Cursive Writing

Over the weekend I was at a civic event when someone in my group said, “It’s a shame that they don’t teach cursive writing in schools anymore.” I replied, “Why?” Not “why don’t they teach cursive writing” which we’ll accept as true even though I doubt it is, but “why would it be a shame if cursive writing was not taught?”

I confess to trying to be a bit provocative, but it was also intended as a serious question. One of my informal management rules is that if I ask someone why they are doing something, if the only thing they come up with is, “we’ve always done it this way,” then it may be time to reassess the practice being questioned.

I believe this is the case with cursive writing. The best argument in defense of the practice is that much of our accumulated knowledge is stored in cursive writing and so that knowledge might be withheld from someone who can’t read cursive. But that was once true for Latin, and few of us study Latin anymore. Some do, but these days it is a nice-to-have elective. I believe learning how to comprehend cursive writing will be like that, too, although that grossly overestimates the effort it takes to discern the meaning of cursive writing. In other words, if you can read printing (which is the common term for block lettering or non-cursive writing), it is not a great leap to be able to read cursive.

Given modern technology, there are some downsides to the continued use of cursive. Print, when produced on a computer of other device, is searchable and can be read by a machine whereas cursive cannot (as far as I know). These technological features of print are extremely valuable, but if you are not aware of them or you have never (knowingly) used them, you would be unaware of this utility. Not coincidently, the people most likely not to be aware of these newer technologies are the same people who have grown up with and are fully comfortable with cursive.

To be clear, I am not an enemy of cursive. I use it on a daily basis. When I take notes in cursive, I retain the material much better than when I take notes on a keyboard. But that’s only because I’m used to doing it that way. Someone who grew up with a keyboard might feel exactly the opposite.

So don’t give up on cursive, but on the other hand, don’t force it upon future generations of students, especially if it comes at the expense of another subject that might be more valuable such as math, science, history, literature, art, music, or just about anything else.   

Are Signatures Becoming Extinct

Today's New York Times business section gives prominent placement to a story informing us that credit card signatures are about to become extinct in the United States. By the end of this month, American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa will all eliminate the requirement of vendors that they collect the signature of the person using the card. It is optional for the vendors, so some might continue with the requirement, but many will not.

The article explains that for centuries, the signature was accepted as a reliable means of verifying the identity of a person, but with digital signatures and the demise of hand-written documents, traditional signatures no longer serve that function in a reliable manner.

But the signature will not be totally extinct: the reporter predicts it will "relegated to a few special circumstances" like "sealing a giant transaction like a house purchase."

From the registry of deeds perspective, I'd have to dispute that assertion since we are heading towards entirely paperless transactions in the near future. Sure, the parties may be asked to make their signature on a tablet, but that act will have more to do with providing evidence of the intent of the person executing the document than it will with identifying that person.

Perhaps a more reliable method of verification will be to video and audio record the person acknowledging who he is, what he is doing, and what his intent is, and then embedding that video in the digital document itself. After all, the signature just provides circumstantial evidence of who signed the document.  Seeing and hearing the person executing the document would be stronger evidence. Other than nostalgia and habit, there's nothing to stop us.

Making Government Data Available to the Public

There's an interesting story in today's Globe about efforts by people in the state's legal community to get the Massachusetts Trial Court to standardize the manner in which data is entered into its statewide computer system, and to make that data widely available in digital form. In "Trial courts decline to standardize data," the Globe's Catie Edmondson reports that the Trial Court has declined to implement this type of standardization now, but it's a positive sign that people are recognizing the benefits of making government-created data available for public use.

Several years ago I was at a conference on government technology and heard a story of how the MBTA had made the GPS data from its buses available in real time. Several entrepreneurs came up with cell phone apps that allowed riders to determine the exact location of the bus they were waiting for and its estimated time of arrival at their location. Another person took this a step further and designed low cost digital clocks for businesses near bus stops to display in their front windows. The rationale here was that if a bus was scheduled to arrive in 2 minutes, a waiting rider might not run into the store to buy something, but if the rider knew that the bus would not be there for 5 minutes - as reported via the store's clock and real-time locational data from the bus - the store might have a new customer.

