LibreOffice adoption soaring, but OpenOffice still open source king | Jon Brodkin | March 27, 2013 | Ars Technica

Apache OpenOffice still appears to be the leader. LibreOffice is installed by default with Ubuntu 12.04.

It stands to reason that there is a bigger base of existing OpenOffice users than LibreOffice ones, both among individuals and corporations, thanks to its long history and name recognition inside and outside the open source community. Its also beating LibreOffice on new downloads, as far as we can tell.

OpenOffice’s published download stats show that it often hits 160,000 or 170,000 new downloads a day. On a “bad” day, the number might drop to 120,000.

Perhaps LibreOffices figure of new downloads is higher than the 100,000 new IP addresses requesting updates each day, but we don’t know based on the available data. “We are also working at getting a similar statistic for downloads, which measure the number of people who get the software but not the number of people who use it,” Vignoli said. “We would of course like to provide the most accurate figures, but we are still a very young project and we have been constantly upgrading our infrastructure during the course of the last two years, since we have launched LibreOffice.”

Controversy over LibreOffice adoption figures arose last October when Rob Weir, an OpenOffice contributor and IBM architect who works on the Open Document Format, wrote the aforementioned series of blog posts questioning “LibreOffice’s Dubious Claims.”

Whereas OpenOffice releases daily download rates, LibreOffice adoption numbers come “from download claims in press releases, and then only at long intervals,” Weir wrote. “We have no idea what exactly they are counting. They have never made the detailed stats public. This does not mean that the numbers are incorrect, of course. It just means that no one outside of their project’s leadership is able to verify the claims.”

Weir took the projects total download numbers and calculated an average daily download rate of 29,460 for LibreOffice and 127,326 for OpenOffice.

Clearly, LibreOffice is enjoying much quicker adoption now. Weirs average was based on the total number of downloads of LibreOffice since January 2011, including the early days when LibreOffice was counting fewer than 10,000 new users a day.

Still, OpenOffice has “a massive brand advantage,” LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks, an employee of Attachmates SUSE business unit, told Ars. “They have a huge and valuable brand that we helped build for many years. Its an enduring sadness that they are not working with us. Clearly, they have more downloads, I think there’s no doubt about that. But we’re growing rather rapidly.”

LibreOffice adoption soaring, but OpenOffice still open source king | Jon Brodkin | March 27, 2013 | Ars Technica at http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/libreoffice-adoption-soaring-but-openoffice-still-open-source-king/.

Who will hire all the PhDs? Not Canada’s universities | Melonie Fullick | April 12, 2013 | The Globe and Mail

While finishing the Ph.D. that I restarted 10 years ago is near top-of-mind, the priority falls when the prospects of completing the degree are considered. After my early retirement last fall, I started looking seriously at academic positions, and the prospects in Canada didn’t seem great.  Melonie Fullick, a Ph.D. candidate at York University writes:

Can there really be a purpose for the PhD other than as preparation for the tenure track? For more academics and students the answer is now “yes,” but in many doctoral programmes outcomes other than permanent academic employment are not viewed positively. Those who pursue them may receive less institutional support and faculty mentorship, because PhD supervisors are usually faculty who have primarily worked within the university, and they’re less likely to have cultivated professional relationships elsewhere.

Canada is only “producing too many PhDs” if every student is being encouraged to pursue an academic career and nothing else. In that case, there certainly aren’t enough positions to go around. One solution is that universities should increase tenure-track hiring so that more full-time permanent work is available. Yet even if this happened, it’s unlikely there would be enough jobs to “absorb” all those currently under– and unemployed, who are still on the academic job market. Should PhD programmes be reduced in size? Perhaps, but the problem with simply reducing enrollments is that it’s likely to restrict doctoral education to those who can most easily access the right resources. This lowers the chances that traditionally underprivileged groups will be represented among faculty at Canadian universities.

Who will hire all the PhDs? Not Canada’s universities | Melonie Fullick | April 12, 2013 | The Globe and Mail at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/who-will-hire-all-the-phds-not-canadas-universities/article10976412.

Anticipatory Systems (don’t) make the news | April 2013 | rosen listserv

On the public listserv discussing Robert Rosen’s work for April, anticipatory systems defined by a journalist reflects incomplete background research by citing Daniel Dubois.  The discussion opened with:

In a very typical example of how rhetoric, marketing, and computational politics work, the computing industry types have now glommed onto the phrase “anticipatory systems” and are using it to pretty much describe just what RR was *not* talking about in his book of that name. About which I suppose there is nothing to do but sigh.
http://readwrite.com/2013/04/10/anticipatory-systems-artificial-intelligence

David

That leads to the article on “How The Internet Will Tell You What To Eat, Where To Go, And Even Who To Date” | Owen Thomas | April 10th, 2013 on ReadWrite Social, with the definition:

What Is An Anticipatory System?

