Technology – Page 41 – artdiamondblog.com

Chinese Prometheus: Executing the Inventor of Airplane

Here is a significant claim from “an elderly Chinese professor” (p. 76) who was talking to Robert Payne in 1943. Payne was “a writer and teacher who befriended Needham in China.” The passage is quoted in an entertaining new book by Simon Winchester.

(p. 77) “. . .; we invented an airplane, and quite rightly executed the inventor; . . . “

Source:
Winchester, Simon. The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2008.

Winchester does not document his source for the quote, but it is presumably one of these two books by Payne, that are listed in Winchester’s bibliography:
Payne, Robert. Chinese Diaries 1941-1946. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1945.
Payne, Robert. Chungking Diary. London: Weybright and Talley, 1945.

For Some Purposes Leapfrogged Technologies Remain Better

“Hachette’s audio department recently held a “funeral” for cassette tapes; an invitation is above.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The article quoted below mentions a feature of new “leapfrog” technologies that has received too little attention. The new product, overall, for most purposes, or for most important purposes, is better than the old product, but it may be that the new product lacks some features that the old product had, that had value. It is a step forward in most respects, but not in all respects.
I salute the observation in the last quoted paragraph below. When I am listening to a book, while walking Willy, some UPS truck often passes me, noisily making a sentence of two inaudible. If I’m listening to a cassette, I can back up a few sentences. If I’m listening to a CD, I have to back up at least a few minutes, and often many minutes (depending on how short the tracks are on the CD).
I remember an early word processor (can’t remember its name, maybe it was Wordmarc), that allowed you to type in the page number of a long document and then go directly to that page. I am currently writing a book using Microsoft Word. And in the vast majority of respects it is better than the word processor of yore. But every time I have to scroll and scroll and scroll, to get to a page, when I already know exactly which page I want, I irrationally curse Bill Gates.

Addendum posted 10/10/08:
Since this post was created on July 30, 2008, I have discovered that Word 2007 has the feature that I missed from Wordmarc, and I also learned that if I had invested more time in Word 2003, I might have discovered that by drilling down to an obscure option menu, it too could have been customized to have had the feature. (In Wordmarc the feature was real obvious.)

(p. C7) There was a funeral the other day in the Midtown offices of Hachette, the book publisher, to mourn the passing of what it called a “dear friend.” Nobody had actually died, except for a piece of technology, the cassette tape.

While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with “Sail,” a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.
The funeral at Hachette — an office party in the audio-book department — mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc. (The CD, too, is in rapid decline, thanks to Internet music stores, but that is a different story.)
. . .
Cassette tapes’ tendency to hiss — and to melt in the summer and snap in the winter — turns off audiophiles. But for audio books, the cassette is an oddly elegant medium: you can eject it from your car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in the same place, an analog feat beyond the ability of the CD.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN. “Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes.” The New York Times (Mon., July 28, 2008): C7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Brain-Controlled Prosthetics Within Reach

“A grid in the monkey’s brain carried signals from 100 neurons for the mechanical arm to grab and carry snacks to the mouth.” Source of caption and photos: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.
The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.
In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill.
The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.

For the full story, see:
BENEDICT CAREY. “Monkeys Think, Moving Artificial Arm as Own.” The New York Times (Thurs., May 29, 2008): A1 & A18.

United States Making More Output with Less Physical Input: An Almost Lighter Economy

(p. 492) The long-standing trend away from value produced by manual labor and natural resources and toward the intangible value-added we associate with the digital econnomy can be expected to continue. Today it takes a lot less physical material to produce a unit of output than it did in generations past. Indeed, the physical amount of materials and fuels either consumed in the production of output or embodied in the output has increased very modestly over the past half century. The output of our economy is not quite literally lighter, but it is close.
Thin fiber-optic cable, for instance, has replaced huge tonnages of copper wire. New architectural, engineering, and materials technologies have enabled the construction of buildings enclosing the same space with far less physical material than was required fifty or one hundred years ago. Mobile phones have not only downsized but also morphed into multipurpose communication devices. The movement over the decades toward production of services that require little physical input has also been a major contributor to the marked rise in the ratio of constant dollars of GDP to tons of input.

Source:
Greenspan, Alan. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World Economic Flexibility. New York: Penguin Press, 2007.
(Note: italics in original.)

Have You Hugged Your Venture Capitalist Today?

“Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, left, and the venture capitalist John Doerr at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article cited below.

