Career slowdown due to childcare is a human rights issue for academics and other professionals

This morning,the Globe and Mail has an article about a report from the Canadian Council of Academies discussing the difficulties female faculty members have advancing their careers.

In general, the process of academic advancement does not mesh well with raising families, whether you are a female or a male.

In order to achieve tenure and promotion, professors are supposed to continually build a publication track record. Taking a break, or 'slowing down', just doesn't work.

One can't properly take maternity or parental care and expect to advance. Indeed female colleagues of mine routinely work during their maternity leave. One even has had her nanny with her in her office looking after her young babies, just a few weeks after each child is born. Why is such leave often impractical: 1) You have to maintain supervision of graduate students; you can't just abandon PhD's in process; 2) You can't just abandon research programs you have carefully negotiated since you often have deliverables or expectations from research clients. 3) It often takes 12-30 months to get papers published in top conferences and journals; you have to keep that process moving, and attend the conferences when papers are accepted. 4) The process of hiring and getting new PhD students going can take 1-3 years; if you wait until you get back from a maternity or parental leave, you have a long gap again before you have a productive research team (and heaven-forbid that you might have another child on the way).

After any statutory or negotiated leaves in a baby's first year, you have a fixed number of courses to teach, so any slowdown while children are young inevitably is deducted from your time to do research and write publications. Slowing down 33% (e.g. from 60 hours a week to 40 hours a week) due to  family responsibilities, might mean reducing the research time from 30 hours a week to 10, a 75% cut. Hardly anyone realizes this consequence.

Interestingly, the Law Society of Upper Canada (Ontario), which had a progressive policy towards enabling female lawyers to take time of for childcare by helping cover their office expenses during their absence, is poised to drop that policy.

This problem, however, is not exclusively a female problem. It affects men too. It contributes to divorce when male academics (and lawyers or other professionals) are unable to take their share of the childcare and family workload. It leads to family-oriented men getting left behind in the career ladder, or simply deciding not to take opportunities that otherwise they would have done.

I have personally found that I have not been nearly as successful in research since having my three children. The sleepless nights and other family tasks have slowed me down very considerably. I know this is the case for other male colleagues. PhD students can be particularly badly affected. I was lucky to have made it to full professor just at the time my first child was born. I believe I might never have made tenure even if I had had children earlier. It must be so much harder for women who have a greater biological imperative to slow down their career.

Institutions and society must recognize this issue, especially now that women make up the majority of students in most academic disciplines. I have seen too many women professors just leave because of this issue, or decide not to take on higher-level responsibilities. And my graduate students both male and female, that have had children, inevitably have huge drop-offs in research performance.

It must become a violation of human rights to not consider childcare and family in promotion, and to not as an institution or profession have active programs in place to accommodate employees and members while their children are young.

Universities and granting agencies, for example, should explicitly have policies that expect and account for 60%+ drops in research productivity when people have young children. Co-supervision of graduate students should be the norm for essentially all graduate students. And when I talk about young children, I don't just mean babies and toddlers; the productivity effect of caring for family may slowly drop off, but it doesn't really ever drop to zero, and should continue to be accounted for until children are capable of travelling by themselves to activities and looking after themselves at home when required.

Yes the provocation and arms buildup by Hamas is intolerable, but aren't there other ways for Israel to respond?

The average person in the world today sees Israel's bombing and military buildup and finds it hard to see the justification for the amount of force being deployed. This will just fuel the hate against Israel, which is not in Israel's best interest.

Yes, elements in Hamas have been bombing Israel for the last year with relatively ineffective "boring" rockets that nonetheless terrorize Israeli citizens. Yes, I accept that Hamas is becoming more brazen and starting to deploy more effective weapons that need to be stopped. Some level of right-to-defend is justified. Yes, there are a great many people in Gaza with fundamentalist attitudes that demand the destruction of Israel.

Even relatively moderate Gazans now live a life where their anger and hatred is being stoked, as they live in increasing destitution.

