Lorenzo’s Blog

By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

For more than 40 years the silicon industry has delivered ever faster, cheaper chips.

The advances have underpinned everything from the rise of mobile phones to digital photography and portable music players.

Chip-makers have been able to deliver many of these advances by shrinking the components on a chip.

By making these building blocks, such as transistors, smaller they have become faster and firms have been able to pack more of them into the same area.

But according to many industry insiders this miniaturisation cannot continue forever.

MOORE’S LAW

• The number of transistors it is possible to squeeze in to a chip for a fixed cost doubles every two years
• First outlined by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel
• Published in Electronics Magazine on 19 April, 1965

“The consensus in the industry is that we can do that shrink for about another ten years and then after that we have to figure out new ways to bring higher capability to our chips,” said Professor Stanley Williams of Hewlett Packard.

Even Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel and the man that gave his name to the law that dictates the industry’s progression, admits that it can only go on for a few more years.

“Moore’s Law should continue for at least another decade,” he recently told the BBC News website. “That’s about as far as I can see.”

Tiny tubes

As a result, researchers around the world are engaged in efforts to allow the industry to continue delivering the advances that computer users have come to expect.

Key areas include advanced fabrication techniques, building new components and finding new materials to augment silicon.

Already new materials are creeping into modern chips.

As components have shrunk critical elements of the transistors, known as gate dielectrics, do not perform as well allowing currents passing through the transistors to leak, reducing the effectiveness of the chip.

To overcome this, companies have replaced the gate dielectrics, previously made from silicon dioxide, with an oxide based on the metal hafnium.

The material’s development and integration into working components has been described by Dr Moore as “the biggest change in transistor technology” since the late 1960s.

But IBM researchers are working on materials that they believe offer even bigger advances.

“Carbon nanotubes are a step beyond [hafnium],” explained Dr Phaedon Avouris of the company.

‘Superior’ design

CARBON NANOTUBES

• Sheets of carbon atoms folded into a cylinder
• Unusual strength and electrical properties
• Promise to revolutionise electronics, computers, chemistry and materials science

Carbon nanotubes are tiny straw-like molecules less than 2 nanometres (billionths of a metre) in diameter, 50,000 times thinner than a strand of a human hair.

“They are a more drastic change but still preserve the basic architecture of field effect transistors.”

These transistors are the basic building blocks of most silicon chips.

Dr Avouris believes they can be used to replace a critical element of the chip, known as the channel.

Today this is commonly made of silicon and is the area of the transistor through which electrons flow.

Chip makers are constantly battling to make the channel length in transistors smaller and smaller, to increase the performance of the devices.

Carbon nanotube’s small size and “superior” electrical properties should be able to deliver this, said Dr Avouris.

Crucially, he also believes the molecules can be integrated with traditional silicon manufacturing processes, meaning the technology would more likely be accepted by an industry that has spent billions perfecting manufacturing techniques.

The team have already shown off working transistors and are currently working on optimising their production and integration into working devices.

Tiny improvement

Professor Williams, at Hewlett Packard is also working on technology that could be incorporated into the future generations of chips.

As well as exploring optical computing – using particles of light instead of electrons to significantly increase the speed of today’s computers -he is building new electronic components for chips called memristors.

He says it would be the “fourth” basic element to build circuits with, after capacitors, resistors and inductors.

“Now we have this type of device we have a broader palette with which to paint our circuits,” said Professor Williams.

Professor Williams and his team have shown that by putting two of these devices together – a configuration called a crossbar latch – it could do the job of a transistor.

“A cross bar latch has the type of functionality you want from a transistor but it’s working with very different physics,” he explained.

Crucially, these devices can also be made much smaller than a transistor.

“And as they get smaller they get better,” he said.

Professor Williams and his team are currently making prototype hybrid circuits – built of memristors and transistors – in a fabrication plant in North America.

“We want to keep the functional equivalent of Moore’s Law going for many decades into the future,” said Professor Williams.

