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The Harrow Technology Report
Insight,
analysis, and commentary on the
Copyright © 2001-2005, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All rights
reserved.
Through the Lens of New Technologies. Give your eyes a rest. Read'n & Write'n? What it means to be a disk drive head... Have you ever heard GOOD computer-generated speech? I have now! Back to the future. And grain by grain... The single-atom transistor is (sort of) here! Fifty-five percent efficiency improvements; The latest on "teleportation;" and What's Internet traffic up to? The cost of content... My mom's a cyborg! And you may know one as well. 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..." Also, to learn how you can listen at whatever speed is most comfortable to you, check out the FAQ at http://www.theharrowgroup.com/help.htm . So, if you wish, just click on the following link to listen to this issue! http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20020701/20020701.mp3 .
Quote of the Week.Two very salient quotes, from Stavance's June 6 "R&D Newsflash": "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
Alvin Toffler
Bill Butle,
New Text-To-Speech -- Wow!
As you probably know, "The Harrow Technology Report" is always available as a spoken Web-based "radio program" at a link specified in the "Listen to This Issue" section. Several times over the years I've experimented with the best "Text-to-Speech" conversion programs to see if my voice had become superfluous, but the robotic-sounding results always sent me scurrying back to my microphone. I will probably still continue using my voice to record these shows, but for the first time I've heard an alternative that sounds so good that there is now an acceptable alternative. It's called Loquendo, a spin-off of work done by the research folks at Telecom Italia Labs. Loquendo runs on a PC and, depending on the configuration, can speak a particular text file. Or under program control, it can act as a text-to-speech server providing multiple simultaneous text-to-speech streams. Loquendo also comes with quite a few voices, each one optimized for speaking the text of a particular language. If you're at all familiar with the many text-to-speech converters that have been available on the market, you haven't (yet) heard anything new. But when you actually hear the result, if you're half as impressed as I am, you'll agree that Loquendo will open up quite a few doors. This is not to say that Loquendo is perfect. It's not. It doesn't always get things exactly right, although there is an easy to use lexicon that let me tell it that www.TheHarrowGroup.com should have the middle part pronounced as "The Harrow Group," rather than as an understandably un-understandable mess. But what Loquendo does that I have not heard before, is that without any special tuning of any sort, the resulting speech sounds vibrant, often quite natural, and -- well -- "human." It's "expressive," in a way that I haven't previously heard from computers. But this isn't something that I can really explain -- it's something that you really have to hear, so you can form your own opinion. And you have a couple of choices: First, I've taken the text of this issue and had Loquendo's "Susan (American English)" voice speak the issue into an MP3 file at this link: http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20020701/20020701-Loquendo.mp3 Although the good folks at Loquendo wanted to optimize the text to assure that my spacing and punctuation didn't mess things up (following a few rules, which I have not done, can improve things somewhat), I wanted us to hear the result of a "typical" document that hadn't been so-optimized, and that's what we have here. The only significant thing I've done is remove most of the URLs from the text, so that you don't have to listen to lots of "double-you, double-you, double-yous..." And to me, the result is even more impressive than if I'd let them further optimize it. Second, Loquendo offers a demo site where you can type in a couple of sentences in a language of your choice, pick the appropriate voice, and it will translate and play the result for you, at http://actor.loquendo.com/actordemo/default.asp?language=us . You can then find out more about Loquendo at http://www.loquendo.com/en/demos/index.htm , or by contacting Gaea Vilage at Gaea.Vilage@LOQUENDO.COM . (If you do, tell her where you heard about Loquendo.) As you can tell, I'm impressed with Loquendo, and this is (of course) just the beginning. I can see the day when that old question, "Is it Memorex, or is it real?" will take on a new meaning; at least in certain contexts, we may have trouble deciding if we're listening to a computer, or to a person. And won't THAT be interesting...
Storage Update.