If the world is supposed to believe that Israel is a mature democracy, can't Israel try other tactics. Some of the following come to mind:

• Call for United Nations resolutions every time they are bombed.
• Instead of bombing with explosives, bomb with millions of 'propaganda' leaflets explaining to the Gazans how evil the Hamas bombing is. Or bomb with devices that have loudspeakers that explain to Gazans what is going on.
• Unilaterally stop the tit-for-tat for a few days to see what happens. If Hamas rockets continue, give a burst of intense response at a pre-announced time, but then stop again. Accelerate this, but always show more restraint than Hamas.
• Call on elder statesman from other countries (US, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan) to get together to help figure out how to get Hamas to stop the provocation and rhetoric.
• If they have to bomb (perhaps because they have intelligence about more sophisticated weapons), announce 10 minutes before where they are going to bomb, so people can escape but relatively little military hardware can.
• Parachute in water and extra humanitarian aid to let the people of Gaza think a little about their intentions.
• Post on an interactive website exactly where they aimed, and what they intended to hit, for the world to see.

Some of these ideas may be impractical. But surely there most be something other than pure intense military response that is vastly greater than the rockets that Hamas has been using. Israel has so much stronger an army, superb anti-rocket military defences, powerful friends around the world. They don't have to destroy their reputation and foster ever more hatred among neighbouring countries by overdoing their responses.

There is just no way that the current action will serve as a 'deterrent'; angry people are not deterrable.  If anything the current action will just stoke up more attacks on Israel for years to come and risk wider war and more Israeli deaths. It is clear that the action must be aimed at destroying weapons Israel knows or suspects to be present. And perhaps they have to be careful not to reveal the source of their intelligence, hence precluding some of my ideas above. Nonetheless, showing restraint and waging an intense propaganda war surely must be viable.

iOS battery drain: Cause is runaway background processes such as Skype

There have been many threads on the Internet after iOS updates about battery drain on people's iPhone and iPad mobile devices.

People blame Apple, demanding a cure and threatening to switch to Android. People have suggested such 'solutions' as factory restores, logging out if iCloud etc. It seems Genius bar staff at Apple are often not able to solve the problem, and some have not believed the problem is as serious as it is.

I had the problem for the first time after upgrading my iOS devices to 6.0.1. My battery was draining from 100% to zero, sometimes in as few as four hours. It was also running 'hot'. Before my iPhone 5 had lasted at least two days on standby.

I experimented carefully with various solutions one at a time. In my case, it turned out that Skype was the culprit. Even though I haven't used Skype on my iPhone for a long time, its background process was still active, and reactivated after every reset. The solution was to 'kill' Skype fully by double-clicking the home button to bring up the 'recent apps' list, finding the Skype process, holding down the home button until the the red 'minus sign' appears, then clicking on it. After doing this, my iPhone's battery is back to normal.

Other people have reported a similar problem with the Facebook background processes, or the iCloud background processes. In the latter case it seems that logging out and logging in is the cure.

Why are these background processes behaving badly for some people and not others? It could be malformed data in the particular person's account, or any number of other possible causes. Clearly these issues are sporadic and only affect a minority of iOS users.

Apple, I think, is not to blame here, but could be part of the solution. Those with a conspiracy theory mindset might guess that Microsoft has seeded bugs into Skype to drive people from iOS to Windows 8 Mobile! Of course, I don't believe that. My theory is simply that a latent bug in Skype was surfaced by upgrading iOS to 6.0.1 for me. Other bugs for other people might have been surfaced by other upgrades.

Apple should, however, put software in iOS to detect processes that are using too much power during supposed sleep times, and warn the user about them (with instructions about how to kill the process), or force those processes to die or use far fewer resources.

The AppSwitch tool is a very good tool, by the way, to see which processes are running in multitasked mode.

Apple's stock is in a downtrend, and I am convinced that the battery woes are driving lots of people away from iOS unnecessarily. There are other issues for Apple's woes (ridiculous patent attacks against them for example), but this is one they can deal with fairly easily.

Video series: Creating a class diagram in Umple of a simple manufacturing plant controller system

Since I am at the Models Conference in Austria, I had to cancel my SEG2105 class. I decided to present my lecture through a series of YoutTube videos.

The video series, which can be seen here, starts with analysing a simple description of a manufacturing plant by highlighting parts of the text that may represent classes, associations and attributes. Then I use Umple Online to create the class diagram step-by-step.

The original description of the manufacturing plant comes from my book, and is reproduced below


This system will be used to manage and control the production processes at Use Case Industries’ manufacturing plant. The plant makes several types of mechanical devices. It has 10 assembly lines, each of which can be used in the manufacturing of any of its products. An assembly line is allocated to a product for a fixed period of time (anywhere from a few hours to a few days) – this is called a product run. During a product run, the assembly line makes a specified number of units of the product.

