Higher Math on the Sands of Santa Barbara

Posted on July 21, 2008 by lewisshepherd
UCSB

UCSB, looking NW

Spent Sunday afternoon with world-renowned mathematician Michael Freedman (short bio here) walking the beach and bluffs above, just northwest of UC Santa Barbara, talking about a number of absurd and not-so-absurd possibilities in the future applications of quantum computing.  Here’s an example of the kind of stuff I was trying, very hard and maybe somewhat successfully, to grasp while walking in the California sun and trying to ignore the nude sunbathers and hang-gliders.  If that’s unhelpful (as most of it is for me), here’s a straightforward description of some of his main work and its possible applications. 

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Theory of the Fireball, Supercomputing, and other Los Alamos Tidbits

Posted on July 20, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Back in the early ’90s when I was first dating Kathryn, now the lovely bride, we went on some awesome roadtrips, including many cross-country – great way to get to know someone.  At the time my brother was an Air Force pilot, flying the F-117 stealth fighter, so we once paid him a visit at Holloman AFB on a 10-day drive through the Southwest.  I’ll have to find and upload to Flickr the pictures he took of each of us sitting in its classified cockpit – surely a massive security violation which I lay entirely at his feet (lucky for him he’s retired from the Air Force now and flying for Delta). 

Sadly, the F-117 Night Hawk has also now been officially retired, replaced by the F-22 Raptor.

As much as that was a thrill, though, the highlight of that particular roadtrip was driving up to the Los Alamos plateau and spending some time touring around the Lab, the Museum, and the interesting little town that’s grown up around all that PhD talent in the middle of the high desert.

That lab’s on my mind because I’ve been thinking about supercomputing and the revolution it could undergo thanks to quantum computing. I’m in Santa Barbara visiting the “Station Q” research program in quantum computing, and will write more about quantum computing soon, since I’m actually beginning to understand it.

But as an interesting artifact in my preparatory reading, Microsoft’s John Manferdelli sent me a link to a Federation of Atomic Scientists archive of declassified Los Alamos National Lab technical reports and publications, from “the good old days” at Los Alamos.

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Latest NASA Launch: Viral Marketing

Posted on July 18, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: Aviation Week has a piece today (“Funding Biggest ISS Obstacle“) outlining the budgetary woes of the International Space Station program, noting that the five partnering national space agencies which jointly operate the ISS “say they are eager to use the facility as a stepping stone for lunar and Martian exploration, but they first must find a way to sustain operations beyond the present partnership agreement….The main question mark about extending operations is related to funding and not technical issues. No road map or timetable for prolonging the ISS lifetime can be established until these financial issues have been resolved.”

Analysis: I’m a fan of space research and travel, and I’d like to see more funding and attention go into the American space effort, and with it more American ability to collaborate on international space ventures.

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Research and Intelligence … Research for Intelligence

Posted on July 14, 2008 by lewisshepherd

I’ll be at Penn State University for the next couple of days, at the Research in American conference.  This particular conference, with the theme “Connecting Technology Thought Leaders with Government Officials,” is sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, focusing on their Science and Technology area. 

Here’s the agenda for the conference, which has an excellent lineup of technologists presenting their approaches and progress. 

ODNI turned to the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) to host and run the conference.  Someone, somewhere in the chain, slipped up and invited me as the Keynote speaker for Tuesday – I’m planning to do the thing with no slides and to speak (in part) about the emerging possibilities of revolutionary research in a post Web 2.0 world.

For some sobering background information,  check out a recent tour of the research-funding horizon by Amy Ellis Nutt in the New Jersey Star-Ledger (“As research funds stagnate, science in state of crisis“).  Here’s a taste:

Once the world’s gold standard, American scientific enterprise is in free fall. Short of government funds and strapped for cash, researchers across the country are abandoning promising avenues of scientific investigation and, increasingly, the profession of science itself.” – Amy Ellis Nutt, The Star-Ledger

Do you share that pessimism?  Think it’s overstated?

I’ll give an update about the conference tomorrow.

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Test for Prediction Markets: They Say Obama, but Polls Say It’s Tied

Posted on July 12, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: According to the latest Rasmussen poll released Saturday July 12, and promptly headlined by the Drudge Report, “The race for the White House is tied. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows Barack Obama and John McCain each attract 43% of the vote.” Newsweek is reporting a similar result in its own poll, with Obama moving down and McCain up (“Obama, McCain in Statistical Dead Heat“), and other polls increasingly show a similarly close race.

