LISTEN To This Issue.

Another Day That Will Live In Infamy.

Quote of the Week.

Haunting Melodies.

Taming The Tower of Babel!

Pill-Popping CDs?

About "The Harrow Technology Report"

LISTEN To This Issue.

Do you prefer to let your ears do the work of keeping you in-touch with, and thinking about where technology is taking us?  If so, "The Harrow Technology Report" is also available in an audio-on-demand, Web-based, MP3 version. 

If you have an MP3 player on your system (and most do, such as Window's Media Player, RealPlayer, etc.), clicking on the link below will either stream the file to you, or, depending on how your system is configured, it might download the file before playing it.  Alternatively, if you specifically want to download the file, simply right-click on the link, and choose "Save Target As..."

So, if you wish, click on the following link to listen to this issue!  http://www.TheHarrowGroup.com/articles/20010924/20010924.mp3 .

 

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Another Day That Will Live In Infamy.

. .  . .

This is not the place to dwell on the horrific events that have recently taken place, but I do feel the need to acknowledge that sad day, which has so changed our world; I'll do this by suggesting that you read a poignant article by Erick Schonfeld in the Sept. 14 issue of Business 2.0 - http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,17123,FF.html . 

And, by offering you the following pictures, and their tag line (which will apply to far more than the images), from the Sept. 15 R&D Newsflash by Ary Stuifbergen of Stavance, in the Netherlands (www.stavance.com).

It will never be the same.

 

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Quote of the Week.

 

"One-third of Americans would give up TV if forced to choose between at-home Internet access and television... 

Half of younger Americans (age 12 to 24) say they would give up their TVs in order to keep their home Internet access."

Arbitron/Edison media Research
"Internet VI - Streaming at a Crossroads"
http://www.arbitron.com/downloads/internetvi.pdf

TV's worst nightmare? 

On the other hand, when the events of Sept. 11 took place, the Pew Internet & American Life Project, as described in the Sept. 17 Edupage, found that,

"...more than four-fifths of Americans turned to television for news, while 11 percent turned to radio; only 3 percent used the Internet as their primary news source. 

On Tuesday and Wednesday, about 51 percent of people with Internet access logged on, less than the average 55 to 58 percent. Some 25 percent of Internet users multitasked on Tuesday—they used the television or radio while surfing the Net or sending e-mail."

When the world turned unfamiliar, it seems that the familiar faces on TV, guiding us through this uncharted landscape, were where people turned -- a good reminder that there's more to "information" than the unfettered raw data that the Internet provides so well.

 

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Haunting Melodies.

 

If you have an Internet connection and software to play MP3 files (most systems do), then click on this link to listen to a minute of the music of life:  http://www.molecularmusic.com/mp3/clover.mp3  .

Brought to our attention by reader Dana Hoggatt, this haunting melody was brought to life by Dr. Linda Long (http://www.molecularmusic.com/), and is a fascinating demonstration of new ways to grasp very complex data.  You see, this brief excerpt is the musical expression of the DNA and amino acids in Tropinone reductase, a protein isolated from the clover plant!

Dr. Long, who is both a Research Fellow in Complementary Medicine at Exeter University and a practicing musician and composer (and Ross King and Colin Angus before her), have come up with a way to map the intricate whorls and swirls of these "patterns of life" into a medium that is rich enough and symbolic enough, to allow people to intuitively grasp and differentiate between the complex instructions that define how living things are put together.  It works like this, according to the Sept. 13 New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/13/technology/circuits/13GENE.html):

"Protein Music assigns the musical notes C, A, G, and E to the four base nucleotides of DNA sequences—cytosine, adenine, guanine, and thymine; the treble line on a musical staff is formed from these pairings, while the bass line is derived from matching musical notes to the 20 amino acids."

"The 20 amino acids have different physical properties — some are oily, some are small or large, some have a positive charge — so we coded these properties as notes to represent them in a musical way," said Ross King.

Is this important, or just another "neat" way to play with computers?  I suggest that it's very important indeed -- reaching far beyond "just" helping us to grasp DNA sequences.  Because as we continue to develop enormously complex data sets in many fields, our ability to understand, and to make sense of this overpopulation of data, demands innovative new ways of looking at (or listening to, or later "feeling") them. 