Each product is assembled in several steps. As the product-under- construction moves down the assembly line, it will be worked on in turn by a series of robots. Each robot completes one step before the product moves on to the next step (and a different robot). Each robot is dedicated to just one manufacturing step.

Each product is composed of parts. Parts may be bought from suppliers, or they may in fact be smaller products that are built by this company (in earlier product runs). In each manufacturing step, a given subset of these parts is put together. Parts waiting for assembly are kept in numbered bins; the robots know which bins to go to in order to get the required parts.

Each completed assembly is given a serial number. When orders for products are filled, the serial numbers of the products sold are recorded with the order.

Apple Time Machine backups should not delete oldest, thin to monthly when space becomes short

The new version of the Time Machine backup capability in Mac OSX Mountain Lion has important improvements.

Most notably it transparently allows one to use multiple disks for backup. I use one backup disk at home and one at work. These allow me to be more confident that if one disk crashes I still have the other, and wherever I am working, I have an hourly backup to fall back on.

However here's a suggestion for the next improvement Apple could make: Currently the policy for maintaining backups is (quoting directly from the Time Machine control panel shown below):

• "Hourly backups for the past 24 hours
• Daily backups for the past month
• Weekly backups for all previous months

The oldest backups are deleted when the disk becomes full."

My suggestion is this: When the disk becomes full, older backups should be thinned to monthly (up to three months ago) starting with the oldest. Weekly backups should always be retained for three months.

So if the disk becomes full, it should not delete the oldest backup, instead it should delete the second-oldest, and what was the third and fourth oldest, leave the what was the fifth oldest, and delete what was the sixth oldest, etc.

Why? Sometimes missing files can only be retrieved from deep history. With monthly backups far back in time, one has a pretty good chance of being able to retrieve such files. Weekly backups several years old are likely not needed.

In my experience I have retrieved lost work from Time Machine about 3 times a year. Not much. However, backups are all about insurance and peace of mind. Who knows when I will have a disk crash or do something catastrophic to my documents.

This post updates my earlier post on backups. Note that I no longer backup to Mobile Me since it has gone away. Some of my data is backed up on iCloud, although I personally feel it is critical to maintain one's own personal backup of cloud-stored data. I still back up using SuperDuper periodically in addition to Time Machine, although now I have two Time Machine disks, I will be updating my SuperDuper partitions less often.

Fair London 2012 Olympic medals ranking - Final results

Here are my 'fair' Olympic medals rankings, based on the final results of the London 2012 Olympics, after the final medals were awarded on August 12th. This updates my earlier posts on August 8th and August 9th, which proved quite popular.

What have I done to make the rankings fairer:

1. I have weighted the rankings by population.
2. I have further normalized by UN development index. Developed countries have an index closer to 1, but developing countries, which have much less capacity to train athletes, are ranked lower, typically in the 0.5 range.
3. I have weighted silver medals as worth two bronze medals, and gold medals as worth two silver medals. This seems considerably fairer than the two schemes widely used by the International Olympic Committee and the press, either ranking strictly by gold medals (breaking ties with silver and bronze), or else weighting all medals evenly.

The first table below gives my final rankings, ordered by this scheme. The raw score is column WM10M, and the ranking is column WMR.

Population and development index, used for normalization, are shown on the right. 

In all the columns in the table below, I have highlighted the top 20 countries (and ties) in the different rankings, so you can see how the different schemes affect the sequence. My preferred WM10M ranking is in blue. I have also marked the top 20 countries by population, and by development index, using grey.

Small island countries of Grenada and The Bahamas come first and second in WM10M score by virtue of winning a medal despite their extremely small population. Jamaica and New Zealand come third and fourth. Congratulations to those countries.

Column definitions

• Gold, Silv, Bro - medal counts
• GR: Ranking, based on Gold medals, with ties resolved by silver and bronze (top 20 orange)
• TotM: Total medals (top 20 yellow)
• WTotM: Total medals weighted using the 4 2 1 scheme described above (top 20 green)
• G10M: Gold medals per 10 million, weighted by development index (purple)
• M10M: Total medals per 10 million, weighted by development index (pink)
• WM10M: 4-2-1 weighted medals per 10 million, weighted by development index (blue)

The second table below shows the same data, organized by population. The third table shows the same data, organized by the 'Gold medal' rankings used by the IOC.

No ranking will ever be totally fair. Maybe team sports, or sports which only give one medal such as modern pentathlon, should be given higher rankings for the medals. But there is no clear way to do come up with an unbiased ranking scheme if those adjustments are made. I think what I present is a good compromise.

