NBC is learning how to present live sporting events on the Internet, but still has a way to go.
I've been commenting on the online coverage of the Tour de France and the Olympic Games for several years. The BBC and IT4 in England have done a better job than NBC, but NBC is improving their sporting event coverage and I enjoyed this year's Tour using their iPad app. (They also have Web and Android versions).
Let's look at the app. The user interface has five modes -- live video, standings, stages, riders and more:
Five viewer modes
You spend most of your time in the four-frame live video mode:
The four-frame live video user interface
Live video is shown in the upper left, and one can toggle the video to full screen. The text column on the right has frames showing the peloton and other rider groups and a curated, Twitter-like news feed. The graphic frame at the bottom has five optional modes, as shown here:
Options for the bottom window
The user can zoom or pan the bottom frame, as shown here:
Bottom window zooms and pans
The text windows on the right scroll and nearly every object on the screen is a hot link. For example, touching the word Peloton below popped up a scrollable list of the names of the riders in the peloton. Touching the rider's name, would bring up data about him.
Most objects are hot links.
I spend most of my time watching live video, but frequently switch to one of the other modes to check the standings or to see how a particular rider, team or nation is doing.
The stages mode is most interesting. It has facts about each stage and, more important, archives of the completed stages. Shortly after a stage is completed, you can go back and watch highlight clips or the video of the entire stage and review the standings and other statistics.
Finally, The biggest improvement over last year was not in the data presentation or user interface, but in NBC's offer -- I paid $14.99 and there were no commercials!
Suggestions for next year
The viewing experience was better than last year, but I'd still like to see several improvements.
1. As we saw above, the live presentation consists of a video stream and three data panes. The data panes and video are synchronized as long as you watch it in real time. If you pause the video for a short time, it "fast forwards" to the current live point, where it is in synch with the ancillary data. But, if you pause for a relatively long time -- maybe half an hour or an hour -- the video resumes where you left off, but the data stream reflects the current state of the race so they are out of synch.
Check the following screen shot. The riders in the video pane are climbing a steep mountain, but the course-progress pane at the bottom of the screen shows them on the subsequent descent (blue). The text on the right is synchronized with the course-progress map, so it is also out of synch with the video.
The video and ancillary (bottom and right hand) material are out of synch.
After pausing, you should have the option of picking up where you left off or jumping to the current point in the race. Either way, the video and ancillary material should remain in synch.
2. A complete archive copy of the video of a stage is posted shortly after it ends. That is good, but the ancillary material -- group positions and news posts -- is not available. Viewing the archive video is like watching a TV broadcast -- not an Internet performance. They should archive the synchronized data stream along with the video.
3. While watching the live stream or an archive stream, I'd like to have a single-touch, 15-second video rewind, as in the UK ITV4 viewer.
4. Similarly, I would like to be able to jump to the start of a video "chapter" with a single click or tap as you could with the BBC's player from the 2012 Olympic Games. A chapter might be something like the finals of the 100 meter dash in the Olympics or the sprint to the top of a mountain during the Tour de France. The person who is maintaining the ancillary news feed would create the chapter entry points as they posted the news updates.
5. The tablet interface is suitable for "leaning forward" -- switching modes and looking things up, but the small screen in your hands or lap is not so great for just "leaning back" and watching the race. I want to be able to mirror the video on my TV screen with a single touch.
I was watching on an iPad, so could have done that if my TV set were equipped with an Apple TV interface device. I don't have an Apple TV, but I do have a Google Chromecast, and Google just announced the ability to mirror the screen of selected Android phones and tablets on a Chromecast-equipped TV set. The updated Chromecast app is labeled "beta," and it took me two reboots to get it to work, but as you see here, I can now cast my phone video to my TV set:
Mirroring a phone on a Chromecast-enabled TV set
(This video is not from the NBC app because I have that installed on an iPad, not my phone).
The video quality is good, though not excellent. The imperfection is most noticeable on text which is part of the video stream -- it is a little blurry around the edges. Static text looks fine from across the room. Chromecast mirroring works if you have a compatible phone or tablet, but, hopefully by next year, NBC will Chromecast enable their app, allowing for switching between leaning forward to display data, post tweets, etc and leaning back to watch the race on a TV screen.
At first, new media mimic old media and NBC's earlier attempts at covering live sporting events online was shaped by their traditional TV coverage -- shoot video and insert commercials. This year, they have developed good ancillary data capability to go along with their video and dropped the commercials for a flat fee. Once they get the video and data synchronized and archived and I can lean back and watch the video or lean forward and play with the data, I'll give them five stars.
My grandson Oscar will enter the 9th grade this fall and he and a friend are working their way through Algebra II at the Khan Academy this summer. No one told them to do it -- no one assigned it – they just decided to do it on their own.
Have you used an online instructional website (e.g.,Khan Academy, Coursera) as assigned for a class?
