Our discussion ranges from the declining cost of 3D printing to ham radio antenna design. Along the way, we touch on the ease with which data scientists can build data sensing motes with open source and open hardware components. We hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed talking.

The now abandoned Michigan Central Station has become something of a metaphor for the industrial age.

We hope you enjoy the conversation and we’re looking forward to your comments. You can listen to it here in the embedded player or you can also subscribe to them at iTunes.

p.s. If you have a favorite coffee shop, tell us about it in the comments. Maybe we’ll have our next coffee talk there.

Of course there have always been relationships between hardware and software, we aren’t discovering anything completely new here. But there are differences now, and they are turning up in interesting places. I attended Distributech recently, the biggest electric utility conference for power distribution, and was surprised to see that how big a push traditional IT vendors were making into the space. This is an event that five years ago would have only had electrical component vendors as sponsors but this time around Oracle was the most visible sponsor there with Cisco not far behind. The world’s first massive electrical network is now absorbing (and increasingly being controlled by) its second.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the conversation and we’re looking forward to your comments. And given that on the Radar team we like to talk at least as much as we like to write, if this goes well we’ll probably do a lot more of them. You can listen to it here in the embedded player or you can also subscribe to them at iTunes.

But today I read this piece from Stanford Law Review on the subject. And it’s smart. As is this simpler summary on NPR.

In so many domains the Internet creates these dichotomous tensions. There are two things we want and the Internet enables either, or neither, but not both.

I personally don’t think we need this kind of law. However, eventually it will become obvious that the cost of storing every damned thing I’ve ever uttered online exceeds any conceivable or achievable ROI from mining it. Hopefully, as companies realize this, they’ll offer a “feature” to solve this problem by letting me, and people like me, establish preferences for time to live and/or time to keep. For example, I’d be perfectly happy if Twitter enabled a one week time to live on every tweet I posted. They are meant to be ephemeral and it would be more than fine with me if their lifespans matched the level of thought I put into them.

I spent Wednesday at Penn Medicine’s Connected Health event in Philadelphia. We saw an array of technologies that wouldn’t even have been imaginable when I came into this world. Mobile telepresence systems, tele surgery, the ability to remotely detect depression with merely a phone and its analysis, real-time remote glucose monitoring, and on and on.

But nothing in technology surprises me anymore. I have Meh’monia, a condition wherein all of the magic and surprise has been drained out of technology, probably by Apple. Today I expect anything that can be imagined to be possible, available, and to be executed beautifully.

A tiny but powerful computer in my pocket with greater than VGA screen resolution? Meh. Glasses with interactive heads up display? I’ll take the designer version. Hall-roaming robots that bring me my meds and let me make video calls to my family? I saw that on the Jetsons.

On my way home I dropped in at the Penn Museum and spent an hour roaming the collection. Two days later the magic I’m still thinking about is the magic in those galleries. Atoms arranged with human intellect (and vast amounts of human labor) into form with awe-inspiring scale and beauty. Many of the objects on display left me transfixed.

I can believe that almost anything can be designed and manufactured in modern facilities with modern methods, but the idea of a perfect 50-pound crystal sphere emerging from a piece of rock with nothing but years of hand labor seems like magic to modern me. As does a 12-ton sphinx of red granite that was quarried 600 miles from where it was carved.

The technology of our virtual world, which until very recently inspired such a sense of magic in me, has become the every day. And for me at least, those artifacts of a previous physical world now seem like the work of ancient magicians.

Enbala’s business is conceptually simple. They use information to optimize the match between electrical supply and demand to help utilities avoid capital expenditure in under-utilized peak-load generation assets. Then they share those supply side savings with the participating loads. The deal is simple, let Enbala control your loads within your process constraints, and you’ll earn additional revenue. At the risk of gross over-simplification, they are sort of like an Uber or AirBnB of the electrical grid, but made interesting by the complexity of constraints and the fact that it all has to happen in real time.

They’ve done a video that explains it, and it’s actually pretty good. But in short, they improve on simplistic and disruptive load shedding and load curtailing approaches by modeling a load’s internal processes and constraints, instrumenting them, and then taking control of major loads within those process constraints. They do this such that the load owners won’t even notice it’s happening. Things still stay cold enough, or full enough, or whatever enough, but within the process margins they might be chilled, filled, or whatever’d a little bit earlier, later, faster or slower to better match hundreds of loads across the grid with current supply conditions.

For example, if the wind picks up and some turbines get to spinning, Enbala can go around to their participating loads and start some pumps to fill some tanks, or start chiller compressors to cool things down. Conversely, if generation is taxed, before starting an expensive peak load plant, utilities will ask Enbala to signal a downshift in pump speeds, delay compressor starts, etc. This is where slowly warming frozen turkeys may be allowed to get a little bit closer to their maximum allowed temperature. And not running a compressor in this case is identical to starting a generator, or perhaps more accurately, discharging battery that was charged at the lower base-load per-kilowatt rate.

Which made me think, who needs giant expensive inertial batteries to stabilize a mixed grid of base load and sustainable power options, when you can just freeze some turkeys?

