Author: Jim Ulvog

Technology opening opportunities for people with special needs

Hat tip to Mark Perry, as usual – Creative Destruction: $7 iPad App Replaces $15,000, 20 Pound Communication Device

Bloomberg has a superb article on how simple apps are opening tremendous opportunities for people who need assistive technologies – Brain-Injured Emma Finds Her Voice With IPad Grassroot App

Emma was severely injured in 2001.  She can not talk or walk and has minimal motion in her arms.

Previously she used a 9 pound device that cost $15,000 to type a message. The device read the position of her eyes.  That’s good, but it has to be recalibrated every time it is moved.  She’s tied to her room.

That has changed….

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Graph of North Dakota oil production

After reading about oil production in North Dakota surpassing California here, I pulled some data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration here.  Created a couple of graphs.

Took the annual average daily production in North Dakota for 2000 through 2010. Added the average monthly production for 2011.  Came up with this graph. Continue reading “Graph of North Dakota oil production”

In December North Dakota passed California in oil production

And North Dakota pulls into third place!

Federal stats show oil production in North Dakota was 535k bbl/d in December compared to 531k bbl/d in California. – Five states accounted for about 56% of total U.S.crude oil production in 2011

Check out the graph of monthly production. North Dakota has been accelerating since 2008 while Alaska and California have been declining for 10 years.

Continue reading “In December North Dakota passed California in oil production”

Grappling with change – another sector talks about their environment

J., an anonymous blogger at AidSpeak, has a post talking through the tensions of military people taking on humanitarian work, which puts them into the place where civilian aid workers have been for a long time – Humanitarian Space (the final frontier).

Having uniformed, armed soldiers doing the same thing that aid workers do blurs the distinction between those whose primary job is building things up (aid workers) and those whose primary job is blowing things up (soldiers).

That creates confusion for everyone involved especially those on the receiving end of humanitarian aid who watched things get blown up.

J.’s post is dealing with the realization that various militaries probably won’t be dropping their humanitarian aid work anytime soon. That means it will be important for the aid community to figure out how to work with and deal with the military community.

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In a paragraph, here’s why we will see a lot more reshoring

Mark J. Perry calls attention to a company that makes bracelets and charms for colleges and sororities – Manufacturing Boom in Michigan, Partly Due to Reshoring; U.S. Factories are Competitive Again

The company brought its manufacturing back from China.

The reason they did so as described by Prof. Perry, is the same reason there will be a lot more companies that do so: Continue reading “In a paragraph, here’s why we will see a lot more reshoring”

Privacy issues with cheap drones

Previously discussed the amazing stuff that little drones can do.

This week’s issue of The Economist has several great articles in the Technology Quarterly section.  One in particular that caught my eye – Unblinking eyes in the sky.

The article says drones that police might use for their operations will fit into the trunk of a car and can be had for the price of a police cruiser. Quite a bargain for surveillance in a crisis situation when you might otherwise need a helicopter which costs $1.7M to buy (according to the article) and require 1 pilot & 1 observer at operating cost of $5k or $10k an hour (my wild guess).

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U.S. energy independence on the horizon? Maybe soon.

An article from NPR, Is U.S. Energy Independence Finally Within Reach?, explains the impact of all the new drilling could be making theU.S. energy independent soon.

The article says:

Energy self-sufficiency is now in sight,” says energy economist Phil Verleger. He believes that within a decade, the U.S. will no longer need to import crude oil and will be a natural gas exporter

Continue reading “U.S. energy independence on the horizon? Maybe soon.”

Autonomous drones

Farhad Manjoo describes what a team at the University of Pennsylvania is doing with autonomous drones – the team calls them quadrotors – I Love You, Killer Robots

The drones are very small, autonomous and extremely nimble. They can determine location of nearby drones.

Check out the drones as they fly through windows at various angles:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=MvRTALJp8DM]

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As you laugh at those ridiculous predictions from 50 years ago, ponder how today’s predictions will look 50 years from now

Everyone knows those silly predictions from the 1950s are so ridiculously wrong.

There’s the old line about the world only needing a few computers. The quote as it usually provided is mentioned by friend John Bredehoft in his post Why Bad Predictions Happen (the ‘five computers’ prediction).

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

John questions who actually made the comment and whether it may have been made in the ’50s instead. Regardless, the point stands.  Do we really need more than 5 of those machines?

Since there are at least five computers in just my home that are more powerful than what was available in the 1950s, we can all chuckle away.  How silly he was.

John suggests we pause for a moment in our merriment:

Continue reading “As you laugh at those ridiculous predictions from 50 years ago, ponder how today’s predictions will look 50 years from now”

Here’s another cliff – volume of first class mail

Although not as impressive as the graph of newspaper ad revenue illustrated earlier, the graph of first-class mail processed by USPS is still a fairly imposing cliff. Wall Street Journal has the graph in their article Postal Cuts Are Dead Letter in Congress.

Peak in about 2001, slow decline through about 2007 and rapid decline since. Volume is about the same as in ’85 or ’86.

Check out that graph and you will see why the USPS has revenue problems.

Another description of change taking place – dematerialization

Dematerialization –stuff that used to take up physical space no longer needs physical space.

Matt Ridley summarizes a large component of the radical change surrounding us in terms of dematerialization. In his WSJ post, The Future Is So Bright, it’s Dematerializing, he says:

Continue reading “Another description of change taking place – dematerialization”

Here’s what falling off a cliff looks like – inflation adjusted newspaper ad revenue

As usual, Dr. Mark Perry has the best graphs.

In Newspaper Ad Revenues Fall to 60-Yr. Low in 2011, he graphs advertising revenue for newspapers on an inflation adjusted basis from 1950 through 2010 (actual) with projection for 2011 through third quarter.

Wow.  So that is what it looks like for an entire industry to fall off a cliff.

Continue reading “Here’s what falling off a cliff looks like – inflation adjusted newspaper ad revenue”

WSJ review of Abundance – the future is better than you think

Great review by Michael Shermer – Defying the Doomsayers.

Just got my Kindle copy of the book and have started reading it.  Superb.  I previously mentioned this book.

Here’s a few examples of the pace of change.

Continue reading “WSJ review of Abundance – the future is better than you think”

How government could make the massive transition in the economy easier

Walter Russell Mead is developing a picture of what the new economy might look like.  Most recent post is Beyond Blue 5: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

That we are in the midst of a massive change in the whole economy has been obvious for a while.  All the rules have changed.

What does this change look like?

The music, newspaper, and manufacturing industries are painfully aware of this.  It is dawning on the publishing industry and the post office that the tidal wave of change has hit them.  Primary education, higher education, and government at all levels haven’t caught on.  I’m not sure where the CPA industry is at.

My opinion, shown clearly on this blog, is that our future is so bright we need sunglasses now.

At the same time, the transition will be terribly painful. Massive changes are needed to make the shift.

One huge area needing change is in the heavy hand of government regulation. Mr. Mead opens his post with:

Continue reading “How government could make the massive transition in the economy easier”

Predicting who is expecting by their shopping patterns in the second trimester – the power of data-mining

Kashmir Hill, from Forbes, reports in How Target Figures Out a Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did that Target is data-mining purchases to predict who is the early stage of pregnancy.

By cross-referencing a lot of purchasing data, Target can calculate the probability of a customer being pregnant and even estimate a delivery date.  The article quotes Charles Duhigg of the New York Times:

Continue reading “Predicting who is expecting by their shopping patterns in the second trimester – the power of data-mining”