Tag Archives: network

Technica

The Rise of the Industrial Internet

As the internet that connects humans reaches a stable saturation point the industrial internet — the network that connects things — is increasing its growth and reach.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

When Sharoda Paul finished a postdoctoral fellowship last year at the Palo Alto Research Center, she did what most of her peers do — considered a job at a big Silicon Valley company, in her case, Google. But instead, Ms. Paul, a 31-year-old expert in social computing, went to work for General Electric.

Ms. Paul is one of more than 250 engineers recruited in the last year and a half to G.E.’s new software center here, in the East Bay of San Francisco. The company plans to increase that work force of computer scientists and software developers to 400, and to invest $1 billion in the center by 2015. The buildup is part of G.E’s big bet on what it calls the “industrial Internet,” bringing digital intelligence to the physical world of industry as never before.

The concept of Internet-connected machines that collect data and communicate, often called the “Internet of Things,” has been around for years. Information technology companies, too, are pursuing this emerging field. I.B.M. has its “Smarter Planet” projects, while Cisco champions the “Internet of Everything.”

But G.E.’s effort, analysts say, shows that Internet-era technology is ready to sweep through the industrial economy much as the consumer Internet has transformed media, communications and advertising over the last decade.

In recent months, Ms. Paul has donned a hard hat and safety boots to study power plants. She has ridden on a rail locomotive and toured hospital wards. “Here, you get to work with things that touch people in so many ways,” she said. “That was a big draw.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest industrial company, a producer of aircraft engines, power plant turbines, rail locomotives and medical imaging equipment. It makes the heavy-duty machinery that transports people, heats homes and powers factories, and lets doctors diagnose life-threatening diseases.

G.E. resides in a different world from the consumer Internet. But the major technologies that animate Google and Facebook are also vital ingredients in the industrial Internet — tools from artificial intelligence, like machine-learning software, and vast streams of new data. In industry, the data flood comes mainly from smaller, more powerful and cheaper sensors on the equipment.

Smarter machines, for example, can alert their human handlers when they will need maintenance, before a breakdown. It is the equivalent of preventive and personalized care for equipment, with less downtime and more output.

“These technologies are really there now, in a way that is practical and economic,” said Mark M. Little, G.E.’s senior vice president for global research.

G.E.’s embrace of the industrial Internet is a long-term strategy. But if its optimism proves justified, the impact could be felt across the economy.

The outlook for technology-led economic growth is a subject of considerable debate. In a recent research paper, Robert J. Gordon, a prominent economist at Northwestern University, argues that the gains from computing and the Internet have petered out in the last eight years.

Since 2000, Mr. Gordon asserts, invention has focused mainly on consumer and communications technologies, including smartphones and tablet computers. Such devices, he writes, are “smaller, smarter and more capable, but do not fundamentally change labor productivity or the standard of living” in the way that electric lighting or the automobile did.

But others say such pessimism misses the next wave of technology. “The reason I think Bob Gordon is wrong is precisely because of the kind of thing G.E. is doing,” said Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at M.I.T.’s Center for Digital Business.

Today, G.E. is putting sensors on everything, be it a gas turbine or a hospital bed. The mission of the engineers in San Ramon is to design the software for gathering data, and the clever algorithms for sifting through it for cost savings and productivity gains. Across the industries it covers, G.E. estimates such efficiency opportunities at as much as $150 billion.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Internet of Things. Courtesy of Intel.[end-div]

Technica

The Internet of Things

The term “Internet of Things” was first coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton. It refers to the notion whereby physical objects of all kinds are equipped with small identifying devices and connected to a network. In essence: everything connected to anytime, anywhere by anyone. One of the potential benefits is that this would allow objects to be tracked, inventoried and status continuously monitored.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

THE Internet likes you, really likes you. It offers you so much, just a mouse click or finger tap away. Go Christmas shopping, find restaurants, locate partying friends, tell the world what you’re up to. Some of the finest minds in computer science, working at start-ups and big companies, are obsessed with tracking your online habits to offer targeted ads and coupons, just for you.

But now — nothing personal, mind you — the Internet is growing up and lifting its gaze to the wider world. To be sure, the economy of Internet self-gratification is thriving. Web start-ups for the consumer market still sprout at a torrid pace. And young corporate stars seeking to cash in for billions by selling shares to the public are consumer services — the online game company Zynga last week, and the social network giant Facebook, whose stock offering is scheduled for next year.