Have you used an online instructional website (e.g., Khan Academy, Coursera) to learn something on your own?
The following table shows the percents of students who answered frequently or occasionally:
Overall, more than 40 percent of the incoming freshmen were frequently or occasionally assigned to use an online instructional website during the past year and nearly 70 percent had used online sites on their own.
Digging a bit deeper, we see that students entering public schools were a little more likely to have online experience than those entering private schools. (Public colleges and universities also offer more online instruction). To me, the most interesting finding was that students entering historically black colleges and universities are much more likely to have online education experience -- on their own or assigned -- than the typical incoming freshman. I could speculate on the cause of this discrepancy, but it really requires further research.
College expectations correlate with high school experience -- students who are going to historically black and, to a lesser extent, public schools are more likely to expect to take online classes in college:
The survey also yields some insight into the importance of having used online classes. They correlate online participation with a multi-dimensional positive habits of mind index and conclude that
Students who chose to independently use online instructional websites are also more likely to exhibit behaviors and traits associated with academic success and lifelong learning.
My grandson Oscar and his friend may be ahead of the curve, having been assigned Khan Academy lessons while in junior high, but it looks like today's kids know the Web is good for school work as well as playing games, posting selfies and building Minecraft worlds.
-----
Update 9/1/2016
The latest UCLA survey of incoming first-time freshmen is out. The following table shows the percentages of students who used an online education site during the previous year -- either on their own or for a class assignment:
Click to enlarge
Here are three observations:
Students were more likely to take an online class on their own than as part of an assignment.
Freshmen at historically black schools were more likely to have taken an online class than others.
Online study increased more rapidly between 2014 and 2015 than during the previous year.
This table shows the averages for all schools combined -- it clearly shows the increased use of online material.
We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and Ms. Belmont and are contacting them to personally apologize. The way in which our representative communicated with them is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect
Great -- except that Lauren Bruce, a former Comcast customer account executive says the customer service rep in the recording was not going rogue, but adhering to company policy. Bruce says the Comcast rep in the recording was trying to upsell the caller and also complete a mandatory questionnaire they had for each call. She says it was sometimes easier to make up answers than get them out of irate customers and that the customer rep in this call is being made a scapegoat.
Here is a copy of the Comcast retention representative handbook -- the call rating system encourages them to be persistent and -- "take control, ask targeted questions, make an offer", etc. I'd hate to have their job -- it's like working on an electronics assembly line.
NBC is learning how to present live sporting events on the Internet.
I've been commenting on the online coverage of the Tour de France and the Olympic Games for several years and the BBC and IT4 in England have done a better job than NBC ... until now. This year, I am watching The Tour using NBC's iPad app, and I like it a lot. (They also have Web and Android versions).
Let's look at the app. The user interface has five modes -- live video, standings, stages, riders and more:
Five viewer modes
You spend most of your time in the four-frame live video mode:
The four-frame live video user interface
Live video is shown in the upper left, and one can toggle the video to full screen. The text column on the right has frames showing the peloton and other rider groups and a curated, Twitter-like news feed. The graphic frame at the bottom has five optional modes, as shown here:
Options for the bottom window
The user can zoom or pan the bottom frame, as shown here:
Bottom window zooms and pans
The text windows on the right scroll and nearly every object on the screen is a hot link. For example, touching the word Peloton below popped up a scrollable list of the names of the riders in the peloton. Touching the rider's name, would bring up data about him.
I spend most of my time watching live video, but frequently switch to one of the other modes to check the standings or to see how a particular rider, team or nation is doing.
The stages mode is most interesting. It has facts about each stage and, more important, archives of the completed stages. Shortly after a stage is completed, you can go back and watch highlight clips or the video of the entire stage and review the standings and other statistics.
suggestions for next year
The viewing experience is good, but I'd still like to see some improvements. One would be adding a single-touch, 15-second video rewind, as in the UK ITV4 viewer. Another would be showing the text frames -- group positions and news posts -- along with the archived video of the completed stages. (Currently you can only replay the video stream). There's also some missing data -- the rider database includes a biography field, but it is not populated.
Finally, the tablet interface is terrific for "leaning forward" -- switching modes and looking things up, but the small screen in your hands or lap is not so great for just "leaning back" and watching the race. I want to be able to mirror the video on my TV screen with a single touch.
If I had an Apple TV, I could do that now with my iPad. My YATS Podcast buddies tell me that Google is updating their Chromecast app to enable mirroring the screens of selected Android phones and tablets on TV sets equipped with a Chromecast device. Better yet, how about NBC Chromecast-enabling their app?
As I said at the start, I like this experience a lot. Some part of that is attributable to NBC's app and some is due to the inherent nature of a tablet and touch interface. I also like NBC's offer -- I paid $14.99 and did not have to watch any commercials. By next year, I expect to have a five-star setup for watching The Tour -- while leaning forward and while leaning back.
