RIP Vicki Hanson

 The news yesterday was sudden, surprising -- and yet it wasn't.   Vicki had always persevered, and it'd been months since I'd heard from her.   As the CEO of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), she was tireless and devoted.   She'd come up 'through the ranks' -- even the ranks that ACM once decried as 'fake' or 'not relevant' (e.g. their early stance on graphics, on HCI {Human-Computer Interaction; or CHI, as ACM preferred to call it, putting the computer in front of the human} and even the Internet itself).  She became President in 2016, a decade ago now, and ACM CEO two years later.   

Here's the memoriam in CACM https://cacm.acm.org/news/in-memoriam-vicki-l-hanson/

Vicki's later work, beyond HCI, was bent on aiding dis-advantaged communities to be part of the computer world.  You might say that was a logical extension from her first love, and in fact I believe that it was.   Her Anita Borg honor signals that love and that devotion.

When she became CEO, I began the ACM Awards Archive project.  Though it was mostly driven and supported by Pat Ryan, ACM's redoubtable {and self-preferred 'behind the scenes'} COO, Vicki was a strong supporter.   Our project focused on previous Award winners -- I sub-titled it the PIP group (Previously Important People); Vicki wanted in addition to support and honor the many volunteers and staff who make ACM work so well.  Her view was that these folk are the real backbone of the guts of the organization.  

She was so right in that view.

When we proposed a year ago to extend the Archive work into a Virtual Hall of Fame, she was supportive, but concerned because ACM had just modified the Digital Library pricing structure and with it, a key major revenue generator for ACM.  Alas, that work with Vicki at the helm is a missed opportunity at this point.  

I know many friends have been sad to learn about Vicki's last year, and this denouement.  I am happy though that I came to know and appreciate her gifts and her contributions.

Chuck

COVID literature

 January 22, 2026--the sixth anniversary of the first COVID diagnosis in America.   Our newspaper, the San Jose Mercury-News, failed to note this.  So, too, the New York Times and the Washington Post

And then, when I went to check my sources, they say, "NOPE, it was January 20th" until you read further and it was "actually January 18" if not January 17.   Well, the first positive test was on the 17th, and January 18 was the ID verification by CDC of that case in Washington state, and on January 20 a statement was released to the public.   Most newspapers carried their first COVID story on January 22nd, 

But almost all "anniversary date" stories credit March 11th, the day WHO declared COVID to be a pandemic in its infinitre wisdom.  By that date, 40 US states had 3,121 confirmed cases, and 42 deaths.  The world had 24,924 cases in 14 countries, and 982 deaths in 10 countries on four continents.   

What do the 'databases' say?   Well, the official Johns Hopkins database lists 723 cases and 1 death by January 22.   California had 722 cases, no deaths; Washington State had one case on January 22 but no deaths, and Wisconsin had one death but no cases.  Huh?    Turns out that the CA data was retroactively assessed, and 'added' back to the original files.  This didn't happen for any other US state.  Such jiggering of the data happened in several early outbreaks as people tried to reconstruct who was sick and who died from what, before the world knew about COVID.   

So, six years in, how good are the books?  Which ones should we venerate?  

A new one just came out mid-2025, "In COVID's wake" by Stephen Macedo and Frances E. Lee, two political scientists, with great credentials.   Reviews are laudatory from people who idolize political machinations, but health credentials seem suspect.  One critical reviewer wrote "The examinations of existing epidemiology literature in imcomplete, and the conclusions are wrong. . . .  A pathetic attempt at revisionist history of epidemiology of COVID-19 by political scientists.  It is difficult to list every factoid these writers got wrong."

I covered the slim book by the great UK Statistician David Spiegelhalter (2021) in an earlier post.  One key critic wrote: "Absolutely useless . . . "

Michael Lewis penned the popular Premonition at the end of 2020.   Usually a very solid writer, Lewis was panned by many for this one: "A polemic against the government and especially against the CDC . . . (while I share some antipathy toward those views, I like the thrust of this critic's main charge).  "It is a jumble of stories that do not get to Covid until around page 177.  It reads like a hot mess.  I am sorry I slogged through it."

The Plague Year, by Lawrence Wright, late 2020.   Praised by many for its detailed first-year coverage, some found it quite biased.  One said, "Political garbage, huge public disservice. . . . I kept trying so hard to give this book a chance, but once I saw Trump's name mentioned for about the 100th time, I realized that this author was very unhinged in his dislike of Trump.  The author absolutely deserves the right to criticize the Administration's handling of the crisis, but on my opinion focused on that too much in a pandemic that was global and involved numerous global impacts, not just Trump."

Jonathan Howard just published a similar screed, "Everyone else is lying to you: a damning archive of science denial."

One of the better is "Lessons from the COVID War" by the Covid Crisis Committee.  A collection of 34 authors, these are good primary source material, but no overall story emerges.

A European writer, Richard Chambers, wrote "A State of Emergency" about the first COVID year in Ireland.   Reasonably balanced, but only about one (small) nation.

There is room for more.

One Institute joins more tightly with another

 InnovaScapes Institute has been a long-term passion for me, as many of you readers know.   We've done some fun things, some not-so-fun things, and even in places some important things.  And it seems to me that the challenges have if anything increased rather than decreased.  So there is plenty to do, even as clients have struggled with funding for projects in this strange anti-science political climate at present.

Along the way, we have worked with many clients and groups, and one such group has periodically been the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) at Maynooth University in Leixlip, Ireland, maybe twenty miles each of Dublin.

I first became acquainted with Maynooth (which is one of the four linked universities of the University of Ireland) circa 2008 or so, when I was working with a nearby Intel Corporation division on a set of collaboration tools.   I headed a group at Intel where our motto was that collaboration with the right set of tools was "Better than Being There" -- that motto earned us a lot of critique and brickbats at the time, but it also predicted many of the specific issues that have been discovered since the Zoom revolution occasioned by the COVID pandemic and consequent lockdowns and travel restrictions.

Via MediaX at Stanford, where I was the director at the time, we composed a workshop for British Petroleum and professional societies in the UK and in Ireland that we titled "Prometheus Unbound"

This workshop strongly advanced the notion that Virtual Collaboration was a tool for "everyone", not just the privileged executives at major corporations (the classic target audience for HP, Cisco, IBM, and virtually every other corporation at the time).   Recall that HP was touting their Halo solution, and Cisco their Telepresence rooms.  Even Webex was focused on the C-suite.  Four years after our workshop, Eric Yuan left Cisco in frustration (they had bought Webex in the meantime, and Yuan was the CTO, but he could not persuade Cisco to drop the big 'rooms' and to shift the target audience to an individual becoming empowered.  Yuan, helped by a retiring exec from Cisco, Dan Scheinman (who agreed with him, so Dan resigned Cisco simulataneously, and funded the start-up now known as Zoom).   

We also worked with IVI three years ago for a couple of United Nations General Assembly presentations centered around highly interactive Multiple Display environments to depict Big Data discoveries for the COVID pandemic in various settings, including of course Ireland's 26 counties.

Well, the great news for this week is that I was invited to become a Senior Innovation Fellow at IVI.  Naturally I accepted, and I look forward to some novel and impactful IVI projects that will extend our investigations and contributions in the Public Health sector through IVI's curent Stay Left, Shift Left,  10x Digital Health initiative   This initiative, described clearly in a recent IJIC article (International Journal of Integrated Care. https://ijic.org/articles/10.5334/ijic.ICIC24544. ) is a compelling story, with a lot of promise but also a wide set of challenges.  

I am honored and thrilled to be invited to join IVI, and I look forward to some very fundamental work in this arena.