JohnPatrick.com

Healthcare workers often use the word “code” as slang for a cardiopulmonary arrest happening to a patient in a hospital or clinic. Announcement of the word energizes a team of providers, sometimes called a code team, to rush to a specific location and begin immediate resuscitative efforts. Code means different things to different people. Broadly speaking, code means a systematic statement of a body of law or a system of principles or rules. Politicians and activists use jobs, healthcare, or a change in leadership. Developing a vaccine for the coronavirus revolves around genetic code. If you ask a high school student what code means, she or he will wonder why you don’t know, and then explain code is the set of instructions which tells a computer what to do.

A set of instructions which tells a computer what to do is often called a “program” or a “script”, or more likely today, an app, short for application. When you click the CNBC app on your smartphone, a set of instructions are executed to display the business news of the day or retrieve a quote for the current price of a stock, bond, option, or fund. A typical smartphone app contains thousands of lines of code.

To offer an example of what code can do, I will describe a script (program) I wrote for one of my hobbies, home automation. Code is written using a computer programming language. There are many of them, the most popular being Python. When I wake up in the morning, I push a button on my nightstand which initiates a Python script  called Good Morning. It runs on a Mac computer in my home office. In the following lines, I will describe what the script does in layperson terms. The actual script follows a very strict syntax, the arrangement of words and phrases formed in a detailed way which the computer understands.

• Retrieve the season, date, time, and weather from the Internet.
• Raise the motorized solar shade.
• Wait 15 seconds and then turn on the night table lamp and ceiling fan light to  low brightness.
• Gradually increase the brightness.
• Set thermostats based on the current season.
• Wait 15 minutes and then unlock all doors.
• Prepare a good morning announcement from various data.
• Use Amazon Web Services Polly artificial intelligence to create an announcement using Salli’s amazingly human voice, and play it on the master bedroom Sonos wireless speaker.
• Friday’s announcement was:”Good morning. Today is Friday, June 5. The time is 7:00 AM and the current weather is overcast. The temperature outside is 67 and the humidity is 85 percent. The forecast is light rain throughout the day. The high temperature will be 77 with winds out of the South at 6 miles per hour and gusts up to 16 miles per hour. There is a 94 percent chance of precipitation. Have a nice day at the Ridge.”
• Make a music selection at random from a list of favorite stations, playlists, and albums. If it is Sunday, select at random from a list of Baroque music sources. If it is not Sunday, select at random from a list of favorite music sources, mostly from Spotify.
• Play the selected music on Sonos speakers throughout the house. Set volume levels based on preference for each room.

The actual Python script is 115 lines of code. It took quite a few hours to write and test the code, to get it to do exactly what I wanted it to do. One thing I learned many years ago is software does exactly what you tell it to do, not necessarily what you want it to do. The process to get it right is called “debugging”.

I first learned to code (write code) more than 50 years ago in engineering school. The computer was made by GE and the computer language was called WIZ. Later, when I joined IBM, I learned other computer programming languages including Fortran, RPG, APL, and Basic. I was never a programmer (coder), but IBM required all sales people to be conversant in software so as to give good advice to customers. If you asked a high school student about the languages I just mentioned, they would say they never heard of any of them. Todays most popular code languages are Python, Java, Javascript, C#, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. There are many more. One of my grandchildren learned the basics of an Apple coding language called Swift.

Code is everywhere. A countertop toaster oven has a computer chip in it with a set of instructions to make your toast or baked casserole come out just right. Most all “televisions” today are actually computers which run code to select and play the streaming service you like. The Apple and Google app stores have roughly five million apps.

The range of lines of code in apps and devices is extraordinary. The average iPhone app has up to 50,000 lines of code. Google’s apps in total are believed to use more than two billion lines of code. To put this in perspective, a million lines of code, if printed, would be about 18,000 pages of text, 14 times the length of War and Peace.

Code is running in millions of pacemakers, games, and just about everything electronic. A few other examples:

• The control software to run a U.S. military drone uses 3.5 million lines of code.
• A Boeing 787 has 6.5 million lines
• The Google Chrome browser runs on 6.7 million lines of code.
• A Chevy Volt uses 10 million lines.

Famed venture capitalist Marc Andreesen said, “software is eating the world”. What he means is software is replacing human labor. Everywhere. In most everything. My Good Morning script is trivial, but consider the SpaceX Crew Dragon which autonomously docked itself with the International Space Station while both were circling the Earth at 17,000 mile per hour. I don’t know how many lines of code it took to do this, but a lot. A Tesla electric car is believed to have 100 million lines of code running under the hood.

The title of this article is “Do We All Have To Learn To Code?” My answer is a qualified yes. When it comes to education, every kid needs to learn at least the basics of coding, regardless of career path they may aspire toward. For those of us who have moved beyond our first careers, an understanding of coding can feed our curiosity about how things work. It is never too early or too late to learn to code. Here is what CodeMonkey has to say,

“CodeMonkey is user-friendly and intuitive. CodeMonkey takes a straight-forward approach, teaching real text-based code in a manner that even 8-year-olds can understand.”

CodeMonkey is one of many online learning platforms. Thousands of courses on coding and other topics are available. Some are expensive, many are free or low cost. I am currently taking Python courses at Treehouse. I have also taken some courses at edX.org, which offers 2,500+ online courses from 140 institutions including Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Texas. For those aspiring to a new career, many of the courses offer certifications. As I wrote in Net Attitude back in 2001, many employers would much rather hire people who have certifications in the various skills the employer needs than people with a college degree without any specialty.

Ok, lets get back to coding or learning to code.

In early April I had a routine consultation with my electrophysiologist at Nuvance Health via telehealth. Nuvance uses telehealth technology from American Well. In preparation for the consult, I took my blood pressure with a Qardio cuff and my iPhone, weighed myself on the Fitbit scale, and took a 30-second ECG with the Apple Watch. A nurse called 15 minutes before my appointment and took the information for input to the Electronic Health Record. The consult went very smoothly between the iMac and FaceTime camera at my home, and the doctor with a Windows computer with a camera. No drive to the Medical Arts building where the doctor is located. No crowded waiting room with other senior citizens during flu season during a pandemic.

A week later, my wife had a routine consultation with her primary care physician using Apple FaceTime. Other providers use Zoom, WebEx, or Skype. Hospitals and larger groups use more clinically oriented video platforms such as AmWell and Teladoc.

Why did it take a pandemic to be able to use telehealth? One thing I learned in the early years of my study of healthcare was a very simple concept: follow the money. It answers most questions about why and how things in healthcare are done. Providers did not like telehealth prior to now for a number of reasons. The main reason was they were not compensated. I agree with them. Telehealth reimbursements have been in place for years, but only for patients in very remote areas. Part of the executive orders related to Covid-19 eliminated the remote areas provision. Telehealth is now booming, although there are some consumers who may not have access to good Internet connectivity.

Telehealth is going to get better and better. In my first example, I described how the nurse called me for information which she then entered into a system. In time, the patient will be able to enter the data directly themselves. Another big change to make telehealth more comprehensive will be the integration of mHealth devices. (See peer-reviewed paper about mHealth I wrote in 2015). For example, one mHealth device allows a mother to insert an iPhone camera attachment into a child’s ear and enable a telehealth doctor to see whether there is an infection.

A hospital in Israel shows how mHealth can be applied to diagnosis of a Covid-19 patient who is at home but being followed. The hospital sends a small package to the patient. The patient schedules a telehealth consult with the doctor. First he or she logs in with a computer or mobile device. The telehealth app guides the patient to use two devices which were delivered in the package. The first device is a small handheld wireless scanner which can take the patient’s temperature from the forehead. The device also has a camera which can look at the patient’s throat. The other device is a small handheld wireless stethoscope. The app guides the patient to the places on the body where they should place the device. After the doctor has received the inputs, he or she can tell the patient how their progress is with their Covid-19 infection. Watch the 2-minute video above and you will see how all this works.

