Tiny Iowa County Takes on the King of Online Defamation

In Gunfight at the OK Corral, a U.S. Marshal from the prairie is called to Arizona to help his brother stand his ground against a band of cattle thieves. The character is an American archetype that is alive and well in the last untamed frontier -- the Internet.

Ben Smith, District Attorney for Sac County, Iowa is a modern Wyatt Earp. Unlike Gunfight, he was not summoned to Arizona, but rather Arizona came to him when Tempe-based RipOffReport.com and others sought to exploit a pending murder trial as part of a proxy war against an Internet security expert seeking to expose them. RipOffReport.com ("ROR") is the nation's leading "gripe" site, where consumers and others post various complaints about individuals and businesses which feature prominently in Google searches due to ROR's search engine optimization capability.

To say this is a David versus Goliath battle is an understatement since Sac County has a population of 10,071, whereas ROR has that many unique visitors every 45 minutes. Yet this tiny county is about to have a major impact on the future of the Internet.

As detailed extensively in a 124-page application for a search warrant recently unsealed by a Sac County court, the origin of this battle begins in 2011 when Smith tried and convicted Tracy Richter for murder. Richter was the ex-wife of Michael Roberts who ran a reputation management company. Roberts had disclosed details of an opportunity to license an existing illegal malicious SQL browser developed by Matthew Cooke to Darren Meade and Adam Zuckerman which, when deployed, could effectively remove webpages from the Internet.

Smith explains that Zuckerman hoped to emulate Cooke's business model of "reputation racketeering" which used one web property to generate defamatory content that his reputation repair property would then use to solicit removal services with people paying thousands of dollars to remove the posts. Smith notes that this is the same business model followed by revenge porn purveyors recently indicted by the California Attorney General.

According to the application, fallout between Meade and Zuckerman in Southern California led Meade to turn to ROR who worked jointly with Meade in launching a smear campaign against Roberts. As Meade testified in a civil proceeding, ROR is "the perfect place to defame somebody because it will always stay up, and [has high Google rankings]. So if you want to destroy somebody's reputation, that's a great place to do it."

The application details how the smear campaign escalated and stumbled into Sac County by including witnesses in the Richter trial and even Smith himself, as his face is on every one of the 1.8 million pages of ROR content. Smith argues that ROR and Richter engaged in a conspiracy that includes extortion, obstruction of justice and witness tampering and warns that:

No greater threat to our criminal justice system exists than allowing convicted, incarcerated murderers (criminals), and their friends and family, to destroy the livelihoods and personal reputations of the people brave enough to testify against them in open court.

The application and arrests that may follow is significant since Smith is not only taking on the most hated site on the Internet (and its founder Ed Magedson), but Smith raises serious questions about the online reputation industry itself. Smith notes that a number of online reputation companies had at one time licensed Cooke's SQL technology by way of an "affiliate-partnership" program prominently listed on many of his former websites including Reputationmanagementpartners.com (the company in which he was partnered with Zuckerman). Topping the list of "partner" companies on that website was Reputation Defender, which is now known as Reputation.com.

Have online reputation companies merely mechanized and optimized online defamation to generate business for themselves? I have firsthand experience that demonstrates that, at least in some cases, the answer is "absolutely." As a lawyer who represents victims of online harassment (including one of Mr. Zuckerman's victims), I have encountered one defendant who responded to a lawsuit filed against her with death threats and a nearly five-year campaign of cyber abuse. Yet in a matter of weeks after she consulted with Reputation Fighters last year, she made the first of her six entries about me on ROR in violation of a criminal protective order -- a most unlikely coincidence.

Speaking as an advocate and commentator in this space, Smith should be applauded for having the courage to step into this potential minefield from such a tiny county. His investigation should trigger a much larger review of the industry by the media, state attorneys general and Washington. Like Wyatt Earp before him, Smith is trying to make sure that the rule of law takes root in a wild frontier and it is important to the success of the Internet that he succeed.

Ben Horowitz: The Pain and Passion Of Fight Club Management

I just had a beer with Ben Horowitz. Actually we had a few. We sat in a dark bar, long into the night and swapped stories that only Startup CEO's can tell each other. The deepest, darkest, scariest moments when you're walking the tightrope between success and failure. The moments when you have two options - bad, and worse. The times when you are both excited about the prospects and honest about the challenges.

It was a great, honest, therapeutic beer. And the funny thing is - I've never met Ben. But he did something remarkable, he wrote a book and told the truth. It was like sitting across from him over a beer.

He said some words that Entrepreneurs don't usually say out loud.

Fear? Never had had to face it.
Terror? No way.
Dread? Impossible.

And yet - reading his book, you can't help but know he's telling the truth. Horowitz was the CEO of Loudcloud, Mark Andreessen's company that created the concept of the 'cloud' and then - with all the opportunity and risk that comes along with being first - ran headlong into the internet crash of 2000.

The book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, is a take-no-prisoners tell all. But Horowitz isn't spilling the beans on any of his co-workers, or competitors, or customers. He's turning the harsh honest light on himself. And he's brutal - because, come on folks lets face it, CEO's are human. We make mistakes. We miscalculate, misjudge, and sometimes we're just plain wrong. From Horowitz's perspective it's not about being perfect, it's about how you respond - and it's about a word I'm not sure I've ever read in a business book before: courage.

The book begins in Berkeley - and with him as an engineer at NetLabs, the shift to Netscape to work with Marc Andreesen, and the launch of Loudcloud as a rocket ship. And as Horowitz makes clear, no one is born a CEO or goes to CEO school. It's all on the job training. The Loudcloud IPO, the Opsware battle to survive, and the extraordinary meeting with Herb Allen all would be a nail-biter of a dramatic novel, if it wasn't all true.


As Horowitz told Techcrunch; "I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same -- they give the exact same advice. It's like a diet book, they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion."

But there was a book he hadn't read. Not the happy talk, rah rah business book. But an honest telling of all the things that go wrong; "I really felt like there was a missing book, which was what happens when everything goes wrong, and you have set it all up right."

The power of the book is its honest, blow by blow telling of the battle to control his own psychology. He calls it "Fight Club Management." And - as we know, the first rule is that we don't talk about it. Writes Horowitz; "the first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don't talk about the psychological meltdown. At risk of violating the sacred rule, I will attempt to describe the condition and prescribe some techniques that helped me. In the end, this is the most personal and important battle that any CEO will face."

He calls this battle 'The Struggle' - describing the daily battles between vision and reality, between the bright road ahead and the daily twists and turns of the startup life.

There's no doubt that Ben wrote this book so that you could have a beer with him. Hear his stories of disaster and near disaster, and share some of your own. There's a reason why being a startup CEO is hard. It's supposed to be. And if you're not cut out for all the twists and turns, ups and downs, better to know that now. Sure Horowitz survived, and his company today is doing well - but the pain and passion that drives us is part of the magic of being a Startup CEO. You don't ever forget the hard parts, which secretly, is probably part of what makes us tick. Winning when it seems like the odds are stacked against you. It makes the winning worth the journey - and setting your sights high.

I suspect depending on who you are, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is either inspirational or daunting. For me, Ben's honest and spirited portrayal of being a startup CEO simply made sense. You have to love the whole the ups, the downs, and in-betweens. If you're up for the journey - then every part of it is worthwhile.

5 Essential Tools for the Solopreneur

Thanks to technology, living life on your own terms is easier than ever. In fact, technology has contributed to the rise of the solopreneur. Solopreneurs aren't interested in building the next large cap company. Instead, most solopreneurs are interested in creating lifestyles that work for them. It's about building a business -- even a small one -- that funds the freedom and flexibility to live the way you want to.

My freelancing business allows me to live a solopreneur lifestyle, providing me with the freedom to work when and where I want. A solopreneur still has to remain connected to his or her business, though. If you want to more effectively manage your business, giving you more time to do the things you want, consider using the following five essential tools for solopreneurs:



1. Any Task Manager

Do yourself a favor and get a good task manager. For the longest time, I resisted task managers. However, it became difficult to manage my work and my life when I had to try to remember everything. A number of task managers, from Any.do to Things to Wunderlist, can help you manage your projects, meetings, interviews, and important life events.

Even just using iCal or Google's Calendar can help you better manage your life. My life is much better organized since adding a task manager.

2. Evernote

I still use a Moleskine notebook for jotting down thoughts, and making notes. However, I am slowly moving over to note-taking apps like Evernote. You can snap pictures, create sticky-notes, highlight, share, and even add audio thoughts. Plus, Evernote makes your thoughts and scribblings searchable so you can easily find what you've been looking for.

Evernote recently announced a partnership with LinkedIn to create the ultimate portable business card organizer. Snap a picture of a business card, and Evernote will bring up the person's LinkedIn information. This makes networking, organizing contacts and creating useful partnerships easy for the solopreneur.

