Techs and the City

THIS spring New York City is rolling out its much-ballyhooed bike-sharing program, which relies on a sophisticated set of smartphone apps and other digital tools to manage it. The city isn’t alone: across the country, municipalities are buying ever more complicated technological “solutions” for urban life.

But higher tech is not always essential tech. Cities could instead be making savvier investments in cheaper technology that may work better to stoke civic involvement than the more complicated, expensive products being peddled by information-technology developers.

Of course, you’d never hear such an idea from the likes of I.B.M., which has plastered airports with ads about how its consultants help municipalities cut costs with its “Smarter Cities” analytics platform, or Cisco, which has teamed with Toyota and other companies to sponsor annual conferences about how to automate cars and gather information on urban activity through streetlight-mounted sensors. For these companies, the more complicated the technology, the more cities can save — aside, of course, from the eye-popping price tags of the technology itself.

To be sure, big tech can zap some city weaknesses. According to I.B.M., its predictive-analysis technology, which examines historical data to estimate the next crime hot spots, has helped Memphis lower its violent crime rate by 30 percent.

But many problems require a decidedly different approach. Take the seven-acre site in Lower Manhattan called the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, where 1,000 mixed-income apartments are set to rise. A working-class neighborhood that fell to bulldozers in 1969, it stayed bare as co-ops nearby filled with affluent families, including my own.

In 2010, with the city ready to invite developers to bid for the site, long-simmering tensions between nearby public-housing tenants and wealthier dwellers like me turned suddenly — well, civil.

What changed? Was it some multimillion-dollar “open democracy” platform from Cisco, or a Big Data program to suss out the community’s real priorities? Nope. According to Dominic Pisciotta Berg, then the chairman of the local community board, it was plain old e-mail, and the dialogue it facilitated. “We simply set up an e-mail box dedicated to receiving e-mail comments” on the renewal project, and organizers would then “pull them together by comment type and then consolidate them for display during the meetings,” he said. “So those who couldn’t be there had their voices considered and those who were there could see them up on a screen and adopted, modified or rejected.”

Through e-mail conversations, neighbors articulated priorities — permanently affordable homes, a movie theater, protections for small merchants — that even a supercomputer wouldn’t necessarily have identified in the data.

The point is not that software is useless. But like anything else in a city, it’s only as useful as its ability to facilitate the messy clash of real human beings and their myriad interests and opinions. And often, it’s the simpler software, the technology that merely puts people in contact and steps out of the way, that works best.

Even San Francisco, one of the most technophilic towns in America, understands the limits of “smart city” technology. It has a chief information officer, Jay Nath, and sponsors “hackathons” to develop software to, say, bring more fresh produce to the underserved Central Market area. But Mr. Nath talks proudly of how San Franciscans helped retool taxi-dispatch systems by meeting in person. “We decided to do an ‘unhackathon,’ ” he told me. “And we had about 100 people from our community” at the meeting.

“Technology doesn’t walk into a room and take over everything,” San Francisco’s mayor, Edwin M. Lee, said last year. “It has to be combined with a spirit that people from all skill sets can solve problems that government over the years has kind of done in silos.”

Indeed, some high-tech solutions being offered to cities run roughshod over urban values. Cisco is marketing cafe-like spaces in residential neighborhoods where creative workers can telecommute to their offices, using powerful communications technologies unavailable to the average home. Take that logic to its limit, and only low-wage workers whose employers can’t afford the jazzed-up satellite sites will actually show up, physically, for work.

That’s because the answers that make cities run more smoothly only inadvertently end up being the ones that make cities run more equitably. Deep data can learn and display policy cues that used to flow from guesswork. What it can do less reliably is reflect democratic action.

For that, you need more people discussing issues with more equal information and franchise. And that can most easily come from decidedly low-tech, but widely accessible, technologies like Facebook pages and e-mail chains. After all, cities don’t have to buy “smart” software to get smarter.