---

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Silicon electronics are a staple of the computing industry, but researchers are now exploring other techniques to deliver powerful computers.

A quantum computer is a theoretical device that would make use of the properties of quantum mechanics, the realm of physics that deals with energy and matter at atomic scales.

In a quantum computer data is not processed by electrons passing through transistors, as is the case in today’s computers, but by caged atoms known as quantum bits or Qubits.

“It is a new paradigm for computation,” said Professor Artur Ekert of the University of Oxford. “It’s doing computation differently.”

A bit is a simple unit of information that is represented by a “1″ or a “0″ in a conventional electronic computer.

A qubit can also represent a “1″ or a “0″ but crucially can be both at the same time – known as a superposition.

This allows a quantum computer to work through many problems and arrive at their solutions simultaneously.

“It is like massively parallel processing but in one piece of hardware,” said Professor Ekert.

‘Complex systems’

This has significant advantages, particularly for solving problems with a large amount of data or variables.

“With quantum computing you are able to attack some problems on the time scales of seconds, which might take an almost infinite amount of time with classical computers,” Professor David Awschalom of the University of California, Santa Barbara told the BBC News website recently.

In February 2007, the Canadian company D-Wave systems claimed to have demonstrated a working quantum computer.

At the time, Herb Martin, chief executive officer of the company said that the display represented a “substantial step forward in solving commercial and scientific problems which, until now, were considered intractable.”

But many in the quantum computing world have remained sceptical, primarily because the company released very little information about the machine.

The display also failed to impress.

“It was not quite what we understand as quantum computing,” said Professor Ekert.”The demonstrations they showed could have been solved by conventional computers.”

However, Professor Ekert believes that quantum computing will eventually come of age.

Then, he said, they will not be used in run-of-the-mill desktop applications but specialist uses such as searching vast databases, creating uncrackable ciphers or simulating the atomic structures of substances.

“The really killer application will probably be in designing new materials or complex systems,” he said.

---

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

By Andrew Webb
Technology reporter, BBC News

Classic comic hero Dan Dare fired the imagination of young Britons in the 1950s and heralded the birth of hi-tech Britain, an exhibition at the London Science Museum reveals.

 

A British-built nuclear bomb and a prototype of the BT Tower are on display as part of the show.

The museum says the Eagle comic’s space hero not only reflected but influenced the UK’s wealth of inventions during the 1950s and 60s.

Portable televisions and radio alarm clocks are among the collection, capturing the upbeat spirit of Eagle.

 

“Dan was packed full of… very credible technology that was in there in very minute detail”, Peter Hampson, the son of Dan Dare’s creator, Frank Hampson, told BBC News.

He said it enabled children to be inspired by science.

Nuclear arsenal

But nuclear weaponry highlights the more sinister and less well known aspect of British research in the 1950s.

Science Museum curator Ben Russell said the government emphasised the benefits of nuclear power, but in reality built reactors to ensure the country could create its own atomic bombs.

In later years the technology’s domestic uses became more prominent.

He said: “What Dan Dare was doing depended on the innovation and industry that was happening in Britain at the time. There was enormous drive to modernise and maximise output.

“The whole point of Dan Dare was that is was supposed to be very positive about technology. Unfortunately, in real life things were not quite as Frank Hampson might have hoped.”<p

---

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

New survey results show that only 29.5 percent in a sample of 1,015 adult Americans consider nanotech morally acceptable. Europe ranked significantly higher. The hypothesized reason? Religious beliefs.

The results of the survey were presented by Dietram Scheufele, professors of life sciences and communication, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on February 15th, 2008. Scheufele conducted the survey in liaison with his colleague Elizabeth Corley of Arizona State University (ASU).

According to Scheufele the participants of the survey were well informed about the benefits and nature of nanotechnology. This would include the potential to prolong our lives, cure diseases (nanotech is already improving our medicine), the immense impact on technology et cetera. Yet, oppose it they did.