Raw data as an Excel spreadsheet are here

Table 1: Rankings ordered by WM10M: 4-2-1 weighted medals per 10 million, weighted by development index.

Table 2: The same data ordered by size of country (PopM)

Table 3: The same data, ordered using the IOC's gold medal based rankings

Olympic medals ranking August 9 by population and development index

(See here for my final update as of the end of the Olympics)

Yesterday's post was very popular, so here is an update one day later. The data below are as of mid day August 9th, 2012.

I have ordered countries explicitly here by my WM10M ranking, which is medals per 10 Million people, but normalized for UN development index, and where a silver counts double the weight of a bronze and a gold counts as double the weight of a silver. For explanations of the other columns, see yesterday's post.

Jamaica passed New Zealand to move into second place today.

I will post a final ranking at the end of the Olympics, and may do one or two between now and then.

A raw spreadsheet is here.

Olympic medals rankings normalized by country population and development index

(See here for my final update to this as of the end of the Olympics)

We all see China and the US jockeying for position at the top of the Olympic medal counts. But which countries are really doing best?

The table below orders countries by population (right column marked PopM). Coloured cells are the top 20 (and tied) countries according to various ranking criteria.

Orange is the 'gold medal' ranking, with ties resolved by silver and bronze medals. This is the ranking used by most rankings tables. Yellow is total medals. Green (WTot, WMR) is total medals weighted such that Gold has a value of 4, silver a value of 2 and bronze a value of 1. This is the system I prefer when population is not considered.

Purple (G10M, GMPR) is gold medals per 10 million of population , but normalized by UN development index (DevInd column). A country with a lower development index has fewer resources, so should be expected to be capable of training fewer athletes. Light orange (M10M, MPR) is total medals, again weighted by population normalized by UN development index. Finally blue (WM10M, WMR) is weighted total medals (as per the green rankings) weighted by normalized population.

Grenada does best in most rankings by virtue of its one gold medal and small population. New Zealand is doing best in countries with moderate population. Other countries doing well are Jamaica (due to their sprinters) and Slovenia.

Great Britain is the large country (by population) doing best. North Korea and Australia also stand out.

The US and China a quite far down, at 37 and 58 in my blue (WMR) rankings, suggesting that although they are doing well overall, they are not doing as well when population and development index are both factored in.

The table notably shows very populous countries with few medals: India and Indonesia stand out near the top.

The data is as of midday Wednesday August 8th. I intend to update it at the end of the Olympics. The original spreadsheet can be found here.

I wish the media would report data like this for all to see.

Greenland record temperatures: How clue are we to the tipping point?

One of the few blogs I read consistently is Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog. His focus is on hurricanes, but he also reports the latest in climatological and meteorological news. Yesterday, his key news was that record May temperatures have been experienced in Greenland.

Why is this so important? Because the future of civilization as we know it is potentially tied up in the Greenland ice sheet. People talking about climate change tend to focus on warmer summers, more droughts, extreme hurricanes etc. These are bad enough. However if Greenland melting accelerates, several drastic consequences could come to pass:

• Sea level rises on the order of tens of meters, destroying the cities and agricultural lands of billions of people
• Drastic shifts in climate, potentially freezing Europe by shutting down the North Atlantic Oscillation.

Two very interesting articles show that the Greenland situation is highly complex. There are huge volumes of information to absorb from the articles, but I would like to draw attention to two quotes:

In Gravity and Sea Level published by the European Space Agency in 2002:

To oversimplify somewhat, Greenland is unstable to increases in temperature, because it exists purely through its altitude maintaining low temperatures. If the Greenland Ice Sheet were somehow removed, it would not return.

Realistically, they mean it would not return until another ice age.

In Constructing Sea-Level Scenarios for Impact and Adaptation Assessment of Coastal Areas: A Guidance Document published by the IPCC in 2011:

The net effect of these processes [melting ice removing gravitational attraction from surrounding seawater] is that sea-level rise occurs faster in areas further away from the source of the melting. For example, in the case of melting Greenland ice, there would be less sea- level rise than the global average in the North Atlantic, near to Greenland.

So if Greenland melts, who would be inundated the worst? This is complex and research is still ongoing: Density differences due to salinity and differing expansion of cold and warm water will be one influence; patterns of circulation (subject to rapid change) will have an effect, gravity mentioned above will have an effect and so will subsidence and rising of certain land areas due to geological action and rebound from the last ice age. It would seem, however, that areas of southern Asia with vast populations near sea level are going to be hit the worst. 