I like this story because it highlights two important and related principles of the industrial Internet. That information can be traded for capital expenditures and assets, and that those optimizations get better as more stuff participates in the optimization.

This is a post in our industrial Internet series, an ongoing exploration of big machines and big data. The series is produced as part of a collaboration between O’Reilly and GE.

If you are working on a health-related startup this is worth your time because it’s being funded by the largest provider and payer in the region. This will give your startup access to both sides of the payer/provider equation in a meaningful way (the aforementioned “unfair advantage”). The application deadline is coming up fast on February 8. Details can be found here.

Over the summer I wrote a post lamenting IPv4 address scarcity and how it contributed to a deformed and centralized web, one that is substantially less open than the one we started with. Most of us don’t have permanent registered host addresses so we live our web lives on other people’s property, perpetual renters. We have been thus excluded from the House of Lords – there is no peerage for the landless.

To support the open web I want, I want IPv6 to be adopted quickly, for NAT to die, and for me to get a whole bunch of IP addresses of my very own. In fact, I might even want IP address portability when I switch providers. I might love those addresses so much I never want to lose them. I don’t know, I just thought of it and haven’t considered it carefully, but I might.

Except actually I don’t want think I want that at all. Through the lens of the open, decentralized, democratized web I want all of that. But through the lens of privacy, anonymity and a different framing of freedom I want the complete opposite. I have enough trouble with cookies. If I had a fixed IP address the work of the trackers would be made just that much simpler.

Remember a year or so ago when Facebook had that big privacy kerfuffle over the logout that wasn’t a logout? They said they resolved that, and also promised that they didn’t track people that weren’t users of the service. But I’m not a user (I cancelled my account over three years ago) and yet my computer remains host to a perpetual Facebook cookie infestation.

Recently I was poking around in my browser privacy settings and deleted Facebook’s two cookies. It is a constant source of annoyance to me that their Hadoopy gumshoes, in the form of Like buttons all over the web, are waiting at the end of my driveway to follow me wherever I go anytime I leave the house. Like buttons are the Agent Smiths of the web. I hadn’t even browsed a new page when like magic they reappeared.

Surfing around a bit I figured that my mean page views between cookie delete and cookie set for Facebook was about one page plus a skosh. I mean, it’s immediate. I can’t go anywhere that won’t drop a Facebook cookie on me. The web is Facebook’s panopticon (Although surveillance on the web isn’t an exclusively held activity of Facebook. Google and ComScore and many others are equally adept). And deleting those cookies, especially when they are reset so fast, is pointless. The combination of IP address, browser type, and settings, etc. makes associating an old cookie with a new cookie utterly trivial.

So, I took a look at Safari’s browser settings. Nope, no “block this domain” option. It’s either block everything (blunt instrument useless) or block nothing (plain old useless). I know these options exist in Firefox but I mostly use Safari so I tried creating hosts file entries that will keep anything of mine ever routing to any facebook.com or facebook.net domain. I hoped that would prevent them from setting a cookie. It didn’t work and I haven’t bothered to figure out why. My browser won’t route to Facebook anymore but the cookies still appear. Must be a secret cookie setting domain somewhere…

Does IPv6 address abundance offer a way out? What if my future IPv6-based ISP were to do a reverse NAT? One that took my desirable-for-open-web perpetual fixed address and exposed it via a huge randomized pool of visible addresses? That sounds kind of cool. Except I don’t think that will work either. Knowing the pool of addresses you are originating from carries exactly the same amount of information as today’s NAT model.

Just as an aside, why does Facebook bother going through the absurd ritual of asking users to agree to their privacy policy if they are going to track the rest of us just as aggressively? I’m looking at you too Google. I know you index the emails I send to gmail users even though I’ve never agreed to your privacy policy either.

Ok, getting back to the topic. If remaining anonymous online is so damned hard, and all I’m really trying to do is keep Facebook from tracking me, why not just create a personalized disinformation campaign? If Agent Smith is going to sit at the end of my driveway waiting for me, can I send thousands of of digital doppelgängers on faked errands to confuse him? I’ll be like a president with digital body doubles. Maybe I can fill my digital Cherbourg with canvas tanks so that it’s too costly for Facebook to see the truth through the noise. (Three analogies in paragraph. A bit much?).

How much noise would I have to make before my signal becomes useless, buried in costly-to-strip-away noise? Could I script a bunch of browsers to just wander the web all day long generating random cookie hits for Facebook to waste Hadoop cycles on? I can’t make it impossible to decode my behavior, but can I make it too expensive to be worth figuring it out? Or assuming that we can programmatically access our own cookies, could we alter them by swapping them periodically with other similarly annoyed “users” to get something less random and seemingly more real?

I like the sound of a cookie exchange. It sounds like holiday cookies. And the result would be lots of plausible surfing linked to a particular cookie, but no longer meaningful as it wouldn’t be related to a particular user. Never mind though, I can already think of a bunch of reasons it won’t work, but I might give that randomized doppelgänger surf bot a try.