Hearing that stories and others like it persuaded me that government data could and should be treated as a digital raw material, made available to the public so that entrepreneurs can add value to it in an almost infinite variety of ways. Unfortunately, implementing systems that share data responsibly and equitably take time, but they are on their way.

New Notary Law

On October 7, 2016, Governor Charlie Baker signed An Act Regulating Notaries Public To Protect Consumers and the Validity and Effectiveness of Recorded Instruments (Chapter 289 of the Acts of 2016). The law appears to be a codification of Governor Mitt Romney’s 2004 Executive Order on notaries. Real Estate Bar Association seems to have been a prime proponent of this new law (I’ve seen a “Overview of REBA’s Notary Legislation” memo).

I just read through the new statute with two things in mind: Did it change any of the practices I currently follow as a Notary Public; and did it address electronic documents, electronic signatures, or electronic acknowledgements in any way?

In answer to the first issue, the new law seems simply to have turned the executive order into law. (One thing I did learn from today’s reading is that it is permissible for a notary to identify the person signing a document by the “oath or affirmation of a credible witness unaffected by the document or transaction who is personally known to the notary public and who personally knows the individual.”). Otherwise, the rules for notaries seem to mirror the Executive Order.

The new law reamplifies many of the prohibitions on practices that misused the term Notary Public. When the Executive Order first came out, there was much talk about Notaries misrepresenting themselves as authorized to do things that were the sole domain of lawyers. Those provisions remain.

The new law also contains a pretty emphatic section about real estate closings that I don’t believe existed in the old Executive Order. The section I refer to states:

A notary public who is not an attorney licensed to practice law in the commonwealth shall not conduct a real estate closing and shall not act as a real estate closing agent; provided, however, that a notary public who is employed by an attorney so licensed may notarize a document in conjunction with a real estate closing conducted by the attorney and a notary public who is employed by a lender may notarize a document in conjunction with the closing of such lender’s real estate loans.

Perhaps this section explains REBA’s claim of authorship of this new law.

Real estate documents make another appearance in the new law which sets out all of the requirements of a proper acknowledgement, but then concedes that failure to comply with these requirements “shall not have any effect on the validity of the underlying document or the recording of the underlying document.” (Within the Registers of Deeds Association there has been some debate on whether a notary’s failure to strictly follow the rules should prevent a document from being recorded. This law seems to hold that the document should be recorded anyway).

Regrettably, the new law is silent about electronic or digital acknowledgements. That is good, in a way, because it does not specifically prohibit them. But it does not specifically authorize them either. Perhaps that is because there is not a strong market for electronic notarization. The flaw in that logic is that in 2005, there was no great demand for electronic recording, but we started doing it anyway and now it accounts for more than 50% of all recordings. As electronic acknowledgements become more feasible and desirable, hopefully the codification of these ambiguities will not stand as an obstacle to future technological innovation.

Cyber Security and the Registry of Deeds

The Middlesex North Registry of Deeds created its last paper record book back in 2001. Today, we have more books that only exist virtually than we do books that exist in tangible form. Digitizing our records has made them much more accessible to our users while also reducing our costs. In recent years, however, increasingly sophisticated hacking attempts have become a substantial threat to digital records.

This past meeting, the Massachusetts Registers of Deeds Association convened a meeting about the threat that hacking poses to our records and our operations. In one presentation, a representative from the Hub Technical Services provided details about the threat environment. For example, five years ago, the preferred tactic of the bad guys was data exfiltration which means they penetrated your computer defenses, grabbed some of your data, and transported it electronically to a device on their control. That was complicated and resource intensive.

Today, the preferred tactic is to encrypt on-site. There, the bad guys insert an encryption program onto your computer and execute it. This encrypts all of your files which means you cannot open them even though they are still on your computer. The only way to get access to your data is to pay the ransom, obtain the decryption key from the bad guys, and use it to decrypt your files. Of course, that assumes they give you the key even after you pay the ransom.

So how does this malicious encryption program get on your computer? Usually it comes via email. Bad guys will disguise an email to look like something coming from someone you know, or at least to resemble something of interest to you. We live in a "click happy" culture, so the recipient of the will often open it and click a link in it. That launches the encryption program.