3. GetReponse

Many solopreneurs rely on the Internet, and on email, to drive sales and revenue. With GetResponse, it's easy to to create and monitor sales materials. One of the things GetResponse does especially well is A/B testing. This allows you to figure out which email messages, setups, and other items are leading to the most conversions.

You can also get access to a landing page creator and to smart autoresponders. For solopreneurs offering courses, ebooks and other useful products, the right landing page and autoresponders can be a boon.

4. Social Media and Analytics

Essential to the solopreneur lifestyle is the ability to get out and enjoy life. You can't really do that if you have to sit at the computer all day posting on social media. While you can outsource some of this, another option is to use a social media scheduler like Hootsuite or TweetDeck.

I like Hootsuite quite a bit because it also allows me to interact via social media. I can check responses, and respond back -- no matter where I am. There are also some valuable analytics when you use social media schedulers as well.

It also makes sense to use analytics tools. If you want to see where your traffic is coming from, and track the effectiveness of a campaign, the right tools can make all the difference. Using your analytics tools can provide you with an easy way to see what the signals are saying -- and then make the necessary adjustments that result in increased profitability.

One of the best analytics tools available is Cyfe, which allows you to monitor business data from multiple sources all in one place, whether it's sales or social media. You can also customize your experience to help you better analyze the data. You can also use tools like Google Analytics and Crazy Egg.

5. Skype

Another great tool is Skype. It allows me to stay connected quickly and easily with clients and business partners all over the world. Any sort of meeting application can be a great help to the solopreneur, whether it's Skype, Google Hangouts, or a full-on collaboration app like Glassboard. All of these apps are available on a mobile device, so you can collaborate no matter where you are.

As a solopreneur, I find these tools essential to the success of my business. The fact that they are easy to use, and that they keep me organized, means that I can be just as profitable without spending all day cooped up in my home office.

Being in Sync means your Data is safe

What is data synchronization? This technology synchronizes data between two or more computers and/or the cloud and automatically copies changes that are transacted between devices.

File synchronization is used for home or small business backups when the user copies files to a flash drive or external hard drive. The syncing prevents creating duplicate files.

For superior syncing, take a look at GoodSync with its 30-day free trial. After which, for $30 (or use 33% of discount code “rsici”), you can continue using its battleship of features. GoodSync provides remote service and also syncs with many online services.

Now let me tell you how well GoodSync works for me. Like most, my operating system resides on my C Drive. I keep my C Drive clear and free of all data so all it has to do is operate my system and contain updates, drivers and security patches. My D Drive is the DVD/CD Rom drive and My E: drive has all my data, taking up over 75 percent of the three-terabyte internal drive. My primary data is on Drive E, and this is backed up by a cloud service and then synced to my external three-terabyte F: drive.

Now, every two hours, GoodSync automatically syncs my external F: and internal E: drives. Even though all my data is in a cloud, what if my internal drive crashes? Downloading everything would be a pain. That’s where GoodSync comes in. Plus, though the cloud has its virtues, assessing data from it on a daily basis is surely not one of them.

You’ll be pleased with GoodSync’s efficient main window. Some of GoodSync’s offerings include file filtering, bidirectional/unidirectional syncing, syncing of deletions, and job scheduling.

Version 9 can include numerous sources and single files in one job. If you create files on your mobile, GoodSync will automatically download them. It supports SkyDive, Windows Azure, Google Docs, Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon S3.

Don’t let the lack of flamboyant design fool you; GoodSync is as good as they come, and for tech savvy users, is a breeze. In particular, not-so-tech-savvy users will be quite impressed with the many options but will need more time to catch on. Read more about that here.

GoodSync stands out from other syncing programs because it displays files from both destination and source on the right side of its main window, while the status shows on the left side. It’s best to use a dedicated destination folder for your sync.

As for connecting to online services, GoodSync supports SFTP, FTP and Webdav.

Another point is that for every PC that you wish to remotely sync, you will need a license.

There really isn’t any reason why you shouldn’t download GoodSync and take advantage of its 30-day free trial.

You have nothing to lose (literally!) with GoodSync. Get going on it.

Robert Siciliano is a digital life expert to GoodSync discussing identity theft prevention on Youtube. For Roberts FREE ebook text- SECURE Your@emailaddress -to 411247. Disclosures.

What Type of Tech Job Applicants Offer the Best Performance

As the tech job sector continues to grow in the United States there is a constant competition going on between employers to get the best talent available. However, there is a true disconnect between many businesses looking to hire talent and what the high tech worker really wants from a job. Many businesses are undervaluing culture and overvaluing wages. Many believe this leads to lower retention and production. I thought it would be interesting to dive into a recent report done by The JDL Group and a technology consulting firm, Paige Technologies. The February 2014 data and study focused on a survey of 275 high tech job candidates. Many of the key takeaways were very interesting and should be eye-opening for c-suite level employees. All of the results and assessments have a direct effect on predicting job performance.

1. Tech Job Applicants Value Projects Over Profits And Power

Yes, tech job seekers would rather work on interesting projects over jobs that pay them higher. Tech workers in demand would much rather build cool things that function well and look good than make more money. They truly enjoy science and aesthetics way more than affiliation and commerce. A focus on quality is very important, as well as the surroundings they work in. Tech job applicants have a deep desire for knowledge and real enthusiasm for curiosity. They are motivated by the value of security and entertainment of the work rather than the power and recognition from peers, as well as public praise the work brings to them. Employers need to understand motives and values of the tech job seeker if they want to recruit the best and the brightest in the tech world.

2. Tech Job Applicants Are Conscientious

The best of the best in the tech industry are prudent individuals who are inquisitive. They are imaginative and quick-witted. They are visionaries who have self-control and are organized. They are not status seekers and act more often than not as team players. They share the ideals and believe in the big picture of the project or business. The top tech job seekers tend to be quick and independent book and theory learners rather than practical and hands-on.

3. Tech Job Applicants Are More Cautious Than You Think

Many think top tech talent employees are bold individuals. However, they are not overly self-confident and are willing to listen to advice. They are very cautious and resistant to change and reluctant to take even reasonable chances for fear of negative evaluations. The best of the best tech performers are not dramatic and do not need to be noticed. They are not always eager to please and are not reliant on others opinions. They believe in making sure all data and pieces of the puzzle are in place before moving forward and never push the envelope.

4. Tech Job Applicants Are Analytical Thinkers

Tech talent is made up of analytical thinkers. Employers should be looking to hire innovative individuals who hone in on logic and analysis. They will not get as high of performance out of individuals whose judgment is impacted by action or interpersonal motives. Past experience and carefulness is very important.

So what does all this mean and what should an employer's key takeaways be from tech job trends? Compatibility is key. Positive tech job fits are based on many factors, however as more and more assessments are done and this market continues to grow, cultural fit is key. Chris Wood, the Managing Partner of Paige Technologies, believes people create culture, which ultimately becomes what differentiates one organization from the next. "Organizations are really only a representation of the people in them, with stakes high, employers must be diligent about identifying traits and mapping culture," says Wood.

Employers who want the top tech talent should look at assessment results like these to find the best "true fit" for their organization that will lead to the best performance on the job. These individuals will stay the longest and be the most loyal to the organization thus making the business have more appeal to other potential tech job applicants and be more profitable in the long run.

In a world where the tech job market continues to change, employers need to continue to evolve culturally if they want to find employees who are more than just a set a skills, but rather the complete package.

Disclosure: JGrill Media is a consultant of Paige Technologies.


About the Author: Jason Grill is an attorney and the founder of JGrill Media. He is the co-founder of Sock 101 and the host of the Entrepreneur KC Show. Jason contributes regularly to national publications, radio and TV stations. Follow Jason on Twitter @JasonGrill and on Facebook.

"Inspiration Porn" Objectifies People With Disabilities

Click here to watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.

When my husband and I visited Yosemite National Park to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, we took a hike up to one of the park's waterfalls. The hike was easy enough that the trail was crowded, but it was still an uphill slog requiring strength and stamina. As a young man and his companion blew by us, he turned to me and said, "Good for you for doing this. I really admire you." Those words didn't make me feel warm and fuzzy, nor did they give me a burst of newfound energy. Rather, they made me angry. With those words, that young man treated me as an object, a "disabled person" instead of just a "person" -- worthy of admiration although he knew nothing about me apart from the fact that I walk with a limp and was working harder than others to get up that hill.

