Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Politics has a kind of magic to it; some man or woman emerges on a dais and makes pronouncements and they come to life. At least, these pronouncements get talked about as if they were alive, or could be, if the politician has the right kind of magic and can get other people to follow along.
I was on the 5th floor of Boston City Hall one night last week, examining the Vermeerish trappings of Boston’s mayoral bureaucracy, the large desks, the high ceilings, the pictures and maps on the wall, the statue of the eagle that once graced City Hall, back before the hall of power became a transparent testament to the bare-knuckles nature of the city’s politics. I was there for a meeting of BostonNow, a quasi grassroots organization aiming to channel energy from the great Boston software tax revolt of 2013 into an ongoing force in Massachusetts politics.
I’m interested in how ideas come to life, but I haven’t written much about political life and politicians. I’d never been to the 5th floor of Boston City Hall, was late due to delays on the T, and could not figure out where I was supposed to go for the meeting. Councilor Ayanna Pressley came sweeping along, also late for the meeting, and led me and a couple of other strays to where we needed to go.

The speakers were from FWD.us, a Mark Zuckerberg/Bill Gates-backed group pushing for immigration reform, and the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, a Tom Menino creation that has received praise for its creative use of technology (I wrote about it in Five Steps to Digitally Transforming City Government). New Mayor Marty Walsh kept the Urban Mechanics intact, and appears to be backing an expansion of its efforts (it is best known for fostering Citizens Connect, an app to report potholes and other city problems).

Walsh himself entered the room at 6:46 p.m., 46 minutes after the event started, and 20 minutes after Pressley left.  He told the 40 or so people in the room, many of them young entrepreneurs, that he wanted to make Boston a better city for them, with better schools that produced better workers, a way to keep the highly educated immigrants coming out of the region’s universities (an obvious nod to Fwd.us) and with rents that were more in keeping with the budgets of scrappy startups than the $50 plus per square foot in the Innovation District. He asked for their help; “you’re the leaders in a lot of ways,” he said. And after four minutes, he went off to a ward to do “some political stuff.”

The ritual is fascinating: people like Pressley and Walsh have to be in multiple places at the same time, and their schedules become rigidly choreographed so they can pull off this sleight-of-hand (more political magic). Sycophants show up to be seen, and the especially desperate will leap up and walk the politician to their car if they can (one man did that with Walsh). I liked that Walsh spoke without notes and without stumbles. Four minutes sounds short, but it is more than enough time to look out of touch, or worse. Walsh did not.
I think of politicians in modern America as having a heroin-like relationship with money, but I didn’t actually sense this in listening to Walsh or the New Urban Mechanics. Nigel Jacobs, one of the co-directors of the Mechanics, said their job was to be “the risk aggregators” for innovative ideas, crossing the barriers of the various city departments to bring new civic innovation to life. What they wanted from the entrepreneurs present was ideas, and a little digital elbow grease.

The New Urban Mechanics are, in effect, an API for the city.  That’s a twist on politics.
For another look at the evening, here’s BostInno’s piece on the event. 

My car gave out Tuesday afternoon, clutch expired, right in the driveway. After getting it towed, I faced the problem of how I was going to drive my kid to camp in the suburbs until it was repaired.

“Oh, no problem,” I thought to myself. “I walk by Zipcar spaces every day. I’ll just get a Zipcar.” And back to work I went.

After 5:30, I went to rent my Zipcar. It turns out that you cannot impulse rent a Zipcar, at least not the first time. You have to apply, and it takes one to three days for the application to be approved, and then you have to either pick up your zipcard in person, or have it mailed to you.  This is car sharing for organized people.

“Oh well,” I thought. “I’ll just rent from Enterprise. I like them well enough, and they’ll pick me up. My rental would be too long to qualify for hourly rates, but at least I’ll get my kid to camp and back.”

It turns out that after 6 p.m. the Enterprise in Cambridge is closed, and it doesn’t open until 8 the next morning. I needed the car by 7:30 a.m. I could go to the airport, but that’s inconvenient.

Hmm.

I remember the stories I’ve been reading about the sharing phenomenon, driven by things like RelayRides.There are now a slew of car sharing options, like Lift (or is it Lyft?) and the one that has the mustache (or maybe those are the same). I had time for one – the kids wanted to go out for ice cream.  I started with RelayRides because I knew how to spell it.

RelayRides approved me as a renter almost instantly. There were a number of cars available the next morning, the closest about a ten-minute walk from my apartment. I don’t need a card to unlock the car: it opens via text message (well, a remote control triggered by a text message). Plus, I got a premium vehicle (hybrid Ford Escape SUV) for cheaper than an economy rental would’ve cost me. The kids got their ice cream, and everybody’s happy.

When I got to the car the next morning, I had a few nervous moments when I couldn’t figure out where the key was.  But then I found out (and a Help line was texted to me when the door opened).
I wonder if a guy in Cambridge with random needs for a car (I’ve driven my Saturn less than 10,000 miles a year for the last 12 years) might give up his car and just use ride sharing? I have a slew of options here. Maybe it’s time to become a one-car family.