Alec Appelbaum, who teaches at Pratt Institute, writes frequently on urban planning and design.

By 0910960015

Source http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-limits-of-big-data-in-the-big-city.html?ref=computersandtheinternet&_r=0

Reasons Customers Might Resist Windows 8

Software giant Microsoft is launching the Windows 8 version of its operating system this week, and suffice it to say that it's radically different from Windows 7. The familiar Start button and menu are gone, for example, replaced by a series of large, colorful tiles. And there's a new feature called the "Charm Bar." Give Microsoft credit for innovation. But will corporate customers rush to embrace the change, or will they resist it at first? Signs point to resistance, according to Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and a leader in the field of change management. "Even in an era where young techies are looking to get the hottest and latest, people are resistant to change," she says. Microsoft's launch of the new operating system accompanies its launch of a new tablet PC, the Surface RT, which will compete against Apple iPad. And industry observers have noted similarities between Apple's tightly-controlled marketing tactics and Microsoft's marketing campaign for the upcoming OS—Microsoft is even using indie rock music in its Windows 8 advertisements. But what works for Apple might not work for Microsoft. Alas, when it comes to embracing the latest technology, consumer hardware and corporate software are as different as apples and orang… well, as different as Apples and corporate software. "Software is the method by which people do their work, and if you're requiring a radical change in how they do their work, it's a lot to ask," Kanter says. This week, Kanter sat down with HBS Working Knowledge to discuss how these same reasons might hinder corporate adoption of Windows 8. In windows 8 we can see,  Loss of Control—Unsolicited change naturally meddles with autonomy, and the world's IT directors and other department heads may not appreciate having a completely different operating system thrust upon them from on high. "People don't like it when they're forced to change their plans, rather than determine the changes they want to make," Kanter says. Everything seems different—Drastic change is more uncomfortable than  journey into the unknown. She cites the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, who reports, "even its most devoted users won't recognize the venerable computer operating system in this new incarnation."

"Of course all change brings difference, but how many differences can we handle at once?" Kanter asks. "In Windows 8 there's the tile interface, there's no more start button, there's this 'Charm Bar'… These tools may work well, but human psychology says that if it's too different and too jarring, you turn away from it. You don't want to have to think about the tool. You want to think about the job you need to get done."  Sometimes the threat is real—In her blog post, Kanter explains that many people fear change because it can be truly dangerous, posing a threat not only to old ideas but jobs as well. In the case of the Windows 8 launch, there's a threat to Microsoft's competitors-including Apple, Google Inc., and Amazon.com—who could lose market share if the operating system and the new tablet prove successful. "Competitors certainly resist the change," Kanter says. "They are going to do everything they can to try to capitalize on any wary customer and fan the flames of user resistance." And the dramatic

overhaul of the operating system is also a risk for Microsoft, which needs Windows 8 to succeed in order to maintain its own market share, especially among consumers. "Microsoft has produced a bold innovation in Windows 8, and the company deserves applause," Kanter says. "But its marketplace success will depend on whether users are ready for such a giant leap. Does this big change activate too many classic sources of resistance? That is the question."

BY : PITALOKA (125150200111091)

The Changing Face of Information Technology

To say that change is coming to the enterprise is like saying the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.But even while change has been a constant factor in data infrastructure since the first mainframe was deployed, it seems that both the pace and the scope of changes taking place today are knocking on the very pillars of IT, threatening to remake the entire industry into something completely unrecognizable in a few short years. 

Indeed, the very notion of what is and is not the enterprise seems very much in the air as virtualization and the cloud spread responsibility for data infrastructure across multiple independent organizations that could conceivably reside on opposite sides of the globe. At the same time, new technologies like SSDs and high-speed, unified networking are starting to tear down much of what is considered to be "the data center" to the point that the very role of IT as an enterprise asset is starting to come into question.

