Before I jump onto the Goals and Themeword meme started by my buddy, Thomas LaRock (blog | twitter), I decided I’d spend a few minutes looking back on both the year 2009. (From a personal standpoint, the 00′s were my most difficult decade yet. Major problems of every stripe beset me on all sides and with alarming frequency throughout the decade. I was all “Good Riddance” and “Don’t let the door hit y’ass on the way out, 2009!” as the ball dropped in Times Square.)
Rather than spend a lot of time cooking up my own top 10 lists, I reckoned (that’s Southern for “thought”, btw) I’d recap a few others top X lists that are in the ballpark of my own personal opinion. I couldn’t resist putting together my own list at the end, which I’d love to hear your thoughts on. In addition, I want to hear about your Top 10 (or 5 or 3) for 2009!
Their Lists
Time Magazine’s list of Top 10 of Everything 2009 was a pretty good recap for the year on big ol’ cultural touch points like movies and music. I found at least one thing to agree with in each of their pop culture lists: movies – The Hurt Locker – check; TV shows – my personal favorite for its brilliant cohesive multiyear storyline and excellent character studies, Lost – check; album – I and Love and You by the Avett Brothers – check; books (sigh – if only I had more time) included the wonderful The Age of Wonders by Richard Holmes.
Lifehacker’s Top 5 Hive Topics of 2009 is a very interesting list covering lots of topics and pointing out a lot of interesting tools that I hadn’t encountered before. My personal favorite among them was the Top 5 Alternative File Copiers, since the Windows Explorer copy feature reminds me of hungrily awaiting my food in the microwave and just as the counter gets to the T-10 countdown, it goes back up to 30, then down to 8, then back up to 42, then down to 14.
I’m not sure if they meant to be funny but Digg’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories of 2009 is hilarious, much in the same way that Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) and I were when we put on an unintentionally hilarious performance at the PASS 2009 Summit Quiz bowl. Go ahead – ask Colin Stasiuk (blog | twitter) what he thought of our performance…
Impressed by Our Quiz Bowl Performance?
Speaking of unintentionally funny, have you seen Yahoo’s Top 10 Searches of 2009? Evidently, the median Internet user (at least from their metrics) is hormone-laden, teenage redneck with a thing for fast cars (Nascar), Hollywood hotties (Megan Fox), and an unassailable but secret love for Mormon-influenced Vampires (Twilight).
My List
I usually try to blog at least once per week and, when I can, even more. I still have this deep down urge to post lots of small blog posts of just a couple paragraphs. But for some reason, I always seem to come out with these big ol’ epistles. Despite my verbosity, y’all still read what I write and for that I’m very thankful. Over the last year, these were my top ten blog posts according to your interest:
Looking for Good DMV Database Admin Queries, where you can find just about every good DMV query ever written except those other really good ones that are posted here in the comments.
Things You Know Now, a semi-successful meme I started where I asked participants to tells us about stuff they’d do differently if they knew it way back in the day.
I excluded a few posts that were numerically in the top ten because, well, they’re my blog posts and I didn’t want them in the top ten. So there! But those that I excluded were things like reposting an interview done by another blogger or maybe a product or book that I plugged for some reason or an other.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my blogging and found it valuable. Tomorrow, I’m jumping on the themeword and goals meme. In fact, I’m crashin’ the party because none of my peeps called on me. [pout]
I was honored to be recently interviewed by the crew at Consortio Services. You can find my portion of this particular webcast at http://www.cstechcast.com/podcasts/cs-techcast/episode99/ beginning at 17:24. In the interview, I discuss a number of thoughts and opinions about the future of cloud computing, where our profession is headed, and more.
When I first became aware of the website, they were audio podcasts only. Since then, they’ve changed up their format a bit, and now have a video portion along with the audio. They now included a visual “slide” with your headshot and title (not a pretty sight, in my case). Also, they some scrolling shots of other things I’m involved with such as Quest Software, my blog here, my Tool Time column on SQL Server Magazine, and the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book, and my personal website.
