Monthly Archives: April 2015

Technology in the Air

Photo of modern airplane flying on autopilot.In light of upcoming summer vacation plans, I want to look at how technology works behind the scenes to keep us safe and comfortable as we travel. Recently I was on a plane and, as I often do, I looked in the cockpit at the instruments. I was amazed at the array of gauges and computer screens available to the pilots. How far have we come in the last 100 years in terms of technology in a plane? Is it better for the pilot? Is it safer for the passengers?

Electronic Flight Bag

My son is taking flying lessons and his flight bag seems to get heavier by the day. Every pilot takes a similar bag into the cockpit and it carries flight maps, aircraft operating manuals, and other documentation. Fortunately, an electronic flight bag has been developed that allows pilots to download maps and other useful information to a tablet. The iPad seems to be the tablet of choice for pilots and can be updated at airports or real time through wireless 4G. They can also hold apps such as weather maps, FAA updates, and GPS navigation aids. Such technology makes critical information much more accessible to the pilot.

Passenger Entertainment

There are many networked systems running in a plane, including the navigation systems, the point-of-sales systems for purchased food and beverages, and the passenger entertainment systems. On top of that, wi-fi has been added to many flights. It is a miracle that it all works and is a testament to good systems architecture and a robust network. I flew overseas last year and the plane had a seatback entertainment system with what appeared to be an endless array of music and movie choices. More recently I flew with a small airline that rented tablets connected wirelessly to an on-board server, with movies and in-flight entertainment. The options continue to grow as airlines try to differentiate themselves and become more sophisticated in their technology offerings.

Who’s Flying the Plane?

I read about the advent of driverless cars, but will we see a pilotless passenger plane anytime soon? Drones are available now that can take payloads that range from cameras to missiles. Passenger planes have autopilot, which can be used once the plane is in the air, but a human still takes off and lands. In a recent article, experts speculated on future technology that could possibly push pilots out of the cockpit. This debate has intensified since a German pilot deliberately crashed an Airbus A320 into a mountain last month. Completely remote aircraft management is being researched. In fact, remote control airports are already in use in Sweden and are being considered in other locations. The question I ask myself is do I trust the plane to a pilot or a programmer?

Thoughts

If your travels take you on a plane this summer, I hope you will appreciate the technological changes that have come to the airline industry, both for your safety and comfort and to help those charged with getting you safely to your destination.

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional and assistant professor of practice for the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

Lessons in Leadership

Hiking group trekking on a Crimean mountain.In many of our AIM courses, we teach about leadership. Whether leading people, new processes, or new technologies, we place a great emphasis on leadership. But what are the characteristics of a good leader?

I believe this is important to understand and practice so this week I will share with you some leadership lessons I have learned and, more importantly, I am hoping that you will share your insights.

Leading Change

Throughout my career I have had several opportunities to lead change. In my opinion, this is one of the hardest tasks because it requires you to transition people into new territory amidst skepticism and fear of the change. I once worked on a very large data center consolidation project where computers were being moved from scattered sites around the world to large centralized data centers. People had become attached to their application running on a computer that they could see and touch like a favorite pet. To move the application and hardware to an unknown location was truly a change to be reckoned with. This same scenario is being played out daily as companies transfer data and functions to the cloud. I wish we could come up with a better term than cloud so that the end result appeared more concrete and palatable to those suffering from computer separation anxiety.

From this experience I learned two valuable lessons about leadership:

  1. A good leader is a good communicator. It is important to be able to paint a plausible and even inviting picture of the future: “IF we do this, here are the benefits for you.” The first thought in everyone’s mind is “what’s in it for me?”
  2. It is vital to lead people in a direction that is in their best interest and does not lead them off a cliff. This builds trust and increases cooperation. The first time a leader moves a team or group in a direction that is not in their best interest, trust dissolves and resistance increases. Until that trust is re-established, the leader will no longer be effective.

Leading from the Middle

Hard charging and visible leaders often lead from the front. Shepherds, in contrast, lead their flocks from the back. I have found that it is sometimes necessary to lead from the middle. Recently, I had the opportunity to teach and lead a weeklong youth leadership course at a nearby camp. There were 48 teen campers and a staff of older youth. During the week, a group of campers was tasked with cleaning the dining hall. The staff was in a meeting at that time. I decided to help clean the dining hall, since I knew that I had support leading the staff meeting. The participants were pleasantly surprised that their adult leader would actually help them finish their chore so that they could go off and do what they wanted. They assumed that a proper leader was always out front TELLING them what to do, which was their limited experience with leaders, but leading from the middle builds team unity and builds respect for the leader.

A Good Leader is a Good Follower

I have come to realize that to be a good leader you must practice being a good follower. If you understand the vision and goals of the leader, then it is important that you help your teammates to achieve those goals. For example, as a follower, it is your responsibility to ask clarifying question when the vision is not clear and then support that vision once the direction has been decided. When it is time for you to lead, you would do well to have teammates who are also good followers.

Thoughts

I think that everyone has a chance to step into a leadership role in his or her lifetime. Whether that role is parent, coach, mentor, manager, or executive, it is important to remember to lead in a way that gets everyone to the goal safely. As the leader, it is not about you but about the group and the desired outcome for everyone.