Only 29.5% of 1,015 adult Americans considered nanotech morally acceptable

In a sample of 1,015 adult Americans, only 29.5 percent of respondents agreed that nanotechnology was morally acceptable.

In European surveys that posed identical questions about nanotechnology to people in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, significantly higher percentages of people accepted the moral validity of the technology. In the United Kingdom, 54.1 percent found nanotechnology to be morally acceptable. In Germany, 62.7 percent had no moral qualms about nanotechnology, and in France 72.1 percent of survey respondents saw no problems with the technology. [via ScienceDaily with ScienceDaily]

I imagine the percentage of people who find it acceptable would be even higher in Iceland, given the results of a 2005 survey of acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (Icelanders rank number one, see National Geographic’s chart).

Why the difference between Europeans and Americans?

The answer, Scheufele believes, is religion: “The United States is a country where religion plays an important role in peoples’ lives. The importance of religion in these different countries that shows up in data set after data set parallels exactly the differences we’re seeing in terms of moral views. European countries have a much more secular perspective.”

The catch for Americans with strong religious convictions, Scheufele believes, is that nanotechnology, biotechnology and stem cell research are lumped together as means to enhance human qualities. In short, researchers are viewed as “playing God” when they create materials that do not occur in nature, especially where nanotechnology and biotechnology intertwine, says Scheufele.

There are two things we must note. The first is that this is Sceufele’s educated guess. The second is that convergence of nano- and biotechnology can in some cases involve animal testing — which might play a part in people’s answers.

But given that the participants of the study were aware of how nanotechnology could catapult mankind’s well-being, and I dare say all the animal kingdom, Sceufele’s assumption sounds reasonable. Unfortunately.

Links & References

• Discovered via the Black Sun Journal’s “Religious Delusion Hampers Nanotechnology”

I recently came across news of a device that geeked me out. Its a neckband that can detect and analyze neural firings when we think about saying something, and translate them into audible words via speech synthesizer. Beyond the obvious use of bettering the lives of people who’ve lost their ability to speak, it could enable us to make phonecalls without having to actually talk (as is demonstrated in a video in this article). The creators of the device mention that they’ll have a product by the end of the year for people with ALS (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Disease).

In my aforementioned geek-out craze I told my girlfriend about the device, called the Audeo, who immediately identified the problem of the device saying a thought you don’t actually want the other person to hear. You’re on the phone with your boss when you suddenly hear the device blurt out “Are you never going to shut up about those damn TPS Reports!?“.

Good point. But the creators say the device can differentiate between things that you’re thinking, and things that you actually want to say. You have to think about using your voice for the device to pick up on it.

I’m sure that this ability is a beneficial byproduct of making the device a “collar” around your neck monitoring the nerves that control muscles of the larynx.

Our Head’s Too Messy, Go for the Neck

The device is not a brain interface worn on the head, so it stands to reason that (a) they are monitoring neural activity to the muscles that control speech (larynx/voicebox), and (b) by doing so it’s easier to detect things that you actually want to say, as opposed to what you’re casually thinking.

 

 

The larynx is innervated by branches of the vagus nerve on each side. Sensory innervation to the glottis and supraglottis is by the internal branch of the superior laryngeal nerve. The external branch of the superior laryngeal nerve innervates the cricothyroid muscle. Motor innervation to all other muscles of the larynx and sensory innervation to the subglottis is by the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

However, I’m sure we’ve all been in situations where we are on the verge of saying something, perhaps in an emotionally colored debate, but think twice and eventually say something less aggressive. In such a situation I’m sure the device could accidentally be triggered. So the user must make sure to be perfectly balanced, one with himself and the universe before using it for important conversations. At least for now.

Writing this I get the idea that this problem could be overcome with AI; natural language processing could detect potentially insulting sentences or harsh language. The user could then be prompted to verify whether he meant to say a particular sentence (whether this would introduce too much lag is another question).

