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David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

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Everything on the Internet is true

by davidcrow

I want to believe
Image by megaul

Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of The X-Files. Or maybe this is my search for the damn Smoking Man. Enough retro television.

The Communitech team published a blog post linking to a speech from Anne Golden, the President and CEO of the Conference Board of Canada. The speech, titled Canada’s Innovation Conundrum, claims that “two-thirds of Canada’s high-tech start-ups” are in Kichener/Waterloo-Cambridge-Guelph.

“But the fact is that the so-called “technology research triangle” of Kitchener/Waterloo-Cambridge-Guelph, home of the Blackberry inventor, Research-in-Motion, accounts for about two-thirds of Canada’s high-tech start-ups. 1 The Blackberry is the exception, not the rule. We need ten more Blackberry’s across the country.”

They’ve kindly added a link to the original source of this “reference” material. It’s an article written by Toronto Star columnist David Olive that provides no reference and link to any of the statistics provided.

“The so-called “technology research triangle” of Kitchener/Waterloo-Cambridge-Guelph, home of BlackBerry inventor Research in Motion Ltd., accounts for about two-thirds of Canada’s high-tech start-ups. Sarnia is Ontario’s leading centre for chemical production and petroleum refining. Hamilton and Sault Ste. Marie have benefited from high world prices for steel; and Sudbury is riding a global boom in nickel prices. “

Not a shred of actual data. Just opinion and made up, unsubstantiated numbers. But I guess since it’s published in newspaper it must be true.

If it is on the Internet it must be true
If it is on the Internet it must be true from Uncyclopedia

In grade 7 & 8 at Orchard Park Public School, Howard Isaacs taught media awareness and critical thinking to his students. Just because it’s in the media doesn’t make it true. I’m sure that it was part of a campaign to teach media awareness in the 1980s as described in Specific Approaches to Media Education however since this is based on a report, “Specific Approaches to Media Literacy,” Barry Duncan et al. Media Literacy Resource Guide, Ontario Ministry of Education, published in 1989 after I was in Howard Isaacs classroom, it’s not the original source.

For me it calls in to question the validity of the research that an organization like the Conference Board of Canada conducts and the policy that it influences. The Conference Board of Canada:

“builds leadership capacity for a better Canada by creating and sharing insights on economic trends, public policy and organizational performance.”

But how can you conduct contract research or influence policy using made up numbers. There should be great concern for any politician or agency or company hiring the Conference Board of Canada to conduct research. This is shameful use of unsubstantiated statistics and data. It calls into question the legitimacy of any of their research or economic analyses.

Posted on August 10, 2010 Filed Under: Articles, Canada, Ontario, Waterloo

Communication and cooperation

by davidcrow

Matt Ridley gives a great TED talk about the power of exchange and specialization.

“What’s relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas and how well they are cooperating and not how clever the individuals are…it’s the interchange of ideas that are causing technological progress.” – Matt Ridley

It’s a discussion about the power of the crowd to mix and mash and build ideas that enable the rapid pace of technological change and increase in the standard of living. It brings me back to a quote I heard at PARC a long time ago:

“Much of what we think of as innovation, is really the creative tension between differing viewpoints”

The PARC team has started to record and publish the PARC Forum events which include some great talks:

  • The future of the social web: And how to stop it by Chris Messina
  • A post-rational take on people and computing by John Canny
  • Ethnography as a cultural practice by Steve Portigal
  • Open for business: Building successful commerce around open source by Mårten Mickos
  • Feral Technologies: An ethnographic account of the future by Genevieve Bell
  • Expecting the unexpected: technology in emerging markets by Brooke Partridge

Many of the talks above are from the Ethnography in Industry series at PARC. But this is about looking outside of your comfort zone for insight and research to inform product design and strategies.

Posted on July 21, 2010 Filed Under: Articles, Innovation Tagged With: ethnography, ideas, Innovation, parc

Re-imagining Health

by davidcrow

I was watching Jay Parkinson at The Feast earlier this morning talking about Re-imagining Health. Jay formalized his social health care practice tools into Hello Health which allows patients and doctors to engage using new tools to improve health care. He also runs an innovation consultancy, The Future Well, focused on re-imagining health, healthy products and brands.


Jay Parkinson: Re-imagining Healthcare from alldaybuffet on Vimeo.

I went to school thinking I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to make people’s lives better. I wanted to focus on sports medicine and orthopedics. Started down this path, registering in the Kinesiology program at the University of Waterloo and hoping to write the MCAT and get accepted to a medical program. At the end of the first year, after volunteering I realized that there were a lot of sick people and that health care wasn’t where I wanted to be. But I had the opportunity to work on a NeXT slab where I used the Web for the first time. (It was also the first time I was subjected to writing code using Objective-C and building experiences using Interface Builder). I decided that technology and design was where I wanted to focus. It’s only recently that my experiences have brought me back to thinking about health care and technology.

