network monitoring software that's available for both linux and windows that monitors the 'services' on each server. I'm most familiar with the liinux software, which is called NetSaint. It monitors ever single server we have in the building... if one goes down, someone is paged within five minutes. It also monitors each service, such as the Apache (website) server on our intranet machine, and lets someone know if that particular piece of software crashes. As for audio equipment... 8 times out of 10, a break in A/V equipment was not preventable ahead of time (A fuse blew, a tube blew, a board or chip wiggled out of place, something overheated...) ... 1 time out of 10 it was caused by a presenter or rock star who thought "something didn't look right" and "fixed it"... And the other time out of 10, it's shoddy testing ahead of time. With regard to the suggestion that Internet gear should diagnose itself, there are two separate problems here: diagnosing the network, and diagnosing the last-mile connection to the end users. All ISPs I've dealt with have extensive infrastructure for proactive monitoring and fault detection in their networks. They're often the first to know about things like gas-line explosions and train derailments because the network monitoring stations detect the cable cuts that are associalted. At the large ISP where I worked, I would often inform my customers that they had a network problem by calling them to tell them it was fixed. Our monitoring software quickly and automatically informed the operations staff about broken links, excessive bandwidth usage, unreachable hosts, and so on. I'm sure it has since been augmented to include various security issues (e.g., denial-of-service attacks). Consider, on the other hand, an ISP with only 200,000 customers. Even if cable modems are only $100 each (a ridicuously low estimate) that's $20,000,000 in installed hardware. Add $10 for self-diagnostics (again ridiculously low); add $2,000,000 dollars in capital investment. Now you start monitoring individual customer links. How do you tell the difference between: - modem powered off (the most common state for a cable modem) - computer powered off or unplugged (the second most common state) - one of various cables unplugged - network link problems (the one you're interested in?) in only $10 worth of hardware? Even with the expensive gear, I tell that a customer was down, but I could not tell *why* without feedback from the remote (impossible when the link to the remote is down :). I'd have to pick up the phone and talk to someone. Self-diagnosis is expensive; we've already spent the last 20 years proving that people are willing to sacrifice quality for a cheaper product, *especially* in an environment where that product is obsolete long before it breaks. And I'm not sure it would actually improve the experience. (4) "Whatever happened to ...?" I work for a consulting firm that makes forecasts within a broad category of technology. Sometimes we are covering highly speculative, "emerging" markets that, although not strictly in the "New Economy," often have that flavor. Proponents of these technologies wax enthusiastic about their impending hockey-stick growth curves, which always start their vertical ascent about 4-6 quarters in the future. My company takes an unusual attitude toward market forecasting: we try to get the right number. While I share your frustration with companies like Whatever-You-Wanna-Hear Consulting Group (one of our main competitors), I am also well aware that the situation in the forecasting world is complex. The suggestion, "Why not go back and look at the forecast numbers, compare them to reality, and hash out the differences?" is in some sense what we try to do in our research reports, although mostly we are simply explaining why last quarter's/year's numbers in our own reports changed a bit due to new market conditions. We also do it internally as a measure of our company's accuracy. The reasons it is not done in a broad sense are multiple and perhaps overlapping. Let me just toss out some reasons: 1. It is not especially desired. Seriously. Businesspeople don't care much about the past, which is over and done with -- the money and time already spent. We have thought about publishing a retrospective that shows our long history of decent prediction, but in reality, few clients would read it. All eyes are on the future. 2. The purpose of market forecasts is not only to get the numbers right. (We stick to that adamantly, but we are realistic enough to know that market forecasts serve other purposes too). For instance, they are used to garner investment dollars. Young companies writing business plans need big numbers for the VCs. VCs are rich but not necessarily smart, and may simply believe the entrepreneurs. 3. Also, there is a feedback loop that operates through the media, consulting firms, and their forecasts. Firms that have big numbers get quoted more often, which means their name gets known, so they get more calls from journalists asking for numbers. This tends to propagate the larger numbers through the public awareness. (We have noticed that many firms buy research reports both from us and our competitors. The inflated numbers show up in press releases, while ours are used for internal planning). 