(p. C3) CUPERTINO, Calif. — Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, is hoping to expand the iPhone’s appeal by luring software developers to create programs for it.
John Doerr, the venture capitalist, is adding an incentive: his firm is putting up $100 million to invest in the work of those programmers.
At an event Thursday at Apple headquarters, Mr. Jobs announced a low-cost software development kit that outside programmers can use to create programs for the iPhone, much as they now write the vast majority of the programs created for the Macintosh. Until now, iPhones have officially been able to run only the limited assortment of applications that Apple includes. (Some buyers have modified the phones to add unauthorized software.)
“We’re very excited about this,” said Mr. Jobs, who also announced that the company was adding features to make the iPhone more appealing to business users. “We think a lot of people, after understanding where we are going, are going to want to become an iPhone developer.”
Sharing the stage with Mr. Jobs, Mr. Doerr announced that his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, had established a $100 million venture capital fund for iPhone entrepreneurs. Called the iFund, it is the largest fund the company has created for a specific technology.
“The potential for iPhone is huge,” Mr. Doerr said.

For the full story, see:
LAURIE J. FLYNN. “Apple to Encourage iPhone Programmers.” The New York Times (Fri., March 07, 2008): C3.

Nanotechnology Extends the Life of Moore’s Law

“Daniel Edelstein of I.B.M. Research is leading a team’s work in the use of self-assembling nanotechnology.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 4) Until now, as chips became smaller, they also became faster in about the same proportion. It’s still true for transistors, but it’s no longer true for the wires used to connect transistors — and that slows performance gains. Daniel Edelstein, a program manager and fellow at I.B.M. Research, says, “We’re running out of steam.”
Mr. Edelstein is leading a team of researchers from inside and outside I.B.M. in developing a new way to solve the problem: using “self assembling” nanotechnology to make better insulators, raising performance. In this case, self-assembly involves creating so-called airgaps, vacuums a few nanometers wide that keep the billions of tiny copper wires in a chip from touching one another, instead of putting down a layer of insulating material and trying to align it effectively at the nanoscale. It’s more efficient, and it means that I.B.M. won’t need to spend $50 million on photolithographic equipment.
. . . While the technique is not quite done being tested, John E. Kelly III, I.B.M.’s senior vice president for research, says that “there is no question in our minds this is going to work,” and that I.B.M. will move to it by 2009, first for an existing high-end processor or a next-generation chip, then across its fabs.
Mr. Kelly says Mr. Edelstein has a “unique” ability to solve problems and work across the company to commercialize new technologies. In the last decade, he has led two other important breakthroughs, most notably the use of copper for the wires inside chips, replacing aluminum.
Each time, Mr. Edelstein has done it by working with a small group of two or three scientists to explore out-of-the-mainstream approaches to problems. He also goes beyond research, getting to know the manufacturing team to help him understand what it takes to get a novel technique into I.B.M.’s existing manufacturing process.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL FITZGERALD. “PROTOTYPE; Trying to Put New Zip Into Moore’s Law.” The New York Times Company, SundayBusiness section (Sun., February 24, 2008): 4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Racetrack Memory May Become a General Purpose Technology

Source of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

The article quoted below suggests that an important new “disruptive” memory technology may be on the horizon. It sounds as though it would be what economists call a “general purpose technology” that would be useful in generating a large number of innovative applications.

(My guess is that in Christensen’s terminology, this technology would be more sustaining, than disruptive, since the technology seems as though it would be of immediate interest to the mainstream market.)

(p. C1) SAN JOSE, Calif. — The ability to cram more data into less space on a memory chip or a hard drive has been the crucial force propelling consumer electronics companies to make ever smaller devices.

It shrank the mainframe computer to fit on the desktop, shrank it again to fit on our laps and again to fit into our shirt pockets.

. . .

Mr. Parkin thinks he is poised to bring about another breakthrough that could increase the amount of data stored on a chip or a hard drive by a factor of a hundred. If he proves successful in his quest, he will create a “universal” computer memory, one that can potentially replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and flash memory chips, and even make a “disk drive on a chip” possible.

. . .

(p. C8) Mr. Parkin’s new approach, referred to as “racetrack memory,” could outpace both solid-state flash memory chips as well as computer hard disks, making it a technology that could transform not only the storage business but the entire computing industry.

“Finally, after all these years, we’re reaching fundamental physics limits,” he said. “Racetrack says we’re going to break those scaling rules by going into the third dimension.”

His idea is to stand billions of ultrafine wire loops around the edge of a silicon chip — hence the name racetrack — and use electric current to slide infinitesimally small magnets up and down along each of the wires to be read and written as digital ones and zeros.

. . .

Mr. Parkin said he had recently shifted his focus and now thought that his racetracks might be competitive with other storage technologies even if they were laid horizontally on a silicon chip.

