Tech Talk

A recently released Gallup Poll indicates that the proportion of U.S. citizens who worry a great deal about global warming is remarkably unchanged in the last 18 years: about 37 percent now, versus 35 percent in 1990. That, even much large numbers of Americans report that they are indeed concerned about climate change and consider themselves quite a bit better informed than before. Four out of five Americans consider themselves very well or fairly well educated on the issue now, compared to barely more than half in 1990.

Continue reading "Poll Finds U.S. Climate Concern Remarkably Unchanged" »

The man who turned the earliest transistor into a practical device, launching a revolution in electronics, has passed away at the age of 91 in Fullerton, Calif.

Morgan Sparks was a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs when he was recruited by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley to help exploit a breakthrough circuit they were calling the point-contact transistor.

Working with fellow AT&T engineers Gordon Teal and John Little, Sparks took the invention and fashioned a low-power variation on it that the laboratory dubbed the bipolar junction transistor, which improved on the work of the original trio of inventors, who were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the transistor principle.

Continue reading "Morgan Sparks, Creator of Practical Transistor (1916-2008)" »

A lot of bureaucracies have been slapping their letter of the alphabet onto the ARPA bandwagon the past couple of years (HSARPA, IARPA). Late last summer, President Bush passed the America COMPETES Act, which included a provision to establish an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy(ARPA-E). I think we should give the intelligence community all the cool new toys it needs, but I really think energy independence takes priority.

Bart Gordon, the House Science and Technology chair who shepherded ARPA-E along the gruesome path of "house resolution" to actual law, is also beating this drum. Today, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Gordon had some sharp words for the people who are taking their sweet time establishing the new agency.

One of the issues seems to be funding. Congress has repeatedly voted to repeal between $13 billion and $18 billion in tax incentives for the oil industry, but so far it hasn't happened. "I don’t believe the Federal government should be subsidizing an industry that is already seeing the highest profits on record," Gordon said. In the shadow of last year's oil company profits ($123 billion), $18 billion seems kind of anemic. But funding ARPA-E with that $18 billion would give it 6 times the annual funding allotted to DARPA, the original Advanced Research Agency. Just some perspective.

In contrast to projects that were throwbacks to the electronics of yesteryear, some Maker Faire gadgets would be impossible to build without increasingly cheap and small microprocessors.

Take John Maushammer's booth, for example. Last year, he managed to shrink down the video game Pong to wristwatch-size. You don't play the game yourself; instead, the computer inside plays both sides, scoring a point for the right every minute, and a point for the left every hour. Now, armed with a more powerful microprocessor, John is working on a watch version of the arcade game Asteroids. He's programmed the tiny ship to scan the screen for dangerous asteroids and shoot or avoid them before a collision. He admits that his code is better at playing the game than he is. Check out both watches:

Another glaring example of how cheap microprocessors have become was the table dedicated to BlinkM, the smart LED. Each BlinkM is essentially an RGB (red, green, blue) LED with a microcontroller on the back. That means that you can easily adjust the color, hue and brightness of each BlinkM without using larger or more complicated microprocessors in your DIY projects. Tod Kurt showed off some nice BlinkM demos at the booth:

There is no news topic more commonly covered in nanotechnology today than concerns overs its potential environmental, healthy and safety (EHS) impact. There are at least two reasons for this, I believe, one is that bad news or failure is always more compelling to read, and to write, than good news or achievement. And the second is that environmental activists are so much more adept and capable at manipulating the PR machinery than a gaggle of physicists, biologists and chemists.

As far as the former reason, this blogger is as guilty as the next scribe, with the caveat that my ruminations on the subject have been with the aim to provide a little more balance to the issue.

It appears I am not alone. Barnaby Feder at the New York Times waded into the controversy on his “Bits” blog and made the rather reasonable, but in today’s atmosphere nearly sacrilegious, assertion that “…nanotech skeptics, perhaps taking their cue from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are going to war with the weapons they’ve got. With no evidence so far that nanotech is actually damaging anyone, they are focusing on the materials most widely used in consumer products and doing their best to worry the public –and government officials — about potential hazards that have yet to be thoroughly researched.”

Uh oh… “no evidence that nanotech is actually damaging anyone” is not going to be taken lying down. A commenter on the “Bits” blog cites “evidence” from research on fish that disproves Feder’s assertion. In his defense, I am sure that Feder reserves the term “anyone” for those of the human species.

But aside from indefinite pronoun confusion, the idea that tests performed on fish are conclusive evidence of nanotechnology’s toxicity to humans would be jumping the gun somewhat.

