Crunch Your IoT Data Before It Clogs the Network

Paul Glynn makes a good point here – for the Internet of things to be effective and efficient, some data refinement needs to take place at a local level. If you pass every measurement, second by second, you will quickly clog your M2M pipes upstream to the cloud. Essential data regarding context and environment needs to pass, and the rest needs to stay local on the internal M2M framework. For measurements that need to be near real time, you need to make a determination of what’s the best sampling rate for your application to be effective. (Every three seconds? Every five minutes?) You will also need to threshold some M2M events for detection reasons – e.g. for a medical application a heart rate sensor ticking away at 65 BPM isn’t news the cloud needs, but a heart rate sensor ticking at 130 BPM while the subject is otherwise at complete rest might be.

In today’s IoT frenzy, a lot of companies rush to connect sensors and provide all sorts of monitoring services, and carriers will happily bill them for the data that transits through their networks.

But sending all the raw data to the cloud for processing and intelligence is inefficient and expensive, notes Paul Glynn, CEO of Irish startup Davra Networks. With the release of its RuBAN application enablement platform, the three-year-old Irish company jumps on the “fog computing” bandwagon with a clear goal to add local value to IoT data before it even reaches the cloud.

“Out of the estimated 50 billion connected devices that may be deployed by 2020, the vast majority will not have a direct connection to the cloud but will pass on their data through local gateways or routers,” explains Glynn.

More: Crunch Your IoT Data Before It Clogs the Network

The Demise of Spinning Disks and Other Technology Verges: Updated

More than a couple of years back I made predictions about spinning disks that are speedily playing out now. As SSD’s both increase in space and decrease in costs the move to adopt them in all infrastructure is accelerating. If you are going to pay for a disk now you should consider the benefits (speed, instant on, low energy, low maintenance,) of SSD unless it’s massive storage you need – and even that barrier will quickly fall once SSD’s come in terabyte sizes for < $150.00. So if you are in a business dependent on spinning disks, it's past time to consider product migration strategies. From 2 years ago:

It’s very clear that memory devices that use spinning platters and disks are all headed to obsolescence soon. This means Hard drives, CD players, DVD’s and DVD players. So what will the replacement be?

The most likely replacement is streaming digital mixed with the SD-MMC card in some form or another. Since manufacturers are making 128 GB versions of these chips, it’s likely that the lower GB versions will become dirt cheap soon, and when that happens 16 GB chips might become the media that movies get sold on. (The typical HD or Blu ray movie takes less than 8GB on average on DVD’s now.) There are also solid state devices using similar memory technology for capacity right now, while solid devices like the Ipod touch are relatively expensive for the average consumer for the memory (64 GB), they will improve.

via The Demise of Spinning Disks and Other Technology Verges | Noblesse Oblige.

Political Polarization and Growing Ideological Consistency

What’s driving this? There are probably many things, but some of this divide is created by reactionaries – people who can’t deal with the rapid rate of accelerating change in the modern world. They exist in both parties, but the GOP reactionaries in the Tea Party are in the process of tearing down the basic structure of their political constituencies to fight modernity in my opinion. This is also why sovereign citizen groups and anti government militia forces are on the rise and why all of our basic institutions are under concerted attack.

Interactive graph: use header tabs and year drop downs to see the shifts as measured by affiliations and political activity, click the animate header to automatically page through years.


The phenomenon doesn’t just belong to the Tea Party however – if you look at the graphs at PEW you see that both sides have shifted into hardened stances further left and right than in the past. Maybe one side of the graph is in reaction to the other’s sudden shift (use the drop down to view these shifts,) but if we are to go forward we can’t continue to centrifuge ourselves apart very much longer.

The ideological consolidation nationwide has happened on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, but the long-term shift among Democrats stands out as particularly noteworthy. The share of Democrats who are liberal on all or most value dimensions has nearly doubled from just 30% in 1994 to 56% today. The share who are consistently liberal has quadrupled from just 5% to 23% over the past 20 years.

If you view the graph objectively without ideological blinders on, you can see that the whole country was moving the center leftwards with the right somewhat accommodating that shift all the way up until 2004 – then you get a fast reactionary bounce, and a hard one as Toomey’s Great RINO hunt started right after Bush II got elected to second term.