When we return to “normal”, I expect we will see telehealth continue to expand. There still will remain a number of scans and other diagnostics which cannot be done at home. However, I believe we will see a large percentage of cases which will be handled by mHealth devices and telehealth. The docs will be reimbursed. The patients will be happy they don’t have to drive to a crowded waiting room.

The Covid-19 curves are bending at different rates depending on country, state, and county. You can follow the curves by country or state at healthdata.org. Unfortunately, the deaths curves are continuing to rise. The healthdata site shows the projections. You can monitor the number of new cases by country or state at the Coronavirus Dashboard.

In last week’s e-brief, I wrote about how Zoom works nicely for family gatherings. I got an email from Khris Hall, Selectman from the town of New Fairfield, CT. She pointed out Zoom has allowed towns such as New Fairfield to continue to move forward with required processes, such as producing, publicizing, taking comment, finalizing the annual budget, and reviewing plans for new school buildings. She said, “We would be frozen without this tool.”

On Wednesday evening, Doug Maine and I presented “The Origins of the Internet” in a Zoom event hosted in the Virtual Playhouse of Bedford, NY. Doug and I were both involved in the early days of the Internet, circa 1993-1995. Doug was CFO at MCI and I was VP of Internet Technology at IBM. Twenty-six attendees connected and we had a robust Q&A session for a half-hour after our presentations. Zoom is not the same as being there, but we will all get used to video chats as a way to remain connected to learn and share.

The Founders Hall event for May 15 will be rescheduled to the Fall. Other author events are under discussion.

Social distancing has pushed us apart. At the same time, it has pushed many of us online. Children are learning online. Old and young are streaming video entertainment. Millions are at their job virtually. They are communicating and collaborating with colleagues and customers. Doctors are seeing their patients via Telehealth portals. 

When we get to the other side of the curve, we will have learned a lot about how to get proficient with all these things online. A lot of our newly formed online engagements will continue. It will seem very odd to sit in a doctor’s waiting room reading old magazines and enduring the coughs and sneezes of other patients. Some parents will get interested in lifelong learning after watching the experience their children have had. Some companies will find part of the work employees have been doing online can continue to be done online. They will save office space and business related travel expense.

One of the beneficiaries of the e-stay_at_home phenomenon has been San Jose, CA based Zoom Video Communications, Inc. Even before the Covid-19 outbreak, Zoom had become the de facto video chat service for the roughly 90% of Americans who are under orders to stay at home. Zoom users have gone from 10 million per day to 200 million. The company’s technology has gone from an interesting enterprise communications tool to global critical infrastructure.

The company’s share price (ZM) has risen substantially since its initial public offering last year. On March 23, Zoom shares surged 135%, closing at an all-time high of $159.56. As of the close on Thursday, Zoom was valued at about $35 billion, and the CEO has joined the Forbes list of billionaires. Various security weaknesses have emerged but the CEO claims to have a solid plan in place to regain customer loyalty. More on the security issues coming up.

Early in the week, I setup a group video chat with my wife and I plus our four children, two spouses, and six grandchildren. Our family group spanned Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Ages varied from 5 to 75. Each person, or in some cases a few persons, appeared in a separate video window. The video quality was excellent and everybody had a good time sharing what they are doing, cooking, eating, watching, reading, learning, etc. 

You may have read about security concerns with Zoom. Zoombombing, where uninvited participants have joined Zoom meetings, has gotten headlines. The primary solution to prevent Zoomboming is simple: use strong passwords. Zoom should make it mandatory to use a password. Another security exposure is the meeting ID. The host/owner/administrator of a Zoom video conference has a meeting ID; e.g. 189-654-652. If an invited participant shares the ID on social media or email, it is possible someone may get access to it and guess the password if it is abc123 or other trivial password, and then join the meeting and act inappropriately. A simple precaution is the Zoom option to have a random meeting ID assigned for each meeting.

Zoom is one of many video conferencing services. I have used a number of them, but I find Zoom to be the easiest and most reliable. The cost is free for video chats of 40 minutes or less. For $150 per year, the PRO option allows for unlimited chats with up to 100 people. The Zoom service works on desktops, laptops, or mobile devices. Whether it is FaceTime, Google Hangout, WebEx, Uber Conferences, or Zoom, video chats are a good way to communicate with friends, family, or professional engagements.

Zoom is also being used for community engagement. The Bedford Playhouse, Home of Clive Davis Arts Center is in downtown Bedford, New York. The Playhouse website has a Virtual Playhouse where Zoom is used to bring content to the community. The Playhouse website says,

If there’s a silver lining on lockdown, it’s that we have an unprecedented amount of time with our families + the opportunity to explore an exciting amount of art, film and culture online.  Virtual Playhouse aims to bring you a selection of interactive experiences, connectivity and conversations to enjoy with our amazing community — just like you normally would at the Playhouse. 

Virtual Playhouse

Bedford is in Westchester County, NY where, as of Friday morning, there were more than 17,000 Covid-19 cases and growing. You can see below the information about one of the Playhouse’s programs for next week. Doug Maine and I have known each other for decades. Doug was a senior exec at MCI and I was at IBM. We both had involvement with the early days of the Internet and that will be the topic we discuss next week. Anyone is free to listen in with or without video.

The Origins of the Internet ~ Presentation + Discussion with Doug Maine and John Patrick – April 15, 7:30pm

Deep inside the offices of IBM and MCI in the 1980s, Doug Maine and John Patrick were two men at the heart of conversations, inventions, partnerships and developments that would transform our lives, business and culture on a global scale. Join us on April 15 via Zoom for a TED-talks style conversation with Doug and John about their fascinating rolls in “inventing the internet”.

The coronavirus numbers are growing as expected, and will be growing much more. There are many websites with coronavirus information. I am sharing below the sites I have found most useful to see how the data are trending. The newest site I have discovered was created by Avi Schiffmann, a high schooler in Washington State. He calls the site Coronavirus Dashboard. It is very colorful and creative. Unfortunately, like the other sites, it is a dire story the data are telling us.

Coronavirus Dashboard
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Data Fact. The Human Genome Project estimated humans have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes. In our mouths are ten times that many and there is a like amount in our guts. Researchers are sequencing the microbiome, and a lot will be learned.

The next author event will be about the Origins of the Internet. I will be doing this with Doug Maine. The Zoom event is scheduled in the Virtual Playhouse on April 15th at 7:30 PM. See table below and the last part of this week’s e-brief above. The Founders Hall event on May 15 will be rescheduled in the Fall.

On March 13, I posted a story about the silver lining in the coronavirus cloud (See re-post below). Despite the enormous pain and suffering millions of people will endure, I continue to believe there will be many good things, in addition to the things I mentioned in the earlier post, which will emerge on the other side. In today’s post, I will highlight some DIY (Do It Yourself) activities happening which will have long term benefits.

Gui Cavalcanti is Founder & Co-Executive Director of Open Source Medical Supplies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mr. Cavalcanti has a background in robotics and has been working on  creating robust, low-cost fluidic robots which can operate in environments as extreme as deep water, outer space, and everything in between. Over the past couple of months he stopped building robots due to a Covid-19-based global supply chain failure which stopped the supply of parts needed to build them.