-----
Update 7/17/2014
I said one missing feature was the ability to sit back and watch race video on a TV set. Yesterday, I received an update to the Chromecast app that enables mirroring of an Android screen on a Chromecast-equipped TV set. As you see here, I can now cast my phone video to my TV set.
(This video is not from the NBC app because I have that installed on an iPad, not my phone).
This new version of the Chromecast app is labeled "beta," and it is a bit glitchy. I had to reboot the Chromecast a couple of times to get it to work.
When it is working, the video is quite acceptable, though not perfectly sharp. The imperfection is most noticeable on text which is part of the video stream -- it is a little blurry around the edges. Static text looks fine from across the room.
This brings us a step closer to the complete leaning forward and back experience for watching live sporting events -- closer to a five-star review.
-----
Update 7/20/2014
NBC has populated the biography field in the rider database and it is now displayed. That was an easy suggestion to satisfy, but the others will require some re-architecting of the system to provide access to a buffered version of the video in real time.
-----
Update 7/24/2014
I stated that my biggest criticism of NBC's iPad app was that archived replays of the video coverage of completed stages are not accompanied by the synchronized course map, news feed and dynamic standings of the live coverage -- if you miss a live stage, you cannot replay the full experience from the archive.
I've now discovered a similar synchronization problem during the live presentation. If you pause the live playback for a short time then restart it, the video fast-forwards to the current live point, synchronizing with the ancillary material, but, if you pause for a long time, the video does not catch up with the ancillary material so they are out of synch.
Check the following screen shot. The riders in the video pane are climbing a steep mountain, but the course-progress pane at the bottom of the screen shows them on the subsequent descent (blue). The text on the right is synchronized with the course-progress map, so it is also out of synch with the video.
That will cost them a "star" in my rating -- let's cut it to three stars.
My next desktop will be an LG Chromebase or something similar -- how about you?
A while back, I reviewed an Acer Chromebook, comparing it to my Windows laptop and a tablet. While the laptop remains my main computer, the Chromebook easily beat the tablet for my application mix. (More worrisome for Apple, my 10-year old grandson agreed -- he liked the Chromebook better than his iPad). But, now we have a new entry, the LG Chromebase, an all-in-one desktop running the Chrome OS and browser. How does it stack up against my laptop, tablet and the Chromebook?
Where does the Chromebase fit in?
The bottom like is that my next desktop will be an LG Chromebase or something similar -- like a chromebox with a good keyboard and display. To understand why, check out the following picture of my current desktops -- two old tower PCs running Windows 7 and an iMac.
Kids installing crapware (and playing games)
The towers are used as kid arcade machines and the iMac is used for Web surfing, email, Skype calls, video Hangouts and kid games. That's it. No resource-intensive applications like video editing. (Time Warner's Internet connectivity can get in the way of those video Hangouts, but that is a different rant).
I've not used a Chromebase, but, based on my experience with the Chromebook, I am confident that a Chromebase with 4 Gbytes of memory could handle all of my desktop applications. It would run them as fast as the desktops, boot way faster, be more reliable, and, most important, be locked down. Look back at the picture of that room full of little kids playing games -- how frequently would you guess they click on some bogus link and download some cool-sounding program that turns out to be crapware or worse?
Of course, all this holds for my desktop applications, but it may not for yours. What if there were a good, Chrome-based version of Microsoft Office -- would that do it for you? Still not satisfied? How about the equivalent of an audio editor like Audacity and an image editor like Paint.net? That would not be enough to get me to give up my laptop, but it would be getting close.
Microsoft has released Office for the iPad (too little too late?) and will soon have an Android version. Is a browser-based version be far behind?
In December 2008 Bill Gates wrote a memo warning that "allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company." In January 2010 Steve Jobs predicted that "The world is moving to HTML5." In September, 2012, Mark Zuckerberg said "I think the biggest mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native ... because it just wasn't there." (Yet).
I think they were all right -- the trick is getting the timing right (like the Mac, not the Lisa) -- LG thinks the time is right about now.
There are four articles on digital education in the June 28, 2014 issue:
Creative destruction: A cost crisis, changing labour markets and new technology will turn an old institution on its head.
The digital degree: The staid higher-education business is about to experience a welcome earthquake.
A winning recipe: Two big Brazilian education firms, now in the process of merging, show how universities can do both quantity and quality.
Wealth by degrees: The returns to investing in a university education vary enormously.
The articles survey trends and developments and speculate on the future of both elite and mass-eucation universities.
For example, at MIT over half the 4,500 students take a MOOC as part of their course and half of their edX (MOOC) students come from developing countries. Anant Agarwal, who runs edX, proposes an alternative to the standard American four-year degree course. Students could spend an introductory year learning via a MOOC, followed by two years attending university and a final year starting part-time work while finishing their studies online.