 

 

Voiceless Phonecalls

The device, currently able to recognize 150 words, is under development by Ambient Corporation, co-founded by Micahel Callahan who demonstrates the device in the following video at the TI Developer Conference’08 by placing a “voiceless phonecall”.

For the past few decades, humans have increasingly been extending their intellectual capacity with the use of machines. An example is using mobile devices to retrieve knowledge on the fly —

making each device-wielding human more intellectually capable than one 20 years ago. But this a matter of perspective, and many only see future invasive devices as “extensions of intelligence” (e.g. neural-interfaced memory storage device) and everything else as tools.

Modern technology is starting to blur this line between intellectual extensions and tools. The “Smartest Person in the Room” project is one of these: Using the Audeo, a person thinks of a question —

the question is consequently sent to a web knowledge-application, the answer found and tunneled back out through the speakers. Question never audibly asked, yet answered. Quite brilliant.

 

 

 

 

Looking forward to monitoring the developments of this project, feeding my interest in machine interfaces right along Emotiv’s Epoc and Neurosky’s non-invasive neural interfaces.

Links & References

• New Scientist on the Audeo

Sleep Waking is an art project that uses EEG and EKG to record brainwaves and heart activity of a sleeping person and feeds them into a humanoid robot (a Kondo KHR-2HV). The robot turns the data into an interpretive dance. In short, the robot dances your dreams. In addition, rapid eye movement is used to control the head of the robot, so if the sleeper’s eye looks left – the robots head looks left.

Live Science reports on the project:

The use of the EEG data is a bit more complex [than the use of rapid eye movements]. Running it through a machine learning algorithm, we identified several patterns from a sample of the data set (both REM and non-REM events). We then associated preprogrammed robot behaviors to these patterns. Using the patterns like filters, we process the entire data set, letting the robot act out each behavior as each pattern surfaces in the signal. Periods of high activity (REM) where [sic] associated with dynamic behaviors (flying, scared, etc.) and low activity with more subtle ones (gesturing, looking around, etc.). The “behaviors” the robot demonstrates are some of the actions I might do (along with everyone else) in a dream.” [LiveScience]

And here’s a video of it, dancing away [Alt].
The project is the brainchild of Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns, who used the equipment of The Albany Regional Sleep Disorder Center in New York to record the data.

A robot dancing your dreams. Can’t help but feel inspired by that quip.

It seems that the telcos and the cable companies just can’t stop making questionable claims against each other. It’s been going on for years, but it seems that the telcos are finally going to court over it. Last month, we mentioned that Verizon was suing Time Warner Cable over what it claimed was false advertising, but then had to embarrassingly admit that its own ads were misleading as well. Now, AT&T is suing Comcast for misleading advertising thanks to a print ad campaign that suggests AT&T DSL customers will have to put a huge cabinet on the side of their homes. As AT&T points out, it only needs to install such cabinets for one out of approximately 750 homes — and it never installs them on private property without the permission of the homeowner. To be honest, it hardly seems like that big of a deal either. If it took a big box on the side of my house to get great internet speeds, I’d be fine with it.

But the thing that seems most strange, is this constant focus on attacking each other with exaggerated and misleading claims. That’s a sign of a stagnating industry. A growing industry focuses on promoting what’s new and what great features it has. Or, if it does mention the competition at all, it’s to show why its service is better — not why the other’s is worse. The fact that the two sides are attacking each other in this manner, while broadband providers in other countries are spending their money on actual improvements is rather disappointing. If these broadband providers put half as much effort into just offering better service, perhaps it wouldn’t have to resort to name calling and lawsuits against each other.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Spam – the scourge of every e-mail inbox – celebrates its 30th anniversary this weekend.

The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC – a now-defunct computer-maker.

The message was sent via Arpanet – the internet’s forerunner – and won its sender much criticism from recipients.

Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day.

Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more than $239m (£121m).

Statistics suggest that more than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day.

The majority of these messages are being sent via hijacked home computers that have been compromised by a computer virus.