I encourage you to add this podcasting site to your list of favorites. There’s lots of great information waiting for you there.
Enjoy!
-Kevin
P.S. I just got the word that I have been re-granted MVP status for the upcoming year. Thanks to Microsoft and all my fellow MVP colleagues for making the MVP program such an awesome credential!
In the Sequels for SQL series, I point you to sites where you can go beyond the nose-to-the-grindstone resources that we see every day as SQL Server professionals. (My favorite resource for pan-SQL Server pointers is Steve Jone’s Database Weekly email newsletter.) These are the story that comes after and outside (the sequels) of our daily working lives (the other SQL). Let’s broaden our horizons together. If you hit on an interesting but overlooked topic, I’d like to hear from you.
SQL Server: We live it. We love it.
When Jimmy May talks, I listen. Not just because he’s a personal friend, but also because he knows what’s what, if you’ll pardon the expression. So when Jimmy says “I believe xPerf will fundamentally change the way I do my job”, then I want to know what the heck this free xPerf management tool is and how I can best leverage it. Check out Jimmy’s blog entry on xPerf here.
Devices & Gadgets: Usually making our lives better, sometimes not so much.
Ever wonder what’s inside one of those tiny USB hard drives? No? Not even a little bit?!? When I started in IT, hard drives where as big as washing machines and cost $60,000 running at speeds in the 100′s of RPMs. My how times have changed. Here’s a fun hack of a USB hard drive – http://www.dansworkshop.com/electricity-and-electronics/usb-hard-drive-hack.htm.
Futurewatch: Important issues just over the horizon.
There are a lot of standard elements of society being rebranded as the “2.0″ version of itself. The 2.0 moniker was first put forward by visionary Tim O’Reilly (blog | twitter), of the eponymous media company. Whenever you see the 2.0 moniker added to the end of something, most famously Web 2.0, then you know that it will include the characteristics of collaboration, interoperability, and user-centered designs. So, whereas the first go at the web in the mid- to late-1990′s was about enabling information retrieval such as transforming printed catalogs into on-line catalogs, Web 2.0 enables all of its participants to comment on, review, rate, and otherwise participating with each other in the use of such a catalog. In the last FutureWatch blurb, I pointed out work on Grid 2.0, centered on efforts to update the USA’s electricity grid. I’m going to do a much more detailed post in the near future about emerging 2.0 efforts, but one to point out now is Gov 2.0. Under this broad set of initiatives, governments from the lowest to highest levels of responsibility are opening up their public databases for consumption by the public. An example of Gov 2.0 in action comes with the President’s SAVE Award, in which the public is invited to vote on their pick for the best money saving tip put forward by federal government workers. Read all about this year’s SAVE Award here.
Humor: I haz da funny.
Weird products in Japan have their own name – chindogu. Most of these are crackpot inventions that everyone knows will never see the light of day, such as these these featured here. However, some of these products DO get marketed and, more amazingly, purchased. Check out the product reviews of this totally bizarro chindogu here at Overstock.com.
Professional Development: Because there are two words in “database professional”.
There are mountains of great websites with tips on how to be a better speaker. Some day, I’ll write a long blog post about my favorite sites for learning how to improve your oration. But if you’re in a hurry, and who isn’t these days, then this blog post at TechRepublic succinctly sums up the advice you’ll find from many other web sites, articles, and blogs.
Society: Important issues to discuss with your friends and family.
One of the most remarkable things about the USA, as a rather biased citizen, is our ability to suck up our pride, admit a mistake, and try to prevent it from happening again. One way that the USA tries to prevent future occurrences is to convene a commission of some kind. I found this analysis by David Leinweber, a Haas Fellow in Finance and Founding Director of the Center for Innovative Financial Technology at UC Berkeley, on the commission studying banking market reform in the USA to be quite intriguing and, frankly, upsetting.
WorldView: If James Bond knows that the world is not enough, then so should I.