In Brazil, private universities, are enjoying success with innovative blends of online, televised and in-person classes at widespread locations. At first they had the same sorts of problems as US trade schools face today, but they are now succeeding at offering effective, low-cost education.
Change is inevitable.
MOOC students are international, with varying levels of education.
Brazil has innovative mass-education.
Public support is falling and tuition rising.
The US educated a relatively high percent of the population in the past, but South Korea is the leader today.
That was a big, general problem, but there are also many small, specific UI glitches. Here are two, one from Apple and one from Microsoft to keep things even. Let's start with Apple.
I just “upgraded" iTunes for Windows. Before the upgrade, I saw a simple Refresh All button in the lower right corner of the screen. About once a week, I would launch iTunes, click that button and it downloaded the new episodes of the podcasts I subscribe to.
After the “upgrade,” the refresh button was gone and I did not see anything like it. I went to an Apple help forum, where, someone had asked about the same problem and learned that the refresh capability was still there, but one had to select the List tab then click on the unlabeled circular arrow in the upper left corner. Well hidden Apple!
Here's a UI glitch from Microsoft -- I put my Windows laptop into Sleep mode several times a day. To do so, I click on the Start button then slide the cursor over to click on the small arrow to the right of the Shut Down button, slide the cursor to the right and click on Sleep. That usually works, but since I am doing all of this with a trackpad and the arrow is small, I screw up and accidentally click Shut Down about once a month – wasting time and perhaps losing data.
Do some minor UI problems bug you? Let me know what they are in a comment.
(Cross posted on http://laredcubana.blogspot.com/)
The obstacles are political, not technical.
Eric Schmidt and other Google executives traveled to Cuba where they met with members of the Internet community and the government. Google is providing Internet access in a few US Cities and is considering others -- might they provide Internet access in Cuba?
Consider the following:
Of course, both governments would have to agree for Google or any other satellite ISP to connect Cubans. I believe that, if the Cuban government would agree, the US would as well.
But, the Cuban government has feared the Internet since the time of their first IP connectivity in 1996. At that time, there was high level debate about the Internet. The hard liners, led by Raúl Castro, argued against the Internet while others argued for a "Chinese" approach of supporting Internet use while censoring content and surveilling users. (It seems Fidel Castro was ambivalent).
The hard liners won in 1996, but what about today? Schmidt reports that a "number of the people" he spoke with said "the eventual model of Cuba would be more like China or Vietnam than of Venezuela or Mexico." If some of those were young government officials, there may be a glimmer of hope.
-----
Update, July 3, 2014
It is noteworthy that Jared Cohen, Google's Director of Ideas, accompanied Schmidt on this trip -- before joining Google, he was a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff and served as an advisor to Condoleezza Rice and later Hillary Clinton.
The Stokab report should be required reading for all local government officials.
Stockholm is one of the top Internet cities in the world -- how do they do it? Wholesale communication infrastructure in Stockholm is provided by AB Stokab, which is owned by the Stockholm City Council. Stokab leases dark fiber and space in nodes/hubs where customers can install communication equipment and interconnect networks since 1994. Stokab's goal has been to build a competition-neutral infrastructure capable of meeting future communication needs, spurring economic activity, insuring diversity and freedom of choice and minimizing disruption to the city’s streets.
How has it worked out?
Quite well, as you see in the following figure, taken from Stokab's report on the socio-economic cost and benefit of the project:
Accumulated investments and socio-economic
return in million Swedish Kronor.
The returns shown here reflect increased property value, returns of the municipal housing companies (currently breakeven, due to large investments), value for tenants, increased employment, Stokab’s profit, saving for the municipality’s and county’s data and IT costs, and increased economic activity in the supplier industry. To drill down into the details, see the Stokab report summary or the full Stokab report.
In spite of the fact that Wheeler came from the ISP industry, you have to like a guy who says:
If the people, acting through their elected local governments, want to pursue competitive community broadband, they shouldn't be stopped by state laws promoted by cable and telephone companies that don't want that competition.
The situation in the US will not change until the Internet becomes a political issue for the general public and that may be happening -- check out comedian John Oliver's piece on the Internet. Wheeler watched Oliver's piece and responded -- check that out too -- it's funny!
ISP industry lobbyists claim that government involvement interferes with The Market, leading to waste and inefficiency, but in Stockholm, the municipal government has created a competitive market. This story is biased because we can't expect every local government to be as skillful as Stockholm's, but their example is worth considering.
The Supreme Court says Aereo is distributing copyrighted material, but there is demand for their service.
An Aereo antenna
The Supreme Court has ruled against Aereo, a company that stores local, over-the-air TV broadcasts then streams then on the Internet. The Court ruled that Aereo was retransmitting copyrighted material without permission.
The lower court case against Aereo challenged their technology claim -- questioning whether those dime-sized antennae were electronically independent. (If they were acting as a single, integrated antenna, Aereo would have been a clear copyright violator).