The drivers behind all of this are the increasingly sophisticated demands of the user. Where workers were once content to engage in data environments for simple communications and number crunching, the norm these days is a highly collaborative, always-on experience in which the entire relationship between individual and work environment is defined by the level of access to IT resources. And that means if you don't have the means to accommodate user needs, they will simply go out on their own and get them.

 "Cloud computing and social networking are two key drivers of change in the current IT landscape," said Michael Keen, vice president of presales at management and automation system developer ASG Software. "These drivers are forcing the hands of many IT executives to come up with a strategy, and a way to execute against that strategy, to drive agility and flexibility in their infrastructure so they can provide a quick and efficient way for IT to adapt to these changes. Traditional enterprise IT models have always emphasized an opposite view - that change is not the norm, but the exception. However, in today's current IT landscape, rapid change is the norm and IT must evolve their enterprise models, people, processes and technology to acknowledge this shift." The challenge, however, is to adapt to these changing environments quickly enough to keep pace with user expectations, but not too quickly so that the new systems and architectures are left obsolete before their full value can be realized.

"Being able to adapt to change is critical to any organization's success, so it is imperative that (IT) develop a standards-based framework that leverages best-of-breed technologies and components to create a new level of integration between business processes and IT," Keen said. "In addition, IT needs to build their new organization with four fundamental ideals in mind; simplification, standardization, modularity and integration. By applying these ideals they can lay the groundwork for an infrastructure that will meet the demands of their customers, business partners, external customers, etc."

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AMD Launches Opteron Server Chips To Take On Intel's Atom

AMD is hoping "X" will market the spot for its server processors.
The chip maker has introduced the Opteron X-Series, a new family of low-power server processors designed for scale-out server architectures. The Opteron X-Series, codenamed "Kyoto," features two new processors, the X1150 and the X2150, which AMD claims beat Intel's Atom processor on various performance benchmarks and technical specifications.
"This is the highest density, most power efficient small-core x86 chip ever built," said Andrew Feldman, Vice President and General Manager, Server Business Unit, AMD.

The Opteron X2150 consumes as little as 11 watts and features a 1.9GHz clock speed. The X2150 is AMD's first server accelerated processing unit (APU) system-on-a-chip that integrates both CPU and GPU engines with a high-speed bus on a single die; the chip comes with AMD's Radeon HD 8000 graphics technology, which is designed for multimedia workloads.
The Opteron X1150, meanwhile, consumes 9 watts at idle with a 2GHz clock speed and is a CPU-only version optimized for general scale-out workloads. Both processors feature four of AMD's "Jaguar" 64-bit x86 cores.
Feldman said the X-Series processors were designed with the shift to mobile computing in mind. With the growth of mobile devices today, data centers require more space, less power and a high number of cores in a dense form factor, he said.
"All of the work that people are doing on their mobile devices is not being powered by a $9 CPU," Feldman said. "All of that computing work is being done somewhere else in the data center."
According to AMD, the Opteron X-Series has twice the number of cores as Intel's Atom S1200 Series processors, which have just two cores. The X-Series has support for a whopping 32 GB of maximum DRAM per socket, which is four times more memory than what Intel's counterpart supports, plus integrated SATA ports. Overall, AMD said the X-Series throughput performance is more than double what the Atom S1200 Series provides, and nearly twice the single-thread performance. Of course, AMD is comparing the Opteron X-Series to Intel's current Atom server processors, which were launched in the fourth quarter of last year. But the world's largest chip maker recently announced its new "Silvermont" system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture for Atom, which will be based on Intel's 22nm design instead of the S2100 Series' 32nm design, so the technical specs comparison are sure to change.
Feldman said the Opteron X-Series chips are designed for Web and cloud hosting servers, multimedia data centers and big data operations. AMD also announced that the new X-Series chips will be featured in HP's Moonshot servers.
AMD's Opteron X2150 APU and X1150 CPU are generally available now for a cost of $99 and $64, respectively, in 1K quantities.

                                                                                                                       

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