I’m always on the lookout for issues related to safe and clean water. If you think people can be grumpy when oil is in short supply, imagine what it’s like when there’s not enough drinking water for everyone. See how India is dealing with enormous water issues in this revealing article from the Economist. And I’d be interested to hear what our Indian blogger friends thoughts are on this topic, folks like Rushabh Mehta, Jacob Sebastian, and Pinal Dave. (Water issues have remained one of my passions ever since my years working for NASA developing the water recycling systems for the International Space Station, in which we made water of the H20 that passes through the human body re-drinkable. And it tastes good. Incidentally, all of the technology we developed for this project, as with all non-classified government projects, became public domain. ECLSS technology is now used in hundreds of commercial products ranging from household detergents to commercial solvents to filtration systems.)
I’m starting a new series called Sequels for SQL Server. In this series, I point you to sites where you can go beyond the nose-to-the-grindstone resources that we see every day as SQL Server professionals. These are the story that comes after and outside (the sequels) of our daily working lives (the other SQL). Let’s broaden our horizons together. If you hit on an interesting but overlooked topic, I’d like to hear from you.
Professional Development: Because there are two words in “database professional”.
Peter Drucker, one of the greats in management thought-leadership, would’ve turned 100 last week were he alive today. Check out these top 20 quotes from the man who revolutionized management theory.
Society: Important issues to discuss with your friends and family.
Quoting the Motley Fool, “We spent the latter half of 2008 feeling the wrath of “too big to fail.” Today, banks are bigger than ever. We need to end that. Now.” It’s Time to End “Too Big to Fail”. Read this thought-provoking article soon.
WorldView: If James Bond knows that the world is not enough, then so should I.
The smartest analyst on international issues out there, Fareed Zakari, discusses US and Indian relations in this insightful article from Newsweek.
I was happy to hear that the magazine Database Trends and Applications had recently relaunched their website. While I’d been a columnist there for a quite a while, I’d never been able to easily find my own articles nor check to see if they’d generated any interest. DBTA has changed all of that with their relaunch. I was also surprised, upon closer examination, that I’d been writing there for more than a year. Check to see if any of these articles are of interest to you. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The November article just went live this week. The site traffic is 79% North America, with India and the UK as the next largets readership markets. It was heartening to see a relatively high level of interest in the “Code of Ethics for DBA’s” among other topics.
If you are perceiving a trend or overarching issue in the SQL Server world, I’d love to hear your input. Drop me a note here or use one of the methods available on http://KevinEKline.com/Contact/ to get in touch with me directly.
I’ve opined in the past about how strongly I think the health care industry in the USA needs a does of information technology. One profession making impressive strides in this area is America’s nurses.
On the one hand, we have NDNQI, the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI®). NDNQI is a repository for nursing-sensitive indicators collected at the nursing unit level. Since it began in the late 1990′s, the program has added many hospitals as well as additional data points (that is, the quality indicators). Lots of useful resources and good reading can be found here.
In addition to NDNQI, we have some excellent work being done by the Veteran’s Administration in their VANOD (VA Nursing Outcomes Database) project, which you can read about here. VANOD is also discussed in a nice presentation by the program manager here. You can download the PPT file directly here.
By tracking health care practices in aggregate and monitoring their outcomes, we can find direct correlation or, even better causation, for better health of patients when multiple practices can be used. For example, let’s say there are a few competing standard practices around the routine for taking the temperature of patients in a hospital – some take temperatures manually in the morning, some take temperatures manually in the evening, and a luck few who can afford the equipment take temperatures automatically through a sensor on the patient. If the data in aggregate is able to show that the automated method yields a measurable improvement in outcomes, then that approach can justified against the expense because we know patients are doing better. The American Nurses Association (ANA) reports on such progress here.
Additional technologies of interest are being reported, such as this article at www.SmarterTechnology.com and this article at www.InformationWeek.com. In fact, in indication of the importance health care information technology, InformationWeek has a really good portal dedicated just to that at http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/index.jhtml.
Congratulations to the ANA and to the VA for transforming data into actionable knowledge!
