ippisl

IN the case of pilots , few factors combined together to build this culture:

1. Checklists were introduced when flying was very young,with very few trained pilots.

2. Pilots want to live, so they use checklists.

3. Pilots don't have a choice. All airlines companies enforce checklists. Probably it's an FAA requirement.

4. Checklists are a part of training.

Atul gawande which is a surgeon coined the word cowboy in a new yorker article and in a lecture before new doctors.

There's some research that shows that decision support systems improve medicine. Too tired to look it up.

I think that those things are not even new. There are already decision support systems(medical expert systems) and protocols of evidence based medicine - for standardization.

And research works around the world is flowing into those systems and improving them.

And the line-infection rate checklist the author talks about, does exist for something like 10 years.

Those are the relatively easy parts.

The hard part is: how do you change the culture of medicine, from "cowboy style" that comes with a lot of authority for the doctor, to a more boring job , with much more subservience to machines and protocols ?

i just did a google search for : "controlled natural language" legal , and got some results.

One way to solve the ambiguity problem of natural languages is using a controlled natural language, which is a limited subset of a natural language[1]. Some of those are machine transformable to logic. There's even some work to encode legal knowledge using them.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_natural_language

Both with the simplicity of the web, and the relative simplicity of building simple apps with good tools , we didn't see a great number of teenagers making money from building web sites or mobile apps.

It would probably makes more sense to outsource building a site to someone from low-cost country that have gained experience than to a local teenager. The same sense probably operate on arduino development and 3d design by teens.

And teen entrepreneurship didn't scale for web-develpoment or mobile apps, no reason to think it would scale this time.

Macdonald's recently introduced touch screens as cashiers in europe. They didn't do it in the u.s. .My guess is thy didn't want the bad PR. Maybe similar motivations exist for lack of robots.

But maybe the simplest explanation is that big businesses are not very much optimized for innovation, so it took a startup.

In the "build a search engine using python" online course , people had to do a project,a search engine. some we're really interesting projects(and probably not easy , since the students are new in programming).

And if you look at the arduino, many people are doing interesting projects.

So i don't think projects are so hard to implement as a part of an online course.

Currently , there's some open source research into neglected diseases. This is certainly a high risk project. I hope it succeeds.

I could imagine open source would work well for non-profits, some of them doing high risk projects(like the green revolution, or gates's work). It's also possible it would work well for university research(maybe with some change of universities operation models).

Open source is relatively new. Maybe it will take time to see what kind of high risk projects it's good for.

Democracy - The ability to vote peridically and demonstrate , the constitution are all various institutions that give power to citizens to influence the decisions of the ruler.

Capitalism - a combination of cooperation and competition by companies to achieve goals many consumers cooperate on getting(by paying). BTW when a few companies compete on the same goal , it's also a kind of cooperation.

open source is a co-operation model. Historically new and sucsessfull cooperation models(democracy, capitalism , scientific method) had a larger effect than new products and services.

One interesting example is the industrial revolution: some claim that the technical innovations at that time are the result of England becoming a capitalist state based on competition(starting with land owners encouraging competition between farmers on productivity).

Will stallman succeed ? I don't know. But i wonder if the option he opened of extremely open source software has made companies more receptive to various kinds of open source licenses and business models that led to the large open source ecosystem we have today.

mediatek has a 1-ghz dual core cortex-a9 , quite cheaply[1].

[1]http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4376108/MediaTek-to-...

Some support for your thesis:

Alice[2] is a graphical environment to teach programming. They did a study of it for high risk CS1 students and found that high risk students who used Alice achieved a much higher retention rate[2].

[1]http://www.alice.org/publications/EvaluatingTheEffectiveness...

[2]http://www.alice.org

Another option is to use p2p as a storage mechanism. And since the storage capacity would be bigger, it could enable personalized videos.

Is the teensy 3(arm) fully compatible with all the arduino libraries ?

>> If your goal is to make unique objects that you cannot find anywhere, then, sure, 3d printers are the future

In reality, uniqueness is overrated. Given a really large pool of objects to choose from(which are manufactured in mid quantities) , there's not a lot of consumer need for unique objects.

The largest market consumers do need unique objects is the healthcare market. But the economics there are totally different. for example 3d printing of dental crowns existed for a long time , but it doesn't(yet) captured the market with lower cost solutions(although it certainly has the power to do so, technically).