Expert witnesses on the technology were divided during the first case -- Aereo's expert said the antennae were independent and the TV station's expert disagreed.
The Supreme Court decision did not depend on a technology argument -- they held that Aereo was not in the antenna leasing business but were sellers of subscriptions to watch copyrighted television programs.
What about the future of local TV? If those tiny antennae really worked independently, Aereo could sell them to end-users and let them receive local broadcasts over the air, but I suspect they either do not work as claimed or only work if they are located very close to the transmitting antenna.
Regardless, the current Aereo business model is toast, but they have shown that there is a market for local content delivered over the Internet. If customers are willing to pay for streaming of local content (including ads), why don't the copyright holders offer the service themselves or hire Aereo to do it for them?
-----
Update 7/1/2014
I said that those dime-sized antennae seemed bogus to me -- that they could not truly be independent. Pete Putnam agrees and presents a detailed technical analysis supporting his conclusion that the antenna array would have to be within a couple hundred feet of the TV transmission tower for such small antennae to work independently.
That is technical support for the broadcaster's assertion that Aereo was essentially doing the same thing as a cable company -- capturing and retransmitting copyrighted material -- but without paying the retransmission fees charged to cable companies.
That raises the question -- how much are those retransmission fees? I went to the Dish Network Web site and found that "Local channels for non-qualifying packages are $6.00 per month." Dish evidently finds it profitable to pay the retransmission fees and charge customers $6 per month. They also offer "Superstaions" for $2 per month each.
So, why doesn't Aereo or someone else go into the legal business of paying the retransmission fees, keeping track of the number of viewers for the sake of advertising sales, and offer local channels over the Internet? Aereo showed there was a market demand for such service.
------
Update
7/20/2014
I've expressed doubt over the technical feasibility of Aereo's claim that they were renting independent TV antennas to their customers, but the Supreme Court ruled that even if that technology did work, Aereo was essentially acting as a cable company. I suggested that they had demonstrated a demand for local TV over the Internet and suggested that they pay the retransmission fees and become a "cable" company. But, the Copyright Office does not agree that they are a cable company, and, even if they are, the broadcasters might be able to force them to carry arbitrary bundles of channels like they do "real" cable companies. I am not a lawyer, but it seems Aereo is finished. There is demand for local TV streamed online -- will the broadcasters allow that to happen at any price?
-----
Update 9/30/2014
The Supreme Court decided that Aereo was a reseller of copyrighted material, not an antenna leaser, so ruled that they could not rebroadcast local, over the air TV signals. That shot them down ... for the time being.
A smartphone with a cheap attachment can diagnose eye disease and let us restore sight to millions of blind people
In 1973, E. F. Schumacher published a book called "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered." Schumacher wrote of the need for "approriate technology" -- technology that was small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled. His emphasis was on, but not confined to, developing nations.
Andrew Bastawrous' low-cost smartphone ophthalmic tools are a textbook example of appropriate technology. He uses an Android phone to assess vision, view the retina, and simulate a persons vision for another to see the world as they do. Eye exams are conducted by technicians on bicycles with solar panels on their backpacks to keep the phones charged. They also have a map-based app to maintain their database of patients and village elders.
Two quotes from the talk:
There are 39 million people in the world who are blind. Eighty percent of them are living in low-income countries such as Kenya, and the absolute majority do not need to be blind. They are blind from diseases that are either completely curable or preventable.
It makes it possible to pick up diseases of the eye and of the body that would not be possible without access to the eye, and that clip-on device can be manufactured for just a few dollars, and people can be cured of blindness, and I think it says a lot about us as a human race if we've developed cures and we don't deliver them. But now we can.
For more information on Andrew Bastawrous and his project as well as a transcript and downloadable audio and video copies of the podcast (6:33), follow this link.
Solar power charges the backpack and the
technician travels on a bicycle or motor bike.
Universities are doing an increasingly poor job of entry-level training -- will industry take over?
My first job after college was with IBM. As soon as I was hired, I was sent to San Francisco for an eight-week training course in which I was introduced to the organization and its culture and taught to wire the control panels of unit-record machines and design unit-record systems. After that phase one training, I worked for a while, then went to a second and later a third class.
In those days, IBM hired people regardless of their major in school, based on an aptitude test and interviews. (The most senior technical person in our office and my first mentor was an English major). IBM assumed the responsibility of training entry-level employees.
A few decades later, universities were expected to finance entry-level training. Companies wanted new hires who were productive on day one. That worked pretty well as long as the cost of education was reasonable. (My tuition at UCLA was $76 per semester).
But, that system has broken down -- society has cut support for universities and, to be honest, IBM did a better job of entry-level training than many of our universities. As we see below, today's students often borrow large sums to pay for their college education and many end up in dead-end jobs.
Percent of graduates in jobs not requiring a degree College graduates: age 22-65 with a bachelor's degree or higher Recent graduates: age 22-27 with a bachelor's degree or higher
Shaded areas designate recessions.