Mr. Cavalcanti realized the world would soon face the same supply chain situation for medical equipment and supplies. He founded a Facebook group to collect open source medical supply designs and document them so local communities could fabricate their own medical supplies. Within less than three weeks, the Facebook group had grown to 64,000 people from all over the world. In addition, 460 dedicated volunteers jumped on board helping write an 80+ page Open Source Medical Supply Guide and a Local Response Guide to help communities self-organize. The DIY group produced more than 280,000 medical supply items and delivered them to healthcare institutions all over the globe.

You can visit the Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies group on Facebook and see the amazing things the group is doing. One person uploaded a detailed instruction guide on how to make vented masks starting with cutting cardboard pieces from a used cereal box. Rod, a local yet internationally experienced fabric and apparel designer, engineered and spearheaded the first production cutting run for an additional 230 hoods and gowns. Another group is making powered, air-purifying respirators (PAPR) used to safeguard healthcare workers. The DIY group is doing remarkable things.

One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals is a lack of ventilators. These machines keep patients breathing when they can no longer breath on their own. The media has widely reported ventilators cost around $30,000 or more. A rapidly assembled team of volunteer engineers, physicians, computer scientists, and others, centered at MIT, has developed a safe, inexpensive alternative for emergency use. MIT is going to post the free detailed plans for an emergency ventilator which can be built quickly around the world at a cost of $100.

Part of the silver lining is the revelation of the dependence on a non-U.S. supply chain and the cost of critical healthcare supplies and equipment. Why does a ventilator cost $30,000? Because medical equipment companies can charge that much. These companies are very profitable. They should be profitable, but how profitable? Is there enough competition? Why is the supply chain broken? Because companies outsourced to China to shave pennies off the cost of production. The silver lining is these issues will get significant focus on the other side of the pandemic. The results will be positive and help prepare for the next pandemic and also lower the cost of medical equipment.

The coronavirus numbers are growing as expected, and will be growing much more. There are many websites with coronavirus information. I am sharing below the sites I have found most useful to see how the data are trending. The newest site I have discovered was created by Avi Schiffmann, a high schooler in Washington State. He calls the site Coronavirus Dashboard. It is very colorful and creative. Unfortunately, like the other sites, it is a dire story the data are telling us.

Coronavirus Dashboard
Global
States 
Connecticut
Florida 
New York
Pennsylvania

Data Fact. The Human Genome Project estimated humans have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes. In our mouths are ten times that many and there is a like amount in our guts. Researchers are sequencing the microbiome, and a lot will be learned.

The next author event is scheduled for May 15th at Founders Hall in Ridgefield, CT. I expect it will need to be rescheduled.

In January, virologists in China isolated a new virus. In March the Coronaviridae Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses named the virus SARS-CoV-2. Most people call it the coronavirus. The virus causes a disease called Covid-19. The vocabulary can be very confusing. The goal of this article is to shed some light on the various terms.

Let’s start with taxonomy, a scheme of classification of things, especially living things. A Swedish naturalist named Carolus Linnaeus is considered the “Father of Taxonomy”. In the 1700s, Linnaeus developed a method we still use today to name and organize species. The table below shows one version of the Linnaean Classification of Humans.

The level of detail can make your head hurt. We humans are often referred to simply as Homo Sapiens. There is much more detail beyond the table if you want to drill down. When it comes to viruses, the taxonomy makes the human taxonomy look really simple. See the following table from Nature.com to get a glimpse of it. The complete 8,000-word article is here.

To put the complexity in perspective, consider SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the pandemic, is one of 6,828 virus species which have been named. Researchers say they know of hundreds of thousands more species. Some believe there may be trillions waiting to be found. This is the virosphere.

The good news is there are a number of profound research projects underway to deal with the world of viruses. This is incredibly important because viruses are not going away. Some experts are saying a new and different virus will appear next year or even later this year. Hopefully, we will be ready. The wake up call this time was so loud and clear, I believe we will be prepared.

One new approach under development is the use of synbio, as described in last week’s e-brief. A vaccine made from synthetic ingredients can potentially offer some significant advantages. The big one is scalability. Synbio vaccines could be produced efficiently for millions or even billions of doses. Synbio vaccines are developed using computer models, not flasks and test tubes. With billions of calculations, a nanoparticle can be designed which has the exact properties desired. The really big breakthrough with synbio is the attachment of multiple different viral molecules to the nanoparticle and thereby create a universal coronavirus vaccine. One vaccine for all corona viruses. That will be the breakthrough.

Another positive development in the silver lining of the coronavirus cloud is tech companies large and small are jumping in the boat to help. For example, IBM is collaborating with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Energy to launch the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. The Consortium will provide supercomputing power to researchers developing predictive models to analyze the coronavirus progression and identify potential treatments. Researchers from around the world can submit proposals, and the Consortium will select the projects which could have the most immediate impact. Other partners in the consortium include NASA, MIT, and the Argonne National Laboratory.

Another significant Covid-19 effort is taking place at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. As of November 2019, Oak Ridge had the fastest supercomputer in the world. It is capable of performing one thousand million million (10¹⁵) operations per second.

Scientists at Oak Ridge have deployed the massive supercomputer to look for compounds which can bind to the “spike protein” of the virus. It is the spike protein which the virus uses to infect host cells. The right compound could render the spike protein ineffective, and the virus would be stopped from spreading. Using digital models, the supercomputer can simulate how particles in the viral protein would react to different drug compounds. The researchers started with a list of 77 compounds and narrowed it down to the top seven most promising candidates which could become effective treatments for covid-19. The research is at the early stage but I believe we can be hopeful.

The coronavirus numbers are growing as expected, and will be growing much more. There are many websites with coronavirus information. I did some digging around to find the ones which presented the data I wanted to see. I am sharing below the sites I have found most useful to see how the data is trending. Fyi.

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The numbers are going to rise significantly from what already looks high. We should not be surprised or alarmed. More tests are going to happen and more cases will be found. If you are interested in the impact of the numbers, I suggest reading “The Sober Math Everyone Must Understand about the Pandemic” by Jason Warner. The essence of his article is if we take action on social distancing now, we can bend the curve and save a lot of lives and avoid a crisis for our healthcare system. If we do not do a good job of social distancing, like what millennials were doing on Florida beaches, then we face catastrophe. Jason’s article steps through the numbers, and it is not pretty.

I posted an op-ed piece in a technical newsletter called TNW. The title of the op-ed is “Mobile voting is far from perfect, but it’s better than what we have now”. The current situation of voting challenges is proof perfect. You can read the op-ed it here. The Congress could do remote voting very easily and safely. One Senator said the Senate should get with it in the 21st century. The vote on the rescue package was 96-0. The four missing Senators were at home. Senators are so technically unaware they could agree on a way to allow the four Senators to vote remotely. The speaker of the house said, “We can not vote from home”. As I have said so many times, we can put a robot on Mars, but we can’t figure out how to vote remotely.

The next author event is scheduled for May 15th at Founders Hall in Ridgefield, CT. Time will tell if it will need to be rescheduled.

The numbers continue to grow and, as Dr. Fauci says, it is going to get worse before it gets better. If we all do a good job in social distancing, the curve will bend sooner rather than later. The government is pulling out all stops for therapeutic solutions, as Dr. Kuhn described on Thursday. As I wrote last week, there is a silver lining to the dark cloud hovering over all of us. One of the numerous positive things going on is the development of a vaccine for Covid-19.

Significant progress is being made by Moderna Therapeutics, CureVac, and Inovio Pharmaceuticals, who are going as fast as possible to begin human testing. Nevertheless, the approach they are taking uses biological DNA and RNA as the core ingredient. As advanced as the current development process is, vaccines as we know them have a number of shortcomings. The most visible shortcoming is they take years to develop and manufacture. Potentially more significant is they become obsolete if and when the virus evolves, which it will. There are already multiple strains, and there will be more. Finally, the immune response the vaccines produce may not be strong enough to be effective.

