Pioneering Spirit

One thing I've been thinking a lot about the last 42 hours is the street sweeping signs. That's sort of silly since I've been helping family members evacuate and there's a generational climate crisis happening. A decade ago, I remember there was a thought that those would be digitized and protocolized as part of Coord Curb's API, a Google backed next generation approach to "smart" cities. That didn't really take off though it's a big little thing. It's yet another thing to worry about moving ...

UPDATE: In the Pacific Palisades, fire hydrants ran dry around 3 AM last night. "The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) confirmed they have received water shortage reports but could not confirm how many hydrants are effected." One of the saddest parts of working on public technology projects is seeing 1) incredible world class talent want to tackle important public problems like the climate crisis and 2) the struggle at best for the public sector to deploy that talent. In the ear...

Below are a pair of excellent excerpts from recently released reports. Both are well worth reading in full. "The folly of skimping on internal core competence is well established in many domains. One paper by Zachary Liscow of Yale finds a remarkable correlation between the staffing levels of state departments of transportation and the per-mile construction cost of highways: increasing employment by one person per thousand in a population reduces costs by 26 percent.28 When there is insuffici...

Tom Kalil, a pivotal science policy appointee in the Clinton and Obama administrations, recently went on the Hear This Idea podcast, a node in the Effective Altruist network.

O1.5 decades ago, Code for America launched it's flagship fellowship. Featuring a who's who cast of tech industry luminaries like the US Federal CTO, Twitter Co-Founder and Mark Zuckerberg, the short video harkens back to an earlier, more idealistic age. (Mark then was a golden boy of American innovation, rather than the battle scarred CEO of a company often likened to the tobacco companies.) It also brings a spirit that's well worth remembering. The series of tech icons ask "what if" best in...

~1.5 decades ago data science became a hot term. The title was originally created because Facebook wanted a talented scientist to work for them but the prospect didn’t want to have a lowly “analyst” title. Thus the term data scientist was born. A few O’Reilly articles and copycat companies and the title quickly grew in popularity.The title rode a big wave. Tech companies were creating more and more data from all the actions people took online, creating a big need to make sense of all that inf...

In 2014, the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) released the an assessment of innovation opportunities in the water sector, including this clarion call to: Develop and implement an integrated water information management system for water supplies, uses, and quality including precipitation, runoff, and storage; for surface water, groundwater, and water use… Near-Term Actions: The Governor and key agencies should immediately take the lead to form a consortium of parties, includ...

A decade ago, in a city far, far away, my co-founder insisted that I watch A Ted Talk. Not just any pop idea monger mind you, but a bonafied Chief Belief Officer, Devdutt Pattanaik, sharing about the mythological differences between East and West. Devdutt's story begins with a race between two brothers three times around the world. One went around the globe, the other waited until the first brother had completed two very long laps and then calmly walked around their parents. That brother then...