How far off is this? Again there I have read many estimates. A meter or two in the next century would be possible, and tens of meters in this millennium quite conceivable. But even if it takes two centuries to get to a meter that is still utterly unacceptable.

One thing is clear: Uncertainty will continue for multiple reasons: We don't know when the 'tipping points' will occur (e.g. shutdown of ocean circulation, feedback leading to accelerating melting), we can't run a controlled experiment, we can never get all the data we might like, and we can't know what socio-economic or technological impacts occur (e.g. reductions in fossil fuel use due to economic depression, technological advances etc., or the inverse). Conservative politicians and climate deniers feed on uncertainty, claiming the science is not settled. But what is not settled is the timing, not the certainty of drastic change if we don't take drastic action.

It is hard for politicians to think even ten years in the future. But we really must think hundreds and thousands of years into the future because we hope to have descendants around then. The further we get into the future, the more absolutely certain we are of devastation if we continue policies that will lead to climate change. 

What's Important in Software Engineering Education articles still having an impact

Over a decade ago I conducted research in which I determined that certain areas of software engineering education are under-taught and over-taught, based on their relevance to the careers of software professionals.

The three articles published from this research continue to be cited and discussed. Just recently Robert Glass and Johann Rost summarized some of my findings in their Dark Side of Software Engineering blog. They invited me to add some of my thoughts, which became part of their blog post. I invite you to read their blog entry by clicking here.

In my original papers, I found:

• The top topics needed in the workplace are specific programming languages, data structures, software design, software architecture, requirements gathering and analysis, and human-computer interaction.
• Most of those same topics are also those for which employees need additional training, and which are under-taught relative to their importance.
• The most over-taught topics relative to their importance are differential equations, calculus and chemistry. These are also among the topics most forgotten.

The three papers from my original research are below; please cite them:

• What Knowledge Is Important to a Software Professional? (IEEE Computer, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 44-50, 2000). 100 citations according to Microsoft Academic Search. Interestingly, the first submission of this article (to IEEE Software) was rejected, as being uninteresting to the IEEE software readership. That's good, because IEEE computer has a much larger readership.
• Priorities for the education and training of software engineers, Journal of Systems and Software - JSS , vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 53-71, 2000 - A more in-depth article about this. (24 citations)
• A survey of the relevance of computer science and software engineering education, Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training - CSEE&T , 1998 - The original article with preliminary data. (35 citations)

Note that the raw survey data is still available online, and has had over 10,600 hits, suggesting the data is being used quite a bit.

I am planning on repeating the study and comparing the new data with the original. I will add a few topics that have become important in recent years such as web development, mobile development, agile methods, and game development. I will also examine recent curricula for additional items.

If you are interested in helping either as a participant or to help distribute the survey in your company, please email me with the subject line Education Relevance. In the original survey it was extremely useful to receive the assistance of senior managers and HR personnel from several companies. I was able to give those companies sub-analyses relevant to their employees.

In my comments in Glass and Rost's blog, I added a few additional points worth reiterating (these are my opinions, not based on any survey):

• Central to becoming a productive software developer, in my opinion is practice, practice, practice, but structured so the practice is spread out over diverse technologies, problem types and application domains.
• There are different sub-contexts for education. If you want to be a quality-assurance expert, you would want to focus on material that would be of much less interest to the 'average' developer; and clearly many of the less-important topics such as calculus will be critical to certain application domains. The survey results should not be interpreted as meaning that all software engineering or computer science educational programs should give uniform emphasis to the same set of topics.
• The notion of agility is becoming not only important in the work force, but also in education: Educational programs need to become more agile at responding to the needs of students (actually I think the reverse is happening in some contexts where fear of losing accreditation drives decisions). But, even more importantly, having students work on agile projects can, I think, help them learn the most important material they will need. I have found UCOSP student projects very successful in this regard.

All sugar is just as bad, even organic cane sugar

I was watching this video in which a nutritionist points out correctly many important facts about sugar:

• In the rush to remove fat from foods manufacturers are adding sugar. She rightly says sugar is toxic and addictive. From the evidence I have seen (she doesn't say so explicitly) it is worse than the fat.
• Artificial sweeteners have been found to make us crave even more sweet things
• There are many hidden sources of sugar.

Excellent video I thought. Until near the end.