The Hub Tech representative said one in ten of these infiltration efforts is successful and that there are 316 new malware threats made every minute.

How to protect against these attacks? It's difficult. User education is very important (Don't click on unknown emails!). So is keeping security software up to date. But it's almost inevitable that an attack will succeed, so having good backups that can be quickly restored are key to preparedness.

More on Registry Standardization

In my preceding post, I discussed the process of selecting the ACS computer system and how that was intended to become the standard system in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, that did not happen. Here is a list of registries in Massachusetts (in alphabetical order) along with the computer system they are currently operating. Whether the registry is "state" or "county" is also indicated:

1. Barnstable - Browntech - county
2. Berkshire Middle - ACS - state
3. Berkshire North - ACS - state
4. Berkshire South - ACS - state
5. Bristol Fall River - ACS - county
6. Bristol North - ACS - county
7. Bristol South - ACS - county
8. Dukes - ACS - county
9. Essex North - Browntech - state
10. Essex South - in-house system - state
11. Franklin - ACS - state
12. Hampden - Browntech - state
13. Hampshire - ACS - state
14. Middlesex North - ACS - state
15. Middlesex South - ACS - state
16. Nantucket - ACS - county
17. Norfolk - Browntech - county
18. Plymouth - ACS - county
19. Suffolk - ACS - state
20. Worcester - ACS - state
21. Worcester North - Browntech - state

State v county, 13 registries are state; 7 are county

ACS v Browntech, 15 use ACS, 5 use Browntech, and 1 uses an in-house system

Of the 13 state registries, 9 use ACS; 3 use Browntech, and 1 uses an in-house system.

Of the 7 county registries, 5 use ACS and 2 use Browntech.

"Big Data's Big Dig"

That's what the Boston Globe called the 19-year, $75 million effort of the Massachusetts Trial Court to computerize its operations.  A story in the Sunday, April 12, 2015 Globe reviewed the trajectory of that undertaking.  While some progress has been made, much is left to be done.

Although the various registries of deeds in Massachusetts have done a pretty good job of computerizing operations (the Middlesex North Registry, for example, has every record from 1629 to the present freely available to the public on our website and receives more than 40% of its new recordings electronically), many government offices seem slow to automate operations.  I suspect that many businesses have similar problems, only a business faces less public scrutiny than does a government office so we hear more about failures in the public sector.

My theory for this technology tardiness is that many of the people still in charge are from the pre-computer era and lack a reasonable amount of aptitude when it comes to technology.  In such cases, too much is left to the IT people who, while they may understand technology, might not fully grasp the entire operation of the enterprise.  Computers are, after all, just another tool for a company or government office.  Unless they are integrated into normal operations, they will never be used to their full potential.  Fortunately, this situation does have a limited life-span.  As people who have grown up with computers ascend to top leadership positions, this upper management digital divide will become very rare.

Taking data hostage

Today's Globe has a story about how computer hackers were able to insert a virus into the computer system of the nearby Tewksbury Police Department and lockup all of the department's computer files.  The article reports that neither the state police nor the FBI were able to crack the virus and, because the department's backup tapes were similarly infected, Tewksbury ended up paying a ransom of $500 and got its data back.

Stories like this reinforce my opinion that it's critical for registries of deeds to continue creating microfilm of recorded documents.  Many scoff at the idea of microfilm, saying it's an obsolete technology but if properly created and stored, it lasts a long time.  While microfilm does have some vulnerabilities, computer viruses aren't among them. 

Technology and Legal Liability

Last week at the Massachusetts Digital Government Summit spoke about how much technology will transform the way cities operate.  Perhaps to most exotic prediction to me was the speaker's assertion that self-drive automobiles are already feasible and nearly available.  These cars use radar, cameras, other sensors and lots of computing power to navigate and "drive" a car safely and smoothly whatever the destination.  The scenario in which this technology might first come available could be driving in traffic.  Imagine being stuck in the bumper to bumper morning commute on Rte 93 and being able to engage your "self-drive" feature and then break open whatever novel you were reading that week as the car nudged its way forward in the midst of all that traffic.