The Economist, my favorite news and analysis magazine, published an outstanding briefing and analysis on the coming wars of ascendancy between the major vendors of cloud computing technology and services. When a technological shift bubbles up into the mainstream news media, the technology has gone through a significant, society-altering right of passage. As technologists, we all know that the “outside world” doesn’t really get what we do. It doesn’t click for grandma that you’re doing difficult and important work because it’s hard to wrap your head around low-level technological work. And, unfortunately, most technologists can’t explain what they do on a daily basis without a lot of jargon and techie-speak. So when a major news magazine that speaks to a large number of CEOs and gray-haired types whose closest contact to email is having their admin send a message for them, it’s important to the world at large. Really important.
You can read the briefing here. (Be sure to read the comments. You’ll get some great insight into why cloud computing is a society-altering technology.)
You can read the full multi-page story, for subscribers only, here.
I’ve been rather publicly skeptical about the uptake of cloud computing (though not its significance), compared to some very optimistic prognostications, such as that by my friend and fellow MVP Paul Nielsen. (For a good generalized discussion about SQL Server in the cloud, take a look at Brent Ozar’s posts here.) The important thing I think that is being widely overlooked by we in the trenches is that the biggest issues around who will dominate cloud computing and how those specifications will bubble to the top. We all know and love and work with SQL on a daily basis, yet we forget that databases went through a decades long period in which SQL had no standard. Similarly, I think many of us are beginning to map our minds around cloud computing in the “this is the ways things are” sort of mind frame, instead of the “this is the new Wild West where anything goes” sort of mind frame. The closest analogy that comes to mind is that of the serial bus on my venerable Intel 286 PC. Any time I wanted to connect a product from a new vendor to that serial bus, I had a lot of work ahead. The USB adapter made everyone’s life better, but it was painful getting there.
Something similar is now being played out in the cloud between Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. We can begin to study what sort of applications to deploy in the cloud and how to support them, but if we choose the wrong “serial adapter” we’ll have even more work to do in the future. One or more of these vendors (and their preferred standards and specifications) will rise to the top. But until a leader emerges, you can be that I’ll be hedging my bets by building and deploying applications on internal infrastructures and database platforms.
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself, any direction you choose.
Dr. Seuss
Dr Seuss makes a great point. Only you can determine where you go in life and where those you lead in life (your significant other, your kids, your family, your business associates) will follow. What happens when you don’t have your feet in your shoes? What if you’re not wearing shoes? Or what if your shoes are sandals? Which direction do you steer? Do you head to the beach or to the snowy mountains? What if you’re not only steering yourself, but an entire professional association?
I’ve watched the blog posts and comments pile up throughout the community with eyes wide and mouth hanging open in consternation. In a way, I’m thrilled to see all of the discussion. After all, prior election were rather placid affairs. An election with a lot of discussion should be a good thing, right? Normally, I’d say “Absolutely!” However, the rancor and negativity have been impossible to ignore. In response, please allow me to walk you through PASS’ history relating to elections, as well as the entire nomination and election process to give you a better understanding for this situation in its entirety.
Before I go further, I want to thank the members of the Nominations Committee (NomCom) for their steadfast dedication and self-sacrifice. NomCom members include uber-volunteer Allen Kinsel (twitter), former board member and co-founder of SQLServerCentral Brian Knight (blog), PASS EVP Rushabh Mehta (blog), PASS executive director Judy Christianson. PASS president Wayne Snyder also sat in the sessions (since he’ll be leading this effort next year) but did not vote. The committee spent many hours of time on the entire process, frequently, at the cost of family and personal time.
The Context
Historically, PASS nominations were entirely committee-driven. In many years, there were only as many candidates, good or bad, as slots. As the years advanced, the board directed that the NomCom alter the nomination vetting process in several ways. For example, for many years, the NomCom simply rubber-stamped existing board members if they wanted another term on the board. After experiencing a handful of board members that were unproductive or even counterproductive, the board wanted to make sure that returning board members were subjected to the same rigors as a newcomer. The NomCom was instructed by the board to develop a set of interview questions to assess the candidates and also to analyze the candidates’ performance as a board member or a high-level volunteer for the organization. (An unintended consequence of this change was that some candidates without much experience within the organization didn’t pass the vetting.)