A totally new approach is under development using synbio. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has put $60 million into coronavirus research including for the synbio effort. If you read Daniel Suarez science fiction novels (among my favorite authors) you have already heard of synbio. It takes a major role in his book, Change Agent, which takes place in 2045, and is about Interpol’s Genetic Crime Division which grapples with a new type of crime: illicit genetic editing. It is quite a thriller.

Synbio stands for synthetic biology. Synbio is mostly about the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the re-design of existing, natural biological systems. More specific to the issue of the day, synbio may replace the DNA and RNA ingredients mother nature has provided for the development of vaccines with synthetic ingredients.

A vaccine made from synthetic ingredients can potentially offer some significant advantages. The big one is scalability. Synbio vaccines could be produced efficiently for millions or even billions of doses. Another advantage is synthetic ingredients do not need to be refrigerated. This would be a huge benefit for places like sub-Saharan Africa.

Synbio vaccines are developed using computer models, not flasks and test tubes. With billions of calculations, a nanoparticle can be designed which has the exact properties desired. The really big breakthrough with synbio is the attachment of viral molecules to the nanoparticle. Neil King at the University of Washington and his synbio colleagues knew there would be another coronavirus epidemic, like the SARS and MERS outbreaks before the current Covid-19 outbreak. King said, “…there will be another one after this,” perhaps from yet another member of this virus family. We need a universal coronavirus vaccine.” One vaccine for all corona viruses. That will be the breakthrough.

Sharon Begley wrote a beautiful article in STAT which explains the synbio efforts underway in much more detail. See To develop a coronavirus vaccine, synthetic biologists try to outdo nature. STAT has great articles about life sciences and the fast-moving business of making medicines.

The coronavirus numbers are growing, and will be growing much more. There are gazillions of websites with coronavirus information. I did some digging around to find the ones which presented the data I wanted to see. I am sharing below the sites I have found most useful to see how the data is trending. Fyi.

Global
States 
Connecticut
Florida 
New York
Pennsylvania

The numbers are going to rise significantly from what already looks high. We should not be surprised or alarmed. More tests are going to happen and more cases will be found. If you are interested in the impact of the numbers, I suggest reading “The Sober Math Everyone Must Understand about the Pandemic” by Jason Warner. The essence of his article is if we take action on social distancing now, we can bend the curve and save a lot of lives and crisis for our healthcare system. If we do not do a good job of social distancing, like what millennials have been doing on Florida beaches, then we face catastrophe. Jason’s article steps through the numbers, and it is not pretty.

I posted an op-ed piece in a technical newsletter called TNW. The title of the op-ed is “Mobile voting is far from perfect, but it’s better than what we have now”. The current situation of voting challenges is proof perfect. You can read the op-ed it here. The Congress could do remote voting very easily and safely. One Senator said the Senate should get with it in the 21st century. The speaker of the house said, “We can not vote from home”.

The next author event is scheduled for May 15th at Founders Hall in Ridgefield, CT. Time will tell if it will need to be rescheduled.

One thing all the Coronavirus experts agree on is the virus will continue to spread for some time. One important question related to this is how contagious is the virus? The key measure is transmissibility, how rapidly the disease spreads. Transmissibility is indicated by its reproductive number, abbreviated as Ro and pronounced R-nought or r-zero. Ro represents the average number of people to which a single infected person transmits the virus. On January 23, the World Health Organization estimated Ro for covid-19 to be between 1.4 and 2.5. Other studies have estimated Ro between 2.4 and 4.0. An outbreak with a Ro less than 1 will gradually disappear. A Ro of 4.0 would produce an extremely bad situation. For comparison, the Ro for the common flu is 1.3 and for SARS it was 2.0.

If we do nothing, then Ro will be high and the number of cases and deaths will be very high. As predicted by some, if we do nothing, the spread could go exponential and lead to millions of cases. If we take aggressive actions, however, the Ro will be lower and the growth rates of the disease will be flattened.

The spread of the disease to date should be a wake up call for every person and organization. Supplies are being hoarded which should already have been on hand. Action plans are rolling out, but they should have been ready from Day 1. The government is prepared for hurricanes but not totally prepared for a pandemic. The good news is the Federal, State, and Local governments are learning a lot from the situation and the emergency plans to reduce bureaucracy should have a very positive impact. Public private partnerships in retail and lab testing are set to solve the critical problem of testing. The wake up call may lead to a silver lining in the coronavirus cloud. Following are some components of the silver lining.

1. The development time for vaccines must continue to get shorter. The good news on this is they can sequence the genome of the virus in hours. Sequencing the first human genome cost about $1 billion and took 13 years to complete. In the case of the coronavirus, the detection of the virus was confirmed in France on Friday, January 24. Later that day, the Institut Pasteur received samples of three suspected cases they detected with the novel coronavirus and began preparation for the sequencing. The process started on Monday and was completed early Tuesday evening. Remarkable. The next step is the process for creating, testing, and manufacturing a vaccine. The process to get from recipe to tested and available vaccine needs a major upgrade and modernization.
2. A major information technology (IT) upgrade is needed between state and federal public health organizations. Now that millions of test kits are being distributed, the public will be asking what were the results. As it stands, the answer from the government will have to be, “We don’t know”. This is a problem I wrote about in Health Attitude in 2015. State governments have been reluctant to share data with the Federal government. It is partly cultural and partly because there is no efficient way to do the sharing. The bureaucracy involved is immense. The Feds have spent hundreds of millions on incentives to get states to share their data but it is not happening as it could. The benefits of sharing will be huge. Once millions of consumers, labs, and providers add data to an anonymized national database, a multitude of data will become available for the greater good. Researchers can study the anonymized data and gain insights about the health of the population at a community level, nationally, or globally. This will be extremely helpful for establishing travel bans and imposing quarantines on a more pinpointed basis rather than a cancel everything everywhere approach. Hopefully, better data sharing will be in place before the next pandemic.
3. A big question which needs an answer is what is the best therapeutic for treating covid-19? Various drugs are being tried. This is new. Historically, if you have a certain disease, you are prescribed a certain drug. For example, if you have breast cancer, then take XYZ drug. Oncologists have learned a combination of drugs may work better than the normally prescribed drug. Either approach in a sense implies one size fits all. In fact, every cancer is different and very personal. This is where AI and machine learning (ML) come in. Globally, more than 350,000 chemical compounds (including mixtures of chemicals) have been registered for production and use. Might one of them work to cure covid-19? I would say it is likely. How do they find the chemicals which can work? ML can be applied to all hundreds of thousands of possible cures based on the genomic sequence of the patient and of the novel coronavirus. You might think of it as a digital clinical trial done in hours, not months. I am confident this type of approach will evolve. 
4. Like you, I have been receiving emails from a lot of organizations ranging from global travel companies to our local dry cleaner. They are all very similar. One I received caught my eye. They said, “Currently, our entire staff is equipped to work remotely and to support our clients and one another via phone and email. We will send updates to you as appropriate, and information regarding our status and availability will be posted on our website”. This is an organization which was prepared. Many were not. Many companies and schools and conferences are saying they are going remote: e-learning, e-meetings, e-conferences. Saying you are e-whatever doesn’t make it happen. Do all the employees and customers have access to reliable high-speed bandwidth? Probably not. Are they all trained on how the e-engagement works? Probably not. Effective e-whatever takes a lot of planning, testing, and training. The good news is bandwidth is generally much better than it was a decade ago. The wakeup call will result in organizations asking key questions. How well do we function as an e-organization? Before we go back to “normal” do we really need everybody to go back to the way it was? Can we streamline our organization and our services by fine tuning our e-capabilities?
5. The pandemic is exposing the weaknesses of our paper-based government, including how we vote. Social separation is being urged but to vote, thousands had to stand in line for hours. Those that voted remotely did so by licking an envelope and stamp. Online and mobile voting can work with security, privacy, accuracy, and verifiability if we put our mind to it. Digital discourse can strengthen our democracy. The discourse doesn’t have to be in crowded rooms. Hopefully, the wake up call will get policymakers thinking about the many things we do by touching paper touched by others. Real estate closings, bank loans, paying for things with cash, and the list goes on.

