Ref Tech Rob

By GlacierNPS [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Working together, even to change the world, doesn’t have to involve a great deal of effort. In the spirit of the “work smarter, not harder” mantra, platforms for problem solving demonstrate that mass collaboration can result in successful projects while reducing each participant’s workload. Anthony D. Williams, PLATFORMS FOR   GLOBAL PROBLEM SOLVING: How  Online  Platforms are RevolutionizingSocial Change One of the benefits of Globally Distributed Creative Problem Solving is this ability to share the work of changing the world. In the face of a never-ending cycle of bad news, our natural reaction may be to turn away in defeat, thinking that the problems are too big for us to do anything about. What could we possibly do in the face of environmental and cultural inertia, a billion dollar lobbying industry, and years of poor education? Well, hundreds of pe...

I want to start this post by explaining why yesterday's post was so, well, abbreviated. When I returned to blogging this week, I made a commitment that I would post 60 entries in 60 days. I really want to make it a habit to provide you with a daily summary of what I'm learning in this new venture. The problem is, I'm still getting the hang of coming up with material on a daily basis. Looking back on yesterday, I see that I would be better off firing off a quick thought that I had, rather than trying to analyze an article when I don't have the time to do it justice. With that in mind, I will try to handle those situations better in the future. So, with that out of the way, I would like to get back to the paper by John Seely Brown. Rather than summarize it, I would like to single out one concept that I found to be extremely thought provoking. That would be the concept of a "network of imagination". This relates to what Brown sees as the importance of play...

I was reading an article this morning on the blog of Irving Wladawsky-Berger (which I highly recommend that you add to your feed reader) when I came across a couple of posts about John Seely Brown. Brown was chief scientist at Xerox for a number of years, and is now Independent Co-Chairman of Center for the Edge at Deloitte. The topic of the most recent post was Brown's paper "Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century" . It's been a busy day, so look for a better summary this weekend.

According to an article posted in Techcrunch , IBM and its Watson project are teaming up with CVS to monitor customer data to pinpoint health problems before customers experience a medical crisis. The article reports that "CVS will allow Watson to scour many millions of data points from patient’s clinical records, medical claims, and fitness devices to go through the same cognition process as others within the Watson ecosystem, but the idea here is to aid CVS nurses and pharmacists in determining patient risk." The network relies on the data that is recorded by humans and machines, processing it faster than humanly possible. This will be increasingly the case as technology progresses. We will find many more tasks for Watson (and others) to work on, hopefully increasing our problem solving pace. I think, though, that Globally Distributed Creative Problem Solving by humans will result in a more human world. That is, if  we continue to remove the obstacles to global cooperat...

Open Innovation Community  pointed me to an interesting article from the pharmaceutical industry this morning. In the August 2015 edition of the Communications of the ACM , an article titled "Permissionless Innovation: Seeking a better approach to pharmaceutical research and development" argues the benefits of opening some aspects of drug development to outside research. The authors, Henry Chesbrough and Marshall Van Alstyne, point out that this would allow drug companies to discover unanticipated uses for new drugs. The article also discusses a couple of interesting instances of open innovation, namely Goldcorp's opening of its geographical data to outside innovators to help discover new ore deposits, and the pharmaceutical industry's development of Cubicin, a powerful antibiotic. We need initiatives like this in the pharmaceutical industry and others. The more problem solvers we can engage on each problem, the better. We have the technology to organize large-...

From here on out, I will be evaluating research tools, books, policies, organizations, and research according to whether or not they facilitate or obstruct what I'm calling Globally Distributed Creative Problem Solving, or GDCPS. Our problems are big right now, and we need some pretty big solutions, solutions that can only be arrived at by unleashing the full potential of our greatest tool - the Internet. I'm looking for something like MIT's Climate CoLab , or FoldIt , though I keep hoping for something that's purely cooperative, rather than competitive. That's why I'm not a huge fan of the corporate crowd-source innovation portals, like Innocentive , or NineSigma , though I'm still going to take the time to explore what they are offering. If you are curious, here's a look at what MIT is doing:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/earth/crowdsourcing-climate-change-solutions/

I'm always on the lookout for good note-taking or organizational apps, and I must say, I've been intrigued by the development of Google Keep. At first, I thought that there was little to recommend it - it was just a way of keeping lists or notes on my Google account. I thought that the color coding was pretty neat, but it lacked quite a bit in comparison to other note or organizational apps. I went ahead and began using it as a quick way of recording notes and keeping them handy. I really  liked the speech to text angle on my tablet. It worked fairly well, and allowed me to take my notes hands-free while I was walking around. Since that initial impression, Google has quietly added updates and features, getting it to the point now where it has become extremely useful for me. In no particular order, Google has added: Reminders. The ability to capture and add photos to notes. The ability to export the notes in a variety of formats (on an Android device). The ability to ...

Today, IFTTT launched a few new features, including the "Do Button". The IFTTT app will also be re-branded as IF. The "Do Button" is a pretty nice app, and I hope that it has many applications which I will find useful. The first use for it that I'm trying out is to easily post to Blogger, so consider this a test post. via Do Note