How do we get out of this condition? Well both sides have to stop being ideologically lazy. If you want to get the other side to shift, you have to convince them, not condemn them. You have to give them reasons to move, and the most convincing reasons are almost always fiscal. It’s time to put aside the fairy tales and come up with concrete policies that will help our diminishing middle and lower classes. IF you can do that then you gain the “Big Mo” like the left had up until 2004 — just dig in your heels more and you just get stuck — like we are now.

suggestion: compare animating “overall” “politically active” animation to “overall general population”.

Main PEW RESEARCH Article, more graphs and information at the link below:

A decade ago, the public was less ideologically consistent than it is today. In 2004, only about one-in-ten Americans were uniformly liberal or conservative across most values. Today, the share who are ideologically consistent has doubled: 21% express either consistently liberal or conservative opinions across a range of issues – the size and scope of government, the environment, foreign policy and many others.

The new survey finds that as ideological consistency has become more common, it has become increasingly aligned with partisanship. Looking at 10 political values questions tracked since 1994, more Democrats now give uniformly liberal responses, and more Republicans give uniformly conservative responses than at any point in the last 20 years

More: Political Polarization and Growing Ideological Consistency

The Internet: for More Than Cats

We’ve had a day and a half of pretty steady rain so I thought I would go down to the creek crossing and take some of those “water rushing by” photos like the one below.

IMG_9282

Unfortunately Kasey tangled her leash in low hanging branches and while pulling it out I bumped the tripod. The camera tilted over and fell into a pile of mud while I tried unsuccessfully to grab it before it hit. The accident caked the top and side of the camera with a coat of mud, which I brushed off and continued taking photos.  I really thought nothing more of it until I got back home and tried to take a photo in automatic mode – one that would normally pop up the flash.

The flash did not pop up, and nothing I did would get it to do so. I got out my old toothbrush and some small dental picks (most good technicians keep a couple of those,) and cleaned out the mud coated hot shoe, and the cracks of the built in  pop up flash – but it still wouldn’t work.

After fiddling in the camera menu awhile I discovered that the camera thought that an external flash was attached, which meant that the mud was either depressing something in the shoe or that there was a short in the ETTL contacts. Either way it needed more than just an external cleaning, which is pretty scary since I really can’t afford expensive camera repairs or replacement at present.

So to make sure I disassembled things right I Googled “canon hotshoe repair” and discovered Conrad Erb Photography’s flash repair page here. It was a lifesaver, showing exactly how to disassemble the hot shoe correctly. I was able to get the hot shoe off, cleaned, and reassembled which fixed my flash problem – so hat’s off to Conrad and if you are in Philly and need any type of photography he’s your guy. Trust me someone who loves cameras enough to meticulously detail a repair like this will get your wedding photos done well.

Anyway, here are the rest of my photos – you can see where I was “chimping in” onto the best settings for the light & water speed, and you can also see a series taken through a bridge railing that demonstrates the difference between f 4.0 and f 32.

IMG_9297 IMG_9323 IMG_9309 IMG_9308 IMG_9303 IMG_9295 IMG_9285 IMG_9284 IMG_9280 IMG_9278 IMG_9277 IMG_9276 IMG_9274 IMG_9223 IMG_9217 IMG_9210 IMG_9206

Apple IOS 8 adds extensions for IoT

The new IOS extensions are Apple’s way of trying to meld their walled garden gear into the Internet of things. Essentially Apple has to poke more holes in the garden walls if they want their devices to stay relevant and useful in the coming home constellation of other devices and applications that must interact, talk with each other, and most important – know their context and their user’s context, in order to provide best utility and “artificial AI” semi-aware functionality. The real challenge is to keep those holes secure while functional.

 

Standards will evolve for this eventually…

Explaining iOS 8’s extensions: Opening the platform while keeping it secure | Ars Technica

Allowing third-party apps to communicate with other apps is just one of the problems extensions are meant to solve—third-party keyboards, connecting apps to cloud services other than iCloud, and the new Notification Center widgets are all their own kind of extensions.

Not all parts of iOS can be changed (or “extended”) by third parties. If you wanted to replace one of the default apps with your own or add some kind of toggle to the Control Center, you can’t do that. Apple defines a handful of pre-set “extension points” to show developers where they can add stuff. The iOS 8 extension points are as follows:

via Explaining iOS 8’s extensions: Opening the platform while keeping it secure | Ars Technica.