All my life, I have been admired, called brave and inspirational because I live with a disability. And, all my life, I have found that admiration and those labels ridiculous. Admire me for what I do -- for writing well, raising decent kids or having a lovely garden. But don't admire me just for existing, just because I live a mostly unremarkable life with scars and a limp and a history of dozens of broken bones. Admiration of this sort is really just pity in disguise. The implication? "If I had a body like yours, I would hide myself at home all day. You must have huge reserves of courage, to bring this body out into public every day."

Australian journalist and comedian Stella Young, who has the same genetic bone disorder I do (called "Osteogenesis Imperfecta" or OI), calls the misplaced admiration of disabled people because of our disabilities "inspiration porn." In this TEDx talk, she does a terrific job of explaining how "inspiration porn," like other kinds of porn, objectifies people. I don't agree completely with Young's contentions that disability is solely a social construct, that nothing about a disability is intrinsically a "bad thing," and that social and cultural barriers are the only obstacles people with disabilities face. I think that dozens of broken bones, chronic pain and many other aspects of OI are intrinsic bad things -- which is not to say that I deserve pity or that my life is miserable.

But I agree with Young that naming and eradicating the social and cultural barriers that objectify people with disabilities is, indeed, a matter of justice. She makes a convincing argument with a good dose of humor.

We want to know what you think. Join the discussion by posting a comment below or tweeting #TEDWeekends. Interested in blogging for a future edition of TED Weekends? Email us at tedweekends@huffingtonpost.com.

China's Internet Giants' Lottery Apps Linked to Spate of World Cup Suicides

A 24-year-old surnamed Zheng ferried his ailing father to a hospital 100 miles from home in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, the official Xinhua news agency reported on July 10. After paying the deposit for the hospital bed, he had $800 leftover -- not quite enough to pay for all his father's medicine. Then he had an idea. Using an app on his phone, he legally bought an $800 lotto ticket betting Brazil would defeat Germany. In the early morning hours of July 9, he watched Brazil lose 7-1 and swallowed all his father's pills. When he came to, he began crying, and reportedly told the officer who had found him unconscious near the hospital, "You should not have saved me, I don't deserve to live."

Ten Chinese bettors have not been as fortunate as the 24-year-old Zheng. The first man to commit suicide jumped from a building in Shanghai after the tournament's first match. Oscar's goal in the 91st minute had brought the score of the Brazil-Croatia game to 3, 1; he lost $48,000. Then on June 18, a woman surnamed Wang lit a pile of charcoal in a hotel bathroom in Haikou, Hainan. Her young child, left outside the door, found her dead sometime later. A suicide note revealed she had borrowed and lost more than $16,000. The list continues. 26-year-old Little Xu was the tenth World Cup suicide. On July 5, he jumped and was found dead on the fourth floor terrace of his apartment tower. He was reported to have lost $69,000 betting on World Cup matches.

The spate of World Cup suicides coincides with the advent of newly legal online gambling in China. In October of 2012, the Ministry of Finance awarded the first online lottery sales licenses. Now China's Internet giants, Alibaba and Tencent, and a slew of other service providers, offer easy-to-use mobile and online applications that connect users to China's provincial Sports Lotteries. Alibaba's Taobao, China's third most visited website, uses its homepage to promote its online betting platform. Tencent's WeChat, with 355 million users, the majority in China, allows users to make in-app "lotto ticket" purchases.

It is now easier for Chinese to buy World Cup "lotto tickets" than cans of Coke. And it is a "lotto" in name only. Bettors can legally place the same World Cup bets that are made inside any Las Vegas sports book.

Vincent Chen, a 24-year-old IT engineer in Guangzhou, is one of China's newly established legion of online lotto ticket buyers. During the group stage of the World Cup, he bought a number of 2-team parlay lotto tickets through NYSE-listed 500.com's online platform. "During the last World Cup I was in college, I bet with my friends," he said. "This time I have been using 500.com to buy tickets." Thus far he has lost about $325 dollars, roughly a third of his monthly salary, and is still debating whether or not to bet on Germany in the final.

Users of China's Twitter-like Weibo have taken to joking "the roof is crowded" when matches come to an end. After finding a man lying naked in the middle of the Baomao freeway, on July 10, the Hunan Highway Patrol tweeted a picture and wrote, "More than a few soccer fans have taken to the roof, this man was the first to take to the freeway. Rationally watch soccer, no more using your life to make bets." The man told police he had lost all his family's money betting on soccer and wanted to die.

500.com incorporated the newly coined phrase into its marketing materials. "Rescue the Fans on the Roof. Free Score Guessing," ran the tagline for its new quarter-final promotion offering users free 4-team parlay lotto tickets.

Millions of Chinese have been drawn in by the online betting platforms' ease of use and extensive marketing campaigns. According to the China Daily, Taobao saw 4 million users bet on its online platform on the first day of the World Cup. Three days later that number grew to 6 million bettors. At a recent media event, 500.com CFO Zhengming Pan said lotto ticket sales had spiked 3 to 5 times when compared with prior weeks.

As of July 5, three weeks into the World Cup, China's National Sports Lottery Center calculated $1.5 billion in "lotto tickets" had been purchased. That figure is triple what was legally wagered on the entire 2010 World Cup. Li Jian, head of the online lotto consultancy Caitong, told Caixin that 70% of World Cup bets had been placed through online channels.

While online betting on World Cup matches has resulted in enormous profits for the gambling platforms, and a windfall for the provincial sports lotteries, it has taken a toll on Chinese society. Come the end of the World Cup here on Monday morning local time, Chinese officials may be rethinking the societal costs of legal online betting.


______

List of Suicides:

On June 13, a man in Shanghai jumped to his death after he was reported to have lost $48,000 betting on the Brazil - Croatia match. He had wagered the final score would be 2 - 1. Oscar's goal in the 91st minute brought the score to 3 - 1.

On June 18, a woman surnamed Wang checked into a hotel room in Haikou, Hainan, shut herself in the bathroom and lit a pile of charcoal. Her child, left outside the door, found the mother dead sometime later. A suicide note detailed the more than $16,000 she had borrowed and lost betting on World Cup matches.

On June 19, Liu Jialin, a renowned 30-year-old chef in Hong Kong, was found dead beside a pile of spent charcoal in his locked bedroom. He was reported to have bet consecutively on Spain as the team lost to the Netherlands and then Chile.

On June 22, a sophomore at Guangzhou University surnamed Lin, jumped to his death from a building in the city's university district. He was rumored to have lost more than $3,000 betting on the World Cup.

On June 23, Yu Chi-hung, a 48-year-old wine sales manager in Hong Kong, was found dead in his wine shop's bathroom beside a bottle of wine, pills and burned charcoal. He left a note that read, "The pressures in life are heavy" and was known to be an avid gambler.

On June 24, 24-year-old Li Zhihao, jumped from the fifth floor of his office building in Hong Kong after friends refused to lend him more money for World Cup betting.

Also on June 24, a security guard surnamed Li, who worked at the Lianjiang People's Hospital in Lianjiang, Guangdong jumped to his death from the top of the hospital building. He was reported to have had an argument with his family over his sports betting debt then gone to work.

On June 25, a 26-year-old man, surnamed Ding, jumped from the sixth story of a building under construction in Quanzhou, Fujian. He was rumored to have lost over $48,000 betting on soccer matches and a suicide note on his iPad admitted to having recently bet on the soccer matches.

On July 5, a 25-year-old man in Xian, Shaanxi got in a physical altercation with his bride of two months after she lost money betting on soccer matches. He then fled to his car where he slashed himself with a razor blade. Still alive, he shut the car doors, turned on the air conditioning and used a lighter to start a fire.

Also on July 5, 26-year-old Little Xu was found dead on the fourth floor terrace of his apartment building in Ruian, Zhejiang. Earlier in the morning, he had paid a $69,000 World Cup gambling wager and argued with his mother over his gambling habit.

Peripheral Vision: Climate Change and Global Development in the 21st Century (Pt. I)

Summary

• Global warming poses an existential threat to life on Earth. This existential threat challenges our capabilities and calls into question the viability and effectiveness of mechanically conceived grid maintenance options.

• Solar Roadways' smashing crowdfunding campaign success provides a terrific opportunity to assess the current state of business crowdfunding in relation to the future of solar power.

• Distributed investing and distributed electricity are part of a "grid revolution" that may structurally shift financial and political power globally from the 1 Percent to the 99 Percent and from the Core to the Periphery.

• The distributed grid paradigm echoes current philosophical, engineering and economic models grounded in an ecological metaphor that values species diversity, small-scale experimentation, and distributed risk and parcelized decision-making.

The Cracking of the Global Grid

With its Indiegogo campaign winding down, folksy technology startup Solar Roadways has raised well north of $2 million from 48,000 funders, released a YouTube video that has received more than 16 million views, and for the moment can proudly boast of being the third most funded project in the history of Indiegogo.