I guess I’m destined to remain fundamentally schizophrenic on this topic. I want a decentralized web where I can freely host my own stuff, on my own gear, so that what I have to say isn’t constrained by someone’s ToS. Also, I want to own my own data so that I can take the piss back out of the pool if I want to. Naturally this requires that I have permanent, known, and addressable place on the web where people can find me. But I’d love to somehow have all that with none of the downside of an identity that is trivially trackable by IP address.

In our discussions we worked through about 35 potential themes and narrowed them down to 10 that we are actively working on in the first quarter of 2013. Here’s the list along with the Radar team member who is focused on it.

Hidden/Sharing Economy — Tim O’Reilly

Consumer AI — Edd Dumbill

Data Journalism — Alex Howard

Future of Programming — Edd Dumbill

In-Memory Data Management — Roger Magoulas

Industrial Internet — Jon Bruner

Open Data Economy — Alex Howard

Professional Making — Mike Loukides

Robotics — Mike Loukides

Synthetic Bio / Bio Hacking — Mike Loukides

Each topic will launch here on Radar with “intention casting” posts like this and this so I won’t bother expounding on them here. The idea of being more explicit and transparent up front about our interests is to more actively engage you in the discussion. We know you’ll point us at things we wouldn’t otherwise find.

As the projects unfold we’ll continue to post here on what we are discovering and we’ll noodle on the principles we discover. When we get to the point where we start to feel like we’re getting a handle on it, we’ll host public hangouts to talk about what we are learning and solicit your reaction and input. Again, the idea is to engage more directly with you on each topic.

Each quarter we’ll go through the process again and sometimes we’ll double down on our focus as we push to turn it into a business. In other cases we’ll abandon it or put it on a back burner because we are either too early or there is simply no there there. Unfortunately some themes will be interesting but won’t make sense for us to continue to pursue. We’ll often be thinking to ourselves “this feels like a Homebrew Computer Club moment, but is it going to blow up or just keep simmering?”

As 2013 develops you can also expect to see some changes here with Radar’s design to help bring focus to these themes. Blogs are great but the sequential format makes it tougher than we’d like for you to focus on a theme. We want to make it easier for you to see a holistic view of a theme as it evolves. More on that later.

Here’s to a great 2013.

First off, I’m sure he wouldn’t use the words “industrial Internet” to describe what he and his team are doing, and it might be a little bit of a stretch to categorize 3Scan that way. But I think they are an exemplar of many of the core principles of the meme and it’s interesting to think about them in that frame. They are building a device that produces massive amounts of data; a platform to support its complex analysis, distribution, and interoperation; and APIs to observe its operation and remotely control it.

Do a Google image search for “pathologist” and you’ll find lots and lots of pictures of people in white lab coats sitting in front of microscopes. This is a field whose primary user interface hasn’t changed in 200 years. This is equally true for a wide range of scientific research. 3Scan is setting out to change that by simplifying the researcher’s life while making 3D visualization and numerical analysis of the features of whole tissue samples readily available.

At the heart of the system is an illuminated diamond knife blade capable of making one-micron-thick tissue slices coupled with a scanning objective. A cubic inch of tissue, such as a mouse brain, sliced into one-micron slices will take seven hours to scan and will produce about a terabyte of data. The design of the knife is licensed from Texas A&M brain networks lab where Todd spent some of his graduate student years, and 3Scan is building it into a cost effective platform by taking advantage of technologies from other industries. For example, the tissue stage was adapted from an aerospace application, and the first version of their sample viewer is based on OpenLayers, an open source geo-spatial platform. Also, the cost to store and process the data has dropped by multiple orders of magnitude since Todd first started working on it in 2005.

Mouse brain vascular network

What makes this interesting from an industrial Internet perspective is the way they are combining an instrumented machine (the microscope) with powerful data analytics and remote access to enable a service. The samples are volumetric and high resolution (1 cubic micron) instead of the traditional 2D slides prepared for microscopy, and because they are digital they are available for 3D viewing, algorithmic inspection, categorization, and analysis as well as traditional 2D viewing. This is a very complex “thing” that is getting on the Internet in a meaningful way, producing data, exposing APIs, and allowing for remote interaction and control.

Researchers will be able to follow their sample through the entire process from receipt to scan to the application of analytical algorithms. They won’t have to develop the competencies to run a machine that would otherwise have to be dumbed down for grad student deployment, and they will be able to add their own algorithms into the processing pipeline without having to manage the analytical infrastructure.

Longer term one can imagine the data and analytical pipeline breaking away from this single device and serving as a general analytical platform for a range of machines that provide different forms of volumetric imaging. Or, a single sample might be processed by different machines across different scientific service providers (i.e. imaging, DNA sequencing, etc.) and because each of them is operating as a network service rather than as a standalone device, the range of analytical methods can continue to grow.

Talking to Todd I felt like I was getting a glimpse here at the future of connected instruments.

This is a post in our industrial Internet series, an ongoing exploration of big machines and big data. The series is produced as part of a collaboration between O’Reilly and GE.

Related:

• Three lessons for the industrial Internet
• Investigating the industrial Internet
• Listening for tired machinery