4. Remember also that the "market size" is a fairly slippery concept anyway. Yes, there really is some exact number of widgets bought and sold each quarter for a certain average price, but this number is in fact unknowable. Why? Because the only way to find it out is to have an independent researcher, like someone from my company, call around and ask the players how many they made or sold. And you know what? They lie. Companies know that these data will lead to pie charts of market share, so they inflate how many they sold. (Although there are also circumstances where they downplay how many they sold to make markets look smaller, such as when their competitors are ramping up in that area). Our job is to sort through the baloney and glean some sort of best estimate. Also, we cannot sample the whole market, so we have to guess after polling some fraction of the total players. 5. Finally -- now really entering the realm of the non-scientific -- market forecasting contains some of the same elements that drive the stock market. Markets are partly created by people's perception of them. I give this notion far less credence than most people in my field, but I grudgingly give it a little. Big forecasts can lead to more sales and vice versa simply through emotional reaction. This will *never* create a long-term trend, but it can have a small effect in a given quarter. (This is related to number 2, also, to the degree that the presence of VC funding in a technology area feeds the perception that it is a "hot" area. This then attracts talented workers looking for career boosts, etc.) Given all of this, it is still understandable to want follow-up checks. I don't think Whatever-You-Wanna-Hear Consulting Group should get away with playing the media and basically buying business by currying favor. But the idealistic concept of using this data to look for patterns in our prediction methodology makes little sense in light of the reality of the business. Few forecasting companies had accuracy in mind in the first place, plus there are the confounding variables of prevarication in reporting sales and emotional effects in buying patterns. Furthermore, I predict that the market for such information is relatively small :-). (5) Automatic evaluation of ISPs' spam-enforcement efficiency. http://www.spamcop.net/ makes reporting spam easier. And here are their stats pages: http://spamcop.net/spamstats.shtml (6) Consumer Reports for design. Adbusters has run some campaigns aimed at reinventing design in a more responsible fashion: http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/first/ http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/first/tour/2.html http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/36/toxic/ http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/36/next/ Most of these pages have more of the article on the following pages. I still think the ideas behind the First Things First manifesto are good. (7) Daily reports on party lines. This is perhaps what National Journal Hotline is... http://nationaljournal.com/pubs/hotline/ (8) Online music sites that tell you how long each recording is. http://www.cddb.org/ is indexed by track/album length; that's how the automatic lookup algorithm works. (9) Shopping basket price comparison for online commerce sites. I haven't used it for some time, so my memory may exaggerate its ability, but I think that ABEBooks has/had an engine that would compare prices for bundles of books. I'm guessing that their system relied on used book sellers sending lists of books and prices to them for combination into a big data base. It's not really what you asked for, but perhaps a step for some types of products Something close to what you want used to exist. In 1998 and 1999, I used a website (it no longer exists -- see below) that would let you create a shopping cart full of stuff you wanted (limited to books, music cds, and videos, but at the time IIRC Amazon didn't sell much more than that) and then would query a bunch of major online stores to give you the best price, shipping included (you gave it your zip code so it could figure that out). In later versions, it would even figure out if partial orders from multiple stores would be cheaper than buying everything from one. Then, if you were happy with a particular offering, it had a link to the site(s) so you could directly place your order. Alas, it's interface was somewhat clunky requiring multiple steps to get something into your "shopping cart", but the information it gave was too useful for me to let that get in the way. Unfortunately, it got bought and morphed into several other web sites, and eventually turned into something much less useful before vanishing completely as far as I can tell. (I haven't mentioned the URL because it now links to a nasty domain name squatter whose site will attack your browser.) Here is a FAQ on the service dating from late 1998: http://web.archive.org/web/19981207051937/www.acses.com/faq.htm and also this help tip on pricing multiple books at once: http://web.archive.org/web/19981207005921/www.acses.com/help.htm#Multiple (10) A book that explains the adult world to children. I don't know about the children you spend time with, but let me say that as a parent, I spend a large amount of time doing the activities you mention and more. And I think this is true for most parents I know. In the past few months my son, who just turned two last week, started to demand handling the money in purchasing transactions, and both my wife and myself let him, and guide him through it. And often in coming to a place, I spend time explaining to my daughter why we're there, what I'm trying to do, and how I go about doing it. These are just a few of the examples of what my wife and I do to bring up our children into adult world. And most parents I know do the same. And I'm not even mentioning all of the role playing we do around these activities. end
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