While the technology currently exists to make this scenario feasible and even affordable, the biggest obstacle is a legal one: existing laws don't permit computer driven cars and, perhaps more importantly, the law of liability has not developed sufficiently to encompass this type of usage.

Liability and insurance coverage are also big issues in another area in which technology has already disrupted establish ways of doing business.  Companies like Uber and Airbnb use technology to allow private individuals to use their own cars and their own houses to provide transportation and lodging for a fee.  This is called "the sharing economy" and it's revolutionizing the way some people live and earn livings.  But as this short article on the Esurance website makes clear, if you're regularly getting paid to drive people around in your car, you are operating a livery service and your auto insurance policy specifically excludes that from coverage.  Get in an accident and your auto insurer will decline coverage.  Recognizing this gap, companies like Uber are now providing some insurance but it's an unsettled area and might not cover the driver or vehicle (just passengers and others outside the vehicle).

These are a couple of examples of how society, aided by technology, often outpaces the legal system.  The law catches up eventually, but not before some people get hurt by rapid changes in society and business.  That's not a reason to stifle progress but it is a reminder that the world is a complicated place.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week I attended the Massachusetts Digital Government Summit.  It was a very interesting discussion in the latest trends in government technology.  Here are my notes from the conference:

Opening Remarks by Glen Shor (Secretary of Administration and Finance)

Our goal is to use technology to make it easier for citizens to interact with government.  Also, to make more data-driven decisions.  Deval Patrick has committed to technology even in bad financial times.  We’ve been more inclined to use off the shelf software rather than building applications in-house.  Developing it in-house, you have a 100% chance of getting what you want but only a 50% chance of success.  With off-the-shelf, you get 85% of what you want with a 90% chance of success.

Trends in Mass IT by Bill Oates, Massachusetts CIO

Three areas of emphasis have been data management, expanding broadband, and collaboration with cities and the educational system.  He showed a video about the Massachusetts Innovation Challenge in which $50,000 in prizes were awarded in a competition among 25 startup companies.  The goal was to take the creativity inherent in the IT business and apply it to state government. 

CIO Panel Discussion

Moderators:

Bill Oates, Chief Information Officer, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Information Officer, City of Boston

Panelists:

Craig Burlingame, CIO City of Boston, 2000-2004
Louis Gutierrez, CIO Commonwealth, 1996-1998 and 2003-2005
John Letchford, CIO Commonwealth, 2010-2013
David Lewis, CIO Commonwealth, 1998-2002
Anne Margulies, CIO Commonwealth, 2007-2010

This was a loosely structured question and answer session in which the panelists gave wide-ranging answers to issues raised.  Below are some of the more memorable points that were made:

Y2K gave state government something that had to be done on time; the deadline couldn’t slip.  This was a very different dynamic.  The procurement process is difficult but if all of these procedures were not in place, the system could very easily be corrupted.  Be careful about relying too heavily on consultants.  Remember the essence of consulting: if you can’t solve a problem, there’s good money in prolonging it. 

In cities, especially, there’s often a losing struggle between funding things that are visible like parks and paying for back-end things like computers that are largely invisible.

The future? Because IT is the backbone rather than the backroom, CIOs will become more like COOs.  IT is part of everything an organization does.  One of the tasks of a CIO is to make very compartmented offices work together to improve the customer experience.

At Harvard, they refer to the future as SMAC: social, mobile, analytics and cloud.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” because the pace of change in technology is unbelievable and the future is very nebulous.

You have to spend half your time dabbling in stuff.

Fail early and fail often.

CIOs have to lead major change in organizations because technology is disrupting the current way of doing things.  You have to be good at explaining how new things work otherwise the new things will never succeed.

Patience and persistence are key traits.  Obstacles are inevitable.  Don’t be distracted by minutia. 

IT and Operations are morphing together into the same thing.   END

Day Two Opening Remarks

Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CIO, City of Boston

The role of the CIO is changing greatly.  It’s not just technology anymore but also includes operations.  Technology doesn’t solve anything by itself but nothing in government gets done without technology.  However, government isn’t meeting customer expectations.  They want government service to be as fast and efficient as buying something from Amazon.  Government doesn’t have the resources to compete with business so we have to be more agile and innovative to succeed in the world of limited budgets.

