Oh wow. Right on the heels of my earlier post today, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who was responsible for identifying emerging technologies and marketplace developments at IBM before he retired, makes a quite closely relevant post today on “All Innovation is Local.”
He ends up with this:
One of the most important concepts in computer sciences is the principle of locality. It means that the vast majority of the references that a computer program makes are to related data in nearby locations in storage. Only a very small percentage of the time will the reference data not be there, and the computer then has to get it from a farther-away level of the storage hierarchy, which takes a lot longer than the local references. Were it not for this principle of locality, computers would run much, much slower.
Perhaps we humans also have our own principle of locality. Even the most global among us still spend most of our time and energy with our families, friends and colleagues right near our homes. We get most of our nurturing and inspiration from our local base. And, . . . it is this base that then enables us to go out and properly deal with the vast global world out there.
The solutions to our Philippine power problems will be found right in the midst of ourselves – again, I’m quite convinced of it. We need to look more inward, and less outward.
By the way, Big Mango took my earlier post today and bumped it up a notch to a broader issue relevant to the Philippines.