Solar roads are likely not the first-best option, nor perhaps even the 10th-best option, for widespread capture of solar energy. Nonetheless, Solar Roadways' smashing campaign provides a terrific opportunity to assess the current state of business crowdfunding in relation to the future of solar power, what we will call sunfunding. The connections between crowdfunding and sunfunding exist. They matter. And they may surprise you. Let's roll the tape.

Crowdfunding has grown approximately 80 percent year over year since 2009, a pace expected to continue for the foreseeable future. In 2014, global crowdfunding projections approach $10 billion, a 20-fold increase from the $500 million raised in crowdfunding campaigns in 2009. If trend lines persist, in 2020, crowdfunding will deliver $500 billion in seed capital to nearly 10 million projects, in the form of donation, reward, lending, and equity-based investments -- generating millions of new jobs and more than $3 trillion in new revenue.

Sunfunding also has mushroomed. In 2013, solar power installations in the United States exceeded 4.5 gigawatts, a more than five-fold increase from installations in 2010. Because solar still only contributes less than 0.5 percent of electric power nationwide, the industry can assume a blue-sky future for years to come, with installation trend lines indicating potential capacity installation of 225 gigawatts in 2020, enough capacity in that single year to power nearly 40 million American homes.

Indeed, solar installations in the U.S. have rocketed so rapidly toward grid pricing parity with coal that analysts now predict utilities will construct few, if any, coal-fired power plants going forward. In the more optimistic of its future-oriented Scenarios, energy company Shell estimates that solar PV could account for 20 percent of global energy by 2060 and nearly 40 percent of the total by the end of the 21st century.

With remarkably aligned annualized growth rates of 75-80 percent, crowdfunding and sunfunding trends, depicted graphically, resemble nothing so much as the trajectory of space vehicles obtaining escape velocity from the earth's atmosphere. But for those with boots on the ground, the impact of these trends more likely resembles displacement associated with the cracking of tectonic plates. Or perhaps more aptly, the cracking of the global grid.

Next

In Part Two of this essay, we will consider some of the more radical implications of crowdfunding. In particular, we will spotlight the emergence of an "acceleration ecology" based on principles of self-assembly that guarantee organic, "hive mind" solutions will always outpace traditional, "command and control" grid options.

No Justification for Permanently Banning Sales Taxes on Internet Access Charges

For the first time since Congress enacted the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA) in 1998, lawmakers are seriously considering permanently extending the moratorium on new state and local sales taxes on Internet access service and eliminating the "grandfather clause" exempting existing taxes -- changes that could cost states $7 billion a year in potential annual revenue.  Our new paper explains why Congress should do the opposite: allow all states to apply their normal sales tax to this service, just as they tax similar communication and entertainment services like long-distance telephone service and cable TV.

Even if Congress isn't prepared to let ITFA lapse, there's no justification for making the law permanent and eliminating the grandfather clause, as a bill that the House is expected to consider next week would do.  Congress can achieve all of its major objectives by enacting another temporary extension that leaves the grandfather clause intact.

A temporary extension would ensure that no new states and localities tax Internet access.  It also would continue ITFA's ban on "discriminatory taxation" of Internet access service and other types of Internet commerce -- for example, taxing these items at higher rates than other kinds of interstate communications or consumer purchases.

At the same time, another extension would avoid the problems that the House bill would cause, namely:

• Eliminating the grandfather clause would strip Hawaii, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin of at least $500 million in annual state and local sales tax revenue they use to pay for education, police, and other services.  These states (and many of their localities) would have to reduce services or increase other taxes to offset the revenue loss. 

• Eliminating the grandfather clause would put at risk numerous other state and local taxes that Internet access providers pay on the things they buy in order to provide Internet service, such as computer servers, fiber-optic cable, or even gasoline for their vehicles.  Almost all of these taxes existed before 1998, so the grandfather clause protects them from legal challenge.  But if Congress eliminates the clause, Internet access providers could challenge these taxes in court as indirect taxes on Internet access service and therefore voided by ITFA. 

• Permanently extending ITFA risks widespread legal challenges by Internet merchants to a host of state and local taxes based on the law's prohibition of discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce.  ITFA's definition of "discriminatory tax" is broad and vague, but Internet companies have largely refrained from using it to challenge state taxes because they knew that if they were too aggressive, ITFA opponents could use this to argue for repealing the law when it came up for renewal.  But with ITFA permanently on the books, that restraint would disappear, potentially leading to widespread litigation.

Congress first enacted ITFA when Internet commerce was still in its infancy and high-speed Internet access was just becoming available to individual households.  Congress sought to balance state and local governments' need to finance essential services against Congress' desire to encourage the development of the Internet industry.  Even then, Congress decided that striking that balance entailed grandfathering existing taxes and prohibiting new taxes on Internet access only temporarily.

 

There is no need to continue treating the Internet as an "infant industry" and exempting it from state and local taxes that other industries must pay.  But even if Congress wishes to renew ITFA, surely its tax treatment should be no more favorable than in 1998 -- a temporary exemption for taxes on Internet access service, with pre-1998 taxes still grandfathered.

Related Posts:

• Congress Should End, Not Extend, Prohibition on Taxing Internet Access


• Supreme Court Opens Door Wider for Collecting Internet Sales Taxes


• Higher Ed Cuts, Tuition Hikes Worsen Low-Income Students' Struggles

My Daughter's Disability Does Not Make Her Inspirational

Click here to watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.

One day after receiving a request from an editor at HuffPost to participate in a discussion about Stella Young's brilliant talk on Inspiration Porn, I got an email from a reader of my blog. She wanted me to know that she had nominated me for a Very Inspiring Blogger Award. There are no accidents, my friends.

I was touched by the nomination. I am always grateful and honored when I am told that I inspire others. Far more complicated, however, is when they say the same about my autistic daughter.

I am not disabled. I do not carry the weight of the history that my daughter does. I am not thought of as less than. I do not fight daily to be seen as among rather than other. I am not feared nor alienated because of my differences. She is.

Is she inspiring? You bet your ass she is. But am I wary of the WAY in which others derive their inspiration from her? Extremely.

Brooke is not inspiring because she is autistic. She is inspiring because she lives her life in a way that commands respect and demands acceptance.

She is inspiring because she lives her truth. Because she grabs this life by the balls and makes it her own.

She is inspiring because she does not take the path of (apparent) least resistance and succumb to the pressure to hide the parts of herself which might make others, in their own insecurities, uncomfortable.

She is inspiring because she loves every last ingredient in the glorious soup that makes her who she is.

She is inspiring because by living unapologetically she inspires others to do the same. To proudly claim their identities and, in so doing, remove the stigmas that have for so long been attached to them.

I can think of no greater inspiration than a model of self-love and self-acceptance -- with or without autism.

Last year, my daughter inspired me to come out as a bisexual woman even when it wasn't "necessary," when I could have lived the rest of my days in the comfort of invisibility, passing for something more palatable to the mainstream.

She inspired me to live my truth by living hers. To understand the responsibility inherent in my privilege and to use it to dismantle it.

She inspires me to slow down and to shut up. To listen. To connect to people on a level far beyond the surface. To seek light. To laugh harder, love harder and live harder. To ask for what I need without apology and to give what I can without reservation. To abandon pretense and be who I am just as she, so richly, gloriously, beautifully, is who she is.

So yeah, my daughter is an inspiration. One of the best kinds. But not because she's autistic. To say that she is an inspiration to those of us without her challenges simply because she shows up every day is to perpetuate the destructive paradigm of othering and dehumanization.

But to see her in all of her messy, complex, multidimensional glory and to take inspiration from her grace, humor, self-awareness, self-advocacy, self-acceptance, self-love, joie de vivre and incredible generosity? Well, then you're onto something.

Because she is indeed one heck of an inspiration, at least to her mama.

Jess can be found at Diary of a Mom where she writes about life with her husband Luau and their daughters, Katie and Brooke. She also runs the accompanying Facebook page, a warm and welcoming community of 140,000 people, some autistic, some not, all, in their own ways, inspiring.

We want to know what you think. Join the discussion by posting a comment below or tweeting #TEDWeekends. Interested in blogging for a future edition of TED Weekends? Email us at tedweekends@huffingtonpost.com.

Pink Is the New Red

Recently I sat in on an energetic workshop for preschoolers at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, watching 15 "Tyke Explorers" assume ownership of the entire Solar System in a kid-sized multimedia extravaganza called "Dance of the Planets."

Tyke wrangler Ken Yamata awarded each unadorned Styrofoam plate -- small for the rocky inner planets, large for the gas giants -- to the youngster who seemed most enthusiastic about that particular Solar System object. The girl who'd thrust her hand high in the air when the red planet was offered up to the group claimed Mars.