Just before the end she suggests using organic cane sugar as a substitute. What! In that one statement she totally destroyed her credibility. The added nutrients and reduction in undesirable elements in the organic cane sugar are negligible. In terms of effect at increasing obesity and hear disease, the organic cane sugar is chemically pure sucrose, and will be just as fattening and addictive.

Software engineer is top career, yet again

Here's yet another article ranking "software engineer" as the top ranking career choice:

http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/2012-ranking-200-jobs-best-worst

The following InformationWeek article comments on this and gives a few reasons why software engineering is so great.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/careers/240000347

They talk about flexitime, problem-solving excitement, team-orientation, creativity, and freedom to fail. The latter is interesting and I am not sure I fully agree with it: Yes, a software engineer will often try alternatives and discover some don't work, but I think 'freedom to fail' is not the way to describe this. Ideally any organization employing software engineers will want people who can spend very little time on 'failing paths'. Instead, a good software engineer will prototype and explore alternatives relatively quickly, and then actively design for a solution that is highly unlikely to fail, or 'refactor' when they see failures looming. A key aspect of engineering is designing robust systems that do not fail.

Another thing I question in the Information Week article is the way the author contrasts software engineering and programming. "Unlike programmers, software engineers typically work in teams ", they say. Firstly, I have long been convinced that there is little meaningful distinction in the workforce in most companies, it is really only a matter of education, skills and attitude that makes you capable of being a software engineer. In reality essentially all programming should be done by people with some software engineering background. Secondly, most people who one might call 'mere' programmers (lacking software engineering core skills) still have to determine requirements, do design and end up managing projects. They just can't do these things as well as someone who is trained. Finally, contrary to the article: Software engineers and programmers are all equally likely to work in teams (or not) in todays world.

Here's my take on why it is truly great to be a software engineer:

• The sheer number of diverse jobs with good pay
• The opportunity to be creative
• The sense of satisfaction from getting something complex to work and be happily used by others
• The feeling of gratitude from thankful clients
• The rush from solving complex problems.
• The chance to interact with people and technology from all aspects of society. You like health care, music or games? Go find a software engineering job designing systems in these domains.
• The human interaction with clients and colleagues and the resulting team spirit
• The respect from being part of the professions of engineering and computing. Note that I am careful to indicate that there are two intersecting professions you are part of.
• The flexibility of the work environment. Opportunities to work at home, or have flexible hours are common.
• The ability to be always learning. Technology and application fields change. Learning is fun.
• The opportunities to lead and manage for those who want

Distracted driving and cellphones: Technological solutions to avoid overreactive bans

Distracted driving is clearly a critical safety concern, however I believe that banning use of cellphones is a major overreaction.

Yet that is precisely what the US National Transportation Safety Board and several other organizations are pushing for. They are not just talking about texting or hands-free use, they are talking about banning all non-emergency calls even with hands-free technology.

Their key argument seems to be this: Unlike talking to a passenger (who can also see the road and recognize when the driver is in a situation where they need to ignore the conversation to pay higher attention to driving), or listening to the radio (which is not interactive), talking to a remote caller is particularly distracting since the caller will keep on talking through critical driving situations, and drivers will tend to feel compelled to maintain the conversation.

That may be the case. However rather than a knee-jerk ban, I think that it would be better to impose requirements for a technological solution. Here's what a cellphone should be capable of doing, within a few years.

• Within two years: Notifying the person at the other end of a cell-phone conversation that the call is from or to a vehicle in motion: This would be relatively easy using GPS and accelerometer date today. The phone could simply inject into the conversation when the call starts, or the vehicle starts moving, or after a prolonged stop, the spoken words, "vehicle in motion". People would get used to it. It wouldn't solve all problems but it would be a first step. It might he hard to distinguish between a passenger talking vs. the driver talking, but a passenger could easily explain the situation.
• Within 5-7 years: Interacting with upcoming vehicular technology inject a warning, or in extreme cases suspend a call, when indeed a driver is facing a difficult situation. For example the phone could take such an action when it detects the dense fast-moving traffic, an accident-prone zone, slippery roads, low visibility, accidents in the area,  potential rapid-braking requirements ahead, or indeed the driver or the driver of a nearby car behaving in a way that shows tiredness or distraction. At this level of technological development, the phone could also detect what area of the car it is in so as to know whether it is in the hands of a passenger or not.
• Within 10-12 years: providing a video link to a camera facing forward out of the car's windshield so the caller can see the conditions on the road.