Aren't we glad that, except perhaps in some voting booths, we've banished the "punched card" into obscurity? After all, storing information in physical holes (or depressions -- remember the 'chads') on a flat medium is clearly something from the bygone era of computers. Or is it...? Proving yet again that it's worth looking at old ideas through the lens of new technologies, IBM's Zurich Research Lab has announced more details on its Millipede data storage system, which works somewhat akin to punched cards, but on a rather different scale. (http://www.zurich.ibm.com/st/storage/millipede.html)
Instead of punching paper chads however, the tip of a Millipede write-head uses heat to form a depression in a plastic sheet, with the spacing and pattern of depressions and flat areas representing the ones and zeros of data. Similarly, a Millipede read-head can scan for the presence or absence of depressions, and so recover the data they represent. Expanding this idea to read and write head "arrays" that each contain about 1,000 or more points, reading and writing can be done from many areas of the plastic at once, speeding data throughput through massive parallelism.
The medium is also re-writable; heating an area adjacent to an existing depression allows the plastic to "flow," filling the depression back to its original "flat" state.
Why Go 'Back To The Future?' The question, of course, is "WHY" return to those thrilling days of physical storage yesteryear? The answers are "Nanotechnology" and MEMS (MicroElectrical Mechanical Systems). You see, in this case, those tips that are
forming and reading the depressions are very, very
small. Atomically small. They're actually the tips
of Atomic Force Microscopes, and they can form and
read depressions so small (10 nanometers in
diameter), and so close together, that this
thermomechanical storage technique can store
hundreds of gigabits/square inch -- perhaps as much
as one terabit/square inch! Which is well beyond
the (currently) anticipated magnetic recording limit
of perhaps 150 gigabits/square inch (see below).
Another way to look at this is that "about three
billion of [these depressions] fit in a punch card
hole." (http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type= This isn't the death knell for traditional magnetic disk drives -- the read/write speed of Millipede appears (at this time) to be far slower, and so its initial implementation may be to vastly increase the amount of memory in portable devices. Imagine, if you will, that if this technology increases its storage capacity at anything like the "Moore's Law-plus" rate of current storage increases, we could have portable digital devices that might NEVER run out of room for storing pictures, audio, video, and more. Which would change a lot of rules. Millipede project leader Peter Vettiger expects
that it will be at least two years before a
Millipede chip is ready for production
(http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20020611S0018),
with CNN estimating that if IBM does decide to
pursue this, it could be on the market by 2005
(http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/industry/06/11
Bit By Bit. Of course there is more than one way for storage to continue its faster-than-Moore's-Law drive to higher density for lower cost; that old standby, "magnetics," still has a lot of life left. Despite a succession of pronouncements that we're (always) about to reach the "limits" of magnetic storage, brilliant people who refuse to follow the rules just keep pushing magnetic storage forward. Today, according to the July Technology Review (http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/innovation50702.asp), a bit of data has to be stored in several hundred "magnetic grains" to preserve a reliable state. Make the grains too small or too densely packed together, and they randomize. But IBM has now proven, and GE is attempting to commercialize, the ability to "pattern" a magnetic media so that individual magnetic grains form in the "islands" of the pattern, with each single grain storing one bit. This could initially yield as much as 40 gigabits of storage per square inch, growing to 150 gigabits/square inch. Which would give us terabyte notebooks, and far-larger desktops. Prototypes are due in 2004, with commercial devices potentially hitting the market in 2008.
It's Just A Matter Of Time... It's sure nice to know that such technologies are sitting in the wings, just waiting for our needs to catch up. How would "limitless" storage change YOUR rules? Don't Blink!
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One Atom At A Time.
We may think that our current transistors, such as each of the 42 million that sit inside our Pentium 4 chips, are small. But in reality, each one of those transistors is still made up of millions or billions of atoms. Imagine how much smaller our computing elements could be if each and every ATOM were ITSELF a transistor. Now, realize that Cornell University researchers have done just that -- they've created a transistor in which the current of electrons flows through a single cobalt atom! Brought to our attention by reader Dana Hoggart, Cornell illustrates (http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/June02/McEuen.transistor.deb.html) how this molecule forces electrons to "hop on and off" the cobalt atom at the center of the ring, one by one, for the current to flow.