As time passed and the board seated many top technical talents, the board began to see a definite pattern of technologists who couldn’t focus on the big picture, couldn’t formulate strategies, and would derail board meetings with unending discussions of deep technical details. Using a hypothetical example, if the board was considering a strategy around collecting information and feedback from chapters (to better advocate to our founders and vendors about the reach of the organization), some board members loved to spend huge amounts of board time building data models and noodling over what sort of client- and server-side code should be written to support the application, when in fact the board hadn’t even settled on what strategy to pursue. That’s like spending all your time writing an application without requirements – worse practice!
After all, these other board members had all been great technologists and had willing spirits and giving hearts, but they actually obstructed PASS’ advancement rather than helping it. There wasn’t anything intrinsically wrong with what they were doing. They were simply playing to the skills that had made them such successful technologists and key players throughout their careers. However, it was simply counterproductive. PASS simply needed more business and leadership skills and less, yes LESS, technical skills in the board room. Consequently, the board further instructed the NomCom to begin assessing incoming candidates for strategic and leadership skills. And because strategic and leadership skills were shown through many years of experience to be at least as important as SQL Server-related skills, the NomCom was also encouraged to entertain nominations from candidates outside of the traditional applicant pool in search of those business skills.
The Process Today
As the chair for 2009′s PASS Nominations Committee, it’s my job to ensure that the candidates presented to the PASS membership for the general election meet the standards and objectives set by the board, the bylaws, and the processes and procedures currently in place. The NomCom had very clear directives and processes (at least internally):
From Here to There, Funny things are Everywhere
Collect all of the “paper” applications that come in through the Call for Nominations. (We received only 11 this season.)
Each member of the NomCom then ranks each “paper” application on a variety of criteria, including criteria like leadership experience, volunteer experience, educational experience, performance, and much more. Based on those scores, we looked for a clustered scores among the candidates. There is usually a clear break of a full point or more between the top scoring candidates and the lower scoring candidates, and this year was no different.
Candidates who scored strongly on the “paper” ranking then advanced to phone interviews with the entire NomCom. (Only seven of this season’s candidates had scores strong enough to advance.)
With leadership skills now as important as other overall skills and experiences, candidates needed to provide the NomCom with a vision statement for what they’d like to accomplish while on the PASS board. Then, the candidate had to answer questions like “Describe a situation where you were able to use persuasion to convince someone with an opposing view to see things your way” and “Tell us about a time when you had to much on your plate and had to reprioritize all of your projects” and “Tell us about your biggest successes in your volunteer/board work this last year”. (It is at this stage that a candidate can establish their leadership credentials. It’s also worth noting that those leadership experiences and examples could come from any aspect of the candidates’ life – not just PASS, or professional work, but examples such as the local PTA, the Girl/Boy Scouts, athletic teams, civic groups, and church activities were all acceptable and encouraged.) Each candidate was then reranked by the NomCom members with all new scores.
Since the candidate’s volunteer track records was given equal weight to their interview and discussion with the NomCom, a candidate who was strong in both areas would definitely advance to the elections while a candidate who was weak in one area or the other might land on the fence or, in a couple situations, performed so poorly during the interview that they didn’t advance. (Once again, there was a strong clustering of scores with a top four and a bottom three by a wide margin.)
While the NomCom wanted to put forward a slate large enough to have two (or more candidates) per open slot, the simple fact is that the NomCom only felt a strong confidence in four candidates. In other words, the NomCom felt that anyone of the four would perform admirably as board members and by advancing the candidate to elections it, in effect, endorsed them. One of the candidates, Tim Ford, who went through the tough interview process commented on it here. Once all the candidates were notified, they were allowed to begin campaigning according to the rules set up early this year.
