Hidden Messages in Signs... for Robots Only

The company 3M is helping autonomous cars by encoding hidden messages in road signs.

3M is using its expertise with signs to assist with autonomous car development. The company, which now boasts 90,000 employees, is tucking invisible messages into traffic signs to help self-driving cars figure out where they are.

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This offers a visual depiction of the various software development methodologies.

The only thing more difficult than building software for a client, is explaining how software is built to a client.

UBI vs the Robots

With advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, many people's jobs will be up for grabs. And we are entirely unprepared as exponential advances, most notably in form of artificial intelligence, will eat away employment as humans' primary source of income. There may be an answer, in the form of a direct payment to each of us.

Universal basic income (UBI) is gaining momentum worldwide. Switzerland held a referendum on the introduction of a nationwide UBI (which it rejected) in 2016,1 Finland is currently testing it for some people, and India is considering replacing its welfare state with a UBI.2 The UBI is an unconditional cash payment that flows monthly from the state budget to everybody. It is transferred from public to private accounts throughout an entire lifetime, from birth to death, without any application or preconditions to be fulfilled by the beneficiary. It is supposed to cover the socio-cultural subsistence minimum. However, the determination of this minimum level of subsistence is a political and not an economic decision.

Some suggest work can be divided into a few categories: routine and nonroutine, cognitive and manual. Routine work is the same stuff day in and day out, while nonroutine work varies. Within these two varieties, is the work that requires mostly our brains (cognitive) and the work that requires mostly our bodies (manual). Routine work started to stagnate at the end of the last millennium because some of that work is easily handled by machines.

One approach to machine intelligence is with neural networks, a tool of artificial intelligence. This provides a means for machine learning that can leverage big data -- the data sets being created and standardized. Everything we do is generating data, and lots of data is exactly what machines need in order to learn to learn.When computer code is wrong, it is self-corrected, further improving error detection and expanding the capabilities of the particular a.i. Bigger data sets speed such learning, and lower the error rates. No, this isn't SkyNet: think of robots as technologies, such as machine learning algorithms running on purpose-built computer platforms, that have been trained to perform discrete tasks that currently require humans to perform.

As others have written, "During the Obama administration, a report of the president was published (no longer available at whitehouse.gov) that included a very dire prediction: "There is an 83% chance that workers who earn $20 an hour or less could have their jobs replaced by robots in the next five years. Those in the $40 an hour pay range face a 31% chance of having their jobs taken over by the machines." Clearly, the robots are coming."

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Why Micro-Services are the "Go to" for Service Oriented Architecture

Within the SOA universe, a micro-service architectural approach means developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with a lightweight mechanism, such as an HTTP API call. Micro-services are built around business processes, with independent and fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management and services may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.

Microservices are designed to be independently deployable, whereas SOA services are often implemented withing a single monolithic environment. SOA is an architectural pattern in which application components provide services to other components -- but those components can belong to the same application. Micro services deconstruct services from apps.

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Cloud Computing Moving Front and Center of Federal IT Strategy

For federal agencies, cloud computing is now a lynchpin strategy. But the options are varied: public, private and hybrid cloud deployments. A variety of factors impact the decision to include the Cloud in IT strategy:
-- Compliance with Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) for cloud providers
-- Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) requirements for security
-- Security options for the various cloud models (public, private or hybrid) and provider
-- Designing a cloud migration

Both OSS and cloud computing individually offer potential benefits for federal agencies to improve their efficiency, agility, and innovation, by enabling them to be more responsive to new or changing requirements in their missions and business operations.

One example cited is: "...in May 2011, the US Department of Veterans Affair (VA) CIO stated to avoid costs, and to find a way to involve the private sector in modernizing Veterans Integrated System Technology Architecture (VistA; electronic medical records system), the VA turned to open source. In response, the VA launched the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) in August 2012 "as a central governing body of a new open source Electronic Health Record (EHR) community".

The approach to move data and applications to the cloud can vary. With critical IT assets in play, the importance of carefully selecting a plan and determining the most appropriate cloud service type and provider, is crucial. Results vary, but with the right support, organizations reap performance, reliability and cost savings from a successful deployment.

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