There are a number of reasons for this, but not the least of which is that a big problem still persists in the lack of standards and measurement. As a result, two experiments testing the toxicity of nanoparticles may appear to be identical on paper but result in completely different results: nanoparticles are toxic, or nanoparticles are safe.

But as I have argued before this debate will not be resolved by scientific inquiry, understanding and rational policies, it will come down to whether the environmentalists can incite enough fear to overcome industry’s drive to make a profit. In other words, fear and greed are the two battling forces, so no need to trouble yourself over “evidence”.

In recent years, consumers have been all about video quality—digital, high definition, giant screens, high capacity disks. Audio quality, not so much. In fact, the move to compressed audio stuffed into iPods and other mp3 players and hard disks that act like home jukeboxes has continued the downward trend in audio quality that started with the move from vinyl record to CD.

At least one artist has decided to do something about it. Rocker Neil Young is releasing his audio archives not on itunes, not as a multi-CD boxed set targeted at Christmas shoppers, but on Blu-Ray discs. Actually, a series of Blu-Ray discs, that will start shipping this fall. The discs will include archival video and stills as well as the audio

Continue reading "Another win for Blu-Ray: Neil Young" »

The Northwest Compact just turned down Energy Solutions' proposal to bury some of Italy's nuclear waste in the fair state of Utah.

Why is that important? Because it's going to set off serious fireworks of drama this summer. Just you wait.

Here's the back story: Last fall, EnergySolutions a nuclear waste disposal company that's been accused of some shady dealings in the past, applied with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to import 20,000 tons of low-level nuclear waste (LLW) from Italy for burial in their nuclear waste dump in Clive, Utah. LLW isn't the bubbling containers of green goo of Troma Films. It's the lowest class of nuclear waste-- tissues you sneeze into on the hot side of the reactor; boots or gloves that have some contamination but not enough to merit disposal with high level waste. But still. It's other countries' nuclear waste, the ultimate NIMBY. And this isn't a one-time deal: EnergySolutions plans to make importing other countries' LLW its business.

Well, Bart Gordon's head fell off. Gordon, who is chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, immediately introduced a bill banning all importation of foreign LLW. You can't blame him. This would set a terrible precedent for other countries that have no place for their nuclear waste, basically telling them that the western US is a logical choice for the world's nuclear waste dump. (It didn't work in Australia either.)

The Northwest Compact is the federally mandated entity in charge of the Northwestern US' low level nuclear waste. Utah is within the NW Compact's purview. So, earlier today, the NW compact handily smacked EnergySolutions down.

But here's the catch. EnergySolutions is a private company. As such, the company maintains that its private nuclear waste dump is not bound by the rules that govern the federally controlled nuclear waste dumps. So on Monday, probably anticipating today's outcome, they filed a pre-emptive suit.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meanwhile, is letting people comment until June 10. (Over 1000 comments so far.) Then it will issue its own decision. If the NRC trumps the NW compact and rules in favor of EnergySolutions, there will be a huge catfight in Utah. If Rep. Gordon's bill gets passed, there will be a huge catfight in Congress, as all of the NRC appointees were put there by President Bush. They're not going to enjoy being told how to do their jobs.

Stay tuned.

Nano is hot. Apple isn’t the only one to call a product the Nano, there’s also a car by that name, and I have a feeling it’ll label more than a few kindergarten cubbies in a couple of years; forget Madison and Montana, what could be hipper these days than naming your little sprout Nano? We’re brushing our teeth with Nanowhitening Toothpaste, putting our kids in Nano-tex pants, fixing furniture with NanoGlue, smoothing our skin with Nano-Gold Energizing Cream, trying to lose weight by popping nanoSlim pills, and using some 600 other consumer products containing nanoparticles. (It’s amazing what people will buy because it sounds high tech.)

That’s about a hundred more than existed last fall, when Spectrum authors Barbara Karn and H. Scott Matthews warned that research in nanotechnology safety is falling behind its commercial progress, and that the technology has the potential to be the next major environmental and health disaster.

Continue reading "Nanotechnology continues its rush into consumer products while nanotech legislation slowly percolates through Congress" »

Probably the most complex mechanical contraption at Maker Faire was the Computer History Museum's model of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2. Babbage began working on the idea for a mechanical calculator based on the method of finite differences in 1846, but he never actually built the device. The museum showed off a scaled down, table-top model at Maker Faire and demonstrated how it works.

