Tech Talk

Ever wonder why the space shuttle carried quaint computer systems from the days of visible transistors and perforated readout paper? The reason is reliability, which matters more than coolio capabilities when your life’s on the line.

That’s why the designers of the Boeing 787 must have thought twice before putting coolio lithium-ion batteries into an airliner meant to carry up to 290 passengers. Maybe they should have thought a third time. This week a scary battery fire in one of the airliners, in Japan, sparked a worldwide grounding of the entire fleet. Nobody was hurt, but then again, the fires broke out when the airliner was on the ground. (Correction: one of the fires did indeed break out in the air).

It seems that the batteries heated up in a self-accelerating pattern called thermal runaway. Heat from the production of electricity speeds up the production of electricity, and… you’re off. This sort of things happens in a variety of reactions, not just in batteries, let alone the Li-ion kind. But thermal runaway is particularly grave in Li-ion batteries because they pack a lot more power than the tried-and-true metal-hydride ones, not to speak of Ye Olde lead-acid.

It’s because of this very quality that Li-ion batteries found their first application in small mobile devices, where power is critical and fires won’t cost anyone his life. It’s also why it took so long for the new tech to find its way into electric and hybrid-electric cars.

Why put these batteries in cars? Because cars are under fierce regulatory pressure to meet ever-stricter fuel-economy and emissions standards, and that requires that they both reduce total weight and also emphasize electric propulsion. Li-ion technology does both. The first vehicle to show off Li-ion technology was the original Tesla Roadster, which surrounds the passenger cockpit with a huge pile of small battery cells, each one segregated so that thermal runaway can’t propagate and, as they say, ruin your whole day. 

But then why risk such batteries in airliners? That’s a tougher question, because here a light battery pack isn’t strictly necessary. But mass still matters. Remember, light weight is the entire point of the Boeing 787, the first airliner built largely of superlight plastic. That advance, along with other refinements, reduces fuel consumption by a fifth.  

Following several problems including a battery fire and a fuel leak, aviation agencies in Europe, the United States, and India have grounded all Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft. (Airlines in Japan have voluntarily grounded the planes.) The innovative aircraft was the first to use a significant amount of carbon fiber composites in the wings and fueselage, reducing its weight and boosting its fuel efficiency.

Photo: By Spaceaero2 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

There was lots of buzz about 4K, or “UltraHD”, television at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held last week in Las Vegas. Representatives from several companies that plan to manufacture these next generation TVs or produce hardware for TV production attempted to explain why there’s so much interest in 4K and how the industry can expect to convince consumers to pay what will initially be a big premium, and eventually will be 50 percent more, for the technology.

At a panel held Thursday, Sony’s Chris Cookson said that 4K is a natural evolution for home cinema, because postproduction of today’s film movies is done in 4K. Television technology has throughout history chased the theatrical experience; 4K in the home is just another attempt to catch up.  Ted Schilowitz from Red Digital Cinema said now that HD is coming into small mobile displays, people are expecting more from home cinema. He reminded CES attendees, however, that 4K won’t be the end of the resolution race, like HDTV, it will simply be a moment in time.

The panel of experts then made the case that going to 4K TV in the home will reawaken interest in 3D, a technology that some think is irrelevant in the home. Even those who are big believers in 3D today consider it simply a feature, not, as had been hoped, a reason for consumers to buy a new TV. But, the experts on the table agreed, the 3D experience will be better in 4K, and may even allow evolution towards high definition glasses-free TV. It will also allow a better integration of the web and TV, including split-screen features.

Schilowitz said that people tend to prefer the immersive experience of 4K to that of 3D. “3D comes at you, but 4K pulls you in,” he said. Other panelists insisted that the best immersive experience includes both.

4K TVs will need 4K content.  Upconversion, technology that processes 1080P videos into 4K versions, is surprisingly effective, the panelists said. And, pointed out Tom Coughlin from Coughlin Associates, speaking on an earlier CES panel previewing IEEE’s International Conference on Consumer Electronics said that experts believe that the content distribution problem will be solved when a new video compression standard, HEVC, is released. This form of compression is expected to allow content distributors to fit a 4K movie onto a 50 GB Blu Ray disk.