Here’s a simple definition of anticipatory systems. Think of them as artificially intelligent services that are aware of external context — including ambient inputs like time of day, social connections, upcoming meetings, local weather, traffic and more. Taking all of that into account comes naturally to humans. But for computers, it’s hard.

The big challenge in artificial intelligence isn’t that computers are stupid. It’s that they’re ignorant. We haven’t given them enough data, nor the tools and rules to process it all. But that’s rapidly changing.

The notion of anticipatory systems in computing dates back at least to the late 1990s. Daniel Dubois, a professor at the University of Liège in Belgium, defined an anticipatory system as one ”that computes its current states [by] taking into account its past and present states but also its potential future states.”

That’s a bit vague, and the practical application of anticipatory systems has proven accordingly tricky. But all of the trends we’re kind of bored with now — social, local, mobile, big data — have laid the groundwork for the realization of anticipatory systems’ promise.

Judith Rosen responded to David’s forum post:

Daniel Dubois delayed the publication of the expanded second edition of Anticipatory Systems, by quite a bit. He had been asked, unbeknownst to me, to give Springer Verlag an opinion on whether Dad’s book was “worth publishing”– for over a year. Who knows how long that would have continued?  I finally started asking questions about the hold-up and I was told “the reviewer was taking a long time” to give them an answer. So, I suggested a different reviewer. As I told the editor of the series, George Klir, there are several people that would not be qualified to speak to that question in my opinion, based either on ignorance or on personal conflict of interest, and listed them. That list included Dubois and I got a sheepish response back from George saying, “Sorry! I didn’t know!” So Mihai Nadin was brought in as the new reviewer and he sent his opinion in to the publisher within a week. I’ve had dealings with Dubois… and as a result don’t think very highly of him. At ALL.

Judith

I notice that Mihai Nadin has a web site at http://www.nadin.ws/ , including some slides from a lecture on March 6, 2013 on “What is and what is not anticipation? Issues of complexity”.  This content has diagrams familiar to people who know Robert Rosen’s work.

John Kineman also responded with the comment:

Why I enjoy the term “artificial stupidity”  – how do we tell it apart from “artificial intelligence”?  What distinguishes them is the intelligent part.

The discussion on artificial stupidity shows up on the C2 wiki.

People who are unfamiliar with the work of Robert Rosen and (an authentic) view on anticipatory systems might refer to http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/ .  Ongoing work can be found in the Relational Science community at http://relationalscience.org.

What the West Can Learn from Jugaad | Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Simone Ahuja | Feburary 26, 2013 | strategy + business

Has the west fallen into a mental trap of innovation as overly structured and capital-intensive, losing the pioneering spirit? Jugaad, says Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja of U. Cambridge Centre for India and Global Business, comes from India, but may have also been present in the innovation in pre-industrial America before 1900.

This approach—whether it is aimed at creating a product, service, or business model—is what we call jugaad innovation. Jugaad is a colloquial Hindi word that roughly translates as “an innovative fix for your business; an improvised solution born from ingenuity and cleverness.” It is based on six operating principles: seek opportunity in adversity, do more with less, think and act flexibly, keep everything about the business simple, tap the margins of society for employees and customers, and follow your heart.

The extreme conditions that make jugaad innovation worthwhile have typically been more prevalent in emerging markets such as India, China, and Brazil than in the United States or Europe. But in recent years, developed economies have begun to exhibit many of the same aspects of scarcity, diversity, unpredictability, and interconnectivity, making these principles relevant to companies around the world.

Jugaad Lost

The jugaad spirit, also known as the “pioneer spirit,” was once common in North America and Europe as well—at least until their economies matured. During the 20th century, Western companies built up dedicated research and development departments aimed at institutionalizing and managing their innovation capabilities. This industrialization of the creative process led to a structured approach to innovation that spawned big budgets, standardized business processes, and controlled access to knowledge.

Most Western firms have assimilated the idea that an innovation system—like any other industrial system—will generate more output inventions if fed more input resources. As a result, the structured innovation engine in most companies is capital intensive, requiring an abundant supply of financial and natural resources at a time when both are scarce. [....]