I.B.M. executives are cautious about the timing of the commercial introduction of the technology. But ultimately, the technology may have even more dramatic implications than just smaller music players or wristwatch TVs, said Mark Dean, vice president for systems at I.B.M. Research.

“Something along these lines will be very disruptive,” he said. “It will not only change the way we look at storage, but it could change the way we look at processing information. We’re moving into a world that is more data-centric than computing-centric.”

This is just a hint, but it suggests that I.B.M. may think that racetrack memory could blur the line between storage and computing, providing a key to a new way to search for data, as well as store and retrieve data.

And if it is, Mr. Parkin’s experimental physics lab will have transformed the computing world yet again.

For the full story, see:

JOHN MARKOFF. “Redefining the Architecture of Memory.” The New York Times (Tues., September 11, 2007): C1 & C8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Of the two photos at the bottom of the entry, the first is of Stuart S. P. Parkin’s lab at I.B.M, and the second is of Parkin in the lab. Source of photos: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“The No. 1 Need that Poor People Have is a Way to Make More Cash”

Moving water is easier with the 20-gallon rolling drum. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) . . . , the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, . . . , is honoring inventors dedicated to “the other 90 percent,” particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day.

Their creations, on display in the museum garden until Sept. 23, have a sort of forehead-thumping “Why didn’t someone think of that before?” quality.

. . .

Interestingly, most of the designers who spoke at the opening of the exhibition spurned the idea of charity.

“The No. 1 need that poor people have is a way to make more cash,” said Martin Fisher, an engineer who founded KickStart, an organization that says it has helped 230,000 people escape poverty. It sells human-powered pumps costing $35 to $95.

Pumping water can help a farmer grow grain in the dry season, when it fetches triple the normal price. Dr. Fisher described customers who had skipped meals for weeks to buy a pump and then earned $1,000 the next year selling vegetables.

For the full story, see:

DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. "Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor." The New York Times (Tues., May 29, 2007): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

The photo on the left shows a woman safely drinking bacteria-laden water through a filter. The photo on the right shows a "pot-in-pot cooler" that evaporates water from wet sand between the pots, in order to cool what is in the inner pot. Source of photos: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Big is Not Always Better

It is an enduring puzzle why the West has been so much more succesful than China in achieving economic growth over the past several centuries. The puzzle arises because there is considerable evidence of early Chinese acheivements in technology.

One example would be the exploratory voyages of Zheng He. The Chinese ships were much, much larger than those of Christopher Columbus. But as Clayton Christensen has shown in a more modern context, size does not always matter as much as nimbleness and motivation.

(And another part of the story involves culture and institutions.)

The most complete account of Christensen’s thinking, so far, is his book with Raynor:

Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

(Note: I am grateful to Prof. Yu-sheng Lin for first informing me of the large difference in size between the ships. I am also grateful to Prof. Salim Rashid, and Liberty Fund’s Mr. Leonidas Zelmanovitz, for my having the opportunity to encounter Prof. Lin.)

The Right Stuff: “Mr. Armstrong Calmly Went About Improvising a Solution”

“John Young, from the Apollo 16 crew, works on the lunar surface in April, 1972.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. B14) When the Apollo 11 astronauts toured the world after their July 1969 moon landing, recalls Mike Collins, the pilot of the mission’s command module, he heard the phrase “We did it” everywhere they went. The “we,” he remembers in David Sington’s documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon,” didn’t refer to Americans, or to any nationality, but to the human race. Millions around the world who had watched on television as men walked on the moon for the first time felt that they had participated in a great adventure that ennobled the species.

. . .

Threaded through the film are fragments of taped interviews with eight other Apollo astronauts: Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, Charlie Duke, Jim Lovell, Edgar Mitchell, Harrison Schmitt, Dave Scott and John Young. These snippets appear almost randomly, in no particular order, and it is impossible to keep track of who’s who. Cumulatively, however, they create a group portrait of explorers with “the right stuff”: men with a much higher resistance to fear than average.

Mr. Collins remembers the intense physical sensations that he experienced during the Apollo 11 mission but that he never associated with panic. What could have been more terrifying than the moment when the module’s computer was found to be overloaded, just as Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin were about to touch down? But Mr. Armstrong calmly went about improvising a solution.

If there was a lack of fear, there were a thousand little worries. Through every phase Mr. Collins fretted about the details that had to mesh for the mission to be successful. But he never feared for his life. That, in a nutshell, is the right stuff.

For the full review, see:

STEPHEN HOLDEN. “MOVIE REVIEW | ‘IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON’; When the Moon Was a Matter of Pride.” The New York Times (Fri., September 7, 2007): B14.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

The earth rising over the moon. Source of photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited above.