"Why did you want to be Mars?" I asked her afterwards.

I thought she might say that Mars is closest to being like Earth. Or that it may be our next home. Or even that it is named for a powerful god. I was not prepared for her unabashed reply:

"I like pink. It was closest to pink."

And this was true. All the undecorated plates were stark-white except for one, which was rose-hued: Mars, the perfect planet for a young Martian princess.

Princess of Mars? (Credit: Transmedia SF)

Is going after the hue rather than the planet a manifestation of the "pink princess" culture surrounding girls from soon after birth, at least until they're able to choose their own wardrobes and dress themselves? Can we blame this "pinkification" entirely on Disney films and a shopping spree at Walt's company store, or is it more pervasive than that, persisting even as the girls mature into young women?

I read an article in which a female high-school senior with engineering ambitions complained about all the pink, pretty, curly, flowery announcements she'd received inviting her to be a "Web diva" (rather than "Web developer"). She called it "degrading."

Tech companies who use ingrained gender associations to attract qualified women to their ranks are not thinking beyond the limits of their own cultural associations. They are certainly not thinking of the young women they want to hire as anything more than an underrepresented category easily and superficially defined. The nobleness of the goal is sadly diminished by the means.

We must share the blame as a culture. Why do we consider the color pink so demeaning and limiting while we persist in allowing it to define our young women? Is this an indication of how little we value girls and their futures?

If the tech companies need to boost their female ranks, why can't we at the very least use their misappropriation of pinkness as a teaching moment, call them on their shallow and stereotypical representations and demand that they do differently? These days I hear a lot of complaining but not even a faint call to action.

Color is a tool, not only on Earth but beyond it, where scientists struggle to represent colors that defy precise definition with terms like "false color," "perceptive color," and "representative color." What's missing is "true color," because there is no absolute true color in our universe.

Just take a look at our "red" neighbor, Mars, in the night sky, glowing from reflected sunlight. It's more rosy than red, and certainly not crimson, scarlet or any of the more vibrant reds. The color is being filtered through our own atmosphere.

"MarDials" are color-calibration devices that allow scientists to adjust colors recorded by cameras on the surface of Mars, where hues are naturally filtered through the salmon-colored sky and a considerable amount of dust in the air, unlike the blue-sky view we have on Earth.

A photo from Mars' surface. Not red! (Credit: NASA)

MarsDial: Choose your Mars hue here! (Credit: NASA)

The "MarDials" on Spirit and Opportunity have this inscription: "Two worlds, one sun." The sunlight may be constant, but the intervening variables between the two worlds -- from atmosphere to digital processing to individual computer-monitor and printer settings -- add layers of insistent hue-shifting filters. Human perception is just another filter.

The color pink means nothing, certainly not "girly." Up until the mid-20th century, boys were routinely dressed in pink and girls in blue. A trade publication published these guidelines in 1918:

The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.

That's just further proof that we, as humans, are the ultimate arbitrators of colors -- and their meaning.

The girl who chose Mars because it's pink may indeed be the next Martian warrior princess, fully empowered by the color she embodies, because, as we all know, pink is just a lighter shade of red.

Harley-Davidson Signals Climate Change Is Mainstream

Is there an answer to climate change? I believe there is, and it's already underway. To borrow terms from technology, a distributed solution has moved along the technology adoption curve, through the innovator and early adopter phases. Now, we're entering the mainstream.

We've watched this distributed solution take form for a while now. Government regulation, which lagged at the federal level, is enacted globally at the city and community levels. Individual power plants are switching from oil and coal to the lower-emitting natural gas, on their own and without regulation. Corporate Social Responsibility, which was isolated in its own department, has in many companies been distributed across the enterprise, with CSR departments providing only specific support functions like competitive benchmarking, measurement and reporting.

How do we know our distributed solution has gone mainstream? Harley-Davidson, whose brand is arguably nonexistent without a combustion engine, just introduced an electric motorcycle. The dominant brand in motorcycles, Harley sells 36 percent of all motorcycles sold in the U.S., including 52 percent of all on-highway bikes. It has a well-entrenched formula for customer loyalty that includes its unique sound. That's so important that the company tried to trademark it, only giving up in 2000 after six years of legal wrangling.

But Harley's core customers are largely boomers so its average customer's age -- and as recently as 2010 its market share too -- were declining.

The company needed to appeal to younger generations. It's doing so with smaller, cheaper bikes and an electric motorcycle called the LiveWire.

How does a company capitalize on one of the most beloved parts of an electric vehicle, its silence, when your brand is synonymous with deafening noise? By creating a brand new sound. As Charles Fleming wrote in the Los Angeles Times last week:

The (Livewire) debut marks a dramatic departure for the 110-year-old motorcycle company, which is hailed or hated for its powerful engines, loud exhaust pipes and brash rebel attitude ... It accelerates like a ballistic missile and sounds like a jet engine turbine.

As LiveWire designer Kirk Rasmussen said, "People get on this thinking 'golf cart,' but they get off it thinking 'rocket ship. "...That should appeal to younger male riders in particular, while the electric aspect should appeal to younger riders of both genders, who tend to be more sensitive to environmental (sic) matters.

There are many more dramatic innovations happening in emerging companies, like mushroom architecture described last week in Huffington Post -- stunning structures that grow themselves and are completely recyclable. But there are just as potentially meaningful changes in existing product lines from industry leaders, such as J.P. Morgan Chase's bond funds for green projects.

Environmental efforts under the CSR rubric are also advancing. Most stunning for those of us who follow Apple Computer and its storied founder Steve Job's rejection of social responsibility is new founder Tim Cook's embrace of "better" ideas for reducing its environmental footprint. Stock market website SeekingAlpha reports on Apple's change of heart:

The company was one of Greenpeace's Do Not Buys for a long period of time. Yet in the past year Greenpeace has been applauding Apple for eliminating toxic materials, materials in conflict areas, and setting a bar in 2014 for climate leadership. The company is now using 100 percent renewable energy at all data centers, which is setting the bar in the tech space.

These mainstream solutions are most remarkable when you realize they are happening independently, across industries, across companies, even when the innovations appear to undercut a successful, established brand, as in the case of Harley-Davidson.

From companies to individuals to institutions, everyone seems to be a part of the distributed solution. Conservative government and business leaders advocate climate change action in a just released report "Risky Business." Millennials are moving away from private car ownership. And Harleys may soon sound like jet engines... or nothing at all.

Leveling the Playing Field: My Lesson From Stella Young and the Dangers of "Inspiration Porn"

Click here to watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.

In 1913, Webster's dictionary defined inspiration as "the act of power in exercising an elevating or stimulating influence upon the intellect or emotions -- the result of such influence which quickens or stimulates."

That definition has clearly evolved as times have changed, changing what society considers inspirational. It's manifested into the idea that we as people -- as individuals -- can become something larger than ourselves. In doing so, however, we perhaps do more harm than we're aware of.

When you do something unexpected or out of the ordinary, it rarely starts out as such. You do it because you want to or because it could lead to a better way of life. You're not thinking about the lasting impact it may or may not have on people, or how they will react to your decision to do something crazy.

It's simply human nature, because, in a way, that's how people survived prior to the dawn of the digital age. However, when you apply the notion of exceptionalism to disabled individuals as Stella Young has, it's no longer about looking at accolades and accomplishments as reasons to shower someone with praise or call them an inspiration. It's about making the playing field level for everyone.

In her TEDTalk video, "I'm Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much," she entertains the idea that disabilities don't make the person who has them exceptional. By the same token, Stella also emphasizes the fact that it's not always miraculous when someone with a disability accomplishes something -- because it's usually something that the average, everyday person does as well. She shows examples of how the media often objectifies disabled people, highlighting the use of the term "inspiration porn."

"[We] are more disabled by the society we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses."

Stella goes on to say that the people in the examples she shows "are not doing anything out of the ordinary. They're just using their bodies to the best of their capacity."

As a writer with cerebral palsy, my heart fluttered when I heard her say that because I completely understood where she was coming from. I've always thought of my place in the world as simply a member of society -- not a "writer extraordinaire" or someone bestowed with talent and "a gift." I've always thought of myself as someone who's just trying to make ends meet. Sure, I do things a little differently than everyone else, but I don't see that as reason for people to take exception to me.

I think that speaks to Stella's belief that considering a disability an exception is an injustice. That makes me feel normal. In fact, I don't think I've ever felt that sense of normalcy as strongly as the day I landed my first job as a columnist five years ago. It was exceptional for me, because I'd finally reached the top of my personal mountain. However, I didn't quite understand why people were calling me an inspiration after just days, even mere hours, after getting the job.

Was it because I'd followed my childhood dream, or was it because I was a person in a wheelchair overcoming obstacles?