The pandemic has provided a wake up call. If we do nothing, hide like a hermit, and hope it goes away, things will get worse. If we take aggressive actions as described at coronavirus.gov, we can flatten the curves and start thinking about covid-21 and how we can prepare now.

Data Facts of the Week

The coronavirus numbers are growing, but see my article, “Is There a Silver Lining in the Coronavirus Cloud?” If you like to follow what is going on in the coronavirus world statistically, take a look at worldometers.info/conronavirus. After the table of country by country statistics, the page shows the specific things which changed from the prior day. For other interesting real-time statistics about population growth, visit the homepage at worldometers.info. Each day the dedicated doctors and scientists learn more and more about the DNA of the virus and how to cure it and ultimately prevent it.

On Friday morning I was a guest on WNZF “Free For All Fridays”. The Flagler County, Florida news station program was hosted by General Manager David Ayers. Local government officials, a hospital executive, and a congressional representative participated. You can find the podcast here.

The next author event was scheduled for March 19th at AdventHealth in Palm Coast, FL. The event was cancelled by AdventHealth. It will be rescheduled.

Press articles about Internet voting abound. The articles quote technology experts who are worried about the theoretical risks of Internet voting, mobile or otherwise. They correctly say the Internet is not perfect. But, neither is the paper-base system we have. The anti-Internet voting activists continue to compare Internet voting to a perfect world which we will never have. They fail to compare it to the old fashioned paper based system which is now the preferred method to vote. How good is the paper based approach?

This past week’s Democratic primaries in Texas and California showed some of the imperfections of current voting methods. For many voters, the primaries were a nightmare. Some lines were up to six hours long. CNN reported voters walked away because they could not wait any longer. Axios reported, “Long wait times put a special hardship on low-income voters who are less likely to have flexible work hours, around-the-clock transportation and child care.” Another problem is southern states have closed 1,200 polling sites, presumably because of the cost to maintain them. It is no coincidence the closed polling sites had mostly been for Latino and black citizens, many of whom could not get to the alternate polling sites.

The paper based voting systems have numerous problems. The Los Angeles Times reported, “In California, machine jams slowed the rolls, delaying lines up to two hours.” Errors in voter registration forced voters to cast paper provisional ballots which would not be counted until the voter registration was confirmed manually. Voters were also confused about how to use the new voting machines. In some races, the voter had to click “more” to see additional candidates on the voting machine screen. At some voting locations, voting machines just flat out did not work.

We should not trust Internet voting, but we should trust the paper based approach? But wait, there is more. Western states have been pushing early voting my mail for years. It has grown rapidly. The number of early votes cast for Super Tuesday Democratic primaries was 4 million. In California, the early votes were 40%. Many of the votes were wasted because Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer dropped out after the early voters had cast their ballot. Many voters were quite disappointed they could not change their vote. With Internet voting, they could have. In fact, with Internet voting a citizen can vote as many times as they want up until the polls close. The last vote is the only one which counts.

We put a robot on Mars, 34 million miles away, and it is still roaming the Red Planet. We can also make Internet voting safe, secure, private, accurate, accessible, reliable, and verifiable. All we need to do state by state and county by county is to develop detailed plans, select vendors which have the best technology, and test, test, test. The only other thing we need is the political and technological will to make it easier for the many millions of people who couldn’t get to the polls or wasted votes by casting paper ballots early.

Data Facts of the Week

This past week, the AP reported there currently are 17 times as many new infections outside China as inside China. If you like to follow what is going on in the coronavirus world statistically, take a look at worldometers.info/conronavirus. After the table of country by country statistics, the page shows the specific things which changed from the prior day. For other interesting real-time statistics about population growth, visit the homepage at worldometers.info. Although each day the dedicated doctors and scientists learn more and more about the DNA of the virus and how to cure it and ultimately prevent it, fear and market reaction continues.

On Friday morning March 13 at 9 AM, I will be a guest on WNZF “Free For All Fridays”. As in past visits to this great local Flagler County, Florida news station, I anticipate a range of challenging questions from host and General Manager David Ayers. Tune in to 92.7 FM or visit flaglerbroadcasting.com/wnzf.

The next author event will be on March 19th at AdventHealth in Palm Coast, FL. The event is open to the public. Seating is limited, so RSVP by calling 386-586-4440 or email [email protected]. The first 65 to register will get an autographed copy of Robot Attitude: How Robots and Artificial Intelligence Will Make Our Lives Better which I will be discussing.

What is becoming clear about the coronavirus situation is it will not be contained. The question is what to do about it. The answer requires knowing where the virus will spread and when. The good news is artificial intelligence (AI) can provide answers now, and even more accurately in the future.

Dr. Kamran Khan, a 49-year-old Canadian epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist in Toronto, was working at a hospital during the SARS epidemic of 2003. The SARS virus started in provincial China and spread to Hong Kong and then to Toronto, where it killed 44 people. Khan concluded there must be a better way to track diseases. With that goal in mind, Khan founded a company in 2014 called BlueDot.

BlueDot has developed an algorithm that can sift through hundreds of thousands of news stories and airline traffic information everyday. The goal is to detect and monitor the spread of infectious diseases. BlueDot applies AI technologies to create alarms about impending virus attacks. Its first success was accurately predicting the spread of Zika from Brazil to south Florida in 2016. Early on, it predicted the spread of coronavirus on December 31, 2019.

BlueDot has 40 employees including data scientists, epidemiologists, physicians, veterinarians, and software developers. Using natural language processing and machine learning, the BlueDot team has developed a real-time warning system based on the vast amount of data it analyzes. The data is retrieved every 15 minutes around the clock from scans of official reports, online news sources, professional forums and information retrieved from key word and phrase searches.

The Economic Times reported BlueDot, “Can read text in 65 languages and can track 150 different types of diseases.” Mr. Khan told The Times, “We call it the needles in the haystack”. After the AI software has analyzed the data, it presents the findings to human experts who tag information they believe is related to a threat.

“There’s a massive amount of data and the machine is finding the needles and presenting it to the human experts,” who then review it and train the AI to understand if the information corresponds to an actual threat. The Times reported, “If the threat looks real, the AI software then looks further for nearby airports and commercial air travel itineraries from around the world. Climate data, national health system databases, and even the presence of mosquitoes or animals that transmit diseases to humans are all taken into account.”

Once BlueDot is confident it has valid data, it sends an alert to its clients including airlines, hospitals, and government agencies informing them where the majority of the airline passengers might disembark. The recipients of the alerts can then prepare for a major disease outbreak.

The Times reported, “So on December 31, in the early morning, the BlueDot system picked up an article in Mandarin that mentioned 27 people suffering from pneumonia, all linked to a wet market in Wuhan.” The virus was not yet identified but the data contained some similarities to the SARS outbreak. BlueDot AI technology predicted the virus would likely spread from Wuhan to Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, and Tokyo, all of which have since reported cases of the novel coronavirus.