The size of their R&D investments caused many Western firms to become risk averse, and led them to implement standardized business processes such as Six Sigma and stage-gate analysis to manage their innovation projects. [....]

Jugaad Regained
Instead of always using a hammer to deal with their problems, companies might find it helpful to use a screwdriver from time to time. In other words, we are not proposing that companies abandon their traditional structures and processes for innovation. Rather, they should expand their innovation tool kit.

Jugaad can bring value to conventional companies in a number of ways. They deliver economies of scope when companies need to tailor solutions to the specific needs of multiple customer segments in heterogeneous markets. They provide “soft” capital by unleashing the passion of employees, business partners, and existing and potential customers. And they enhance flexibility to better manage unexpected challenges and harsh constraints through the improvisational use of limited resources.

What the West Can Learn from Jugaad | Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Simone Ahuja | Feburary 26, 2013 | strategy + business at http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00143?pg=all.

See also podcasts from the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School, Centre for India and Global Business at http://www.india.jbs.cam.ac.uk/opinion/podcasts/

China’s Tianfu Ecological City will celebrate pedestrians | Oakland Ross | March 29, 2013 | Toronto Star

Designing a city simultaneously for the levels of pedestrians, cars and bikes reflects systems operating at multiple levels of scale.

In Tianfu Ecological City, feet will rule — along with the people who use them.

“It should be easier to be a pedestrian than a motorist,” says Kindel. “That’s the reverse of the thinking in Toronto or Chicago. The needs of the pedestrian have been neglected over the past 30 years in North America.”

True, Tianfu will include conventional urban streets but automobiles will have only a secondary presence, and they will not intersect physically with pedestrians.

Instead, the city will be constructed on multiple levels — one for cars and another for people on foot.

“There is a pedestrian network that will enable pedestrians to move about without coming in contact with cars,” Kindel explains. “It is not car-free, but it is designed as a pedestrian-oriented city.”

As for bikes, they are part of the plan, too, with dedicated, physically protected lanes on every street.

“The irony is, you won’t need a bike,” says Kindel. “You can ride your bike for recreation, but you won’t really need a bike to move around this city.”

The development is designed so that everything people might need — from public transit to green space, from schools to supermarkets — is located within a 10-minute walk, or about 800 metres, of where they live.

China’s Tianfu Ecological City will celebrate pedestrians | Oakland Ross | March 29, 2013 | Toronto Star at http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/03/29/chinas_tianfu_ecological_city_will_celebrate_pedestrians.html.

The city had been reported earlier in Popular Science.

Chengdu Tianfu District Great City will connect via mass transit to Chengdu, a megalopolis of 14 million in southwest China. Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture says its planned city will use 48 percent less energy and 58 percent less water than a conventional city with the same population. It’s designed to be self-sustaining and environmentally conscious, using waste summer heat to provide winter heating. A power plant will use co-generation technology to provide both electricity and hot water.

Great City will cover just 1.3 square kilometers, or 0.5 square miles. This is about 245 football fields of space. That is not a ton of space for 80,000 people. And that’s the idea–everything is supposed to be so close that you can walk anywhere within 15 minutes. [....]

The high-density city is designed to be a prototype, which could conceivably be replicated anywhere else in the country. It’s supposed to start construction later this fall.

China Is Building A Brand New Green City From Scratch | Rebecca Boyle | October 25, 2012 | Popular Science at http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-10/carefully-engineered-chinese-pocket-city-will-fight-sprawl-building-not-out

Designing Cities for Change | Robert Ouellette | March 7, 2013 | meshcities.com

Information-driven change in cities, says @MESHCities, needs new skills, institutions and companies to empower people to design smart, responsive cities.  Designing for change is different challenge from designing for a static environment.

Most designers, unfortunately as yet, do not have the breadth of experience not to mention the inclination to deal with the new complexity the densely populated, information-driven city creates.

There are, however, firms who understand that they are designing for complex change they can’t fully predict but they can try to reasonably accommodate.

Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is one firm that consistently deals with the issues of massively changing cities. One of their projects is Beijing’s China Central Television headquarters. [....]

Beijing’s CCTV building is to 21st C. Beijing what the Rockefeller was to 20th C. New York: A symbol of a dynamic, upstart society intent on defining the future of civilization. Needless to say, Koolhaas’s post skyscraper un-tower was designed around the latest intelligent building systems. If this building is an example, the cities of tomorrow will be smarter, more sustainable, and different looking than the legacy cities we are leaving behind.