The best way to avoid a big failure is to have a lot of little failures early in the process.  A good way to do this is to develop in-house expertise on today’s technologies. 

Relentlessly focus on end-users.  Design systems for them, not for the employees who will be using the systems.

We have the power to change the perception that government is inherently wasteful and inefficient.  We can show our constituents that government can work well.  Great customer service sends the message that government cares.  END

Specific Topics

Mobile/Government – Jim Upton of AT&T Mobility and Agnieszka Ilnicka of City of Boston IT

(Upton) Citizens are going more mobile but government is not.  Government is losing touch with its constituents.  Government needs to catch up.

Successful mobile apps are fast and “on point” meaning that they do a specific task very well and don’t try to do too much.  It’s better to deliver apps in pieces than it is to try to create a single one-size-fits-all product.  Creating apps for the government has extra challenges such as making them multilingual or protecting privacy.  The apps that get most widely adopted are those available in an app store which should be a consideration in your design decisions.    

Apps take a variety of forms from a programing perspective.  Native apps are those written in the mobile operating system’s code (iOS or Android).  Other apps are written in HTML5.  These are probably easiest to write but they can’t be put in the app store.  The most common type of app today is called a hybrid which is written in HTML5 and then “wrapped” in iOS or Android. 

What does the future hold?  Hyperlocal will be big.  He anticipates the widespread use of iBeacons which emit signals that communicate with your telephone and tell you where and how far the beacon (destination) is from you.  The other big thing he expects is “augmented reality” in which you would point your phone’s camera at something (a particular building, for example) and have information about that building automatically appear on your phone’s screen, overlaying the image produced by your camera.

(Agnieszka): Is the manager of “constituent engagement tools” for the city of Boston.  She described the methods citizens of Boston have to interact with their government.  In 2008, there was the mayor’s 24 hour hotline which is staffed by humans around the clock.  Also, there was email, US mail and contact through the city website.  We knew mobile was the next step. 

The mayor’s office of New Urban Mechanics worked with a company called Connected Bits to give us Citizens Connect, a mobile app that allows people to report infrastructure and service problems.  Simplicity was the key to this app and it was very successful.  We soon discovered that the most frequent users of this app were city workers.  This led them to develop a City Worker app which was a beefed up version of the citizen app.  This has been very successful too.  A new app they’re testing is called “Street Bump” which uses your phone’s GPS and accelerometer to make note of when you drive over a bump like a pot hole.  The citizen doesn’t have to do anything other than turn the thing on at the start of a trip.  They continue to fine tune this app.  Her advice was to keep development costs low by partnering with universities, non-profits and businesses.  END

Analytics in the Age of Big Data

Four major trends in IT today: (1) cloud; (2) mobile [we’re always connected]; (3) Internet of Things [gadgets that generate data; and [4] Big Data.  “Big Data” is a very ambiguous term.  It means data of all types and formats.  It can be text files, spreadsheets, databases, video, audio, images, and machine created data such as that emitted from things like cars, thermostats and sensors.  The challenge is to find a way to store and query all of this stuff even though it remains in its native format.  (there’s no clear answer).  The big payoff will come when mashing up all of this data.

Keynote Speaker (Day Two) Chad Vander Veen, editor of a new “media platform” called Future Structure which is described as “the intersection of ideas, infrastructure and technology.”

Because everything is connected today, we have to fundamentally change the way we look at how government operates.  He compares it to how fantasy football has transformed how (some) people look at the game of football.  It’s still the same game but it’s viewed in a way that breaks down all the old boundaries and practices.      

By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in cities.  This is a fundamental shift in the history of human civilization.  We have to look at a city as a deeply connected system (or system of systems).  Infrastructure and public health are deeply connected (clean water, working sewers).  Don’t think of roads as being only for cars.  Consider subways, trolleys, bicycles and pedestrians.  A big challenge is how do we move people around our cities more efficiently.