For feelings of timelessness, unboundedness, and permanence, nothing beats the Sahara Desert. Yet as recently as 14,800 years ago, vast reaches of it were green, as a stronger summer monsoon enabled lakes, wetlands, grass and shrubland to expand upwards from the Sahel. Then around 6,000 years ago, with increased incoming sunlight and a weakening monsoon, desertification set it. But was that process fast or slow? Is it a case in point for those sounding alarms about “abrupt climate change”—change that takes place too fast for humans and ecosystems to adapt?

Continue reading "Desertification Studies Cut Both Ways in Climate Debate" »

Republican presidential candidate John McCain cosponsored the first major U.S. bill to establish a carbon trading system, and the likely Democratic nominee Barack Obama is cosponsoring a lineal descendant of that bill. So it’s a foregone conclusion that we’ll have legislation next year regulating and cutting carbon emissions, right? Not necessarily, to judge from the degree to which criticism is rising, not just on the political right but on the left as well, of the mainstream approach to reducing climate change risks.

Continue reading "In Obama-McCain World, Is Carbon Regulation Inevitable?" »

I finally stumbled upon the website for “Power of Small: Nanotechnology”, the PBS program intended to enlighten us about nanotechnology’s promises…and threats. Needless to say I wasn’t breathlessly looking for it. So after having forewarned of it two months ago, I actually watched some of it.

Based on the early PR, I was expecting a documentary, but instead it follows the Fred Friendly model of a panel discussion. I waded in undeterred, but my interest quickly waned.

By and large based on what I did watch, I agree with David Berube of Nanohype, who clearly has far more patience than me as he watched all the clips.

The clips are organized around three topics of discussion: Privacy, Health and Environment.

For the privacy section, Berube notes, “There is little distinction about how nanoscience will sufficiently increase the privacy concerns given microchips are already available.” We’re in agreement there.

On the health part, the discussion quickly descends into 150-year life spans…sigh. Again, how you pin this problem of extended life on nanotechnology is unclear as Berube argues “Then we move to genetic switches that affect aging. We don’t need nano to engage in genetic engineering.” Exactly.

Continue reading "Power of Small: Tedious and Largely Irrelevant" »

If there's one thing you can count on at Maker Faire, it's the presence of robots. They're everywhere in all shapes and sizes. Sure, it was impossible to miss the giant electric giraffe, but size isn't everything.

Take Herbie the Mousebot (a robot kit from Solarbotics) - if you judged just by the number of delighted smiles and giggles coming from children's faces, this had to be the winner. The little robot has a light sensor that it uses to follow around a beam of light from a flashlight. It also has whisker and tail sensors that make it turn around when it hits your foot or starts to go under the couch. Brilliant! It's smart, cute, and simple. Made solely of discrete components, it looked fun both to build and to play with:

As cute as Herbie was, how could he possibly compete with one of the world's most loved androids? That's right, I'm talking about R2-D2. The R2-D2 Builder's Club were also a big hit at the Faire, showing off their handcrafted, chrome-domed creations. In some ways, they're even better than George Lucas's original (for one thing, they don't require a tiny man inside). Check out the video to see the droids in action and find out what makes them tick:

And I always have room for the just plain weird. Voxhead is a robot with a neck, head, and one arm. He sits on a table making bizzare sounds (even after you know that he's supposed to be singing Radiohead's "Creep," it still takes a lot of imagination). While it's easy to just slap a speaker on a robot to make it talk, Voxhead sings the hard way, by replicating the human vocal cavity (complete with artificial tongue). Its creator, Mike Brady wants to use Voxhead to probe the ways we learn to communicate - the robot itself learns by listening to its own attempts to mimic sound and trying to improve. Voxhead's the android equivalent of a babbling baby. Take a listen yourself:

Maybe it's due to the rapid pace of technological development, but for some reason, nothing seems to bring a smile to a geek's face quite like antiquated electronics. If you have a soft spot for such relics, Maker Faire was a good place to be. Faire-goers constantly stopped by our booth to marvel at Keith Bayern's transistor clock, the winner of IEEE Spectrum's digital clock contest. Completely devoid of integrated circuits, Bayern's clock uses nearly 200 transistors and took him nearly two years to design and build. The finished product, in addition to keeping time, is a beautiful piece of technological art. (If you're interested in building one of your own, Bayern sells kits at http://www.transistor-clock.com) Keith explains his project below:

Like one of our runner-up clocks in the contest, nixie tubes are also a popular blast from the past. In Eric Schlaepfer's booth, he had a variety of clocks utilizing both nixie and cathode ray tubes. He also showed off his collection of vintage oscillograph machines. Check out the old-school paper capacitors:

Just about every bad thing that has happened over the last century in terms of a technology being introduced to society is now linked to nanotechnology.