In effect, they've created a "designer molecule" that channels the electron flow through just the central atom. This molecule doesn't yet perform all of the functions of a traditional transistor, such as amplification or controlled switching, but because the environment surrounding the molecule affects the current flow, even at this early stage it may prove useful as a chemical sensor. Their next step is to add the structures to turn this into a controllable switch. Now don't get too excited: our next CPUs won't work on this atomic scale. But I find a statement by one of the molecule's creators, Dr. Héctor Abruña, prophetic: "As chemists, we can deliberately design and manipulate molecules to achieve a specific function. This is very important because we are now able to incorporate the properties of these molecules into electronic devices." They are, in effect, changing all the rules. On the other hand, even though we've now demonstrated what was "unthinkable" just a short time ago -- the beginnings of single-atom transistors -- it seems that some people still see limits to what we can do. For example, the Cornell article begins by stating that they, "...have now reached the smallest possible limit: a transistor in which electrons flow through a single atom." But who says that we have to depend on electrons, which we've been harnessing in one way or another for the past century? There's more to an atom than its electron shell... As impressive as this achievement by Cornell is, I believe there's still plenty of room for innovative minds to change the rules again -- and again, and again, and again...
Tidbits...
·
One 'Unintended Consequence' Of
Nanotechnology -- Incandescent light bulbs are
the world's most common method of generating light.
Although compact fluorescents are increasingly
showing up in commercial and office settings, most
homeowners still prefer the "warm" spectrum of the
familiar light bulb. The problem is that the light
bulb, which works by heating a tungsten filament to
incandescence, is very inefficient; something you
know all too well if you try to unscrew a bulb while
it's running -- you'll burn your fingers.
Incandescent light bulbs are only about 5% efficient
in generating the light we want -- the other 95% of
the energy that the bulb consumes goes out as
infrared light, or waste heat.
·
Teleportation Update -- The
wonderful unfolding sci-fi-to-reality story of
teleportation is one of the better examples of the
"totally impossible" moving into the scientific
journals and the headlines. You may recall that
over the past couple of years, scientists at several
independent labs have demonstrated that they can
transfer the state of the spin of one, and later a
cloud of photons, over distance instantaneously.
This is teleportation, if currently only of
information, and not of reticent physicians (a la
Star Trek's "Bones." - see
http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/ "What we have demonstrated here is that we can take billions of photons, destroy them simultaneously, and then recreate them in another place." Does this sound
interesting?
·
All Those Bits! -- Following up
on our recent glimpse into the burgeoning amount of
Internet traffic -- so much Internet traffic that it
will exceed voice traffic this year
(http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
From Out of the Ether...
The Cost Of Content -- In a recent
discussion regarding the tremendously increasing
capacity of disk drives
(http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/ "How could you FILL UP 120 terabytes, considering that you could store seven years of 24/7 movies, or 80 years of music, or...? The problem might not be how much we CAN store, but more practically "the cost of the content." Want to buy 30,000 movies to transfer to your shiny new disk?" Reader Alex Shmelev did some 'out of the box' thinking of his own, and came up with the following response: "...I would think
that the "cost of content" would shrink, and instead
be converted into a "cost of consumption". For
example, why would music or film companies rely on
broadband content delivery if they could, instead,
install a significant portion of their catalog
directly onto the hard drive of a new PC? What do you think??" I think that Alex has the right idea in extrapolating how technology will be marching forward, and in considering dramatically new ways to benefit from the changes. For example, I could certainly imagine that Turner Networks or other holders of large media libraries might be very interested in storing encrypted copies of their huge stockpile of old movies, old TV programs (and series), and other entertainment on those disks. And even new movies could be downloaded and stored on the disks during slack network time, a la Tivo, as pointed out to me in a conversation this morning with Roberto Saracco, Director of the Telecom Italia Labs' "Center of the Future." (http://fc.telecomitalialab.com/english/index.htm) Assuming that the media companies decide to work
WITH technology instead of trying to sue its use out
of existence (a futile effort over time, I expect),
then entertainment assets will remain highly
valuable in these days of an increasingly broadband
Internet -- they may just require imaginative new
ways to wring that value out. (Media companies were
similarly frightened of the VCR, yet now they make
more off of tapes and DVDs than they do from the box
office...) "I suddenly realize that in the future we will store personal information which we never stored before! Until now, we store information as a well-decided act of our own. Probably in the future, we will store information without actually knowing we are storing it. Some processes will decide what is worthwhile to store for personal use [again, like Tivo already does today]. And then the stunning conclusion: Isn't this exactly what our brain does (and what we call our memory)? Thanks for your inspiring newsletters." As Ary so aptly points out, dramatic technology
advances pave the way for some surprising, and
certainly unplanned opportunities and changes! Cyborg Update.