It took me awhile to decipher between the two, but I took the flood of congratulatory e-mails I received that day as signs of recognition. They were my measuring stick of sorts -- little reminders that let me know that even if I didn't have it all figured out at that point, I at least knew I was on the right track to becoming recognized as a writer -- a person -- rather than "a girl in a wheelchair."

If anything, those e-mails were my motivation to give people more reason to change their minds about the word 'disability.' I wasn't concerned about being an inspiration or even making any sort of big impact at that point. I just wanted to try to get the word out there that my cerebral palsy doesn't make me any less different or loved than anyone else.

Now that I'm in a position where I can use my work as a model for disabilities, I often find myself following in Stella's tracks. I want to convey the idea that I'm one writer out of a million around the world. I just happen to be in a wheelchair, and the fact that I can use my hands and fingers more efficiently than my legs isn't such a big deal as it relates to my cerebral palsy. It's just a "knack" that I have -- the same way every person on the planet has his or hers, too.

To me, that's more of an asset than an inspiration. If people look at me or my work as an inspiration, however, that's their choice.

Stella concluded her video with a number of things that really hit home for me -- one being, "I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm."

It puts an exclamation mark on everything disabled people have long been fighting for and gives rise to the notion of "questioning what you think you know" about disabilities -- or anything else under the sun.

We want to know what you think. Join the discussion by posting a comment below or tweeting #TEDWeekends. Interested in blogging for a future edition of TED Weekends? Email us at tedweekends@huffingtonpost.com.

What I Learned From a Year of Software Engineering

In my first job out of college as an investment banking analyst, people used to joke about the long hours and frequently disrespectful treatment of junior employees as a form of "character building." It was the kind of joke that people in the industry often made: uncomfortable realities that we referenced half in jest, and half in earnest as strange, deranged badge of honor. In spite of it being a hyperbole in a warped industry, the truth is I learned a lot more about myself than I expected and it did make me grow up. I learned that I was much more idealistic than convenient for the job I had chosen. I felt, deeply, my physical limits without enough sleep and my own brittleness under pressure. Eventually, it became almost impossible for me to cry over anything work-related, even when there were cuss words involved.

This joke of a phrase -- "character building", probably seems overly generous for nine-to-five jobs that might be productive but hardly dangerous or at the forefront of reimagining humanity. But in my ordinary life so far, every job has on some level illuminated, fortified or chipped away pieces of my mental and emotional being. Some of these are things I have always known about myself, others I have suspected -- still others I never knew. I worked for non-profits after banking and quickly realized that for all that -- I was perhaps not idealistic enough. I could not breathe and live a cause without a slow, systemic slippage into some level of intellectual doubt. Those tendencies, and a demanding perfectionism, were counterproductive when progress sometimes required a greater tolerance to kick-start. I learned these things that had at first felt like irrefutable limitations but now are clear insights of what I must let go of in part to grow.

And now, a year later into a career pivot that my 22-year-old self could not envision, I am sometimes more uncomfortable than ever about the things I am learning as a software engineer -- in that feeling outmatched by the pace of your necessary growth but nonetheless the most worthwhile kind of way. I have qualities that amplify well with the job, but there are also tendencies grate against the paradigm. One of the most difficult things for me has been inviting and diving into the necessary chaos to truly understand something -- the willingness to break things, to take things apart, to use things not as instructed to reach limitations and bare principles. Decades of education of wanting the right answer and a perfectly made thing feel, at times, slow to undo. But everyday it is more deeply impressed upon me that the ones who can really reinvent are those who learn how things work by experiencing them deeply rather than by simply being told.

It is often easy and gratifying to imbue one's view of technology with the air of magic and fantasy -- that was certainly a common default reaction of mine when I had limited technical knowledge, but that ultimately defeating. To equate complexity with mystery is not productive to learning, solving or inventing. Even the most complicated system is built by the same small components -- you have to believe in your ability to start somewhere. To really internalize that things are built, piece by piece, empowers the faith that you can build things. It does not always feel natural to simply stop accepting the system that you are given as some unchanging, partially understood truth. It feels exhausting at times to not be able to simply walk away and say, "I don't know." In my one year so far I try to remind myself constantly of the growth post that discomfit and to learn to live with that feeling of not knowing, but willing of discovery.

In an industry awed and driven by cerebral achievements, there exist the noisy games of some trying to assert intellectual prowess through various loud points of view. For personalities like mine that care a lot about "the best way to do something", it can be an intimidating and confusing navigation of opinions that all seem tremendously self-assured. I finally learned that this is basically an inimical waste of time. For every opinion that exists, there is almost always an inverse of it that can sound equally reasonable. Sometimes it is a matter of preference, other times it is a matter of circumstance. You can only really learn what is right for your set of constraints, aesthetics, and needs, if you are willing to be wrong occasionally through experimenting.

I realized that pride-induced-fear and fear-induced-pride are some of the most potentially destructive things for what I do.

A year and sometime ago, I had the crazy idea of trying to do something I had no idea how to do because I had a rather naïve desire to build some online non-profit community platform. I remember vividly I got into this because of the practical desire of wanting to build something that makes someone's lives a little better. I could not understand developers that had all that power to help people but chose to contain themselves in theoretical bubbles.

Yet along the way I discovered how much I loved solving technical challenges and appreciated code as its own abstraction -- and slowly I became more disengaged from real life problems and the people needing solutions. I immersed myself in the curiosities and intricacies of technicalities instead.

I suppose on some level that makes me a real software engineer now and there is some rite of passage for that. But there is a part of me that misses my own indiscriminate enthusiasm for what it could do, rather than what the code looked like (even if I will always appreciate a beautiful, maintainable piece of code). Striving for abstract perfection feels worthy, but it is not real life with its inherent messy designs and tradeoff. To be ruled by the dogma of your craft is to lose sight of the real engineering question here -- how do you balance a purely technical pursuit with actual impact? I hope I never forget that.

A year of software engineering -- perhaps not quite hyperbolically character-building, but there is some shifting and stirring for sure.

Rebuilding American Manufacturing Powerhouse

Over the past few decades, we've learned the hard way that once manufacturing is gone, engineering know-how quickly follows, and then later on innovation and our national security suffers the consequences. That's a place that America has never been before.

In May of 2012, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee reported more than 1,800 cases of suspected technological counterfeiting, involving more than 1 million parts for some of our country's "most important military systems." At the same time, the 2012 Defense department report confirmed that the most advanced work for many technologies is no longer being conducted in the United States at all.

Outsourcing was once regarded as a clever new way to improve one's bottom line, but strategizing around wage differentials, currency rates and transportation costs can only ever provide a momentary bump on a stock report and is anything but a robust solution. Millions of manufacturing job loses in the last decade are largely a result of outsourcing, with hardly any due to productivity gains as claimed by some.

Even some experts, who had in the mid-90s promoted a "China plan" for U.S manufacturers as a necessary strategy to cut costs, are now touting re-shoring back to the U.S., although benefits of reshoring are little more than anecdotal. It's true that wages in China have been steadily rising at 10-15 percent per year but they are still a small fraction of U.S wages. And besides, in a global market, as China's wages grow, low-skill labor will simply move to another even lower wage country. As much as we might wish it, reshoring is not going to replace all that we've lost; and "silver bullet" solutions like 3D printing are not going to revamp a $2 trillion American manufacturing economy anytime soon.

America's comparative advantage in high-technology products, engineered and manufactured by our world-class engineers and highly skilled workers, is the only sustainable model that has ever worked. This is because in high-technology industries, manufacturing and R&D are closely bound. Once the manufacturing process is matured, design and manufacturing can be separated -- that is, manufacturing can be outsourced. Hence it is important to establish the needed infrastructure as the technology is being matured so that manufacturing can take root alongside R&D. Ample evidence shows that combining the two is key to fueling real innovation, and the co-location of R&D and manufacturing facilities adds value to each. History has shown many times that failure to manufacture a generation of such products puts the ability to innovate the next generation of products at risk.

We need to re-establish a robust manufacturing sector by rebuilding the knowledge, skills and infrastructure to create and maintain new supply chains for next-generation products by leveraging our inherent strengths in government-funded basic research, entrepreneurship and free markets.

Role of Government

Although some say that "government should not pick winners and losers" and "get out of the way," of American private enterprise, it's worth remembering that historically our government has always nurtured the creation of new high-technology industries, often by underwriting basic and translational research, development, demonstration, and early procurement.

A highly illustrative example is America's aircraft industry. A dozen years after Orville Wright took his Flyer airborne at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the United States lagged behind other nations in the emerging aviation industry. In 1915, the federal government established the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to advance the standards, design, and development of engines and airfoils. By 1916, American companies had produced only 411 aircraft, but we churned out more than 12,000 in a nine-month period from 1917 to 1918 to close out WWI. Then as now, defense procurement has proven highly successful at accelerating innovation.