No companies planning to ship 4K televisions later this year have announced pricing. “It will be under $20,000,” said LG’s John Taylor. He did point out that even if 4K TVs cost more that $20,000, there are people in the market that will have to have them. 4K TVs won’t, however, be mainstream until they cost just 50 percent more than comparable HDTVs, the panelists agreed, and that will take time.

Photo: CEA

With the exception of Apple, which brings fanboys out in droves to line up for the introduction of every new model of iPhone, redesigns don’t often get a lot of attention. That's particularly true at CES, where there are plenty of brand new products to catch the attention of journalists and buyers.

Last night, however, two redesigns of familiar products caught my attention.

First, I spotted Novatel’s MiFi 2 hotspot. You are likely familiar with MiFi, a mobile device you can buy from your cellphone provider to create an instant hotspot for wireless online access. It’s been around for a while. The MiFi 2, is a definite improvement, both in look and in function. The touchscreen serves up all sorts of useful data, including critical data usage stats. Pricing depends on carrier and contract.

And then there was BodyMedia’s bluetooth armband, a wearable computer that monitors motion, temperature, and other factors of health and activity . You would have had to been an extremely devoted fitness geek to think that wearing the somewhat clunky first generation BodyMedia armband was a good idea, but the new, much smaller, version, the Core2, will likely have broader appeal. At least it appealed to me. Pricing hasn’t been set, but BodyMedia representatives said they expect it to cost about the same as the first generation product, listing at roughly $120.

Photo: MiFi 2

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Those awkward silences during phone calls can communicate a lot. Especially if you're sending hidden messages during them. Computer scientists at the Warsaw University of Technology have come up with a way to secretly send nearly 2000 bits of encrypted data per second during a typical Skype conversation by exploiting the peculiarities of how Skype packages up voice data. They reported their findings this week.

Steganography, as Warsaw's Jozef Lubacz, Wojciech Mazurczyk, and Krzysztof Szczypiorksi explained in their excellent feature article in February 2010, differs from encryption in that its not just that the message is unreadable; the fact that it's being sent at all is hidden as well. Steganography's been in use for thousands of years and has evolved to include hiding data within compressed image files in such a way that the image isn't degraded so much that a human eye would notice. The problem with that sort of steganography, the researchers point out, is that it leaves a trace. The image file will wind up on some server somewhere with your message embedded in it.

A safer class of steganography, from the spy's point of view, is called network steganography. This gets around the traceability problem by hiding the message in the peculiarities of the manner in which a network works. Mazurczyk, Szczypiorski, and colleagues have already come up with several versions of this including LACK, which hides messages in data packet delays; HICCUPS, which makes the message seem like the expected noise or distortion; and the less-creatively-named Protocol Steganography, which slips messages into underutilized data fields.

The new scheme SkyDe (for Skype Hide) uses the peculiarities of how Skype works to hide the message. First the researchers noted that even when there's silence in a Skype call, the software is still generating and sending packets of audio data. After analyzing Skype calls, they found that they could reliably identify those silence packets, because they were only about half the size of packets containing voices. Sky-De encrypts your hidden message, grabs a certain portion of outgoing silence packets,, and stuffs the encrypted message into them. A person at the receiving end's SkyDe software would then grab the small packets and let the big ones through. Skype software interprets the lost small packets as silence anyway, so it doesn't miss them.

A video explains it all:

Time is money. Knowledge is power. Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

And now, to the list of all we know on earth and all we need to know, we can add this: time is mass, and mass is time.

Actually, the realization is more than 80 years old. In his PhD dissertation, Louis de Broglie mated the Planck relation (E=hν) and the Einstein mass-energy equivalence (E=mc²) to assign a frequency to every mass—the Compton frequency, ω₀=mc²/ħ (h-bar, of course, is the Planck constant divided by 2π.)

In the past, the matter-wave has had limited practical application: the frequency is just too high to measure. A single cesium-133 atom, for example, has a Compton frequency of about 3 x 10²⁵ Hz. The picture has changed a bit over the past decade, as scientists (including U.S. Secretary of Energy and former Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory director Steven Chu) have developed atom interferometers—devices that can measure the differences in Compton frequency between different masses.

