The Quality of Life

I just spent the weekend with my father, who is 95, mentally alert with severely impaired vision and eyesight. Over the past several months I have been struggling to find a device or device that he can operate and will give him access to digital media. This is about keeping an active mind active and avoiding frustration which is the typical barrier to all the gadgets we of the digital age now treasure. Audiobooks would be an ideal medium, but he needs to be able to download, start/stop, and make selections. With our ipods and smart phones we sometimes seem to ignore the simple fact that what works for many of us as "easier" is "harder" for those who's abilities are impaired. We made progress today by connecting headphones to a CD player, but the CD player can only be operated by a miniature remote--where the buttons are small the locations seemingly random and the frustration level extremely high.

While I'm sure we (my sister and I) will find improvements that allow him to enjoy and without extreme effort some of the things we take for granted, the fact that we take them for granted is itself a problem. For many of us "quality of life" means work/family balance, financial security and the ability to choose what we do, we will soon join the generation where our quality of life will be determined by simpler and more day-to-day issues. We should remember that and strive to make accessibility as important as availability and usability.

What is Convergence?

When I was COO at Clarent, our discussion was about the impact of "convergence" where the internet and traditional telecommunications came together. Today convergence is a MUCH bigger trend and many of us do not see the changes as they are coming; green-tech is meeting the web in the networks and interconnects of real time exchange of ideas; semiconductors and software are becoming almost indistinguishable as sub-micron manufacturing processes essentially instantiates code; persistent memory is being converged in a cloud; security is synonymous with individuality and identity; relationships exist in n-dimensions rather than one-on-one. Sometime it is just too much, and other times it is just too little. Profoundly enough, the one factor that still needs to converge in a scalable way is teamwork, the fact that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that a new way of doing things with greater efficiency drives new things to discover and do. We are all converging and by default are able to know more about each other--the question remains can we KNOW each other in a profound new way. Can empathy be expressed technologically?

Thoughts on Time and Individuality

Today my younger child celebrated her 13th birthday (actual date was March 4). Tuesday my older child turns 21. My thoughts about how fast time has changed, and what has changed are fast, furious and fleeting insights into the finite and the infinite. As Einstein said (to paraphrase) "The only two things that are infinite are the universe and human stupidity." As to the latter, what strikes me are arbitrary judgements made in politics and business that are driven by ego, dogma or simply misguided and incomplete thought processes. The herd mentality comes to mind.

President Obama has some hard decisions to make. We don't know how to fix the economy because we don't know how to change public sentiment overnight. Markets function wonderfully when people are rational, optimistic and think for themselves. i remember a time when i was an undergraduate at Yale watching Igor Stravinsky conduct a rehersal of the Yale Symphony Orchestra. Looking at the violin section he was extremely frustrated--the violinists looked and acted like clones of each other rather than tapping their individual talent. "Individual bowing..." he stated--and immediately the intensity and urgency of the music increased with mechanism replaced by passion. A lesson we should all take note of now...