For example, if you play several of the sample music clips, you can easily tell the difference between them.  But if I showed you pages of DNA base-pairs, or the 3D models of the resulting proteins, would it be so simple?  Would you be able to come back a day or a week later and quickly grasp which set of DNA maps applied to which protein?  Yet you'd probably remember the appropriate tunes with little effort!

Many years ago, I was trying to demonstrate to the senior management of a computer service organization, where they would, and would not, have tools in place to address the service needs they anticipated over the next ten years.  On one hand, there were 30-some categories of service functionality they wanted to offer.  On another hand, there were various service tools they currently had in their arsenal, and others in-development, each of which addressed some elements of the different service needs.  And of course, the development time was different for each tool.  People found it very difficult to look at a table of this information and grasp the gestalt of just what service capabilities could be met, when...

So I took all of this data and used the first commodity spreadsheet that could generate multi-row 3D column graphs (I believe it was called Wingz), making it very easy to grasp just which capabilities would be available at any give year.  Then, for good measure, I animated the graph, making it abundantly clear how the service capabilities would grow each year under the current development plan.  Then, by doing "what if" changes to see what would happen if individual schedules were changed, and overlaying the animations, it was obvious how the changes would affect the company's future service capabilities!

By using this then-new tool, I was able to help people intuitively visualize previously incomprehensible data.  And now Dr. Long and the other pioneers in this new "visualization" technique have pulled a similar rabbit of the hat for even more complex sets of data. 

Which is a good thing, because we're going to need increasingly innovative techniques to enable us to grasp the ever-more complex world around us!  This is also a wonderful example of what happens when you marry previously disparate areas of knowledge. 

I would never have come up with Dr. Long's solution, because I have no background in music.  But her "unusual" combination of backgrounds enabled her to succeed with a very "out of the box" solution that works quite well. 

I suggest that this is a model for how we can best move forward.  Engineers, computer scientists, doctors, and all of the other extremely important specialties, may do wonderful things within their own fields.  But I believe that it is people who have knowledge ACROSS previously stand-alone fields, who will be in the best position to "break the rules" in new and helpful ways.  In fact, this might be something that "traditional" stovepiped educational programs might want to think about...

As Dr. Long demonstrates, such "cross-border" techniques can be music to our ears...

 

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Your Feedback is Important!

 

I'd like to understand your interest in The Harrow Technology Report, how you make use of it, and the value you feel it provides to you, your career, and to your company.

Please send your comments to me at  Jeff@TheHarrowGroup.com  .

I look forward to hearing from you!

Jeff Harrow

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Taming The Tower of Babel!

 

My trip to Europe last month was an easy one, language-wise -- I was in Ireland to deliver a seminar on computing and technology trends, and to do some fine vacationing.  In Ireland, with the exception of some areas in Western Ireland where the road signs are completely in Gaelic, English is the language of choice. 

Of course, when I travel to other countries, things are often rather different -- my high school language skills fall far short of enabling me to effectively communicate.  Needless to say, conversing with the wonderful people in these places, if they don't know English, presents a serious obstacle to this uni-lingual American.  (My problem -- not theirs'.)  But this is one area where technology seems likely to come to my rescue!

A couple of years ago I commented on a cobbled-together demonstration at the Boston Marathon.  The folks at Dragon Systems had a large but portable box that allowed English and French people to talk to each another -- each speaking in their own language!  In effect, it worked like this:

Jill might speak a sentence in English.  The box would listen, and do a "speech to text" conversion into English text using standard "dictation software."  Next, the box would use commercially available text translation software (such as Babel Fish, as used by AltaVista - http://world.altavista.com/) to convert the English text into French text.  Finally, French "text to speech" software would speak the French translation of Jill's words.  The process would then work in the other direction to allow Jill to understand her companion's spoken French.