In a new Science paper, physicists at the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say they have extended the technique to measure the relativistic Compton frequency shifts between two initially identical masses. The advance allows them to exploiting the familiar “Twin Paradox” (It isn’t really a paradox, though it does involve twins; a twin accelerated to near-light-speed for a trip to Alpha Centauri and back will return to earth having aged much less than the sibling who remained behind).

Shau-Yu Lan and colleagues in the Berkeley "Matter Wave" group led by Holger Müller, used frequency-comb-stabilized lasers to establish a steady frequency difference between two cesium-133 atoms, one in motion relative to the other. (The diagram to the right shows the world-lines of the two cesium atoms; the red arrows are the laser pulses.) Every so often, the researchers would interrupt the feedback loop stabilizing the lasers, and the briefly destabilized system would jump. This jump—a “Ramsey-Bordé photon recoil measurement” (which I imagine as the twang of a plucked string, though that’s probably inaccurate)—is a function of underlying Compton frequency. A little arithmetic (all right, a lot of arithmetic), and there you have it: ω₀ for all the world to see.

The initial experiments yielded a cesium-133 Compton frequency of 2 993 486 252 ± 12 x 10¹⁶—within about 5 parts per billion of the expected value.  The authors describe this accuracy as “modest,” roughly equivalent to that of the first cesium atomic clocks. They do, however, anticipate immediate improvements that might allow a Compton clock, with its inherently higher stability and quality factor, to serve as a primary time standard.

Even more intriguing is the prospect of a practical definition of mass based on the same physical constants that now define all other primary units of measurement. A Compton clock definition of mass would be accurate to about 4 parts per billion, an order of magnitude better than anything possible with the current SI physical standard.

Images: Holger Müller/University of California, Berkeley

At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, back-to-back visits to LG and Panasonic reveal two very different approaches to selling, and maybe making, televisions. At LG the focus was on display technologies, picture quality, size, and form factors. Panasonic put its Smart TV features front and center.

Make the first right turn off the corridor of Central Hall, in the Las Vegas Convention Center, and you’re facing what LG bills as the “world’s largest 3-D video wall.” Put on 3-D glasses, and gawk for several minutes. 

It’s just as well you’re standing there—it’s difficult to break through CES’s largest wall of people standing in place.

When you finally do make it in, there are more televisions, divided by technology: more 3-D OLEDs (including a curved screen [below]!), plasma TVs, and what LG calls Ultra HD TVs.

The next section is Smart Living, of which, Smart TVs are just one area. There were smart refrigerators, smart washer/dryers, smart stoves, and more. Along one wall were tablets and smartphones.

At Panasonic, much of the vast booth space was devoted demos that played out one scenario of smart television or another. At one popular one, you could draw on a plasma TV with a light pen, superimposing the kind of whiteboard diagram that pro football commentators use. The image can be saved and sent to a tablet and thence e-mailed to a friend.

The 2013 CES put on by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) will be followed by a partner event, the IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics, ICCE, organized by the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society. The latter will be two orders of magnitude smaller than the former in terms of attendance, but in some ways, the smaller conference may be a good predictor for the future iterations of the larger one, in several key areas.

Home 3-D Printing:  The 2013 CES features several companies showing gear that creates objects layer by layer in a compact, fabrications machine. These devices offer similar features to the full-scale 3-D prototyping equipment used in design and some field repairs.  Home fabricators could play a role like today’s printers, except that what’s printed is things, not documents.  Makerbot is showing a 2-material printer. Other companies are showing services that allow designs to be sent out for fabrication with metals and ceramics, in addition to the plastics normally used on consumer products.  The growth of design libraries such as the Thingaverse, as well as web-based production outsourcing to companies like  Alibaba , who can make small manufactured lots from these designs, could fundamentally change the face of manufacturing in the next 10 years.

Home and Personal Cloud:  The rapid adoption of smart mobile tablets and phones is largely due to apps that rely on services obtained through “the cloud.”  These services—navigation assistance, social networking and content sharing, voice recognition and data searches—are often provided by large data centers that have large numbers of servers and storage.  However, some consumers and small businesses don’t want to put all their content in remote data centers but still want this content available to them via local and remote network connections.  For them, new network storage products being shown here at CES may allow Internet-accessible content using home, small office, or home office Network Attached Storage (NAS) products.  There are also products from companies such as Kingston, Seagate, as well as a reference design on display using a WD drive in the Marvell booth, showing personal battery powered W-iFi accessible storage devices that for a personal cloud storage solution that you can slip into a pocket.