Analysis: I’ve been tracking the growing divide between two quite different methods purporting to offer statistical predictive analysis for the November presidential election. Polls are saying one thing, but Prediction Markets are saying another. 

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The “Rush to the Cloud” – Not So Fast…

Posted on July 11, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Had a great time on Wednesday on a panel at the “Defense 2.0” conference, at the Arlington Ritz-Carlton.  I believe I learned as much from my fellow panelists from Cisco, IBM and so forth – about the importance of information security and assurance – as any conference in recent memory.  The story in Government Computer News (“Defense 2.0 a Work in Progress“) captures the views of most of the speakers. 

I had a gentle and gentlemanly disagreement with the keynote speaker, Mike Nelson.  Mike has a distinguished career, working with Internet-inventor Al Gore while he was VP, and later Director of Internet Technology and Strategy at IBM.  I offered that he was perhaps slightly overly enamored of the “rush to the Cloud” school of thinking.  I’ve written about that school of thought before, and the balance of where computing power is likely to reside in future, given Moore’s Law for the foreseeable future.  The GCN quotes capture my thinking in short form: there’ll be the cloud, along with increasingly powerful computing in local form factors (some desktops, more laptops, handhelds, mobiles, and embedded-computing forms of all sorts).

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A-SpaceX, Google, and Virtual Tuesday

Posted on July 9, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Yesterday I had a “virtual world vibe” going.  At 5:30 a.m. when my dog Jack woke me up offering to take me for a walk, the first thing I noticed on my mobile was a series of tweets from Chris Rasmussen, NGA’s social software guru, posted the night before.  Twitter is interesting for a lot of reasons, but one is the ability to snatch asynchronous stream-of-consciousness statements, from strangers and friends alike, as they pass by in the microblogosphere conversation.

Chris went on a tear about Second Life, with several hilarious observations and comments within the space of an hour, so here are several from his public Twitter feed:

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Up Late? Innovate.

Posted on July 7, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Here’s some quick thought-provoking advice from Phil McKinney, who runs HP’s Innovation Program Office.  (Phil has his own blog as well, but the advice comes from an interview yesterday in the San Jose Mercury News.)

Q. One of your tips for innovation is to stay up late, because that’s when your filters are down. (The mental filters that rule out wild ideas, which might turn out to be good ones.) Do you still do that?

A. “Oh yeah, it drives my wife crazy. The idea really is to go back to things you’d do before you were successful, before you learned that you’ve always got to be on your guard.”

Man, do I swear by that!  Phil has some other points that I’m less enamored with, mostly because I don’t believe he’s thinking very radically.  His point that in the future we might be data-mining healthcare histories is undercut by the fact that we’re already doing it, as I blogged yesterday. 

Another less-than-startling prediction: We’ll still be using Second-Life style virtual worlds two decades from now?  Please!  I suppose we’ll also still be changing toner cartridges!!

Check out Phil’s blog, it reflects his innovative thinking better 🙂   But don’t read it till after midnight…

 
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Healthcare: It’s the Data, Stupid

Posted on July 7, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: Today’s L.A. Times has a startling report: “A stunning number of people who work in healthcare settings lack paid sick time — as many as 75% of all home health aides, for example… Federal data indicate that as many as 29% of all workers in the ‘healthcare and social assistance’ job sector lack paid sick days. Healthcare employees who work while ill may end up hurting the people they are hired to help….”

Analysis: Mark Twain said the only two sure things in life were death and taxes.  So it’s no surprise that the two presidential campaigns are focusing on healthcare and the economy, since people are universally affected in personal ways.  Forget taxes for today, I’m interested in technology’s role in healthcare, which is growing, and there’s no more potentially game-changing facet of that than the role of data. 

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The Best of America, in Iraq

Posted on July 6, 2008 by lewisshepherd

The fireworks (and sales) of the Fourth are over. Much has been written about this holiday, about which many in America are unnecessarily cynical. Both sides in the presidential campaign made much of patriotism this week. I just wanted to share something that I read in a back-of-the-paper page of the Washington Post today, a little interview which says more about the quiet ideals motivating American foreign policy at its best, and the undaunted courage of those who help to carry it out.

The interview (“The Doctor is In: To Iraq and Back“) is with dentist and retired-two-star general Ronald D. Silverman.  He practices in Alexandria, Virginia, and I may just see if I can get an appointment with him, because I’d like most of all to shake his hand and thank him for what he’s done.

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