Similar government investment led to our leadership in semiconductors, computers and the Internet though we've failed to leverage the fruits of more recent innovations such as cell phones, flat panel displays and lithium-ion batteries, to name but a few. This was at least partly due to a lack of timely investment by government and industry in the translational research needed to reduce technical and market risks and bolster those budding markets. The U.S. is creating knowledge but failing to create wealth and jobs with technologies that we've largely invented.

To be sure, the initial spark for new industries comes from the genius of individual entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers, but it sometimes takes a bit of federal support to fund high-risk R&D in order to overcome market failures, and the hesitance of established firms. Risk-averse corporate R&D has declined significantly in the last two decades and is now mostly limited to product development (otherwise known as "applied" R&D). It can be characterized as incremental at best and tends to focus on making current products more profitable. This is not so much a character flaw as a survival tactic for our increasingly timid corporate behemoths.

Simply investing in basic research and leaving the rest to the free market has not worked in recent decades in a globally competitive world. It has left an innovation gap between discoveries and manufacturing. Once our "nascent" technologies begin to mature and their manufacturing /supply chains take root elsewhere, it is not only difficult to bring them back but worse, the next generation versions are now being invented over there.

Investing in the Future

President Obama's Manufacturing Innovation Institutes are meant to bridge this innovation gap by investing in translational R&D to mature emerging technologies and their manufacturing readiness. Modeled after Germany's Fraunhofer institutes, which in turn were inspired our own "Bell Labs" of yesteryear, the Manufacturing Innovation Institutes identify and avoid market failures and are funded jointly by the government and the private sector. The first of these institutes was established in 2012, three more were announced earlier this year, and the President has proposed a total of 45 over the course of the program. These institutes are not designed to bring back all those millions of middle-skill jobs we've already lost. The mission of these public-private partnerships is to leverage new discoveries and inventions that could lead to the next big thing and lay the foundations for next generation high-tech products so we don't lose them as well.

We may not yet know what "next big thing" these technologies will lead to; but public-private partnerships, such as Manufacturing Innovation Institutes, should be put in place to avoid market failures by supporting emerging technologies that offer (a) high growth potential and broad economic impact and (b) a "first mover" advantage relative to international competitors. We have to be careful not to let these institutes shift their focus away from the translational R&D needed to create new industries.

When it comes to existing industries, cutting edge technology, more often than not, plays only a secondary role. Ineffective trade policies can tilt the playing field against U.S. manufacturers (steel, solar cells, for example) and this leads to further erosion and sometimes, loss of a whole sector's growth, jobs and key supply chains. In addition to fair trade and smart regulations, we need a skilled workforce and affordable energy to stay competitive.

The training of skilled production workers should also be a shared responsibility between public and private sectors much like the Manufacturing Innovation Institutes. Leveraging federal investments, the private sector must engage with community colleges and municipalities to craft training programs for employable skills, and revamping internships and apprenticeship programs. Consider that, despite cries from domestic employers at the lack of a skilled domestic workforce, foreign manufacturers like Siemens, BMW, and Toyota routinely invest in their own workforce training and are managing to thrive in the U.S.

This Administration's focus on advanced manufacturing comes at a uniquely advantageous time with the development of low-cost natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGLs) in the U.S. We need a comprehensive national strategy for sustainable use of shale gas to promote economic growth and jobs. For a brief window we have reduced feedstock costs for U.S. chemical industry and reduced energy costs for America's energy intensive manufacturing sector such as steel, aluminum, paper, glass and others by as much as $11.6 billion per year. This shale gas boom has already supported 2.1 million jobs and added $283 billion to GDP last year. The hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies that enabled the shale boom are examples of American ingenuity and decades of R&D funded by public and private entities.



Anchoring Manufacturing in the U.S

As we excel in creating knowledge we must get better at converting that knowledge into American jobs and wealth through public-private partnerships on initiatives like Manufacturing Innovation Institutes.

But that is still not enough -- because there is no guarantee that the resulting new products and processes will take root in the U.S. For that, we need legislation that encourages establishing new manufacturing facilities in the U.S. as well as financial disincentives for moving them overseas. We need to ensure a net return on the taxpayer investments that helped develop the technology in the first place.

In cases where companies still prefer to manufacture outside the U.S., they should do so by returning a percentage of their offshore profits to the U.S taxpayer as compensation for the systems or components that were developed through those government-funded technologies or their derivatives. Without some type of legislative teeth to promote domestic manufacturing while discouraging offshoring, the benefits of our investments in basic and translational R&D will not trickle down to strengthen our economic and national security. And as with any "investment," in contrast to "spending", appropriate metrics and effective oversight polices will be needed to measure our return.

Many of the ingredients we need to restore a robust American manufacturing power base are still intact. If enough leaders, of all stripes, in Washington and in industry, can make the strategic commitments necessary, we can regain our manufacturing prowess through public-private partnerships built on a solid foundation of basic & translational research to create new industries and fair and sustainable trade, taxes and regulation to enhance competitiveness of existing industries. The time is right, and the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit in America's collective DNA are still second to none.

WATCH: This May Be The Single Greatest Lie We've All Been Sold About Disability

Being disabled doesn't automatically make you a noble inspiration to all humanity, says Stella Young. In this very funny talk, she breaks down society's habit of turning disabled people into "inspiration porn."

We want to know what you think. Join the discussion by posting a comment below or tweeting #TEDWeekends. Interested in blogging for a future edition of TED Weekends? Email us at tedweekends@huffingtonpost.com.

How Millennials Make Age a Negative

In the past, those of us who have been around for awhile earned a sort of de facto respect from society. If you lived long enough to learn what you've learned, to gain your wisdom, and to become an expert at anything, that was worth the admiration of those around you. But leave it to millenials to screw up the machine, chiming in with their "yeah, whatever" attitudes which do nothing more than to remind the rest of us that our society is doomed.

We are all taught to respect our elders. After all, they know more than us, they have seen and done more than we have, and hell they've lived longer than us. It's not rocket science to realize that an older person has seen his share of ups and downs, and understands for the most part how the world works.

In sharp, incredibly annoying contrast, millennials look at those older than they as "obstacles, speed bumps and road blocks". Millenials, with their damn smartphones, tablets, Snapchat accounts and Instagram screen names, believe that they have got it all down, and that they don't need some "old fogie" telling them how to do things.

Sure, we did the same thing to elders when we were in our 20's and 30's. But what's different now is that this new crop of know-it-alls utilize technology, to gain some sort of "edge" over the rest of us, to the point where they flaunt their tech attitudes as if they are God's gift to the world. It annoys the hell out of me, if you couldn't already tell.

Age is something to be respected, something to be seen and admired, something to be earned. Just because you have a Twitter account doesn't make you journalist with great things to say. Just because your Instagram account has pics of The Great Wall doesn't make you a world traveler. You're just a kid with some technology in your back pocket.

Millenials are not the next great generation. They are the first guinea pig technology generation, who only think they are the greatest. Technology is using millenials to learn how not to do things, while at the same time taking money from them because it's so damn easy. Millenials need to learn to look past their devices and understand humanity.

... because society is made up of human beings, not internet accounts and touch screens...

Where's the Gold in Your Data? Turning $500,000 Into $3 Billion

I collect a lot of data. We all do.

The fact is that data are worth a lot of money.

Google and Facebook built $100 billion-plus companies based on mining data. Shouldn't you?

In Abundance, I wrote about my friend Rob McEwen, chairman of Goldcorp, who literally mined his data for gold bullion.

Rob offered a $500,000 prize to anyone who could analyze the geological data collected from his Goldmine to help him locate the next 6 million ounces of gold.

He turned a $500,000 prize into a $3 billion return...

Below are the details of how he did it (and how you can too). Enjoy!

How would you use a similar competition in your business? (BTW, check out www.HeroX.com if you're interested in this sort of thing).

Abundance Excerpt: "Gold in Dem Hills"

A dapper Canadian in his midfifties, Rob McEwen bought the disparate collection of gold mining companies known as Goldcorp in 1989. A decade later, he'd unified those companies and was ready for expansion -- a process he wanted to start by building a new refinery. To determine exactly what size refinery to build, McEwen took the logical step of asking his geologists and engineers how much gold was hidden in his mine. No one knew. He was employing the very best people he could hire, yet none of them could answer his question.

About the same time, while attending an executive program at MIT's Sloan School of Management, McEwen heard about Linux. This open-source computer operating system got its start in 1991, when Linus Torvalds, then a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, posted a short message on Usenet:

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix...