The Fallout
I want to point out that a lot of the criticisms of this year’s elections are, in some form or another, a declaration of what people think the elections should be rather than what they actually are. This is a lot like assessing a family sedan for racing performance, and then criticizing it when the quarter mile and zero-to-sixty numbers aren’t too strong. The fact is, you’ll always come away disappointed. (Of course, I’m TOTALLY aware that PASS is too veiled about all of these processes. To extend the analogy, it’s like a family sedan that you can’t tell is a sedan until you get inside of it.)
Much of the turmoil seemed to start with Brent Ozar’s blog post and interview with candidate Matt Morollo. Be sure to read the comments! (I’m not going to speak to the specifics of any individual candidate, btw.) In our case, the nomination process was designed in pre-collaboration days before Web2.0 capabilities were ever conceived. Transparency was not a strategic goal of the board or of the NomCom, vetting the best candidates was the main strategic goal of the NomCom. Examples of this sort of criticism, and I’m not saying that the criticisms are wrong only that they target an ideal situation rather than what is currently in place, are illustrated when Geoff Hiten declares a PASS Fail, when Chuck Boyce says It’s the Transparency, Stupid, or when Andy Leonard says that only database professionals should be board members. Again – these are not wrong per se, they’re simply personally held views about the way things should be. Marlon Ribunal’s recent blog post seemed to reflect an awareness that NomCom policies are a reflection of directives coming from the board and attempting to help drive the board’s core strategic goals. Stuart Ainsworth, on his blog entry, pointed out that all candidates should experience a high degree of scrutiny and questioning. And Joe Webb pointed out that balance is extremely important for board candidates regarding not only their skills, but also who the candidates work for, what the candidate does in their day job, and much more in his post on the PASS Board of Director elections.
Times, They Are a Changin’
Would You Eat Them Here or There?
Web2.0 has definitely arrived on PASS’ doorstep. The board has, traditionally, not been motivated by transparency coupled with direct collaboration with the wider community. The gyre of Twitter conversations and blog posts with long trailing conversations are a new experience to many with a seat at the board table. While it’s important to one or two of the current board members, a transparent and collaborative approach hasn’t taken root with everyone on the board. Do you want that to change? Then I am directly calling you to action! Meet with like-minded individuals at the Summit in two short weeks. Identify a champion (or two) within the board who will spearhead the effort and then work cooperatively to build the proposal(s). But beware what you wish for. Governance changes are surprisingly draining on a board, especially if they’re expected to draft the new governance policies themselves. In effect, by retooling the governance of the organization, you’ll also be asking the board NOT to accomplish something else among the major goals for the year. Perhaps the very first proposal should be for the establishment of a Governance Committee that could discuss the issues openly and collaboratively, while taking the majority of the workload off of the board?
There have been so many ideas about what needs to change for the election process, many contradicting one another. Do you want to require a director to have attended one or more past PASS Summits? Or do you want to promote diversity between North American and other countries where Summit attendance is probably prohibitively expensive? Do you want to allow the board to prescribe a certain ratio of consultants versus corporate IT versus vendors? Or do you want the most experienced candidates, even if they’re all from one sort of career path? Or, as these multitudes of conversations have asked again and again, do you want someone who can sling some great Transact-SQL code or do you want someone who has a more diverse viewpoint with more of a general business orientation in their daily job? Do you want direct open elections without a NomCom or only a cursory check on qualifications? (Be prepared for a lot of candidates to come out of the woodwork from all over the globe!) Or do you want to have a strong quality-control process in place for nominees as a prerequisite for the elections? Would you feel good seeing a candidate conduct a train-wreck of interview in which that can’t clearly articulate why they should be a board member? That gives us transparency, but discourages a lot of people from considering putting their hat in the ring. Or would you rather shelter them from possible embarrassments? You get more candidates that way, though transparency declines. The trade-offs aren’t always so easy.