Very cool, considering that this was done, essentially, by combining off-the-shelf hardware and software (a very powerful way of prototyping new "products," and identifying what areas need to be optimized!)  Alas, Dragon Systems (http://www.dragonsys.com/) was purchased by troubled Lernout & Hauspie, and I haven't heard any more about their work in this area.  But it now seems, according to the Sept. 4 PC Magazine brought to our attention by reader Gerard Wenham, that IBM's Lee Green is pursuing a similar direction.  He's using the power of today's PDAs to perform similar spoken translation services between English and Italian:

"You say: 'Good morning.' It says: 'Buon giorno.' You ask: 'May I have the bill?' It asks: 'Potrei avere il conto?'"

Not bad!  Of course, if you've used translation software to read something written in another language, you know that the results can be, well, "interesting" -- there's still a long way to go to match the insight of a human translator.  But even with these limitations, a speech-driven pocket translator such as envisioned by Mr. Green would be far better than the current "nothing at all!" And it will surely get better, as Moore's Law packs ever-more processing power and storage into our pockets. 

 

But What About "Signs?"

That "translating PDA" would work very well for interacting with people -- but it won't be too useful in helping us to "get around."  Most of us take for granted that we can understand the myriad signs that pepper the landscape, offering directions, warnings, and even advertisements of the great restaurant five miles ahead.  But in a foreign country, we become illiterate -- we can't read the signs! 

In my case, my minimal Spanish would probably allow me to "speak" a Spanish sign well enough for the translator to give the sounds meaning.  But suppose I was in Russia, or in Israel, or in Japan -- just a few of the countries where I have no training to even sound out written words?

An answer, though, may be in the offing from another part of IBM: their Product Marketing Headquarters in Somers, NY.

If I were wearing these special sunglasses, all might be revealed!  Let's say I'm looking at a Japanese sign that I don't understand.  A whispered command will cause the tiny camera next to the lens to capture the sign's image, and then send it to a computer (currently carried in a backpack, but we know how that will shrink) for processing.  This will translate the Japanese words into English, and the glasses will then whisper the translation into my ear!  Very impressive indeed. 

But this could get even more interesting -- some years from now, I can easily imagine that the computer will be small enough to fit completely within the sunglasses, and fast enough to instantly translate any bit of text that crosses my visual field, in real time.  And the glasses will augment my reality -- instead of whispering the translated text, they would insert the words in my language, right over the "foreign" text!  In effect, wherever I looked, I'd be able to read the signs as if I were at home!  "Foreign" countries, would seem a lot less foreign...

 

We've Only Just Begun.

Yes, these examples of taming the Tower of Babel are early prototypes, and my extrapolation is currently science fiction.  But I have little doubt that research will continue in these directions, and that once these prototypes' offspring hit the commercial market, they'll become as commonplace as calculators for those traveling the globe. Which will certainly help make the world a smaller, friendlier, place.

Ciao!

 

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Pill-Popping CDs?

 

Finally, several weeks ago, we learned that under certain conditions CDs can be destroyed by fungi eating the reflective layer within the CD sandwich!  (http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc/20010702.html#_Toc518206110)  While the CD's manufacturer categorized this event as "a freak incident caused by extreme weather conditions," South African reader Brandon Harrison suggests that this isn't such an improbable event after all:

"In a discussion regarding the CD-eating-bug article with a friend who is a specialist in the area of corrosion, he mentioned to me that such an occurrence is not unusual at all.   

This phenomenon is known as MIC (Microbiologically Induced Corrosion), and it's well known in fields such as the petrochemical industry, [although] in the IT field, it seems that the possibility of something like this occurring has seemingly been ignored or overlooked.  One would think that CD manufacturers would have highlighted the correct storage of CD media to ensure that loss of information does not occur.

Many people, including myself, have thought of CD’s as being indestructible, and have backed up sensitive data on this media thinking that it will be around for many years to come.  I cannot help but think back to an article you had a few years ago, on how media keeps changing, and how somewhere down the line you may want to recover something from an old tape [or other media], only to find out that you cannot read the data due to the media having become unreadable, or because the latest hardware [or operating system] no longer supports that device."

Thanks Brandon.  Indeed, for really critical data, it makes sense to back it up onto several different kinds of media, stored in different locations. 

But this MIC problem is interesting -- I mean, who would have ever thought that we might have to give an ailing CD an antibiotic...?

About "The Harrow Technology Report"