Other startup companies, government laboratories, Harvard Medical School, and numerous other centers of excellence are using AI to study massive amounts of data. They are using tools which were not available ten years ago. AI is being used to examine large numbers of chemical molecules to determine if they might be therapeutic toward coronavirus. Long term, it is likely there will be new diseases appearing. The good news is AI is getting smarter and smarter every day, and will eventually be able to predict outbreaks earlier and develop cures and vaccines much more quickly than is currently possible.

This Canadian start-up used AI to track coronavirus and raised alarm days before the outbreak

Press articles continue to beat up on Internet voting. They say the only way we can have accurate elections is with paper ballots. Paper elections are so accurate in Iowa they flip a coin to break ties. In Nevada they use cards. Meanwhile millions of people don’t vote because they can’t get to the polls.

Data Facts of the Week

If you like to follow what is going on in the world statistically, take a look at worldometers.info. As of Thursday morning, the site showed year-to-date deaths from Coronavirus at 2,814 and from seasonal flu at 76,441. The reason for so much fear and market reaction to coronavirus is because there is so much we don’t know about it, namely exactly how it spreads and how quickly.

Axios reported not only are pundits and policymakers concerned about tech headed toward out of control, but also the general population has concerns. A new survey shows 61% think tech is changing too fast, 66% worry technology is making it impossible to know what information is real or fake, and 61% think government think does not understand tech well enough to regulate it. 

As of mid-morning Friday, Tesla market capitalization has dropped by more than $40 billion. The five giant tech company market caps plunged by more than a half-trillion dollars. All five companies are global, but to put their massive valuation into perspective, it still represents 18% of the market cap of the U.S. S&P 500. Shareholders are not happy and government regulators and politicians are gearing up for new regulations. The pressure on big tech will continue to mount.

The next author event will be on March 19th at AdventHealth in Palm Coast, FL. The event is open to the public. Seating is limited, so RSVP by calling 386-586-4440 or email [email protected]. The first 65 to register will get an autographed copy of
Robot Attitude: How Robots and Artificial Intelligence Will Make Our Lives Better

If you have not seen a robot motoring around a local retailer, you will. Historically, robots have been deployed mostly in manufacturing. However, robots are now fulfilling more and more tasks in retail. They are flipping burgers in restaurants and patrolling shopping malls for security. In big box retailers, robots are patrolling the aisles and scanning the shelves.

Walmart is expanding its shelf-scanning robots by 650 bringing its fleet to 1,000. The six-foot-tall robots are made by San Francisco-based Bossa Nova Robotics Inc. Each robot is equipped with 15 cameras. The robots roam the aisles looking for items which are out of stock, and send alerts to store employees’ smartphones who can take appropriate action. The robots can also report if the price on an item is different than the price indicated on the shelf. Industry analysts claim out of stock items cost retailers nearly a trillion dollars in lost sales per year.

Some employees are chatting about the robots as “job stealers”. The employees have a right to be concerned. Other robots can scrub floors and unload trucks. Walmart claims the robots make it possible to redeploy employees to less mundane jobs. That can be true in the short term, but eventually the jobs being eliminated by robots will far outpace the redeployment opportunities. Only one presidential candidate talked about the impending problem, but he dropped out of the race after the New Hampshire primary.

To learn more about the coming robots, read Robot Attitude: How Robots and Artificial Intelligence Will Make Our Lives Better.

I added the following Disclosure to my post about the Iowa caucus, Internet voting, MIT researchers, and Voatz:

Disclosure: I am not an investor in Voatz or any other Internet voting company. I do not receive any fees of any kind for what I say or write about Internet voting.

As predicted, the press has jumped on the idea of Internet voting and pointed out how insecure it is. I could not resist writing another post to get a more balanced point of view entered into the mix. I have also given some interviews and participated on panels about the subject. Following are some links to videos of what I had to say. There is some redundancy in the New York interviews. The links are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLsHkes9-qQ&t=95s Pepperdine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxUm30YdYbw NYC 11/2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVajKvM4sco&t=32s NYC full interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdsZI-2ipes NYC August 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWqWSY8z9k&t=303s Internet voting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Um4wnMZ1-s NYC August 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cJGsvfWyaw NYC August 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SfT6ENx-jg&t=3s NYC August 2016

Data Fact of the Week

Each of our body’s 10 trillion or so cells contains about six feet of DNA, the enormously long molecule that contains all the genetic information which makes us a person. If laid end to end, the DNA would reach to the sun and back dozens of times. An equally amazing comparison is with the size of each of our cell’s nucleus, the container which holds our DNA. The diameter of a typical nucleus is about 1 ten-millionth of an inch, making it 400,000 times smaller than the DNA which has to fit inside it. The compression factor is equivalent to folding 20 miles of string perfectly into a tennis ball.

Tesla has now reached a market capitalization of more than $160 billion. This is remarkable but just a fraction of the MAGFA group. See the table below. The five giants market cap has pulled back a bit but is nearly five and a half trillion dollars. All five companies are global, but to put their massive valuation into perspective, it represents 20% of the market cap of the U.S. S&P 500. Shareholders are happy, but government regulators and politicians are licking their chops. The pressure on big tech will continue to mount.

The next author event will be on March 19th at AdventHealth in Palm Coast, FL. The event is open to the public. The first 65 to register will get an autographed copy of
Robot Attitude: How Robots and Artificial Intelligence Will Make Our Lives Better

On Thursday morning, The New York Times ran a story about how MIT researchers found alleged flaws in the Voatz software used to support overseas military voters from West Virginia. Voatz has great success with mobile voting in multiple precincts around the country with no security problems. The terrible way in which the Iowa caucus vote reporting app was implemented with woefully inadequate testing and training was a rallying cry to researchers to find something wrong with Voatz. Researchers can be very helpful, but only if their approach to the research is itself beyond critique. It is not always the case.

Like many negative stories about Internet voting, the Times cited an experience with TrustTheVote software used by Washington, D.C. in 2010. The city technology team which implemented the voting system found a problem with the router which connected the voting server to the Internet. Perhaps because of time constraints, the router was replaced with a new one without setting a strong password. Protection of the voting server was limited to a default, out of the box, password which a high school kid could easily guess. When the voting server was turned on to the public for testing, with no security testing, researchers from the University of Michigan were able to break in to the server within minutes. Rather than quickly and discreetly work with the Washington technology team to fix the problems, the researchers caused the voting system to play the University of Michigan fight song each time the voting system’s integrity failed.

Is that research? Was the goal to help advance Internet voting for the benefit of the millions of voters who are disenfranchised by our 150 year old system, or was it to gain notoriety and bragging rights by taking down a poorly implemented voting server?

In the case of the MIT researchers and Voatz, there is much to question about their “research” approach. Suppose Apple found some bugs in release 10.0 of its software which they fixed in release 10.1. Suppose researchers decided to evaluate Apple’s software and, to do so, they elected to test the release 10.0, and then reported the bugs Apple had already fixed. Is that helpful research? In the case of Voatz mobile Internet voting software, the MIT researchers analyzed an Android version of the Voatz app that was at least 27 versions old. The software they reported on was never used in an election. The researchers did not have access to the Voatz server, so they created one which they believed would work like the Voatz server.

Research? Had the researchers taken the time, like nearly 100 other researchers who evaluated Voatz software, to test and verify their claims using the latest version of the Voatz platform, the outcome of the research would have been quite different. The MIT researchers did not inform Voatz of their testing nor offer to collaborate for the benefit of disenfranchised voters. Instead, they chose to remain anonymous and seek media attention around their findings. 

The leadership of the Democratic caucus did a terrible disservice to American democracy. With people already skeptical of Internet voting, the experts are now piling on saying “See, we told you so. Don’t even consider Internet voting”. The anti-Internet voting activists do not seem to be interested in the 100 million people in 2016 who could have voted but did not. 