While Beijing’s blinding growth spurt is dazzling the international stage, what Canadian design firms take on the challenge of redesigning North America’s aging cities?

One firm is Toronto’s Brown and Storey Architects.

Like Koolhaas, Brown and Storey look beyond obvious stylistic interpretations of design. To them design as a process is not, metaphorically speaking, about making a static photograph it is about editing an interactive movie—an approach well suited to designing for change.

Take as an example the Garrison Creek project. 19th century civil engineering practices buried most of the ravines and creeks that give Toronto is unique character. Brown and Storey revived the covered Garrison Creek by making its figural presence once again part of the city experience. Hydrologic systems that shaped the city’s landscape are made visible.

It is this “embracing of systems” approach to design that gives Brown and Storey’s work its relevance in the smart, process city.  [....]

Designing for information-driven change is a demanding art and science still in its infancy. In fact, one of the challenges of creating the smart, responsive cities of the future is empowering the people who will design them. What skills will they need? What social institutions will be there to support them? What companies will help them benefit from the opportunities change creates?

From Designing Cities for Change | Robert Ouellette | March 7, 2013 | meshcities.com at http://meshcities.com/index.php/meshcities/comments/designing_cities_for_change.

Family Business as a Model for Sustainability and Social Responsibility | Dennis Jaffe | March 14, 2013 | Rethinking Complexity

Should the path to corporate sustainability and CSR be a return to the values in family businesses?  While we could contrast the western style of leadership as different from Chinese (traditional, not contemporary) social practices, I am reminded that I’ve described IBM as the most Chinese business I know, with some uncles that you can trust and some other cousins you can’t.  In recently rereading A Business and its Beliefs by Thomas J. Watson Jr., I was struck as how it was written with the legacy of Watson Sr. (and the description of “respect for the individual” as providing work during the depression) as the major influence.  Dennis Jaffe writes:

The family owners act very differently than the shareholders of a public company (though a family controlled business is often a public company). While as cousins living in different places they are not intimately acquainted with each other, they feel a shared connection to their heritage and share some common values and a shared respect and trust in each other. In many ways, their relationships reflect a Chinese concept of guanxi, a sustained network of respect and obligation, where they are available to help and support each other through ties of tradition, respect and obligation. The family has a set of values they apply to the business that include profitability, but also obligations to employees, suppliers, customers and the community they live and work in. These values go back several generations, and were instilled in them by their great grandparents. Rather than seeking short-term returns, the family sees their investment as also having an obligation to sustain future generations. Their sense of the business is as a trust, of stewardship, responsible not just for today but for many stakeholders, including those of future generations. They govern the business with a sense of balance to all of these stakeholders.

The family owner I interviewed had seen the business evolve over a half century of her engagement. She had been instrumental in creating an educational program to develop financial skills and values in the next two generations of family owners, and seen the business become more meritocratic and democratic to listen and act on the voice of many engaged family owners.

Our study has interviewed family owners of nearly 50 large family enterprises, many of them lasting more than a century so far, who have passed their values and legacy across several generations. They have seen a shift in the past two generations from paternalistic leaders, who ran the business for the family members, to greater engagement and participation by increasing numbers of family owners who are creating an active community of family owners who use the family wealth and enterprise to express shared values and fulfill obligations to current and future generations and communities. They have moved from paternalistic management to a more democratic, engaged and participatory form.

The values and intentions of the owners of these large family businesses present a great contrast to other public companies, which face pressures from shareholders for immediate returns that serve to deplete the long-term capability of the enterprise.

Family Business as a Model for Sustainability and Social Responsibility | Dennis Jaffe | March 14, 2013 | Rethinking Complexity at http://www.saybrook.edu/rethinkingcomplexity/posts/03-14-13/family-business-model-sustainability-and-social-responsibility.

IBM 100 | Icons of Progress | A Business and Its Beliefs at http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/bizbeliefs/ .

The Future of Learning | Gary Metcalf | March 13, 2013 | Rethinking Complexity (Saybrook U)

Higher education has innovators dilemma with MOOCs, says @claychristensen, via Gary Metcalf, who cites Bela H. Banathy.

Howe: Why is higher education vulnerable?

Christensen: The availability of online learning. It will take root in its simplest applications, then just get better and better. You know, Harvard Business School doesn’t teach accounting anymore, because there’s a guy out of BYU whose online accounting course is so good. He is extraordinary, and our accounting faculty, on average, is average.

Howe: What happens to all our institutions of advanced learning?