Quick complaint

The sender of the first junk e-mail message was Gary Thuerk and it was sent to advertise new additions to DEC’s family of System-20 minicomputers.

It invited the recipients, all of whom were on Arpanet and lived on the west coast of the US, to go to one of two presentations showing off the capabilities of the System-20.

Reaction to the message was swift, with complaints reportedly coming from the US Defense Communications Agency, which oversaw Arpanet, and took Mr Thuerk’s boss to task about it.

Despite Mr Thuerk’s pioneering spam it took many years for unsolicited commercial e-mail to become a nuisance.

It took until 1993 before it won the name of spam – a name bestowed on it by Joel Furr – an administrator on the Usenet chat system.

Mr Furr reputedly got his inspiration for the name from a Monty Python sketch set in a restaurant whose menu heavily featured the processed meat.

The sketch ended with everyone in the restaurant, encouraged by a troupe of chanting Vikings, shouting: “Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.”

April 1994 saw another pioneering moment in the history of spam when immigration lawyers Canter and Siegel sent a commercial spam message to more than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups.

The Canter and Siegel e-mail is widely seen as the moment when the commercialisation of the net began and opened the floodgates that led to the deluge of spam seen today.

Since those days spam has grown to be a nuisance and is now used by many hi-tech crime gangs as the vehicle for a variety of scams and cons.

“Spam is a burden on all of us,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “What’s worse is that a lot of spam is deliberately malicious today, aiming to steal your bank account information or install malware.”<P

---

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

“Mom, where are you calling from Your voice is trembling, are you sure everything is alright”

These were the first words Carmen Hernandez heard after getting through to her son on the phone following the massive earthquake that struck Peru in August 2007.

Mrs Hernandez lived in Pisco, where the quake hit hardest.

“Please keep talking, it’s so good to hear your voice,” she replied.

The huge quake left at least 500 people dead and thousands homeless in the Ica region, south of the capital Lima.

It instantly wiped out electricity, fresh water and communication infrastructures.

But Mrs Hernandez was able to speak to her son in Spain thanks to the work of charity Telecoms Sans Frontieres.

Tough call

The group are currently on standby to deploy to Burma; they are waiting for authorisation to enter the country.

“The UN-sponsored organisation specialises in setting up communication links at times of emergency, for use by charities and those affected.

“In natural disasters in particular, the communications are disrupted,” explained Oisin Walton of TSF, during a training exercise in Pau, southwest France.

“The GSM antennas are down, the landlines are down.”

TSF was started to address this need and to take the burden of setting up temporary communications infrastructures away from other charities with more pressing concerns.

But the organisation, which is 10 years old this year, was started by two charity workers because of a much simpler need.

“We saw that people would come to us and they would pull a little piece of paper from their shoe with a telephone number on it,” explained co-founder Monique Lanne-Petit.

“[They would] ask us, ‘would you please call this person who is my friend, or my relative and tell them that I am here and tell them that I am safe’”

The first phone call they offered anyone was to an Albanian refugee caught up during the conflict in Kosovo in 1998.

“He was in tears and smiling at the same time,” said Miss Lanne-Petit. “It clearly made a tremendous impact on his life.”

Since then, TSF has deployed on countless missions all over the world, offering calls to thousands of people.

The group worked in Sri Lanka and Indonesia following the tsunami in 2004; in Pakistan following the earthquake in 2005 and in Peru in 2007.

Recent funding of $2m from the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Group Foundation means that the charity – which still only has 15 permanent staff – can be “in country” for 200 days every year.

No number

During those operations the charity offers two basic services: a communications infrastructure for charities and what it calls “humanitarian calling operations”.

TSF KITLIST

• BGan satellite link (data and voice: 496kbps). Primary connection
• Gan M4 satellite link (data and voice: 64kbps). Used as backup
• Large VSAT satellite dish for long term deployments
• At least two satellite phones including a mobile device
• Mobile phones and local sim cards if GSM infrastructure intact
• Routers and access points for communication centre
• Wireless relays to extend coverage
• PCs, printer and scanner
• GPS
• Power packs including car batteries and solar panels

“We go around either the camps or the affected villages where we offer to each affected family in the area a three-minute call anywhere in the world,” explained Mr Walton.