West Virginia has not received much press coverage on the great leadership it has provided in this area. The state wants to make it easy for military and disabled citizens to vote wherever they may be. Rather than roll it out at the last minute with no testing, West Virginia worked with Voatz to thoroughly test the mobile voting system. Voter satisfaction with Voatz Internet voting was high, and the vote was accurate and secure.

Voatz has been very progressive and open in their testing approach. They established a public bug bounty program two years ago. Nearly 100 researchers helped the company find bugs. They were paid a bounty for bugs they found. The MIT researchers could have joined the public bug bounty program. Instead they chose a sneaky approach and tested out of date software and gave the results to The New York Times.

America has the best researchers in the world. They can help make Internet voting a great success which would strengthen our democracy. The goal should be enabling people to vote conveniently, securely, privately, accurately, and with verifiability. This can be done as Voatz has demonstrated. Come on researchers, let’s collaborate to make it even better.

Disclosure: I am not an investor in Voatz or any other Internet voting company. I do not receive any fees of any kind for what I say or write about Internet voting.

A Meet the Author event was held on Friday at a monthly meeting of the Senior Provider Information Network. The meeting was at the beautiful Market Street Memory Care Residence in Palm Coast, Florida. Additional author events will be held in Florida during the 1st quarter of 2020 and then more back in Connecticut in the Spring. The table below shows events scheduled so far. Details on upcoming events will follow. Questions to [email protected]

As predicted, the press has jumped on the idea of Internet voting and pointed out how insecure it is. I could not resist writing another post to get a more balanced point of view entered into the mix. I have also given some interviews and participated on panels about the subject. Following are some links to videos of them. There is some redundancy in the New York interviews. The links are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLsHkes9-qQ&t=95s Pepperdine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxUm30YdYbw NYC 11/2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVajKvM4sco&t=32s NYC full interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdsZI-2ipes NYC August 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWqWSY8z9k&t=303s Internet voting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Um4wnMZ1-s NYC August 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cJGsvfWyaw NYC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SfT6ENx-jg&t=3s NYC

Data Fact of the Week

Each of our body’s 10 trillion or so cells contains about six feet of DNA, the enormously long molecule that contains all the genetic information which makes us a person. If laid end to end, the DNA would reach to the sun and back dozens of times. An equally amazing comparison is with the size of each of our cell’s nucleus, the container which holds our DNA. The diameter of a typical nucleus is about 1 ten-millionth of an inch, making it 400,000 times smaller than the DNA which has to fit inside it. The compression factor is equivalent to folding 20 miles of string perfectly into a tennis ball.

Tesla has now reached a market capitalization of $145 billion. This is remarkable but just a fraction of the MAGFA group. See the table below. The five giants have now reached a market cap of five and a half trillion dollars. All five companies are global, but to put their massive valuation into perspective, it represents 21% of the market cap of the U.S. S&P 500. Shareholders are rejoicing, but government regulators and politicians are licking their chops. 

A lot of knowledgeable experts will be weighing in with their points of view about what went wrong with the Iowa caucus vote counting. There were many problems but it is clear as can be the core problem was the lack of testing. I learned decades ago about the importance of testing anything involving software. The other thing I learned is software always does exactly what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. The only way to get software to do what you want it to do is testing, and you can never test too much.

My team at IBM built a website for the Atlanta Olympic Games of 1996. In 1995, there were not many people who knew a lot about how to build really large websites or, for that matter, any kind of website. The Olympic site was the largest in the world back then, and we learned a lot in building it. We were humble with our expectations. We didn’t know how many people would come to the site, when they would come, or what they might do when they got there. We learned many lessons, but I can summarize it in a simple mantra: Think big, act bold, start simple, iterate fast (with testing). Another way to say it is to take a lot of baby steps.

The Olympic Games website was successful. For the first time, people around the world had real-time access to the individual and country results from the Olympic Games. We had a lot to share about how the site was developed but, unfortunately the story was overshadowed by a glitch in an unrelated application (the word app had not yet been invented) developed in Atlanta. The application was designed to distribute news and results to the press. A software developer made a change to the application but failed to test it. The result was a disaster. If an application was to have a failure for a customer, the last place you would want it to happen is with the press. 

In software development parlance, testing happens in phases. First is the alpha test to see if the concept works. Then comes beta testing where you bring in a small number of users and get their feedback. Sometimes software can be in the beta phase of testing for months or even years. When it is finally ready to go live for all users, the software is released. As an extreme example, Google introduced gmail in 2004 and kept it in beta for five years, signaling the company was still making feature changes and testing them. As of 2019, there are 1.5 billion users.

Development of a test plan is at least as important as the plan for the product or service itself. In the innovation group at IBM, my team would develop a new application and conduct the alpha test among just our own team. When everybody was happy, we would roll it out to a small subset, by invitation. When the team was satisfied with the testing progress, more beta users would be added. When it was clear the application was working properly and the users were happy, the application would be released for all users. 

Almost 20 years later I heard about the impending launch on October 1, 2013 of healthcare.gov. I knew it would be a failure from the get go. A project as massive as healthcare.gov which intends to serve all types of insured citizens in all 50 states can have many possible points of failure. It reminded me of the mantra I learned in 1996. It appeared the mantra for healthcare.gov was “think big, act big, start big, fail big”. The healthcare.gov site could have been introduced in one state for one type of insured. After successful testing, another state could be added. Then another type of insured. The proper testing would have spanned at least a year, in my opinion.

Clay Shirky, an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, analyzed the failure in “Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality“. He concluded the developer’s idea that “failure is not an option” but, with no testing, was a fantasy. The developers feared if they openly tested the system before releasing it to the public, politicians would attack the purpose and efficacy of the site. The lack of testing caused catastrophic results.

And now, in 2020, after a vast accumulation over decades of experience with the Internet, the leaders of the Democratic caucus released an app which had virtually no testing. People in 1,700 precincts were told to download the app for the first time on the night of the caucus. The app was not available in the app store because it had not had proper testing. The users in the precincts had to follow a special download process which was daunting for many. In interviews before the caucus, leaders said they had a backup plan if things did not go well. The backup plan was a call center which also served as the technical support center for users having trouble with the app. Some users were on hold for hours and finally gave up. 

How difficult would it have been to have an alpha/beta test plan? It would have been relatively easy. It could have started with 17 of the 1,700 precincts. If successful, another 17, then 170, and after all were happy, released to all. A solid test plan would have taken months. It is clear from the various news reports the Democratic leadership had little or no technical competency and the vendor who developed the app had little experience with apps. 

The leadership of the Democratic caucus did a terrible disservice to American democracy. With people already skeptical of Internet voting, the experts are now piling on saying “See, we told you so. Don’t even consider Internet voting”. The Internet had nothing to do with this massive failure. It all came down to one simple concept: Testing. 

Another root cause of the Iowa disaster is the lack of technical skills. Voting was delegated by the Constitution to the Secretaries of State most of whom are lawyers. The administration of voting takes place at the county level, 3,000 of them. The staff and volunteers are hard working and dedicated to enabling people to vote. Unfortunately, the system they have to work with is a 150-year-old paper based system, the staffers are not technical, and budgets to upgrade are limited. 

In 2016, 100 million people who could have voted did not. Why? There is a long list of reasons. Absentee and vote early paper-based voting is not the answer. In Election Attitude – How Internet Voting Leads to a Stronger Democracy, I described how our smartphones with biometric authentication and blockchain technology can automate the voting process with security, privacy, accuracy, and verifiability. If we can land a robot on Mars, we certainly can automate voting. We just need the right attitude politically and technologically and a lot of testing.