Christensen: Some will survive. Most will evolve hybrid models, in which universities license some courses from an online provider like Coursera but then provide more-specialized courses in person. Hybrids are actually a principle regardless of industry. If you want to use a new technology in a mainstream existing market, it has to be a hybrid. It’s like the electric car. If you want to have a viable electric car, you have to ask if there is a market where the customers want a car that won’t go far or fast. The answer is, parents of teenagers would love to put their teens in a car that won’t go far or fast. Little by little, the technology will emerge to take it on longer trips. But if you want to have this new technology employed on the California freeways right now, it has to be a hybrid like a Prius, where you take the best of the old with the best of the new.

Excerpted from Clayton Christensen Wants to Transform Capitalism | Jeff Howe | Feb. 12, 2013 | wired.com at http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/mf-clayton-christensen-wants-to-transform-capitalism/all/

The needs of current students may not be sufficiently well aligned with the industrial mode of education from the 18th century.

Young people need enough education and training to enter productively into the economy. They also need the chance to continue to learn as challenges and opportunities arise for them.

Organizations cannot continue to treat human resources as ore to be mined. Knowledge is not something produced by the Earth to be exploited as it found useful. Learning is a collective process. It requires sharing and investment.

The communication technologies that we have today are truly amazing, but they will not solve problems or produce knowledge by themselves. Bela H. Banathy, who founded the systems program at Saybrook many years ago, used to explain that we still lived in a world of 18th century education. Professors (subject experts) stood in front of students in desks (the receivers of the input) to convey knowledge, like material being poured into a contained. Taking that system and putting it online is not an improvement.

We need, fundamentally, to rethink what we are doing, and why. What knowledge is needed, when, and by whom, for what purpose? What skills can be developed that add both value and capacity for new learning? How do we share knowledge efficiently and productively while also rewarding the people involved fairly?

The Future of Learning | Gary Metcalf | March 13, 2013 | Rethinking Complexity (Saybrook U) at http://www.saybrook.edu/rethinkingcomplexity/posts/03-13-13/future-learning.

This thread continues on findings made by Clayton Christensen some in a 2004 conference talk, excerpted at http://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/disruptive-innovation-in-services/

Is GDP the right way to measure progress? One economist says no (Dan O’Neill) | Drew Nelles | March 22, 2013 | The Globe and Mail

Should economic activity be measured as positives minus negatives, as Dan O”Neill (U. Leeds) says, in a Genuine Progress Indicator?

At the moment, our main economic indicator is GDP – gross domestic product. This is simply a measure of money changing hands in the economy. If I go out and buy a beer a pub in Edinburgh, this contributes to GDP. If I buy a bicycle, it also contributes to GDP. If the government invests in education, this contributes to GDP.

But the problem is that if there’s an oil spill off the coast of Mexico or the U.S., this also contributes to GDP. If we have more crime in society and pay to deal with it, this contributes to GDP. If we have more war, it contributes to GDP. Our main indicator of economic progress doesn’t distinguish between beneficial economic activity and dysfunctional economic activity.

One way we could fix that is by something called the Genuine Progress Indicator, which is a measure that separates the good stuff from the bad stuff and sees how they compare over time. Another area that’s been suggested is a completely different set of national counts, where we start to measure quality of life through surveys of happiness, well-being, life satisfaction and so on.

Is GDP the right way to measure progress? One economist says no (Dan O’Neill) | Drew Nelles | March 22, 2013 | The Globe and Mail at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/is-gdp-the-right-way-to-measure-progress-one-economist-says-no/article10242590/.

Resilience instead of strength, systems instead of objects, says @Joi Ito, to manoeuvre through disruption brought by technology.

Ito: What you need to do is understand these changes are happening, and build systems and governments and ways of thinking that are resilient to this kind of destructive change that is going to happen. It’s a kind of change that is really hard to predict, it’s really hard to control, so how do you as a human being, or as an organization, survive in this chaotic, unpredictable system where planning is almost impossible?

Wired: Please tell me you have an answer.

Ito: There are nine or so principles to work in a world like this:

1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.
2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.
4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects.
5. You want to have good compasses not maps.
6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.
7. It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.
8. It’s the crowd instead of experts.
9. It’s a focus on learning instead of education.

We’re still working on it, but that is where our thinking is headed.

Resiliency, Risk, and a Good Compass: Tools for the Coming Chaos (Joi Ito) | Michael V. Copeland | June 11, 2012 | Wired.com at “http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/resiliency-risk-and-a-good-compass-how-to-survive-the-coming-chaos/.