Even the lattice acquisition was a small one , the VC's made no profit on it.

I think his political thinking and language thinking share a similar problem: preference of ideal theories over practical solutions.

I think you're diminishing the role of a big "good" vision in the process of innovation.

What's the guiding vision of the internet community ? as far as i can tell is mostly there's no valuable guiding vision. It's all about rapid trial and error to appeal to as many people as possible with whatever idea that will work.

So we end with most of the web development community working on creating junk-food sites, optimizing ads and new ways to sell stuff. This way you get McDonalds and TV advertising invented. Big inventions indeed , mostly with negative value.

Of course there are some clusters of the web with a big guiding vision: collaborative consumption, using the power of the web to reduce prices, better ways to share important knowledge, new labor marketplaces, democratizing innovation.

And you see a qualitative difference between both sorts of companies.

There's a database(quite old) of HN posts and comments here:

http://www.btscene.eu/details/2240774/Hacker+News+Database+o...

one example:

http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/30514580062/rubymotion-succe...

1. Making it easy to replace a physical interface for a hardware device with a mobile app.

2. Making in easy to do testing and verify reliability, both at the development stages and at the manufacturing stages.

3. Making it easy to port the arduino to other platforms or porting it to other interesting platforms(full porting including good library support).

circuits.io is working on an interesting solution:

http://blog.circuits.io/post/34159982502/in-this-video-karel...

They are also working on cheap, paper based dna/rna tests( "molecular medicine"), which are really precise diagnostics for many kinds of diseases.

Wide spread molecular medicine might hold the keys to much better disease classification and in result much better treatment. And this precision could transform many parts of medicine from intuition based, to algorithm based. All those could really lower costs.

Really hope they succeed.

The article claims that "Over 400,000 new jobs have been created by Apple’s App store.", but that's just shoddy accounting. What about mcdonalds in europe installing thousands of touch screen replacing cashiers and the tons of other apps that replace people, does that go into that accounting ?

And what about the intense price competition between workers that online, global platforms create ?

Will those 2 million needed technical jobs cause more job losses ?

My problem with this article is that it tries to create a rosy picture of a big change our economy is going throught, while in reality we just don't know how things are going to turn out,whether we will have enough jobs for everyone, and how rough and long the transition period is going to be, and it does so just to sell a product(which might be valuable).

It's just like reading medical research done by pharmaceutical companies.

The whole electronics supply chain is optimized towards volume manufacturing. There's a second supply chain for small volumes, but it's expensive: boards instead of chips or more expensive chips and boards(due to volume breaks), complex development, testing. The assembly costs are relatively minor.

I think the first step for the kinko[1] vision would be to largely automate the development and test costs. Maybe arduino is one path to this.

[1]I think it would make more sense as a centralized source who prints designs coupled with rapid shipping, not as a kinko.

I agree, There's definetly a lot of new tools for simplifying prototyping and manufacturing. And that's a long trend seen in many fields.

But this pushed hard on testing processes. Industries like software, that can avoid testing(through bugs and reuse and good testing tools) seen an innovation boom.

But industries where testing is hard, seen troubles in innovation. Pharma is a good example of this with the small amount of new drugs in the pipeline, even thought there's tons of "prototypes".

So i wonder,is there a need, and how can we automate and simplyfy the need of physical product testing ?

Some social critics say psychology/psychiatry's rise is in part because it let other people and institutions do victim blaming, and not invest in treating societal problems.

It also fits well with neo-liberal thought:"little concern for externalities", "rational consumer" and this kind of bullshit.

And this gives the incentive for sellers who don't use amazon's warehouses incentive to use them.

Really , when you think about that ,classically sellers/wholesellers have the following roles:

1. Finding people/stores willing to buy stuff

2. Financing of buying stuff from many manufacturers(until getting paid)

3. Storing said stuff

4. Distributing said stuff to stores, online stores and users

5. Prediciting demand

6. Marketing to users/stores.

It seems that amazon is attacking/replacing all those roles, and probably doing a better job. The end game seems simple: To skip the sellers(for products sold online), and deal directly with manufacturers(like their doing with ebooks).

It's not unique to them, walmart already did it. But amazon sells almost everything.

Amazon's differentiation is price and a content ecosystems together with a great marketing channel, not the UI. Nothing that fits the model of the device makers.