 heath Where is the killer application that will suddenly have consumers clamouring for interconnected devices in the way that the internet itself took off in the 1990s after Sir Tim Berners-Lee at Cern invented the www address system, the worldwide web?
Will the current internet giants evolve into Internet of Things corporations, or will the winners be new, nimble and unheard of?
So many uncertainties and potential difficulties surround the idea of the Internet of Things that it is easy to scoff at the hugeness of the concept.
And yet, of course, it is already happening, bit by bit, sector by sector – at different speeds according to what area of industry or human activity is involved.
Cars are already hugely computerised; the European Union is mandating that all new cars in Europe will have to be fitted with what is called the eCall system, which will automatically connect a vehicle to emergency services following a collision and provide location and impact information.
Telemedicine using sensors is being tested in various parts of the world, and may be invaluable in an ageing world. Cameras are already wirelessing their pictures to the internet.
The stands at the Cambridge conference include start-up companies involved with those farm sensors for animals to swallow and send their health data direct to farmers’ computers by wireless.
Another business is seeking to seed farmland with hundreds of cheap devices which will 2 Way Radio aridity information direct to a control room so that farmers can direct irrigation directly to the parts of fields where it is needed.
There is plenty of room for bold new disruptive entrepreneurs.
My conclusion to two days’ exposure to the exhilarating possibilities of the Internet of Things is that it’s too huge to grasp and too easy to get carried away into a sci-fi rhapsody.
But think about it sector by sector, industry by industry, place by place, and something begins to emerge out of the mist. It is happening all round us. But it will probably not be called the Internet of Things.
The late Mary Parker Follett is the greatest management thinker most people have never heard of, but her ideas remain as vital as ever.
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The Democrats can use all the assets they can find as they approach a midterm election that grows increasingly challenging. The polls are daunting. The electoral map for both the Senate and House is unfavorable. And history is rarely kind to the president’s party in midterm voting.
But the Democrats have two significant assets in the form of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, the president and former president who have thrown themselves into the 2014 campaign with gusto.
In a real sense, the pair — the only two-term Democratic presidents since World War II — offer complementary strengths. Although his presidential approval rating is mired in the 40%-to-45% range, Obama is still an effective fundraiser for the Democrats. And from his “bully pulpit” in the White House, he is positioned to help frame issues such as the minimum wage, income inequality and immigration reform that could assist his party’s candidates.
Clinton, meanwhile, is not only able to articulate the stakes in competing policy visions. But he is also an effective on-the-ground campaigner who resonates well in many parts of the country that will not give Obama a hearing.
Both candidates reflect their past. Clinton is a son of the rural South. He was born in the small town of Hope, AR, a place that has been a part of Clinton’s political persona since he burst onto the national stage in 1992.
Obama’s life has been molded in urban America. Although he was raised in Hawaii, his adult years have been spent in Chicago (and Washington).
As vote-getters, both men have reflected their roots. In winning the White House twice, they both ran well in the Democrats’ geographic base on the two coasts — the Northeast and the Pacific West — as well as the battleground states of the industrial Midwest.
Obama, though, generally won a higher share of the vote than Clinton in states with a large metropolitan population, such as California, Florida and Ohio. And he took Indiana and North Carolina in 2008, as well as Virginia in both 2008 and 2012 — all states that Clinton never carried.
Yet from West Virginia to Missouri, Clinton was able to win a number of rural-oriented states in the South and border South where Obama was defeated in both 2008 and 2012, in many cases by landslide margins.
Clinton’s two presidential victories were more geographically sweeping than Obama’s, as he took 32 states in 1992 and 31 in 1996. In his two successful presidential races, Obama won 28 and 26 states, respectively.
The disparity was even more striking when taken to the congressional district and county levels. When Clinton was reelected in 1996, he won nearly half (more than 1,500) of the nation’s 3,100 or so counties and nearly two-thirds (280) of its 435 congressional districts. When Obama was reelected in 2012, he carried less than a quarter of the counties (barely 700) and less than half (209) of the congressional districts.
Yet Obama was comfortably reelected because he won where it counted. Of the 39 counties with a 2010 population in excess of 1 million, Obama carried 35.
Note: The total of counties carried includes similar jurisdictions such as independent cities.
Sources: America Votes 30 (CQ Press/SAGE Publications). The number of counties carried by each candidate was compiled by the author using appropriate editions of America Votes. The number of congressional districts carried was compiled by Polidata.
Clinton, at least, was able to enjoy the leavening impact of a favorable midterm election in 1998, when the president’s party bucked the historical trend to actually gain seats in the House. An improved economy and the widespread perception of Republican overreach in pushing Clinton’s impeachment played major roles in the outcome.
Obama has not experienced such a midterm comeback, nor do many expect him to in 2014. Instead, he has taken on the role of a Cassandra of sorts, urging Democrats to turn out in larger than anticipated numbers this fall or experience the dire consequences that he predicts would come from a robust Republican Party in control of Capitol Hill.
Both Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2012 scored clear-cut reelection victories, but with coalitions that were sculpted a bit differently. Clinton ran better than Obama among white and older voters, when comparing exit polls from each year. Obama polled a perceptibly higher vote share than Clinton among younger voters, African Americans and Asians. Both candidates ran similarly well among Hispanics.
Note: Exit polling for 1996 broke down the ages of older voters as 45-59 and 60 and older.
Sources: Exit poll data for 1996 is from a multi-election table published in the New York Times on Nov. 5, 2008. Exit poll data for 2012 is from the New York Times’ web site.
As shown in Map 1 below, both Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2012 followed similar, but not identical, paths to reelection. Each dominated on both coasts — the Northeast and the Pacific West — as well as in the battleground states of the industrial Midwest. Clinton, though, demonstrated much more appeal than Obama in rural America, winning a number of states in the South and border South that Obama did not come close to carrying. On the other hand, Obama’s prime strength was in states with large metropolitan populations, where he tended to win a higher percentage of the vote in 2012 than Clinton did in 1996. Obama won two states in 2012 that Clinton did not in 1996, Colorado and Virginia, although Clinton did take the former in 1992. In the tables below, vote percentages in states won by Clinton (1996) and Obama (2012) are indicated in bold type.
Note: There are two basic ways to compute candidate vote percentages in a presidential election. One way is to use the total vote cast for all candidates, of which Clinton drew 49.2% in 1996 and Obama 51.1% in 2012. A second way is to use only the major-party vote, which bases the percentages on just the Democratic and Republican vote and ignores those cast for others. Clinton took 54.7% of the major-party vote in 1996; Obama received 52.0% of the two-party tally in 2012. The decided difference in the Clinton vote from one measurement to the other is due to the nature of the 1996 election, which included a significant third-party option in the form of Ross Perot, the Reform Party entry that year. In this chart, however, percentages are based on the total vote, since that is most commonly used in the political world. For the record, Clinton carried Colorado, Georgia and Montana in 1992, but not 1996. Obama won Indiana and North Carolina in 2008, but not 2012. For a PDF version of these tables, click here.
Source: America Votes 30 (CQ Press/SAGE Publications).
Rhodes Cook, a veteran political reporter, publishes his own political newsletter, the Rhodes Cook Letter, and is a senior columnist for the Crystal Ball. Follow Rhodes on Twitter @rhodescook.
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The match went so long that it exceeded the limits of the scoreboard! Deadspin pulls some choice quotes out of Xan Brooks’s descent into madness live-blogging the marathon Wimbledon match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. Just read it. You can follow him as he loses his grip on reality before your very eyes.
It’s just a shame somebody had to lose.
Back in the crazy dot-com boom days, I knew someone who was into high-performance automobiles. And since