So many people responded to his post that the first version of that operating system was completed in just three years. Linux 1.0 was made publicly available in March 1994, but this wasn't the end of the project. Afterward, support kept pouring in. And pouring in. In 2006 a study funded by the European Union put the redevelopment cost of Linux version 2.6.8 at $1.14 billion. By 2008, the revenue of all servers, desktops, and software packages running on Linux was $35.7 billion.

McEwen was astounded by all this. Linux has over ten thousand lines of code. He couldn't believe that hundreds of programmers could collaborate on a system so complex. He couldn't believe that most would do it for free. He returned to Goldcorp's offices with a wild idea: rather than ask his own engineers to estimate the amount of gold he had underground, he would take his company's most prized asset -- the geological data normally locked in the safe -- and make it freely available to the public. He also decided to incentivize the effort, trying to see if he could get Torvald's results in a compressed time period. In March 2000 McEwen announced the Goldcorp Challenge: "Show me where I can find the next six million ounces of gold, and I will pay you five hundred thousand dollars."

Over the next few months, Goldcorp received over 1,400 requests for its 400 megabytes of geological data. Ultimately, 125 teams entered the competition. A year later, it was over. Three teams were declared winners. Two were from New Zealand, one was from Russia. None had ever visited McEwen's mine. Yet so good had the tools of cooperation become and so ripe was our willingness to use them that by 2001, the gold pinpointed by these teams (at a cost of $500,000) was worth billions of dollars on the open market.

When McEwen couldn't determine the amount of ore he had underground, he was suffering from "knowledge scarcity." This is not an uncommon problem in our modern world. Yet the tools of cooperation have become so powerful that once properly incentivized, it's possible to bring the brightest minds to bear on the hardest problems. This is critical, as Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy famously pointed out: "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else."

Our new cooperative capabilities have given individuals the ability to understand and affect global issues as never before, changing both their sphere of caring and their sphere of influence by orders of magnitude. We can now work all day with our hands in California, yet spend our evenings lending our brains to Mongolia. NYU professor of communication Clay Shirky uses the term "cognitive surplus" to describe this process. He defines it as "the ability of the world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects."

"Wikipedia took one hundred million hours of volunteer time to create," says Shirky. "How do we measure this relative to other uses of time? Well, TV watching, which is the largest use of time, takes two hundred billion hours every year -- in the US alone. To put this in perspective, we spend a Wikipedia worth of time every weekend in the US watching advertisements alone. If we were to forgo our television addiction for just one year, the world would have over a trillion hours of cognitive surplus to commit to share projects." Imagine what we could do for the world's grand challenges with a trillion hours of focused attention.

How Kenya's Mobile Apps Are Changing the Face of Africa

By Louise Bleach

The mobile app ecosystem in the Western world is oversaturated with fads, gimmicks and multi-million valuations that can cause innovation to be pushed to the sidelines.

Shift your gaze a few thousand miles -- 9,598 to be exact -- from Silicon Valley to Nairobi, and you'll find a different story of innovation unfolding. Nicknamed the 'Silicon Savannah', the Kenyan capital has spurred a stream of mobile apps that tackle basic problems with simple solutions.

As 3G mobile internet connections become the norm and phones become smarter, apps emerge that improve healthcare, banking, and livelihood for those who need it most. It is here in East Africa's tech hub that innovation is occurring in its rawest form: out of necessity.

Africa, too often generalized as one entity, is in fact made up of 55 countries, each with their own unique cultural dynamic and economic systems. A gold mine of just over a billion people, Africa is still barely tempting the gaze of foreign investors. So, how is innovation in mobile technology molding the continent and who is leading the charge?

The Mobile Continent

In a little over a decade, Africa has witnessed the fastest growth in mobile subscribers in the world. Last year, 1.9 billion people were using smartphones, a figure that's estimated to reach 5.6 billion by 2019. In a continent where more people have access to mobile phones than adequate sanitation, the potential for this technology is immense.

In Kenya, the foundation of the mobile ecosystem has been laid mostly by NGO funding. In 2010, Omidyar Network and Hivos were among the first organisations to take this leap of faith, launching iHub as the city's first local nexus of all things tech. Today, the community hosts 14,805 members, 152 companies and employs 1128 people. More incubators and coworking spaces have followed, such as 88mph which operates in Nairobi, Lagos, and Johannesburg. With hosted hackathons and a stable wifi connection, it's here that young entrepreneurs, technologists, and designers connect and branch out to the international venture capital community.

Kenya, but also South Africa and Nigeria, are the optimistic leaders driving mobile app innovation. The rest of Sub-Saharan Africa however-- home to 7 out of 10 of the world's fastest growing economies-- is beginning to reap the benefits too.

From Finance to the Fields

Imagine a world where internet banking is non-existent, physical banks are few and far between, and transport infrastructure is still a good decade away. Suddenly, our Western issues become obvious 'first world problems', compared to a landscape where managing personal finances is near impossible.

Enter M-Pesa, a mobile money transfer and microfinancing service that disrupted the Kenyan market in 2007 and infiltrated the lives of millions of people and businesses. With M-Pesa, a venture by Vodafone and Safaricom, anyone can use text messaging on a simple mobile device to pay their bills, buy their groceries, pay for their children's school fees, and allegedly even bribe customs officials.

Registered users are able to load cash onto their phones at an allocated outlet, found anywhere from the local chemist to the local petrol station. They can then send money to a third party by text message, which is then collected by the recipient at their nearest vendor. The service is used by a staggering 17 million Kenyans and accounts for approximately 25% of Kenya's gross national product. In 2012, over US $40 billion worth of transactions were funneled through the service.

From finance to the fields, M-Farm is another mobile app drastically improving livelihoods. For most low-volume Kenyan farmers, the only accessible source of information about market rates is their potential buyers. A lack of pricing transparency means farmers tend to get the worst deal. Transparency tool M-Farm tackles the issue by pushing current market prices and agricultural trends directly to the farmer via an app or text message. It also offers farmers the ability to collaborate and cut out the middleman. A simple and basic text-based app, this product addresses the essential needs of a rural farmers in a most viable way.

I-Cow, also a Kenyan brainchild, aims to increase the productivity of cow farming by working somewhat like a virtual mobile midwife. Through this very basic app, farmers are able to track the estrus stages of their cows and be sourced with modern information on breeding, animal nutrition, milk production efficiency and gestation. The app was created by a Su Kahumba, a former organic farmer, before being picked up last year by leading internet provider Safaricom. According to telco, the app targets close to seven million small scale farmers. "The application, which has been running on pilot for some time now, is expected to fill the gap that currently exists between farmers and the agricultural extensions officers," said Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore.

In Kenya, dairy is a $463 million business, and the difference between a subsistence farmer and an abundance farmer just a few litres of milk a day. If a cow farmer is able to fractionally increase their outputs, they can rise out of poverty. It is remarkable that a simple mobile app empowers them to do so.

The Most Basic of Needs

Across the world, health is a moral imperative. Still, far too many Africans succumb to preventable diseases everyday. An astounding 90% of all deaths caused by Malaria occur in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as 40% of all deaths for children under five years old.

This is the big "African problem" that so many have attempted to address. NGOs haul supplies and governments invest in improving medical services, but the task remains gargantuan. How do you begin to improve a health care system constrained by high population growth, high disease burden, inadequate workforce, widespread rural populations and limited financial resources? The answer is mobile.

Another one grown out of Kenya, the MedAfrica app acts as a doctor to the masses. This pocket clinic can help diagnose and monitor symptoms, advise on treatment, validate doctors, authenticate possible counterfeit drugs and, if all else fails, direct you to the nearest hospital.

In countries like Kenya, there are on average 14 physicians for every 100,000 people. Meanwhile, 25 million Kenyans have phone subscriptions. Taking advantage of this fact, MedAfrica spreads the medical knowledge of a miniscule few to the masses in the most efficient way possible.

Toward a Sustainable Future

In emerging markets, people are hungry for progress and information. The demand is there, as is the technology infrastructure-- so why are foreign investors not jumping at the chance to engage with the next billion consumers?

One reason is because African innovation has yet to translate into a lucrative business within the technology sector. As Andrea Bohnstedt, director of private equity consulting firm Africa Assets, said recently, "People are more spoiled by pitching competitions, and few developers are actually concerned in building scalable companies that investors will risk putting their money in". Most African tech entrepreneurs lack the appropriate initiative and strategy to grow their simple applications into a holistic revenue-generating technology, a combination that spells out too much risk for most investors.

Progress is occurring internally, and mobile apps designed by Africans for Africans are lighting up the continent. The current success of the technology lies in necessity, but its evolution will depend on its marriage with a sustainable business model. As soon as this emerges, the rest of the world will be racing across the savannah to be a part of it.