I think part two of my above proposal could in fact help actively reduce accidents, since the driver himself or herself would also hear the warning. All three of the above could in turn become requirements, as technology develops. Phones could be certified as 'distraction-reduction enabled'.

I used CB radios in the 1980's. Truckers and many other commercial drivers have used such 2-way communication devices for decades. Cellphones are only different because the person at the other end may be someone who is not also a driver, or aware of the driving context. My suggestions would largely remove that argument.

Talking while driving can have several important benefits.

• It can keep the driver alert on long stretches of highway driving.
• It can allow the driver to make better plans, which can sometimes improve safety.
• It can allow drivers to communicate their status to others which can be helpful in many ways.
• It is needed in many lines of business, where people need to talk with dispatchers, or decide where to drive to based on a changing context. Spoken communication is almost certain to be better than information appearing on a screen.
• When lost, having someone guide you to the right place can be very valuable. Lost drivers are likely to be particularly distracted as they deflect their ideas to look for address numbers, 

And there are many other sources of distraction on the roads:

• Use of GPS-based navigation devices
• Talking to children or blind passengers, who be as less aware of context like external callers
• Changing channel on the radio, or the heating controls, or other aspects of our ever-more-complex vehicle controls.
• Drinking to keep hydrated and maintain one's caffeine levels; eating snacks. Being hungry and thirsty presumably can result in their own source of distraction, so we wouldn't want a complete ban on doing these activities.

There is no technological solution to rowdy kids or the need to drink a coffee. But there can be for the distractions worsened by technology itself.

I am completely in favour of a rigorous ban on texting, and strong restrictions if other devices that require deflecting the eyes or using the hands. In this regard, user interfaces and accuracy for voice-driven calling and voice-output on navigational devices needs improving. For example, I find my iPhone 3GS normally fails to call the correct person or play the right song when I use Voice Control (maybe it is my half-British accent). This should be an area of urgent focus for UI improvement. I would like, to have a few preset commands, 'call home' being the most important, that would be ultra-reliable.

I can see an argument for 'cell-phone' free zones or conditions (bad weather, heavy fast-moving highways, complex inner-city road layouts, etc). But the outright ban is over-reaction.

I can also see an argument for greater limitations on cell-phone use for new drivers (akin to zero-alcohol policies, and limitations on night driving). Various jurisdictions now also require driver re-tests for seniors above a certain age. Perhaps limitations on cellphone use could be integrated with such requirements. It would likely be possible to devise speed-of-reaction or distractibility tests. It is clear that as we age, or ability to multitask diminishes. On my license I have a requirement to wear eyeglasses because I couldn't pass a vision test without them. Perhaps I could have a requirement to not use a phone if I can't pass a multitasking test.

For an earlier post on my predictions for smart phone capabilities, see here.

US companies dominate in patent power, and software dominates in patent category

IEEE Spectrum has published its annual statistics on patents. They show the dominance of US companies, such as IBM and Microsoft, and the rapid growth of Apple. The overview article is here.

The ranking approach uses what they call 'patent power' and takes into account the growth, impact, generality and originality of patent portfolios using various methods. The 2006 article describing the methodology is here

Here are a few observations:

Top companies in terms of patent power in 2010: The companies with the most powerful patent portfolios, in all industries, are the following. These are those with patent power over 2500. Companies were listed in just one category, even thought they may have patents in several categories. In these numbers I have combined the numbers where one company has bought another (e.g. Oracle having bought Sun)

1. IBM (8402 in Computer Systems)
2. Microsoft (7146 in Computer Software; this does not include the Nortel patents they bought in a consortium led by Apple; note also that if Microsoft buys Yahoo, as news articles suggest they are considering, the combined company would top the list at 9910)
3. Johnson and Johnson (6796 overall; 3610 in Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals; plus 2810 through Ethicon Endo-Surgery and 376 through Depuy Spine)
4. Medtronic (5540 in Medical Equipment)
5. Covidien PLC (4544 overall, the top non-US company; 3333 in Medical Equipment; plus another 718 through Nelicor Puritan Bennett and 493 through Mallinckrodt)
6. Oracle (4171 overall; 3129 in Computer Software, plus 558 through BEA, 362 though Siebel, and 122 through Sun)
7. Samsung (4033 in Semiconductors; second-to-top non-US company)
8. Cisco (3299 in Communications/Internet Equipment
9. Qualcomm (3170 in Communications Equipment)
10. Yahoo (2789 in Communications/Internet Services)
11. Apple (2764 in Electronics; this does not include the Nortel patents they bought with Microsoft and others - with their share of these, they would likely be in 10th place)
12. Hitachi (2669 overall; 2531 in Electronics; plus 138 through Hitachi Global Storage)