“Health, not healthcare!” – Ester Dyson

The consumerization of health and health care is an interesting. The Internet has started to democratize access to information. At about the 19:05 marker in Jay Parkinson’s presentation he talks about Zach Klein‘s experience of $4000 and 20 hours of lost work to get a diagnosis. And when typing in the symptoms into a search engine the first hit was the diagnosis provided by the second physician visited. Just to be clear, I don’t think that Jay Parkinson is arguing to remove medical providers or to only perform self diagnosis, he’s arguing that these new social tools can help connect, enable and inform people and their physicians. He’s built these social tools into HelloHealth, it’s a shared plan – where doctors and patients collaborate. Better informed patients hopefully mean more compliant patients.

And I’ve started to look for ways to better understand my own choices and behaviours to help me make sustainable choices. Why? In 2006 I had a heart attack at DemoCampToronto6 (aka BarCampER). And generally I’m an informed patient, I’m relatively compliant but I want better tools to understand my health. Gartner has called the consumerization of IT the most important trend of the decade 2005-2015. And we can see the impact of these changes on mobile phones and software distribution with the rise of the iPhone and the application store. People are adopting social technologies like Facebook and Patients Like Me. New sensors allow access to data to improve health.

This has me thinking more about the tools and connections used at Kristin’s office to enable engagement and connectivity with patients. I’m left thinking about the regulatory implications for health delivery and how to improve patients lives. And the risks to professional practice, but I think there is significant opportunity beyond electronic medical records and we need to start exploring them.

Related Articles

  • Platforms and Health
  • Personal Healthcare and Data

Posted on July 16, 2010 Filed Under: Articles, Healthcare Tagged With: ehealth, Healthcare, Innovation, social

Factory of dreams

by davidcrow

I seem to have a strange fascination with local economic development. I’m not an economist. I’m not a politican. I just want the community that I live in to be vibrant, safe and offer opportunity.

I have been following Fortune’s coverage of activities in Detroit. David Whitford wrote a piece about the Russell Industrial Center in Detroit. It reminds of the great work being done in Toronto at 401 Richmond and 215 Spadina by the Urban Space Property Group. And 720 Bathurst now that the Centre for Social Innovation has purchased a building. While the challenges in Toronto were never as large as New York City in the 1970s or Detroit now, I was just shocked listening about the state of a suburb in Pittsburgh.

“We are not a poor town, we are experimental because we’re not a town that’s down on it’s luck” – John Fetterma

John Fetterman, talked about his challenges as the Mayor of Braddock, PA at PopTech 2009. I went to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University and I remember some of the communities. I was fortunate to live in Squirrel Hill, but I remember the first night I spent in Pittsburgh in 1996. But I am more shocked by the economic conditions encountered in Braddock including .

I was just shocked at some of the data:

  • 90% of the population has moved away
  • 90% of the buildings in the community have been lost
  • Median price of a home: US$5,250
  • Median household income: US$17,518

I’m curious about the ongoing impact of the closure of UPMC Braddock post January 31, 2010. This is a story to follow.

Posted on July 15, 2010 Filed Under: Articles, Community, Culture Tagged With: braddock, renewal

The fortunate at the bottom

by davidcrow

Students from , Colombia. Photo: © Charlotte Kesl / World Bank
Students from , Colombia. Photo: © Charlotte Kesl / World Bank

I finished reading The New Global Opportunity  and I was introduced to some new concepts and texts that helped explain much of the focus on Africa and entrepreneurship. The concept of “bottom of the pyramid” and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad. It helped frame why there is so much focus on entrepreneurship in third world nations. In particular it helped frame micro-loan programs, product marketing, and other tools for me.

What struck me was the verbal description of the size of the world economy:

“Think of the world economy, very roughly, as 32 Californias. (California today is about $1.8 trillion strong.) The U.S. accounts for eight of them; the European Union plus Switzerland and Norway, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand make up another 10½. Prosperous Asia — that’s Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore — gives you another 3½ Golden States. That already gets us to 22, meaning the rest of the world —  the BRICs, the whole Islamic world, including its oil-rich states, most of Southeast Asia, all of Latin America, and Africa — is the equivalent of 10 Californias, with China accounting for about a third of that output.

Now let’s divide the world another way: The population in the first group of wealthy countries is about 1.1 billion, or 16% of the world’s total. The rest of the world is home to 84% of the planet.”

The comparison of relative size of different different aggregations of economic outputs (aka gross domestic product) struck me.

GDP by Region from in Californias (~$1.8 trillion)

The striking figure is the population statistic. Which is that 16% of the world’s population in the US, EU + Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Prosperous Asia account for 68.75% of the economic output. There is a huge potential for the remaining 84% of the population in BRIC and the rest of the world. My basic assumption that if you could match the economic output of prosperous nations there is a potential 115.5 Californias. There is a huge growth opportunity in growing the economic output of the rest of the world to match developed nations. In the article, Michael Elliot does a great job highlight the impact of the opportunity looking at the growth rate of China in 2009.