Finally, my mother is the ultimate example of someone who is quite happy without having to deal with these "computer things," thank-you-very-much. She can do all of the things she wants to do without having to learn about the cyberworld of CPUs and bits and bytes and modems and the Internet. Which is why, after she recently received a pacemaker, I gleefully reminded her that she's now more intimate with the world of technology than am I, since she is now a very real cyborg! ("A human being who has certain physiological processes aided or controlled by mechanical or electronic devices," according to Microsoft Bookshelf.) Between pacemakers
(http://heartdisease.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A So far. Because, as pointed out by readers Dave Meachin, Greg Thompson and others, two researchers at the European branch of the MIT Media Lab have now designed a "tooth implant" that will silently send sound directly to your ears.
As described in the June 21 Wired News (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,53302,00.html) and by ENN (http://www.electricnews.net/news.html?code=7858450), once implanted within a living tooth by normal dental surgery, this relatively low cost device will use your jawbone as an antenna to receive wireless digital signals from the sending unit in your pocket (which you can connect to a cell phone, CD player, or whatever). The new tooth then "micro-vibrates" to send the sound directly into your ear. According to developer Jimmy Loizeau, "The vibrations are on a molecular level, so the user only experiences pure sound streaming into their consciousness," with none of the sound detectable outside of your head. You could even choose to implant two of these, for added volume and a "surround sound" effect! It's tempting to make light of such a device; to chalk it up as an example of scientists demonstrating what "can" be done, rather than what people "need" (with the obvious exception of the benefits that these devices might bring to traditional hearing aids and people with related disabilities). But the tooth's other inventor, James Auger, offers another idea that I think we're going to be forced to address, as a growing number of "optional" implants begin to become available: "It, [the tooth], offers a 'Darwinian' advantage to the user, whereby they have an advantage over their competition. [It's] not a random mutation but a chosen one. We are very interested in the ethical debate surrounding bionics and post-human evolution." How often have you wished to have a knowledgeable person whispering in your ear as you take questions from your boss, or you stand in front of an auditorium full of people? With such a device, your assistant, with a Web's worth of information at his fingertips, could be that "inside voice" with no one the wiser. Or how about a soldier on a covert mission? Totally silent, private information could easily make the difference between life and death. Or how about a sports figure receiving guidance from the sidelines? Or a student taking the SAT? Such an implant could well be used as a "competitive advantage," and if it proves significantly valuable in a particular field, it might become as widely "necessary" as a cell phone is today in some industries. Those who choose not to use the technology might fall by the competitive wayside. If that comes to pass, then what about the NEXT "optional" implant that confers a similar competitive advantage? And the next...? This tooth implant has yet to reach the prototype stage, but it, or something like it, surely will... Auger used the term "post-human evolution." Hummm. My mother doesn't have a PC, but she is now a cyborg. She didn't really have much of a choice, but an implanted computer is giving her a very real Darwinian advantage by extending her life. Soon, as teeth and other implants do become available, what happens when we all get to pick from a Chinese menu of optional enhancements? Especially -- what (competitively) happens to those of us who opt-out?
Oh -- and one other implication of this technology that you psychologists and psychiatrists might want to think about -- perhaps the next time a patient describes 'voices in his head,' he may just be right! :-)
About "The Harrow Technology Report"
"The Harrow Technology Report" explores the innovations and trends of many contemporary and emerging technologies, and then draws some less than obvious connections between them, to help us each survive and prosper in the Knowledge Age. "The Harrow Technology Report" is brought to you by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal of The Harrow Group. http://www.TheHarrowGroup.com . Where To Find "The Harrow Technology Report:"
Copyright (c) 2001-2005, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All
rights reserved.
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