Good non-college jobs: at least $45,000 a year low-wage jobs: $25,000 a year or less
Shaded areas designate recessions.
IBM may not be offering the same 3-phase training that I had as a new hire, but they are offering MOOCs at universities through their Academic Initiative and have recently agreed to partner with 28 business schools and universities on developing data science curriculum and programs.
The Georgia Tech MS degree will cost students $7,000 and a Udacity nanodegree will cost approximately $2,400 -- about $200 per month for 12 months. AT&T is sponsoring some of their employees in the masters program and will offer internships to 100 nanodegree graduates.
Online education has also reduced the cost of tuition reimbursement benefits for employers. Starbucks is offering tuition reimbursement for employees who complete an online bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University.
Online education has boomed with the spread of Massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs have had successes and failures, but the infusion of capital and interest has triggered a wave of innovation in technology and pedagogy. New media often mimic and substitute for old media. We first saw MOOCs as a replacement for university education, but it may be that their major impact will be on vocational training.
Udacity has pivoted from university education to lifelong vocational training and the deal looks good enough to induce companies like AT&T and Starbucks to cover part of the cost.
What might it mean if employer-subsidized vocational training catches on?
Traditional universities will lose students. The majority of students see a degree as a path to a job, and universities control certification. If a $2,400 nanodegree gets one a good entry-level job, many students will skip the university.
University education is much more common today than it was when I started at IBM. Universities, like many other organizations, typically try to grow, leading to aggressive marketing programs and lowered admission standards. While a university might have an incentive to admit and retain poorly qualified students, an employer does not. The company personnel department may replace the university admission committee as the gatekeeper to the middle class.
That might be efficient, but tying education to employment has a downside. Consider the effect of tying medical insurance to employment -- it is an important part of an employee's benefits, but it discourages mobility, harming both the economy and the individual.
The courses I have mentioned here are not typical MOOCs, but they are compatible with MOOCs. For example, Udacity has not spelled out the details, but a nanodegree will involve testing for certification and, no doubt, more personal interaction with instructors than today's MOOCs. However, they also intend to make the teaching material available as a MOOC. Self-study students will not get credit or personal attention, but they will have access to the same material as paying students. The material will be a fringe benefit for society and an advertisement for Udacity.
As Steve Jobs used to say -- one more thing. I've been talking about vocational training, but I think there is also demand for curiosity-driven, non-degree, lifelong edcuation -- edutainment if you will. That may be the way those nanodegree graduates round out their education.
-----
Update 9/19/2014
At a lower level, we are also seeing online trade schools. For example, Open Colleges in Australia. They claim to have over 700,000 students and offer trade school courses in these areas:
That sounds good, but digging a bit deeper I became skeptical. The site reminded me of a TV ad for a trade school -- lots of rosy career promises, special offers and testimonials from students. I tried to find the cost of their classes or career preparation programs, but did not find a way to get the cost without starting to enroll. I did, however, learn that I could pay by the month or fortnight and would get a discount if I paid up front for the entire course.
With my skepticism aroused, I took their multiple choice test of my language, literacy and numeracy skills and learned that I was skillful enough to be admitted to their Certificate III and IV level courses. I was not qualified for their Diploma level courses. Did I mention that I gave random answers to the questions? Just lucky I guess.
I did not spend much time on their site and they may do a great job of training and finding employment for their students, but whether they do or do not, there may be room for MOOC-like trade schools.
This acquisition is ostensibly a data play, not a connectivity play, but couldn't a constellation of low-earth orbit Skyboxes cover the globe? Teledesic 2?
Now, Google has acquired Skybox Imaging for $500 million. Skybox uses very small satellites orbiting at an altitude of 600 kilometers, which means they move at over seven kilometers per second relative to the surface of the Earth. Their technology is sufficiently advanced to compensate for that speed and produce videos that clearly show the movement of vehicles -- check this video:
Off hand, this seems more like a data gathering move than part of a developing nation and rural connectivity strategy -- they can use these images to look at traffic (for self-driving cars?), count ships in a port or cars in parking lots, etc. For examples, check this video:
But, they plan to launch many of these low-earth orbit satellites -- couldn't they be used for global connectivity as well? Several companies were formed to do just that in the 1990s. Bill Gates, Paul Allen and a Saudi prince backed the best-known one, Teledesic, but the technology of the time was not up to the task and the company failed.
Shifting emphasis, you can see an earlier video of the Skybox entreprenurial team presenting their vision at the Stanford Busiiness School here.
While this effort is not directly tied to providing connectivity, it beefs up Google's space technology and skills. Google is becoming a player in the space game along with Internet entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, and Richard Brnason's Virgin Galactic. There are rumors that Google is negotiating a stake in Virgin Galactic and one can't help thinking Musk and Bezos are watching all this with interest.