The five pillars of the city are (1) water; (2) waste; (3) energy; (4) transportation; and (5) built environment.  There also a lot of bad ideas out there. 

How will technology influence cities of the future?  With the Internet of Things, everything is connected.  By connecting all of our infrastructure, we generate better data which lets us make smarter decisions.  Value pricing for parking.   

He then talked a lot about “connected autonomous vehicles” which are cars that drive themselves.  By the end of this decade, auto makers will be offering “semi-autonomous vehicles”.  The technology exists today to make this happen but our “soft infrastructure” like law and liability have to catch up.  END

Digital Engagement by Nigel Jacob of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics

Boston is using technology to better engage its residents.  We want to make citizens more central to how we govern.  A big issue is trust of government. 

The way we operate is to try a lot of smaller projects, see if they work, and if they do, we scale them up.  If they don’t work, we shut them down quickly.  It’s important to fail fast.  Two examples of this are related to the Boston Public Schools.  One app is called “Discover” which took the existing school department website that shows each of the 100+ schools in the city and redid it to closely resemble a “hotels.com” type of site.  The other app is “where is my school bus” which tells a parent where the bus is in real time. 

The other thing we do is blend online with offline.  You can’t separate online from in person engagement.  They created a “City Hall To Go” which is like a food truck for government services.  It drives to where the people are and offers a variety of services rather than forcing them to come to City Hall.  The other app is called “Community Planit” which is a planning app designed like a game.  Information about real projects and problems are made available online.  Before attending an in-person meeting, people can educate themselves on the facts and the issues so when they do finally come together they are much more productive because a lot of the preliminaries are already done.   

This promotes more civic involvement.

The third thing to remember is that real engagement is hard.  Experiment to find what works.  Experimentation is the key to civic engagement.  END

Education Technologies Today and Tomorrow

By Mark Racine, Chief Information Officer of Boston Public Schools (and a former 5^th grade teacher)

Started by saying that classrooms haven’t changed much in 100 years.  Goes through classroom technology timeline:

·    

• 1890s – handheld slate tablets
• ·        1900s – pencils (affordable but paper isn’t yet so slate tablets continue in use)
• ·        1920s – radio comes to classroom.  Education programs widely broadcast
• ·        1930s – reel-to-reel projectors
• ·        1940s – slide projector (permits efficient distribution of non-book materials by publishers)
• ·        1950s – overhead projector
• ·        1960s – calculators and photocopiers
• ·        1970s – computers in classrooms (but almost exclusively for admin purposes)
• ·        1980s – educational software – students begin learning from computers
• ·        1990s – wired to the Internet – slow but at least they’re connected
• ·        2000s – WIFI

Every one of these technologies is still in use in our schools today.  None have left.  Why are we doing things the same way we always have done?  Why haven’t we evolved?

To change the way we teach we first have to change the way we think about learning.  The old model of learning was linear.  The teacher stood at the front of the room, delivered a standard lesson on a tight schedule whether the students got it or not.  It was like requiring the students to drink 8 glasses of water each day.

Instead, think of learning as a swimming pool in which the student immerses him or herself.  How do you do this?  Technology can surround the student with learning opportunities.  Technology permits this kind of immersion.  But immerse the child in technology, not the teacher. 

Another point: school districts strive to standardize technology which from an Information Technology perspective, is the proper course since it provides economy of scale.  But this type of exclusivity is completely wrong from an education perspective.  Students should be exposed to all types of technology because when they are looking for jobs they will need to know all of these technologies.  If they’ve only been exposed to one in school, the school has missed an opportunity.  Schools should also teach students how this stuff works so that when it doesn’t work they know how to fix it.  This allows students to discover stuff on their own.

The motto should be “failure is not an option, it’s a requirement.”  Failure (of technology) is a learning opportunity.  Teachers and students should prepare for it, deal with it, and learn from it.  One reason teachers rely so much on paper handouts is that it’s a reliable technology that they know is going to work.  That’s not necessarily the case with computers.  But when a computer doesn’t work as planned, it presents a learning opportunity that should be embraced.

Empower the students.  Learning should be personalized even if the technology is not.  And always remember, learning happens everywhere. END