Software-related patents: I am particularly interested in software patents, since I in general think they are counterproductive although it is a necessary evil to keep patenting in this domain until changes I have suggested are made. The rankings show IBM dominating in the Computer Systems category; Microsoft and Oracle dominating the Computer Software category, and Samsung, Yahoo and Apple with high presences in other categories that also include software patents. Clearly software patenting is of dominant importance in the patent world, which is unfortunate. It also seems to be on the rapid increase, which bodes badly for ordinary software developers.

Categories with relatively low power patent presence: There are no companies with patent portfolios above 2500 in domains such as aerospace, automotive and chemicals. It is notable that General Motors (1030) is still doing well despite its troubles in the last recession; it is only just behind Toyota (1272) in the automotive category.

Canadian companies:  Top Canadian companies are RIM (1064, Communications/Internet Services) and Magna (553, Automotive).

Google: I thought it notable that Google (2165, Communication/Internet Services) was ranked well behind IBM, Samsung, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo and Apple, companies they compete with or have intimate relationships with (e.g. Samsung is the top seller of Android systems). Google seems to be losing its reputation as an innovator. See yesterday's post for related comments. However, this year, Google has bought some IBM patents so if the list was recreated with 2011 data it might look a bit different.

Absolute numbers: In absolute numbers of patents (not 'patent power'), IBM also dominates with 5905, but Samsung comes second with 4599. Other companies are far, far behind.

In fear of the great Google Shutdown train: What could be next?

Google has been in a frenzy of 'cleanup' activity over the last few months. It is beginning to make me feel positively uncomfortable.

Google's latest blog post announces the shutdown of a number of services that are not doing well, notably Google Wave and Knol.

I think it is the latter that alarms me the most. They point out that the proposed replacement for Knol is WordPress based. Yet they have their own Blogger service (which you are using right now to read this) that competes against WordPress. Does that mean that the writing will be on the wall some time in the future for Blogger? It certainly makes me think about moving this blog elsewhere.

In addition to Blogger, I am heavily invested in Google Code for the Umple project. Will Google Code be on the chopping block too at some point? After all, like Blogger it is a service that Google provides on a largely public-service basis. Google is already shutting down 'Code search' with no announced replacement, and has severely limited the usability of Google Groups, as I have previously commented.

I think that if I had read all these announcements a year ago when I was first starting blogging and open-source development, I would likely have chosen different platforms. I imagine many people just setting out to use such online services will think the same thing. I chose Google because it is a large company with a reputation for stability, innovation and beneficence. Two of my factors in choosing Blogger and Google Code over WordPress and GitHub were the integration with Google accounts and Google search. However long-term stability trumps all. Using Google services puts me at the mercy of Google Shutdown.

I will persist with Google for now, hoping their 'Do no evil' mantra wins out in the end. However, I am continuing to take steps to protect myself. These include making all links to the Umple project go through the umple.org domain, so I can relocate them if I had to, and regularly backing up my subversion repository and blog. I will be looking into mirroring my blog on a domain and server I have full control over.

I also hereby ask Google:

• To make formal 10-year service guarantees for its services in which people invest huge amounts of personal time, like Google Code, Blogger and  Google Groups.
• To extend these guarantees each year, so any potential shutdown would always be 10 years out
• To publish usage statistics trends of its services so we can be confident that we are using services that are not dwindling in numbers of users.
• To keep data in shut-down services visible in a read-only manner without limit  (e.g. keeping Knol URLs active for reading indefinitely, so links that point to them never go stale). There would be very little cost in doing this.

I think that unless Google does this, more and more people will migrate away, and fewer and fewer new users will adopt these services, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophesy of shutdown due to low usage.

And lest people think I am being unfair to Google, or risking having Google push me personally off its services for criticizing it, I have been just as critical of Apple, and have not even ventured near Microsoft's online services since they have historically been too closed. Google is still an excellent online service provider for blogging, open-source code hosting, and mailing lists, and is still probably a lower risk than smaller companies regarding potential shutdown. But overall, I now do not consider it a low risk in this regard.

Also in defense of Google, they do make their announcements in a reasonably friendly way and try to suggest alternatives. I do wish in their announcements they would tell us the number of users they estimate to be affected (both content providers and readers).