One of our grand challenges is to bring Internet connectivity to rural areas and developing nations and Google may be working toward that goal. They are experimenting with terrestrial and extra-terrestrial wireless technology. I will look at terrestrial wireless in a subsequent post -- this one focuses on extra-terrestrial technologies.
During the last couple decades, NGOs, governments and entrepreneurs have worked with four extra-terrestrial connectivity technologies:
(See pictures at the end of this post)
Let's look at Google's projects in this context.
High altitude platforms (HAPs) are blimps, drones or balloons that hover or circulate in the stratosphere. They have cloudless access to solar energy and being above the weather helps with control, but their signals must travel through rain and clouds. They are the lowest flying technology, so packet latency is relatively small, but so is their "footprint" -- the area their signal covers on the ground.
The most visible HAP Internet effort has been that of Sanswire, which has run well-publicized tests for over a decade. Sanswire has gone through bankruptcy, announced projects in Latin America that never materialized and faced complaints by suppliers and employees, but they are still working on Internet connectivity.
Most satellites -- like the Space Station and sensing satellites -- are in low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO satellites move relative to the ground, which means that either communication windows are intermittent or many satellites -- a "constellation" -- are needed to cover the planet.
The first LEO Internet project I know of was used for intermittent connectivity in Africa during the early 1990s. Shortly thereafter, a number of entrepreneurial LEO projects were announced. The most ambitious was Teledesic, which proposed Internet connectivity for the entire planet using a constellation of 288 satellites orbiting at 700 kilometers. Teledesic had high-profile backers like Bill Gates, Paul Allen and a Saudi prince, but the technology of the day was not up to the task and the company failed.
Today, the best-known LEO communication system is Iridium's satellite phone service, consisting of 66 LEO satellites. (Iridium was conceived by motorola as an Internet project, but was scaled back to telephony, went bankrupt and reemerged as a phone service).
This week, Google acquired Skybox Imaging, a company that has put a LEO satellite in a 600 kilometer orbit. The company was formed for data gathering, for example for providing real time video and images of traffic on roads, the sea and in the air, environmental monitoring, or map and earth imaging.
As we see in the following heat-map video from Skybox, satellite imaging proliferated rapidly between 1986 and 2012:
This sort of imagery has both economic and military value so it will provide Google both revenue and expertise in the short run. Might they be planning to parlay that into a constellation of Skybox communication satellites -- Teledesic II with modern technology -- in the long run?
Medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites are used for communication and navigation. Google recently announced a project with O3b Networks (other three billion). O3b currently has four satellites in 8,000 kilometer equatorial orbits and they plan to launch four more this year. They say those eight satellites will enable them to offer continuous service to all parts of the Earth within 45 degrees of the Equator.
The project with Google is headed by two O3b executives and they speak of spending billions dollars and putting at least 180 satellites in orbit. When they speak of 180 satellites, one wonders whether they are considering a LEO constellation.
(Update: Google's project with O3b Networks has ended, but O3b's MEO technology could still be deployed in Cuba and elsewhere).
Today's commercial satellite Internet connectivity is provided by geostationary satellites, which are positioned above the equator and remain stationary with respect to the surface of the earth since they orbit exactly once per day. Their orbit altitude enables multi-country footprints, but latency and launch costs are high.
Geostationary satellites have been used in rural areas and developing nations since the early days of the Internet, and the industry has remained viable as a result of technical progress in launch technology (public and private), antennas, solar power, radios and other electronics, as well as tuning of TCP/IP protocols to account for the 1/4 second latency due to the orbital altitude. (I've had surprisingly natural voice over IP conversations with people on geostationary satellite connections).
Have those technologies progressed to the point where HAPs and lower orbit satellites are now viable as well?
Since the beginning years of the Internet, NGOs, government agencies and entrepreneurs has been working on the Grand Challenge of connecting developing nations. They have not succeeded, but Google, with improved technology, deep pockets, a long-range viewpoint and economic motivation (ads) may be able to pull it off.
Finally, I cannot end this post without wondering whether Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, and Richard Brnason, founder of Virgin Galactic are eyeing those other three billion people.
A proposal for a low-earth-orbit satellite constellation like that attempted by Teledesic is being re-considered using modern launch and satellite technology. Entrepreneurs Elon Musk (launch technology) and Greg Wyler (satellite technology) are working on a constellation of 700 low-earth orbit satellites to provide Internet connectivity to rural areas and developing nations and Google has several related projects. Will they realize Teledesic's 1990 vision using 2020 technology?
In an earlier post, I proposed the use of conventional geostationary satellites in Cuba. If this effort by Musk and Tyler were to succeed, and the Cuban government would allow it, this would provide an even better interim connectivity solution. (Modern fiber infrastructure would remain as the ultimate goal, but satellites would provide an affordable interim step.)