I hope you have some leadership stories that you are willing to share with me. What worked for you? What lessons did you learn by getting it wrong the first time? Did everything turn out well, or were there lessons along the way? Let me know.

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional and assistant professor of practice for the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

All Things Old Are New Again

Grey cassette tape with red reels and clear window.Some days, it seems like all things old are new again. The retro movement is bringing back products that I thought would stay buried forever. In this blog post I will review a few products from the past that have returned with a new twist.

Polaroid

I thought the Polaroid brand had disappeared until I saw an ad for a new Polaroid camera. This does not look like anything I remember, but amazingly it still has the instant print feature. Thanks to a technology called ZINK (Zero-Ink) these cameras print images instantly while saving them digitally. This new technology uses heat to excite color molecules embedded in special paper that are then arranged to form a print of the image you captured. Just like the cameras of old, you have to buy packs of special paper and you get the classic Polaroid border.

Classic Video Games

Old arcade games such as Pong, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders are available again through the various app stores. Perhaps it is refreshing to go back to 1972 to try your hand at Pong after being challenged by the complexity of modern video games. A dot and two paddles seem pretty simple today but it was cutting edge when Atari created the first arcade games. Instead of pulling out our smart phone, we actually had to go to the arcade in the mall and pay a quarter for the privilege of testing our skill and hope that our initials would appear in the hall of fame. Swedish airports have capitalized on this nostalgia kick by installing classic arcade games that will take any currency. While waiting for your luggage you can try your hand at Ms. Pac-Man, and all of the money the machine takes in is donated to the Swedish Red Cross.

Old School Telephones

That same smartphone that now plays video games used to be a hardwired telephone complete with handset. The old school phone is new again, but with a twist. The iRetroPhone is a dock and charger that lets you use an iPhone as a rotary dialer with a traditional handset. Touted benefits include comfort, shielding from any radiation, and complete access to your phone screen while talking. As in the days before cordless phones, you have to stay within cord-length of the IRetroPhone, but it does provide for a bit of nostalgia.

Cassette Tapes

While vinyl records have been making a comeback for several years, cassette tapes are just now rebounding. All of my cassette tapes are garbled from bleed-through and years of storage, so someone must have done a better job preserving them than I have. There is a growing market for old cassette tapes and some independent labels are recording new material on tape. While the market is still small, it is growing in some circles. Sony has developed a tape that will hold 185 terabytes of storage. It has the same form factor as a cassette but uses different materials. If used for music it will store 47 million songs, but it will most likely be used as a backup medium for large data centers.

Thoughts

What is behind the push to recreate old form factors using new technology? Are we trying to return to what we perceive were simpler times, or is this a backlash to increasingly complicated technology that is sometimes not so user-friendly? Cassette tapes were fun, but for reliability give me solid-state memory any day. Are there old technologies you wish would make a comeback? Will we some day witness a revival of eight-track tapes? Let me know your thoughts.

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional and assistant professor of practice for the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

Early Women in Technology: Cracking the Enigma

A woman works on the American Bombe. Image in public domain.Last week I wrote about women in technology, a theme I’m continuing because there are so many women who played key roles in pioneering technologies, especially in early computing. This post is dedicated to all of my friends in the United Kingdom.

Cracking the Enigma Code

A recent TechRepublic article showcased the contributions of the British Government Code and Cypher School toward breaking the code of the German Enigma encryption machine during World War II. There were over 10,000 people working on this top-secret decryption effort, two thirds of whom were women. Many of them were just out of college or even just out of high school. Their job was to experiment with different decoding combinations that would crack messages being relayed by German command to the field. The decoding work went on in shifts, 24 hours a day. Every 24 hours the Germans changed the encryption algorithm so the British task started anew each day. The British needed a faster way to break the daily encryption code so that they could decode more messages.

Contributions to the Turing Machine

Alan Turing developed an electromechanical machine called the Bombe, which was designed to emulate several German Enigma encryption machines. While his invention did hasten the end of the war, it still took monumental human effort to configure it and run it each day. That task fell largely to the Women’s Royal Naval Service or the Wrens. Large drums had to be set from the front and boards had to be correctly plugged in the back, based on a menu or set of instructions for the day. The members of the Code and Cypher School, including the Wrens, worked in eight-hour shifts, often changing shifts weekly. Their mission was top secret, so they were not able to tell their families about their work. Because of this secrecy, many of these women and men were not given the credit they deserved until much later, if at all.

Pioneers in Computing

In the early days of computing, women in America were calculating ordnance and trajectory tables using simple electromechanical calculators, while women in Britain were programming the very earliest electromechanical computers to decrypt messages from the Allied enemies. Both were involved in early computing and both were on a common mission to aid the Allies in winning the war. From these experiences came a pressing need to automate work and speed up calculations. The earliest electromechanical computers gave way to the first digital computers, and thankfully they became employed in business and commerce instead of war.

Thoughts

When you open your laptop or turn on your tablet or smartphone, I hope that you will consider the contributions of women and men in early computing. Room-sized computers have given way to pocket-sized devices, but not overnight and not without a lot of effort. It has been an incredible history and I look forward to the future.
Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional and assistant professor of practice for the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.