This was the service that Mrs Hernandez had used in Peru. During that operation, she was one of more than 600 families who made a call to a loved one.

“Generally people call their family either in the country or abroad,” explained Jean-Francois Cazenove, the other co-founder of TSF.

“Many people call abroad because a lot of money comes from the diasporas in these countries.”

Others just want to tell relatives they are alive or update them on the situation. But, according to Mr Cazenove, in certain disasters the calls also have another more crucial function.

“When people are in refugee camps, they are just a number, but when they call their family, their father, their mother, they are a person again,” he said.

Precious resource

Clearly, the phone calls are important to people. But at times of disaster, the distribution of food, medical supplies and shelter are a priority.

And TSF play a part with this as well.

“With so many actors in the field – local, international NGOs, UN agencies, local authorities – coordination is very important,” said Mr Walton.

The charity sets up emergency telecommunications centres to allow groups to talk effectively.

These contain all the telecoms and IT equipment found in a normal office – including printers, scanners, laptops and phones – housed in a tent or temporary shelter.

Connections are via satellite links which offer anything between 64 kilobytes and half a megabyte of bandwidth. This can cost up to $10,000 per day.

So to reduce the amount of content downloaded, TSF has developed its own kit, including a router which automatically configures laptops that connect to the network.

The router automatically stops bandwidth heavy applications such as Skype and peer-to-peer programs.

In addition, it blocks web content which sucks up precious bandwidth.

“When users download a web page it blocks the photographs,” explained Mr Walton.

“A photograph maybe just 30kb but if there are 10 photographs that’s 300kb.”

Red alert

Key to all of TSF’s activities is speed.

During the recent training session, volunteers constructed a fully functioning communications centre and were browsing the web within one hour.

The setup included two satellite connections and even wireless relays to increase the coverage of the connection.

Most of the kit – weighing 200kg – had been carried in three suitcases that are packed and ready to go at all times.

“We generally deploy within three hours,” explained Mr Cazenove. “We have a commitment with the UN to deploy within 48 hours but we are generally in the field within 24.”

Alerts generally come via text message from a web service called the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDacs).

During the training, the team received a red alert warning them of a possible tsunami triggered by an earthquake in the Pacific.

Within minutes, they were on the phone to their base in Thailand, to check that they were ready to go. TSF also has a base in Nicaragua.

The alert was eventually downgraded – it had occurred in a largely unpopulated area – but the team had been ready to drop everything and board a flight.

“It is very important for us to deploy rapidly because rapid response is the key to saving lives,” said Mr Cazenove.

---

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

The liberalisation of the UK postal service has produced “no significant benefits” for both households and small businesses, a report has said.

That is the initial finding of an independent review of the UK postal sector commissioned by the government.

It warned there was now a threat to the Royal Mail’s financial stability.

The Royal Mail’s 350-year monopoly ended at the start of 2006, when other licensed operators were given the right to collect and deliver mail.

‘Untenable’

The independent panel warned that the “substantial threat” to the Royal Mail’s financial security threatened the universal service – the collection and delivery to all UK addresses.

As a result, the independent panel – which will produce its full report in the summer – said the continuing “status quo is not tenable”.

“The policies needed to establish a sustainable future will be the focus of our report later this year,” they said.

While the initial report said homes and small firms had not gained from the increased competition, it said large companies had “seen clear benefits from liberalisation – choice, lower prices and more assurance about the quality of the mail service”.

It says these large firms have benefited from the big growth in competition in the bulk mail sector – postal firms that collect, sort and transport bulk mail before handing it over to the Royal Mail for the final delivery.

Yet at the same time, the report found that the Royal Mail still had “virtually no competition” in the delivery of addressed letters over the “final mile” to letterboxes.<P

---

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation