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The Harrow Technology Report
Insight,
analysis, and commentary on the
Copyright © 2001-2005, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All rights
reserved.
Light Tweezers! Listen
to this Issue.
Quote of the Week.
Light Tweezers.
Vinyl Vs.
Polycarbonate, Redux.
There's MUCH More I Can Do For You!
Backup Thoughts.
Bar Codes Of A
Different Stripe? 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/20030421/20030421.mp3 .
Quote of the Week.
Where will we find "The Next Best Things?" "...Not [through] bandwagons, fashions or [individual] fields -- but [through] working at the edges, and in the intersections of disciplines."
Nicholas Negroponte This is a holy grail of innovation, where the creator and Director of the famed MIT Media Lab sees the real opportunities for identifying the 'next best things.' It's not (necessarily) in finding ways to better the technologies we already have in faster/better/cheaper ways, but in exploring the current "edges" of whole disciplines (such as the many separate engineering disciplines, and those of art, psychology and more.) Most importantly, this holy grail of innovation is about exploring at the new "intersections" of these historically stand-alone disciplines, where nose-to-the-grindstone, industry-oriented labs usually (financially) fear to tread. In my opinion, the real magic will indeed come from these "intersections," as scientists and engineers from formally disparate fields come together and develop new questions and totally new ideas, sometimes getting "ah ha!" insights into how to do today's things better, and how to do new things that were only yesterday firmly in the realms of our imagination. This mixing and mining of previously stovepiped ideas and knowledge will be the catalyst that opens our collective eyes to fascinating new visions. This "crossing the boundaries" research could also be of great value to more business-focused labs, or to any "creative" groups within a business. For just one example, if I ran such an organization I would put "interaction enhancers" very high on my priorities list. Would a bi-annual or even quarterly "retreat" be a coddling of the lab's scientists and engineers and artists and sociologists and others? Or would it be an imperative "idea incubator" that could pay off brilliantly? Would researchers who do come up with innovations that could change future products (and more) be given a token reward, or would they be highly compensated, publicly, so that other researchers recognize how their own creative work could be of tangible value to them as well as to the company? Sometimes, a business' "bottom line" needs to recognize that its greatest asset may well be the innovation potential of its own creative people. Expose them to a constant stream of new information and ideas, and to new ways to look at "old" ideas, and with the proper inducements they just might 'change all the rules.' Again. And again, and again... Don't Blink!
Light Tweezers.
I don't know if these tweezers would be allowed through airport security. After all, their tips are sharp enough to move individual virus particles around (which are each about 100 nanometers (billionths of a meter!) in size). But as described in a March 7 Physics News Update article (http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2003/split/627-1.html) brought to our attention by reader Dana Hoggatt, University of Chicago scientist David Grier, and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität scientist Jennifer Curtis, recently described their "Optical Vortex Tweezers" to the American Physical Society. Their sci-fi sounding tweezers send laser light through a hologram, and the resulting light is capable of exerting physical force on tiny objects! These "light tweezers" can move these tiny particles around and even set them to spinning! Grier and Curtis describe it like this, in the brief teaser for their talk at http://www.aps.org/meet/MAR03/baps/abs/S2950004.html : "Helical modes of light can be focused into toroidal optical traps known as optical vortices, which are capable of localizing and applying torques to small volumes of matter. Measurements of optical vortices created with the dynamic holographic optical tweezer technique reveal an unsuspected dependence of their structure and angular momentum flux on their helicity. These measurements also provide evidence for a novel optical ratchet potential in practical optical vortices." I'll be the first to admit my ignorance at this level of optics and physics. I have always thought that light photons couldn't exert physical force, since they have zero mass. But then, I have certainly learned that many of the rules we grew up learning in science classes (and in many university courses) never considered just how different things are at the nanometer-scale -- how much this changes the rules. Perhaps one of you may know how to explain this in ways we can all understand...? Of course, even without a good understanding of what's going on here, there are obvious potential extensions of our learning to use light to control matter: How about the archetypical "ray gun" that might do more than vaporize; could it non-lethally push a target aside or spin him down the hall? Or the "tractor beam," or its equivalent "repulsor beam" (or could that also turn into "shields?") Not to mention such light's potential for use as a 'guiding hand' in nano-machines and nano-laboratories. And far more. OK, these ideas may be taking this innovation too far. On the other hand, who'd have imagined light pushing things around, at all...? Again, Don't Blink!
Vinyl Vs. Polycarbonate, Redux.
Last issue we explored some of
the differences between vinyl records and
polycarbonate-based CDs; my son liked vinyl's
"character," while I preferred the more vibrant and
cleaner sound (no pops, scratches, etc.) of the more
modern CD (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/ Sounds odd, doesn't it, since we tend to think of newer technology as always better. And for many uses, it is. But if you have a keen ear, the right equipment, and high quality vinyl media, reader Bob Olson explains why you may find the sound from today's CDs (http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cd.htm/printable) "wanting," by comparison. "Despite my enthusiasm for advancing information technology, I have to take the side of your son who likes sound quality of "old fashioned" analog records better than the sound of CDs. I was shocked about ten years ago when I first compared the sound of high quality records played on a good turntable/arm/cartridge setup with the sound of CDs played on a good CD player. But hearing is believing. The technical explanation is clear-cut. Original sound is analog by definition. A vinyl record stores the sound in analog form. The grooves in a high quality record exactly mirror the original sound's waveform so that no information is lost. The output of a record player is analog and can be fed directly to your amplifier with no conversion. A digital recording takes snapshots of the analog signal at a certain rate (for CDs it is 44,100 times per second) and measures each snapshot with a certain accuracy (for CDs it's16-bit, which means the value must be one of 65,536 possible values). This means that, by definition, a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave. It is approximating it with a series of steps. Some sounds that have very quick transitions, such as a drum beat or a trumpet's tone, will be distorted because they change too quickly for the sample rate. CD players also have to convert the digital recording to an analog signal to feed into your amplifier, and this digital-to-analog (D/A) conversion also mucks up the sound quality. (Audiophiles spend megabucks on D/A converters or high-end CD players to minimize this problem.) Digital wins in the mass market for many good reasons: CDs are convenient, they don't degrade over time, they're programmable, and many mass market audio systems aren't good enough to reveal the difference in sound quality anyway. But there's actually a major "vinyl revival" underway among people who want really good sound and are willing to pay for it. The new Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio formats are starting to close in on analog sound quality, but the latest high-end turntables, arms and cartridges, precision-engineered using exotic materials, keep pulling more sound out of those old records. So, for now, those of us who judge technology by performance, not marketing hype, have to speak up and say 'Don't knock that analog stuff -- it's really high tech!'" [See http://www.timefordvd.com/tutorial/SACDOverview.shtml for an explanation of Super Audio CDs (SACD), and http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/analog-digital.htm/printable and http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question487.htm for insights into the analog/digital difference, plus an introduction to another up-and-coming audio forma called DVD Audio.] So -- the once seemingly-clear differences between the old and the new can be more muddled than the sound we sometimes hear from each media (bad recordings, dirty media, etc.) Which might also make us wonder if there's something to the often stated preference of some audiophiles for tube, rather than for transistor amplifiers. (See http://www.modernrecording.com/articles/soundav/link16.html for some insights into the very real differences that do exist.) Hint -- it's all about "distortion," but not in the way you might think.) As we continue to delve into the worlds of the digital and the tiny, don't dismiss the "old" technologies out-of-hand -- they may still offer surprisingly valuable characteristics. And they're, well, "mature."
Begin Self-Serving Advertisement There's MUCH More I Can Do For You!
You may not realize it, but there's much more to The Harrow Group than just "The Harrow Technology Report." For almost twenty years, as I've been sharing my research on the ever-faster-moving and converging technologies that are changing how we work, live, and play, I've also been working directly with businesses and organizations, large and small, to help them understand and address how these changes may affect them, their customers, and their customers' businesses, through a series of:
·
Presentations -
Highly engaging, interactive, multimedia,
constantly-updated presentations and keynote
speeches to individual businesses, internal groups,
and trade organizations, helping participants to
better understand and appreciate how technology has
brought us to where we are today, and where it's
likely to lead us tomorrow.
·
Workshops
- Beginning with the presentation described above
(to give all participants a common understanding and
insight), the workshop further engages attendees to
explore how this march of technology might affect
their individual businesses and organizations, and
their specific needs.
·
One-On-One Consulting -
Individualized
consulting services, available via phone or
in-person, to help you explore the topics and trends
discussed in The Harrow Technology Report,
and related issues. Please continue here for additional information. Then, contact me at Jeff@TheHarrowGroup.com with any additional questions, to discuss fees, and to schedule a consulting event. I look forward to working with you! End Self-Serving Advertisement Backup Thoughts.
Considering that my first microcomputer had zero/zip/NO mass storage of any kind, today's 160+ gigabyte hard drives and almost 5 gigabyte DVD rewritable drives are very impressive. (Even if my storage needs have grown almost as fast as the new capacity -- it seems that I always need more.) Keeping all that data safe, however, is a constantly-shifting challenge.
The Restore From Hell. For example, I've used tape backup for years, but several months ago when the unthinkable (a crashed hard disk) happened, my warm fuzzy feeling about being able to easily restore to last night's condition was shattered, because although it should have, the backup software would not restore the all-important Registry from my recent tape. Bummer. (A highly improbable anomaly, I'm told, which I have not since been able to reproduce. My bad luck. But I did recover -- I had to reinstall Windows from scratch and then reinstall all the programs, and then recover all my user data from the tape. Not fun, but much better than the alternative of having lost all of my user data!)
Safer Strategy. So while I continue to use my tape backup every night (it has the advantage of being 'removable media,' and so I can periodically store a copy off-site), I've added a second layer of protection -- a daily disk-to-disk "image backup" using PowerQuest's DriveImage 2002 (http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/). This slick utility (there are other similar utilities on the market) works by creating a compressed image of each-and-every bit from each-and-every sector of your normal disk, and then writing this "image file" to another device for safekeeping, such as to a tape drive, a rewriteable CD or DVD drive, or in my case to another hard disk on the system. For example, on one (half-full) 60 gigabyte drive that I protect with image backups, every bit on the drive is compressed into a 15 gigabyte "image file" that can later be restored onto a new disk with not a single bit changed. Note that this is a LOT of data to compress and store; on an "average" (1 gigahertz) PC the process takes about 1.5 hours. Also, if you're backing up your "system drive" (the one with Windows on it), this image backup can't be done while Windows is running. So DriveImage contains a scheduler that will automatically shut down the system at a scheduled time, perform the image backup, and reboot the system back into Windows. A pain, I admit, but it should be worth it. If "the impossible" were to happen again and I wake up to find my main disk corrupted or destroyed, I should now be able to restore that "image backup" file from the other hard disk in about 90 minutes. The result "should" be (OK, I'm gun shy now, but it does work in testing!) a resurrected disk that is EXACTLY, bit-for-bit, identical to when I last performed the image backup the previous day. That means that EVERYTHING should be as it was -- Windows, boot sectors, Registry, applications, user data, etc. Everything. (Except those user files that had changed since the image backup was made, and those were likely captured by the tape backup in the middle of the night, and so can be easily restored.)