The common culprits that nanotechnology is typically linked to are:

Asbestos
Genetically modified crops
Technology stripping us of our privacy

The last item always has me scratching my head see here and here and the latest discussion of the subject by Dr. Paula Hammond of MIT’s Institute for Soldiers Technology did not enlighten me any further.

Hammond discusses how by combining nanotechnology in the shape of smart materials with smart information systems the safety of soldiers in the battlefield can be improved. She specifically cites how at her lab they are working on thin film technology that will be able to detect a poisonous gas and then be able to change the permeability of the uniform the soldier is wearing to make it impossible for the gas to go through the material.

Then, somewhat inexplicably, she raises the specter of this technology getting into the wrong hands leading to questions of how this technology can minutely detect every move we make and by doing so compromise our privacy.

Hold on a minute. First off, all this privacy everyone is clamoring about was long gone before nanotechnology came along. The combination of information technology and basic telecommunication technology, along with a video camera at every street corner in cities like London dismissed any sense of privacy we used to have.

But let’s pretend that we still have some expectation of privacy and nanotechnology is about to threaten it. Say a nanoscale sensing device was placed into every piece of published material (highly unlikely given the cost, but for arguments sake let’s say it will happen). And this sensor was somehow able to detect who you were (another pretty tough one to do, but let’s just say it could) and reported back to some databank on all the material you were reading and for how long. Pretty spectacular…oh yes, and frightening too, of course.

But how is this much different from what is already possible by just basic information technology and buying your reading material with a credit card instead of cash?

If people want to start railing against how we have lost our privacy due to technology, fine, let me join you. But making nanotechnology another culprit because of capabilities that it does not yet possess, and when most guarantees of that privacy have long since vanished due to other technologies, seems a bit like flogging a dead horse, or in this case a phantom horse.

Can a $10 bottle of champagne be better than a $150 bottle of Dom Pérignon?

It’s easy to say why one car is better than another; it’s not so easy with books or movies. That’s one reason we value the recommendations made by Amazon and Netflix. Now what about wine preferences? Is there anything harder to articulate?

Continue reading "Cheap wine, and lilacs in the springtime - where's Google when you need it?" »

I just got back from Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, a two-day event where hackers, modders, makers, and inventors (I could go on) converged to show off their homemade projects. Inside the main expo hall, DIY synthesizers filled the air with sound - all sorts of blips, bleeps, and buzzes. But of all the musical projects, there were two that really caught my eye (and ear).

The Guitar Zeros are just what they sound like: a real band with zero guitars. Instead, they play using modified controllers from the video game Guitar Hero. The game itself is beyond popular (it raked in more than a billion dollars in sales last year) with wannabe rockstars (like me and my roommates) frantically mashing fret-buttons in living rooms and bars around the country. But tapping along to scrolling dots is different than actually creating music in a band.

The Guitar Zeros are not exactly the first to modify a toy guitar- check out Gizmodo's gallery of "circuit bending" videos- but they manage to turn the plastic axes into usable instruments that can create listenable music. Check out the video below for some of their performance and explanation of how the system works.

My other favorite musical-mod was Andrew Turley's MIDI microfiche reader. It's a great example of a simple but unique idea. Turley uses a photodiode to map dark and light areas of a microfiche to high and low notes. He even added some additional controls allow him to select the key and range of the device. Check it out:

Not only are there a lot of startup companies developing and building innovative fuel-efficient vehicles, but top designers and engineers are leaving the big auto companies to manage those efforts. That’s the main message of an article about new green car companies, appearing in the The Wall Street Journal today, May 6.

Continue reading "Green Car Designers Ditch Big Companies for Startups" »

As we ease into an era of Internet telephony, is it getting easier to wiretap a phone? Frankly, it seems like it just couldn’t get any easier. That’s the lesson that comes out of a star-studded, revelation-filled court case in Los Angeles.

It’s the trial of Anthony Pellicano and four other defendants, accused of 79 counts of wiretapping, and it included enough Hollywood names to start a new studio. Among them: Silvester Stallone; the comedians Garry Shandling and Kevin Nealon; superagent Michael Ovitz; TV executive Brad Grey; John McTiernan, director of the Die Hard movies; and Michael Nathanson, one-time head of MGM.

But it’s the sordid technology-related details of the trial that interest David Halbfinger, as he details in an article in today’s New York Times.

Continue reading "Anthony Pellicano - Smooth Operator" »