-----
Update 1/27/2014
Well, the die is cast. Google has elected to back Elon Musk's satellite Internet project in competition with Greg Wyler. It's great to see two major teams competing to be ISPs to the Earth. If one or both succeed, the upside for humanity is clear, but is there a downside? It is a bit frightening to think of a global ISP with, say, a billion customers. What sort of regulation or oversight would be needed?
Elon Musk is announcing the opening of the SpaceX satellite engineering and development office in Seattle (video)
Teledesic animation showing a satellite
constellation that would cover the planet.
There has been significant technical progress in connectivity
to geostationary satellites since this picture was taken in India.
Figure from Arthur C. Clarke's article proposing
geostationary satellites for world wide radio coverage
Geostationary satellites have large footprints.
Titan Aerospace solar-poweed drone
O3b MEOs will cover the middle of the planet/
Does anyone know anything about this Google blimp? (Photoshopped?)
Our balloons today are doing pretty much everything a complete system needs to do. We're in discussions with telcos around the world, and we're going to fly over places like Indonesia for real service testing this year.
Astro Teller, head of Google X, gave a Ted Talk on the unexpected benefit of rewarding failure. Google X works on "moonshot" projects. They start with a radical idea then immediately begin trying to prove it is impossible by attacking what appears to be its weakest spot. If the weak spot cannot be overcome, they kill the project and reward the participants.
In this talk, Teller described several projects that had failed and some that had not yet failed. Project Loon, Google's balloon-based Internet access experiment has not failed so far. In fact, it has made significant progress.
Teller gave a status report on Project Loon, which is still very much alive, starting at 8 min 22 sec of the following full talk:
The transcript of his Project Loon report follows, but you should check out the video for the images.
8:22
Probably the craziest sounding project we have is Project Loon. We're trying to make balloon-powered Internet. A network of balloons in the stratosphere that beam an internet connection down to rural and remote areas of the world. This could bring online as many as four billion more people, who today have little or no internet connection.
8:46
But you can't just take a cell tower, strap it to a balloon and stick it in the sky. The winds are too strong, it would be blown away. And the balloons are too high up to tie it to the ground.
8:59
Here comes the crazy moment. What if, instead, we let the balloons drift and we taught them how to sail the winds to go where the needed to go? It turns out the stratosphere has winds that are going in quite different speeds and directions in thin strata. So we hoped that using smart algorithms and wind data from around the world, we could maneuver the balloons a bit, getting them to go up and down just a tiny bit in the stratosphere to grab those winds going in those different directions and speeds. The idea is to have enough balloons so as one balloon floats out of your area, there's another balloon ready to float into place, handing off the internet connection, just like your phone hands off between cell towers as you drive down the freeway.
9:52
We get how crazy that vision sounds -- there's the name of the project to remind us of that. So since 2012, the Loon team has prioritized the work that seems the most difficult and so the most likely to kill their project.
10:12
The first thing that they did was try to get a Wi-Fi connection from a balloon in the stratosphere down to an antenna on the ground. It worked. And I promise you there were bets that it wasn't going to. So we kept going.
10:27
Could we get the balloon to talk directly to handsets, so that we didn't need the antenna as an intermediary receiver? Yeah.
10:37
Could we get the balloon bandwidth high enough so it was a real Internet connection? So that people could have something more than just SMS? The early tests weren't even a megabit per second, but now we can do up to 15 megabits per second. Enough to watch a TED Talk.
10:58
Could we get the balloons to talk to each other through the sky so that we could reach our signal deeper into rural areas? Check.
11:08
Could we get balloons the size of a house to stay up for more than 100 days, while costing less than five percent of what traditional, long-life balloons have cost to make? Yes. In the end. But I promise you, you name it, we had to try it to get there. We made round, silvery balloons. We made giant pillow-shaped balloons. We made balloons the size of a blue whale. We busted a lot of balloons.
11:46
(Laughter)
11:48
Since one of the things that was most likely to kill the Loon project was whether we could guide the balloons through the sky, one of our most important experiments was putting a balloon inside a balloon.
12:01
So there are two compartments here, one with air and then one with helium. The balloon pumps air in to make itself heavier, or lets air out to make it lighter. And these weight changes allow it to rise or fall, and that simple movement of the balloon is its steering mechanism. It floats up or down, hoping to grab winds going in the speed and direction that it wants.
12:26
But is that good enough for it to navigate through the world? Barely at first, but better all the time.
12:35
This particular balloon, our latest balloon, can navigate a two-mile vertical stretch of sky and can sail itself to within 500 meters of where it wants to go from 20,000 kilometers away.
12:55
We have lots more to do in terms of fine-tuning the system and reducing costs. But last year, a balloon built inexpensively went around the world 19 times over 187 days. So we're going to keep going.
13:14
(Applause)
13:20
Our balloons today are doing pretty much everything a complete system needs to do. We're in discussions with telcos around the world, and we're going to fly over places like Indonesia for real service testing this year.