The Problem. One thing that's missing from this image backup strategy (and one reason I continue to use a file-based incremental tape backup as well) is that, because of the size of the image files vs. the speed of my tape drive, I can't (reasonably) write the image files off to tape for off-site storage. I could write the image backup files directly to an external disk drive (connected via USB 2.0 or FireWire), but they're rather expensive for an off-site backup rotation schedule. Or, I could write them to CDs, but a typical day's image backup would fill 22 CDs and I'd have to stand watch to keep feeding in blank CDs. I could also write the image backup file to a recordable DVD, but even with their far larger capacity (about 4.7 gigabytes vs. a CD's 0.8 gigabyte capacity), it would still require 4 typical DVDs along with my constant attention. (Hey -- this computer is supposed to work for ME, not the other way around!) Which is why I'm always
interested in the potential of new, higher-capacity
removable storage solutions, such as Sony's
forthcoming blue laser optical drive that will
initially pack 23.3 gigabytes onto a DVD-like disk.
And its capacity is expected to rise to 50 gigabytes
by 2005, and to 100 gigabytes sometimes later
(http://www.pcpro.co.uk/?http://www.pcpro.co.uk/
Yes, I may sound a bit paranoid about keeping my data safe, but if you've ever had to unexpectedly devote much of a WEEK to restoring a system from scratch, reinstalling all of the current drivers and applications and utilities, and then getting everything setup and tuned and configured just the way you like it, then this extra level of backup security feels pretty good. There are of course many different backup schemes; this one that seems right for me (and I'm only describing part of it here) is not necessarily right for you (for a more complete look at the important subject of backups, check out Fred Langa's suggestions at http://www.langa.com/backups/backups.htm). But perhaps this exploration of my backup plan will convince you to think about your own, before you get an error message that causes that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Remember, the laws of statistics and the probabilities of software and hardware failures guarantee that it's not "IF" you'll (eventually) suffer a catastrophic failure, but only a question of "WHEN." How you prepare, in-advance, will determine if this is a minor or major inconvenience, or even a "return to Go, but do NOT collect $200!"
Bar Codes Of A Different Stripe?
Finally -- you know "barcodes." Today, everyone knows barcodes, since they proliferate on almost everything retail (and I've been waiting for biologists to figure out how to grow them directly onto package-free produce, like apples and tomatoes.) Examples Of 2D And 1D (Linear) Barcodes
(For additional interesting information about UPC, RFID, and 2D barcodes, see http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/upc.htm/printable , http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/smart-label.htm/printable , and http://www.barcodeman.com/faq/2d.php and http://www.adams1.com/pub/russadam/stack.html). Now, thanks to a report titled "Rare Earth-Doped Glass Microbarcodes" in the Jan. 21 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as described in the April 3 Technology Review (http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/rnb_040303_2.asp), we find that a new type of barcode could soon be identifying currency, explosive residue, ink, and even individual molecules (including DNA)! Scientists at Corning have created tiny rectangular beads 100,000 nanometers long by 20,000 nanometers wide and thick (just at the edge of visibility if, that is, you're in your twenties!) They're made of glass and "lanthanide metal oxide ions" which are etched with one of 100-billion possible bar codes that glow when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light; the codes can then be read by an appropriate optical scanner. There are many obvious uses for such microscopic barcodes, not the least being a recovery of precious label space on retail goods. But there are also, as is often the case with each new application of technology, privacy concerns. How comfortable would you be, knowing that the path of each and every dollar bill you spent could be traced (assuming that cash register drawers and bank tellers were universally equipped with barcode readers)? Or how about every item of clothing being uniquely identified, and traceable through optical telescopes added to security cameras? Just to name a couple of concerns... Technology advances can certainly confer great benefits. But they can also often be used for less than stellar purposes. We can't (and shouldn't!) stop the advances, but we can and should remember that we each, individually and through our elected representatives, have the responsibility to determine how NBIC[1] advances are actually implemented in our society. In fact, we should pay very careful attention to these issues, so that we evolve a future that we can, quite literally, live with.
[1] NBIC - The
"Converging" of the previously disparate fields of
Nanotechnology, Biology & medicine, Information
sciences, and Cognitive sciences.
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