Let me be direct on a second point – not enough people are answering the Call for Nominations. If you want to see elections with multiple candidates for each open slot, PASS will need many more high-quality candidates each year.
Finally
I don’t mean to put any one on the spot or make anybody feel bad. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, after all. However, I hope that I’ve helped illuminate some of the dark corners of this process and why the NomCom put forward the slate of candidates that they have. Don’t like it? I’ve given you what you need to set about bringing change to your professional association. Let me know what you think!
Start here to see this revolutionary new technology! I’m not kidding – this is a huge game changer!
Whether you like it or not, our energy landscape is changing. Our children’s energy needs will incorporate all the energy resources we’re currently used to – electricity generated by coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants with automobiles powered by gasoline and diesel. But their energy needs will also be met by a plethora of other sources, such as wind, wave, and solar methods of collecting energy along with cars power by electricity, fuel cells, and possibly alternative fuels like hydrogen and LNG. Today, those energy sources contribute less than 5% of our total energy needs. But, for the next generation, they may contribute 10-25% of the total energy needs in America. Every percentile less hydrocarbon-based fuel that we use represents billions of gallons of oil that we don’t have to import.
One of the biggest obstacles to widespread implementation of any of the alternative energy technologies is the cost of implementation, usually measured as dollars per watt. For example, older solar panels are very costly (usually around $2/w) as are parabolic mirror systems, which also have a large number of moving parts and, thus, high maintenance costs. And big wind turbines, while efficient, are also monumental structures built at great expense with big time maintenance costs. Personally, I really like the promise of wave power because of its constancy. We will always have waves and tides as long as we have the moon. Solar and wind, though, are vexed by inconstancy – the sun sets every night on solar power plants and wind speeds must exceed 12 mph to power a turbine on a typical wind farm. Unfortunately, wave technology is probably about 20 years behind solar in terms of development and has a lot of obstacles to overcome due to the high amount of wear and tear inflicted by the elements.
Wide implementation of any alternative energy can becomes dramatically more effective through tinkering with the equation in one of two ways. The first way is to improve the efficiency of the technology such that it creates many more watts at the same cost. The current record for a solar film is about 20% conversion of sunlight into energy, though commercially available solar cells are only in the low teens of efficiency. On the other side of the equation, we can produce the same or somewhat lower watts (i.e. efficiency), but at a dramatically lower cost. Thus, our $/w ratio is greatly improved on either the dollars-in side of the equation or the energy-out side of the equation. Alter either one and the equation behind the technology starts to look promising.
Here’s an example – it currently costs about $20,000 to $38,000 to place enough solar panels on your home to provide 4 kilowatts of power, about what a standard middle-class American home consumes. A German company just developed a new thin-film solar technology earlier this year which can probably produce nearly as much energy, but for only half the cost. While it doesn’t enable a typical American family to live entirely off the grid, it is more affordable and has a payback period that’s not measured in decades. This technology is still in the lab, so it’ll probably be a few more years before we see it commercially available. (An irony of this scenario is that relatively sunless Germany is one of the foremost leaders in solar technology due to the generous government subsidies in the wider context of energy consumption. IMO, that’s reason enough to consider our own subsidies so that we don’t get left behind on one of the 21st-century’s important industries.)
Now, there’s an even more exciting new breakthrough in the area of wind energy. It’s called the windbelt, invented by Shawn Frayne. I seriously hope that Shawn makes a mint on this idea. But he seems to be taking the even more laudable path of Dr. Jonas Salk, who never exploited his polio vaccine for personal gain. A windbelt is essentially an aeolian harp string covered in the proper energy producing magnetic compounds which, when buffeted by the wind, wavers near conducting elements on the sides of the windbelt. Voila! It produces 10- to 30- times more energy than a turbine. Plus, it’s extremely cheap and easy to make and maintain while requiring only slight winds, rather than the gusty 10+ mph required by turbines.