As this is happening, though, the protean Internet technologies of computing and communications are rapidly spreading beyond the lucrative consumer bailiwick. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies.

The concept has been around for years, sometimes called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Yet it takes time for the economics and engineering to catch up with the predictions. And that moment is upon us.

“We’re going to put the digital ‘smarts’ into everything,” said Edward D. Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. These abundant smart devices, Dr. Lazowska added, will “interact intelligently with people and with the physical world.”

The role of sensors — once costly and clunky, now inexpensive and tiny — was described this month in an essay in The New York Times by Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology; he said the ultimate goal was “the sensor-aware planetary computer.”

That may sound like blue-sky futurism, but evidence shows that the vision is beginning to be realized on the ground, in recent investments, products and services, coming from large industrial and technology corporations and some ambitious start-ups.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Internet of Things. Courtesy of Cisco.[end-div]

Environs

The Corporate One Percent of the One Percent

With the Occupy Wall Street movement and related protests continuing to gather steam much recent media and public attention has focused on 1 percent versus the remaining 99 percent of the population. By most accepted estimates, 1 percent of households control around 40 percent of the global wealth, and there is a vast discrepancy between the top and bottom of the economic spectrum. While these statistics are telling, a related analysis of corporate wealth, highlighted in the New Scientist, shows a much tighter concentration among a very select group of transnational corporations (TNC).

[div class=attrib]New Scientist:[end-div]

An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world’s economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of New Scientist / PLoS One. The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue.[end-div]

Idea Soup

The meaning of network culture

[div class=attrib]From Eurozine:[end-div]

Whereas in postmodernism, being was left in a free-floating fabric of emotional intensities, in contemporary culture the existence of the self is affirmed through the network. Kazys Varnelis discusses what this means for the democratic public sphere.

Not all at once but rather slowly, in fits and starts, a new societal condition is emerging: network culture. As digital computing matures and meshes with increasingly mobile networking technology, society is also changing, undergoing a cultural shift. Just as modernism and postmodernism served as crucial heuristic devices in their day, studying network culture as a historical phenomenon allows us to better understand broader sociocultural trends and structures, to give duration and temporality to our own, ahistorical time.

If more subtle than the much-talked about economic collapse of fall 2008, this shift in society is real and far more radical, underscoring even the logic of that collapse. During the space of a decade, the network has become the dominant cultural logic. Our economy, public sphere, culture, even our subjectivity are mutating rapidly and show little evidence of slowing down the pace of their evolution. The global economic crisis only demonstrated our faith in the network and its dangers. Over the last two decades, markets and regulators had increasingly placed their faith in the efficient market hypothesis, which posited that investors were fundamentally rational and, fed information by highly efficient data networks, would always make the right decision. The failure came when key parts of the network – the investors, regulators, and the finance industry – failed to think through the consequences of their actions and placed their trust in each other.

The collapse of the markets seems to have been sudden, but it was actually a long-term process, beginning with bad decisions made longer before the collapse. Most of the changes in network culture are subtle and only appear radical in retrospect. Take our relationship with the press. One morning you noted with interest that your daily newspaper had established a website. Another day you decided to stop buying the paper and just read it online. Then you started reading it on a mobile Internet platform, or began listening to a podcast of your favourite column while riding a train. Perhaps you dispensed with official news entirely, preferring a collection of blogs and amateur content. Eventually the paper may well be distributed only on the net, directly incorporating user comments and feedback. Or take the way cell phones have changed our lives. When you first bought a mobile phone, were you aware of how profoundly it would alter your life? Soon, however, you found yourself abandoning the tedium of scheduling dinner plans with friends in advance, instead coordinating with them en route to a particular neighbourhood. Or if your friends or family moved away to university or a new career, you found that through a social networking site like Facebook and through the every-present telematic links of the mobile phone, you did not lose touch with them.

If it is difficult to realize the radical impact of the contemporary, this is in part due to the hype about the near-future impact of computing on society in the 1990s. The failure of the near-future to be realized immediately, due to the limits of the technology of the day, made us jaded. The dot.com crash only reinforced that sense. But slowly, technology advanced and society changed, finding new uses for it, in turn spurring more change. Network culture crept up on us. Its impact on us today is radical and undeniable.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]