“Last year there were 37 Chinese companies on the Fortune Global 500, and the number is only going to increase. From oil giants such as CNOOC and Sinopec, to network equipment manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE, to telephone operators like China Mobile, Chinese firms have become household names in the corporate community. China has become a true motor of the global economy — according to official figures, it grew 8.7% in 2009 and its role as both a market and a supplier of goods and services to the rest of the world is now established.”

I need to spend more time learning about the cultures beyond Canada, the US and Western Europe.

The most revealing insight for me was the impact that education for women has on the economies of nations. As a father of two daughters, this hits close to home. I want/need to do things that provide the best educational opportunities for my daughters. Four years ago Sutha and Leila asked me the things I hope to happen in my lifetime. I didn’t have daughters, I wasn’t concerned about economic growth, it was just something I hoped could/would change.

“Whenever I’m asked what a country can do to compete with China,” he notes, “I say, ‘The first thing is, Educate your women.'” Give Mao some credit. Even in the darkest days of unreformed communism, China educated its women, with the consequence that it now has an adult female literacy rate of 90%. India’s is just 54.5%.

But if girls and women are really to play their full role in leading nations out of poverty, Maria Eitel, president of the Nike Foundation, argues, education alone is not enough. The real multiplier effect comes from linking education to some sort of economic opportunity. And that has to start early, when girls are in their teens, before they are forced by social and family pressures to marry and have children. If adolescent girls can be helped along the road to economic independence — given a microloan to buy a cow or a beehive, for example — then the economic equation for the family changes. A father realizes that it makes more sense for his daughter to stay in school and earn some money on the side, rather than being forced into early marriage. Policy focused on girls, says Eitel, “is uniquely capable of breaking the intergenerational cycles of poverty.”

What I’m learning is that I need to spend some more time to better understand what folks like Oxfam are doing and how I can help. However, I don’t want to be an NGO. I don’t want to be a not-for-profit. And I wonder if there are technologies that can help enable the safety, security and education.

Posted on July 14, 2010 Filed Under: Articles, Innovation

Integrity, hunger strikes and plagiarism

by davidcrow

Some rights reserved by The Rocketeer http://www.flickr.com/photos/kt/309783238/in/photostream/
Some rights reserved by The Rocketeer

I asked Mark McQueen to comment on the OMERS/ABP newly announced €200 million venture fund (with €100 million being spent in Canada) knowing full well that he was currently unable to comment. Mark responded with a little bit of the history of the OMERS efforts to create a venture fund.

“This is not the first anyone’s heard of OMERS getting into the direct early stage VC business. CEO Michael Nobrega spoke about it last Spring at the CVCA conference, OMERS Worldwide chief Jacques Demers mentioned in during a panel last September in Boston, and OMERS PE boss Paul Renaud was equally detailed during a CVCA panel in May in Ottawa. I feel as though I have a good sense of what they are planning, and would be happy to share. E100 million over 15 years for Canadian startups is welcome and needed capital, even if it represents one tenth of the money that the Government of Ontario wiped away (for Ontario-based firms) when they announced the end of the LSIF program five years ago.”

It’s too bad that Mark is currently on Day 10 of a hunger strike. His writing, humor and insights on the financial industry and it’s impact on Canadians is unsurpassed. The hunger strike stems from Globe & Mail not properly referencing the originating sources of their published news stories:

“Unfortunately for we providers of the what must have been the original source material, none appear to receive a single acknowledgement as to the origin of the analysis, research, storyline, etc., etc., that made up the key underpinnings of the Globe’s lift masquerading as a bona fide “news” article….we’ve now reached the 10th incident by last count (see prior posts “Google acquires BumpTop part 3” May 3-2010 and “DTM copycats at it again part 8” June 20-08). I’ve broached the topic with the editing team in writing on more than one occassion, but no response has ever come.”

Mark documents at least 10 incidents where mainstream media has plagiarized stories from online resources. And has started a hunger strike to protest the lack of integrity and referencing sources present in mainstream media. It seems that many journalists are able and willing to reference their sources, I’m looking at good guys like ex-Globe & Mailer Mathew Ingram, who referenced Mark’s Bumptop piece in his post on GigaOm.

I’m supporting Mark’s efforts by uninstalling the Globe & Mail application from my iPad and refusing to share any link love.

I’m also accepting food donations and lunch invitations on behalf of Mark. Ping me if you have a hankering for lunch at Cava, George, Spendido or anywhere else that you’re buying 😉

Posted on June 25, 2010 Filed Under: Articles, Canada, Copyright, Geek Life

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