My Car, My Way: Within a couple of years collision avoidance and automatic parking of automobiles will become standard on many cars, key steps along the way toward mass adoption of fully autonomous vehicles.  In a real sense automobiles are becoming mobile computers and as these cars become connected to the Internet and cellular networks, either directly or through mobile devices used in the vehicles, we can expect not just enhancements in navigation and entertainment, but new applications that will allow us to tune the car’s performance and ride.  Social networking and inter-car communication (made possible, in part, by the new IEEE 802.11p standard) may allow new ways to interact with fellow drives.  It’s no longer a choice between“my way, or the highway”!

Tricorders:  Connected diagnostic and monitoring devices and applications are bringing the benefits of good data to home health. Older people will live independent lives for longer than they might otherwise, and healthy people will stay healthy longer. At last year’s CES show, Qualcomm announced an X-Prize award for creating a working Tricorder.  At this year’s ICCE conference which directly follows CES, there will be a special session on Tricorders (named after the StarTrek medical diagnostic device from the 1960’s TV show) in which several speakers will explore the concept, implementation, and implications of wireless home diagnostic devices. 

At CES, manufacturers proudly show products that have just come onto the market or are about to. The 2013 IEEE ICCE conference features technologies that will become real products in 3-5 years time.  Leading edge technologies are moving from the laboratory to real consumer products at a faster pace than ever in the history of electronics. Consumer applications rapidly ramp the production volume of these technologies, lowing their manufacturing costs and making their use even more attractive to product designers.

Consumer electronics has assumed enormous importance in modern economies, increasing the competitiveness in consumer product production.  Needless to say, much wealth is created with the introduction of new consumer devices.

Tom Coughlin is the founder of Coughlin Associates. He has over 30 years of magnetic recording engineering and engineering management experience at such companies as Polaroid, Seagate Technology, Maxtor, Micropolis, Nashua Computer Products, Ampex and SyQuest. He’s an IEEE Senior Member.

I’ve written about my aunt before. I’d love to get her on the Internet, but she’s reluctant to sign up for a monthly service that involves installing a blinking box that requires complicated set up, troubleshooting her home phone system, or signing an expensive cellular data contract. So when I visit the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas I always keep an eye out for possible solutions.

Freedom Pop, exhibiting this week at a press event called Digital Experience, may have one. The $99 purchase price of its instant wireless network (just plug in to a power source to operate) includes 500 megabytes of data per month, to be provided by Sprint, free for life. Additional data charges can be deducted from an account at $10 per gigabyte, or heavy users can pay $60 per month for a 10-gigabyte plan.

The company sells a case for the iPod Touch for the same price, and includes software that makes it easier to call and text on the device. My teenage son, who we’ve told won’t be getting an iPhone until he can pay for the data plan himself, is interested in this one.

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I’ve tried out the Neurosky MindWave peripheral before. It’s a headband with EEG sensors that, paired with software, let’s you control things by thinking. It’s a pretty rudimentary form of control, essentially a dial-up/dial-down function; concentrating activates the controller, losing focus stops whatever you’ve doing. In past years, I played video games with the device, with limited success.

It’s one thing trying to move an object on a screen by thinking about it. Yeah, you can do it, but it doesn’t seem like a big deal. It’s vastly more interesting (and potentially embarassing) to move a real object through space. So I couldn’t resist trying the latest gadget to use the Neurosky interface, the Puzzlebox Orbit, from a little company called Puzzlebox. The Orbit is a helicopter inside an orb (to keep it from damaging itself when it inevitably crashes). The whole thing is about the size of a basketball. It comes with a transmitter that hooks up to a mobile device, software, and a Neurosky headset; the package costs $189.

Visiting Puzzlebox at Showstoppers, an evening press event held in conjunction with the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, I put on the headset and tried to fly the helicopter. There’s definitely a sense of pressure when you’re trying to think an object into space and it’s just not moving. Finally, running through a set of mental math problems got it airborne.