West Virginia has shown great leadership in this area. They have been working with a Boston based technology company called Voatz. Voatz has a team of technology and voting experts. They designed a mobile blockchain app which has proven to be secure and easy to use. Rather than roll it out at the last minute with no testing, West Virginia worked with 144 overseas military voters residing in 31 countries. Ballots were submitted via the app for the November 2018 election. Before that, there was a smaller pilot of the system in two West Virginia counties in May 2018. Voter satisfaction with Voatz Internet voting was high, and the vote was accurate and secure.

We should not let the mismanaged Iowa experience diminish the vision to enfranchise the 100 million people who didn’t vote in 2016. We need Internet voting to have a strong democracy. As Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet said, “We can do this.” 

On Thursday afternoon I made a presentation to about 50 members at the Hammock Dunes Club, where I am a member. The topics I discussed included 5G, augmented reality (AR), Bitcoin, Blockchain, CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing for cancer treatment, facial recognition, home automation, Internet voting, mHealth, robots, and AI. All of these have been and will continue to be topics of my weekly blog posts.

Tesla has now reached a market capitalization of $138 billion. This is remarkable but just a fraction of what I call the MAGFA group. See the table below. The five giants have now reached a market cap of five and a half trillion dollars. All five companies are global, but to put their massive valuation into perspective, it represents 21% of the market cap of the U.S. S&P 500. Shareholders are rejoicing, but government regulators and politicians are licking their chops. 

The next Meet the Author event will be February 14 in Palm Coast, Florida. Additional author events will be held in Florida during the 1st quarter of 2020 and then more back in Connecticut in the Spring. The table below shows events scheduled so far. Details on upcoming events will follow. Questions to [email protected]

There are many posts in this blog about knee surgeries and replacements. One of the problem areas is the meniscus, a C-shaped piece of rubbery yet tough cartilage which acts as a shock absorber between your shinbone and thighbone. A meniscus tear can occur if you suddenly twist your knee while bearing weight on it. The knee is the largest joint in the body, and a meniscus tear can result in swelling, popping, limping, giving way, and a lot of pain. Like many issues, age can be an issue contributing to meniscus tears.

A privately held medtech company with headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee, Active Implants LLC, develops orthopedic implant solutions designed to complement the natural biomechanics of the musculoskeletal system. The company’s goal is to allow patients to maintain or return to an active lifestyle. The current focus of Active Implants is to gain clinical validation for its NUsurface^® Meniscus Implant, the first artificial meniscus. The target market is to replace a meniscus which is damaged or deteriorating.

The NUsurface meniscus implant is designed for patients with persistent knee pain following medial meniscus surgery. The artificial meniscus is made from medical-grade polymer and other unique materials. Because of the composite structure and design, the artificial meniscus does not require fixation to bone or soft tissues. The NUsurface Implant design mimics the function of the natural meniscus and redistributes loads which are transmitted across the knee joint.

The NUsurface device is already being marketed in Belgium, Germany, Israel, and Italy. The U.S. FDA has designated the NUsurface implant as a “breakthrough device”. According to the Active Implants website, two clinical trials of the NUsurface® Meniscus Implant were fully enrolled as of June 2018. One trial is called SUN (Safety Using NUsurface^®) and the other VENUS (Verifying the Effectiveness of the NUsurface^® System). Final approval by the FDA is expected this year. If approved, it will be the first artificial meniscus in the United States.

As I wrote in Robot Attitude: How Robots and Artificial Intelligence Will Make Our Lives Better, we are continuing the journey where more and more non-biological items are being inserted in humans. At the same time, biological-like items are going into robots. When we reach the singularity, it will be very difficult to tell the difference between human and non-human beings. 

Source: First ‘Artificial Meniscus’ Wins FDA Breakthrough Device Designation | MDDI Online

Another of Elon Musk’s companies, spaceX, continues on a roll like Tesla. Wednesday morning there was a beautiful launch of a Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket’s nine Merlin engines put 60 more StarLink satellites in orbit to expand the Internet service goals of the company. We will hear much more about this in coming months. After the stage 1 booster separated, it returned to Earth and made a perfect landing on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. I was able to see the rocket from my terrace which is about  80 miles north. Atop the rocket were the 60 satellites and two fairing pieces, like a clam shell, which protect the satellites during the trip to space. A fairing is 43 ft long and 17 ft in diameter. It weighs approximately 4,000 pounds. After the two fairing halves tumbled back to Earth, a spaceX ship in the ocean with a huge net was able to catch one of the fairings. Truly amazing. The other fairing had a near miss at a second ship. A fairing costs about $6 million, so the attempts are  worthwhile. Isn’t it amazing American and Russian space agencies have not thought of re-using booster rockets and fairings after their many decades at space launches?

Tesla has now reached a market capitalization of $103 billion and Apple now exceeds $1.4 trillion. Microsoft is almost at $1.3 trillion. Amazon and Google are north of $900 billion and Facebook is approaching $600 million. Who would have thought these numbers would be possible?

The next Meet the Author event will be February 6 in Palm Coast, Florida. Additional author events will be held in Florida during the 1st quarter of 2020 and then more back in Connecticut in the Spring. The table below shows events scheduled so far. Details on upcoming events will follow. Questions to [email protected]

Several House members have introduced a bipartisan resolution to modernize how Congress operates. It includes the ability to vote remotely or take part in hearings online. A California Congressman said, “Across the nation we see the development of new, innovative ways of conducting business to improve communication and connectedness. It’s time for Congress to learn to be more mobile and adapt to the times in which we live.” Amen.

What a great idea, although long overdue. Consider how the Senate votes. On January 21, the Senate held 11 votes related to amendments to a pending resolution. First, let me say I am not going to make a political pronouncement about whether the 11 votes should or should not have been passed. I want to comment on the mechanics of how they voted, not the politics. In the House, when a vote is called, it is over in a few minutes. The count is shown in real-time and members can modify their vote up to an announced cutoff. In the Senate, they vote the same way they did 150 years ago.

Our Senate uses the NBC (No buttons or clicking) method. The roll call is the controlling technology. Each vote starts with “Mr. Alexander”. Mr. Alexander then stands up and casts his voice vote. “Ms. Baldwin”, “Mr. Barrosso”, “Mr. Bennet, “Ms. Blackburn”, and the same for the other 95. After Mr. Young stands and casts his voice vote, there is a very long silence. Not sure what somebody is doing. I would hope all the votes were entered into some kind of app which then showed the totals, but it would not surprise me if they manually counted the votes and then had a second person double check. A long document is then presented to whoever is in charge, in this case the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

As I have written in Election Attitude – How Internet Voting Leads to a Stronger Democracy and in numerous posts, mobile blockchain voting is very doable. All we need to do is impose the political and technological will to overcome the fear and the protection of the status quo. It can be done and be secure, private, accurate, and verifiable. Much more so than paper ballots. In a closed chamber where all the 100 voters are in the room, a simple wired keypad application could easily handle the voting task. It would be a near instant vote count.

Every month I get an email from a software company called Smile. It includes a report telling me how many minutes I saved for the month as a result of using an app called TextExpander. I have the app on all my devices. When I type eatl, my device types on its own “Election Attitude – How Internet Voting Leads to a Stronger Democracy”. The time savings are up to an hour a month. Imagine how many hours the Senate could save if it had electronic voting.

Our Congress is the body of politicians who the tech industry is urging to develop regulations for artificial intelligence, facial recognition, cryptocurrency, and other critical and highly technical issues. Are the politicians, especially the Senate, up to it? You can guess how I would cast my vote on that question. The latest survey shows a job satisfaction of 9% for Congress. No surprise.