With proper configuration, you can build them into windfarms. But you could also use this technology for really interesting applications. For example, smart sensors in the HVAC ducts of many of today’s “green buildings” require you to change the batteries every couple of years. Factoring the cost of the batteries and the cost of the maintenance staff, it’s a couple thousand bucks over the life of the sensor. Now, with a tiny windbelt attached to the sensor, you could create recharging sensors that don’t need any light at all, using just a breath of wind from standard HVAC ventilation systems.
There was a time when health information was merely a collection of facts about you. You visited a doctor on the 17th because of a sore throat. You had your appendix removed when you were a grade-schooler.
Now, in the 21st century, information is increasingly used to drive business value. In a sense, information is becoming an asset. And as many of us have seen with the antics on Wall Street, any asset can be abused for personal and possibly unethical gain. Legislative bodies around the globe have expended a lot of energy on regulating the use and access of health data, such as the well-known HIPAA legislation (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) here in the United States. But despite the existence of this law, we’re still facing some huge hurdles.
First, HIPAA doesn’t handle all problems related to health data. For example, new regulations need to be devised to fully protect individuals from exploitation of information stored their DNA sequences. Just a generation ago, no one could possibly know if you held a genetic predisposition to, just as an example, renal failure. Now, simple and quick tests exist to identify key genetic markers for such a predisposition. Could this data be used to deny or charge exorbitant rates for medical coverage? Life insurance? A job?
Second, health care (at least in the USA) is decidedly low-tech, despite much pushing and prodding from our government. Overall, the health care industry (and doctors in particular) has been reluctant to cultivate the power of the Internet to deliver information to anyone, anywhere. My wife was employed at one of the best hospitals in the southeast United States (Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital), where they needed large, redundant administrative staff to transcribe every thing about a patient’s visit into their medical systems. Doctors refused to do it themselves (though younger doctors were noticeably less reluctant to use computers) and many important computerized medical devices (think of MRIs, CAT scanners, electrocardiograms, etc.) offered no integration at all. Huge amounts of floor space are devoted to maintaining so much paper medical information that it could literally be measured in tons better than pages.
Whereas much of the recovery from recessions during the early years of both the Clinton and Bush II administrations were attributed to huge improvements in information technology, none of that has matured yet for the health care industry. In fact, almost every business ecosystem in the United States has been revolutionized by information technology except health care! The system is, in effect, still a sick care system rather than a real health care system. And efforts to computerize it are much the same as data processing activities of the 1960′s – taking easy, repeatable actions and having a machine do them at high speed. But the real promise of IT has yet to be realized in health care. Imagine a time when a data mining application could show the slow and steady development of a behaviorally-influenced disease, like Type 2 Diabetes or coronary disease or IBS, and provide plenty of early warning signs plus knowledge and support and tracking for convalescence and recovery. As SQL Server professionals, we know that good data mining can reveal that sort of issue and one thousand more. Conversely, consider the situation where an individual sees three different doctors for the same problem. How do you know that you’re getting personalized and relevant information instead of the latest prescription drug brought in by the pharmaceutical representative? I can tell you in my own experience with heart problems (first documented here) that I’d seen over a dozen doctors within five years time, and yet only the very latest doctor of the whole bunch pointed out the correlation between GERD, sleep apnea, and heart problems.
Add to this the fact that even those medical institutions that are using medical IT systems are firmly stuck in the 20th century. I’ve seen a lot of medical IT systems and even the very best of them are still clunky, lame client-server applications that are very ineffective at modeling the business. Many of them attempt to implement anachronistic and overweening standards like HL7, which is essentially analogous to commuting to your job in an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer.
I’ve decided to get ahead of this curve and I’m encouraging you to do the same. Maybe it’s just my time as a community organizer for PASS, but my first inclination is to look for like-minded individuals who support the same goals and aspirations I do. I suggest that you start with the Health Data Rights organization at http://www.healthdatarights.org/ – join the movement to own and control your own health data and make it work for your betterment. Other places to begin your activism include http://www.google.com/health/ and Tim O’Reilly’s wonderful blog about Gov2.0 at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/08/what-does-government-20-mean-to-you.html.