I was invited to see what for the moment I’ll call a new video conferencing technology in action today. I trooped over to Harvard’s Sanders Theater to watch Michael Sandel teach a session of Justice, focusing on the moral aspects of collective responsibility, or what we owe each other, and what society owes us.

Sandel stood underneath both the Latin script on the wall above the stage and a huge projector screen, with six video windows on it, not unlike a gathering of Skype windows. These connected his Harvard class to students in universities in Shanghai, Tokyo (where it was 1 a.m.), New Delhi and Sao Paolo (as well as a connection to San Francisco). Sandel engaged students from each place in his hour-long Socratic discussion of our moral obligations.
Sandel used an iPad app called Spin, put together by Net Power & Light, a San Francisco startup that is emerging from stealth mode. I don’t know enough about Net Power & Light’s technology to say much about how it works, but I wanted to note some quick impressions:

It isn’t nearly as good as telepresence technology, but the iPad video was pretty good. As a way to create a five-country live video conference in classrooms more than 11,000 miles apart, running over WiFi, it was excellent. There were some small hiccups in the audio, but nothing worse than what you would get over a cell phone. Spin is obviously cheaper than telepresence.
They did ask us to turn off our cell phones and any WiFi connections we might have, though we were told that was because of concerns over the massive power outage in Cambridge last night.

He didn’t do anything fancy, like bring in outside video or audio. But it turns out that this was the third time Sandel has used the Spin technology to connect students for a global discussion of political philosophy, and we journalists (I think I was the only journalist working for a U.S publication in attendance) were shown a clip from a previous class where he brought in a guest speaker via Spin.

It’s not clear to me that it works any better than something like Google Hangout.

It took several people running iPads around Sanders Theatre and one grad student running the session via another iPad (I think) to make this work. That’s not going to fly for most classroom environments. That said, overseas, there was only one iPad per classroom, and students who wanted to speak could either walk up to it, or someone brought it over when Sandel called on them.

It was clear that on the topic of the day, students in five disparate cultures mostly shared the same sense of collective responsibility. (Whether people not in the intellectual elite would agree with them is a different question.)
The journos went downstairs afterwards for a chat with some students, Sandel, and Tara Lemmey, Net P&L’s CEO [disclosure: I am friendly with Tara, which may color my comments].

The three students said they liked the interaction with students from other places. They want better audio, but they also want to use the technology more often, and especially in their discussion sections (large Harvard classes like Justice often include discussion sections, led by graduate teaching assistants).

Sandel told us he feels like the technology “is opening the Sanders Theater and the Harvard classroom and inviting the world in.” He hopes to expand his use of it, though there’s nothing firm on that front.
Tara said the Spin platform was initially built for people to play music together.

I liked how Tara corrected me when I mentioned ‘users’ of the Spin system. “It’s a design criteria that we don’t use the word user. Nobody’s allowed to use it. They really do get banished in the organization if they do. We talk about people.”

I’ve started playing a bit with the Spin tool. I hope to write more on this soon. I don’t know that it’s revolutionary or disruptive. But it might not have to be to be hugely useful.

We freelancers are always bumping into obstacles. Like, how to pay for our reporting trips. This piece looks at two creative approaches to freelance travel.

Freelancer Amber Nolan has come up with jethiking, or really Cessna hiking. She’s used that to bum rides to 13 different states. I love the idea, though I’m not sure it’s a great way to cut your expenses for freelance work. Her site shows that the last piece she did was in May, and involved travel by kayak. But she appears to have a TV show in the works, based on her travels. If there were a network of pilots offering up rides like this, there might be some way for freelancers to actually leverage this sort of thing, especially for travel writers.

Chris Killian, a freelance political journalist, spent two months covering the presidential campaign in the swing states by living out of an old van. He set up his own site, SwingStateStories, where he published the bulk of his reporting, which was supported by Kickstarter funding. But he also landed this meaty cover story in the Christian Science Monitor’s Weekly. The numbers do keep this in perspective: he raised $4,472 on Kickstarter, and that’s what had to support him for two months on the road. But it is a sign of how unconventional methods are viable, depending on your costs and your interests.

Lots has been said about A123 since it declared bankruptcy last week. A good deal of it, like this Steve Syre Boston Globe column, Government a lousy venture capitalist, excoriated the government for making large taxpayer-funded loans and investments to A123, Evergreen Solar, Solyndra and others. It’s an easy point to make, but it might be the wrong one. After all, the government makes taxpayer-funded bets all the time on things like education, defense technologies, agriculture and basic scientific research (to name a few). And the government was not to blame for the market failing to develop as fast as expected; though politicians are good at being optimists (except for when somebody from another party is involved).
One challenge for green energy industries is that companies involved in them face government-backed competitors. In China’s case, for just one example, the government heavily subsidizes the components that go into making these products. That does not happen here.

Also, companies like A123 and Solyndra require huge amounts of capital. Private investors are unlikely to commit billions of dollars these days in something that is still unproven. In fact, investors wanted the government to help them reduce the huge risk represented by green industries, which almost universally are more expensive than traditional fossil fuels and thus face daunting competitive odds from the start. The market would say that failures happen in such industries. But the market doesn’t care about anything but short-term profit, and that causes companies to miss out on long-term opportunity, as Harvard Business School’s Willy Shih notes here.

Shih is also no fan of government loans and grants, but over the years, I’ve talked to a number of investors in green energy, and they all more or less say that green industries are quasi-commercial, not quite research project, not quite robust enough to stand on their own. They also cite the extraordinary costs of starting these businesses. Loans and stimulus money reduced the risk. Maybe a better model for the government is to serve as more a guarantor of investments dollars in some form, analagous to what it does for banks with instruments like deposit insurance.
If green industries are the industries of the future, America needs to be good at them. We have given up on some of the main industries of the present, like cellular phones and tablet computers. Look at what we are doing in semiconductors, which our business investors have all be given up on, excepting a couple of stubborn, disciplined companies like Intel. They made myriad small decisions that have led to a place where investors don’t want to fund companies that need to buy semiconductor equipment and build plants. Other governments will.

China and Germany are just two of the countries making big bets on solar and other green industries. Some of those bets will go just as sour as Solyndra. But what private investor really wants to compete with a government in a risky business? Targeted state capitalism holds real short-term power, regardless of whether it succeeds over the long run. That seems to mean we taxpayers have to hold our noses and tell the government to put some more green into green industries, despite all their red ink. Yes, we have to learn not to repeat mistakes, but the lesson does not appear to be keep the government and our taxes away from investing in the future.

Americans like youth. Driven by the unforgiving movie camera, we began to obsess about it in the 1920s, when ‘baby’ and ‘chick’ both became widespread as slang for a woman. The focus on youth pervaded novels like Tender Is the Night (1934) and Lolita (1955) [nod to Harvard’s Philip Fisher and his fabulous course The 20^th Century American Novel].

It afflicts men, as well, especially over the last decade. In 2010, more than 1 million American men had some kind of plastic surgery option, quadruple the number in 2000.

So it was no surprise running into youthism while reporting a story on trends in technology. High tech prizes itself on merit but gives big bonus points for youth; some of that legitimately stems from how hard it is to keep up with exponential change (Moore’s Law puts Kuhn’s ‘normal science‘ on speed). Some of it is just plain bias; few of us can resist the culture’s preference for the young.

Since Silicon Valley prizes MIT and Stanford PhD-types between 20 and 25, I expected the executives I interviewed to say they looked to their younger staff for insights into where to go. Instead, they went way younger. Here are some sample comments:

There used to be a time when the general masses didn’t quite understand how computers work. Today a child is born and they know how to use a computer first, before they’re born. It almost seems that way. Your three-year-old kid can do things with your cellphone you can’t.

Kids demand things that are better and are first adopters, have a sense of ease in technology. That has an impact for us. We better be on that curve where kids and consumers are learning technology much faster and we need to make sure we adapt our products to reflect that.

Both that comment and the next show how much consumer expectations of technology are changing, and how quickly outmoded our tech platforms have become. Here’s a projection from that same curve:

The kids go to their computer and put their hand on the screen and try to move stuff around. That same thing is going to happen with voice. In one of the Star Trek movies Scotty is busy talking to the computer.  And he says ‘why isn’t it responding?’ And they all look at him like he’s crazy. We’re at that moment.

There’s still so much potential think about how much easier technology can continue to make our lives over time. This ultra-connectedness will continue to be a challenge for people. Once people become digital natives like our kids are, you think about being overconnected. Things could be easier and our kids will definitely not go to libraries and not look up things like we did.

Another nod to tot tech:

I still remember how I had to translate in my mind what it meant to have a file that was a digital representation instead of a file that was a physical representation.  Today the world is nothing but digital natives, that grew up deeply steeped in these technologies. I’ll steal Don Tapscott’s line in Growing Up Digital; he talked about how his father looked at the TV as technology and was always messing with the antenna and the clicker. We look right through the technology to the content. That’s what kids do today. Three-year-olds can swipe into a device and go to their games and play.  That’s the fundamental effect of consumerization. There is no longer a different class that deals with technology.

Here’s the biggest reason why Silicon Valley shouldn’t be funding 25-year-olds:

The one that has me really, really astounded right now is my 11-year-old son has been playing Minecraft. I’ve gone down and sat in the man cave with him and listened to him online with his friends and watched the interaction of them building, because that’s all Minecraft is. Having 20 kids on at the same time working together to do that.

My oldest is 25. She started with IM. She still loves texting. She can’t understand why my son loves sitting down there and talking with his friends over Kinect. That’s just evolving so much.

This executive thinks his company might want to establish Minecraft-like collaboration group. But will non-tweens take to it?

Here is an example of Minecraft collaboration, involving my son and one of his friends: