Tech Talk

Nowadays, when you see a driver ahead edging out of his lane, your first thought is: Get off your phone. Just in time for Thanksgiving, one of the biggest driving holidays on the U.S. calendar, a new State Farm Insurance survey confirms just how widespread the automotive use and abuse of social media is.

Almost half of 18-to-29-year-olds admit to accessing the Internet on a cell phone while they’re behind the wheel—49 percent 'fessed up to scrolling while driving, up from 29 percent in 2009. E-mail is still the biggest Internet-based distraction—43 percent of young drivers said they mix inbox and gearbox. But social media are coming up in the passing lane: 36 percent of first-decade-drivers check Twitter and Facebook status from the driver’s seat, and 30 percent say they update their status while driving. (“My status is…distracted moron.”)

Drivers in older age groups have nothing to be smug about, though the percentage of people who report Internetting-while-driving does decline with age (doesn’t everything?). Overall, 21 percent of all drivers have tried to stay connected while staying in motion—that’s one-and-a-half times 2009's rate. Fifteen percent check social media, and, golly, 13 percent update their social networks while supposedly in control of a ton of hurtling metal, glass, volatile hydrocarbons, and fine Corinthian leather.

Among those surveyed, 72 percent supported laws to prohibit texting and e-mailing while driving, and 45 percent thought that there should be technological barriers to prevent texting-while-driving. If comparing those numbers to the percentages of people who are doing that very thing redlines your cognitive dissonance meter, you won't be surprised by a recent paper that suggests Facebook can become a central feature in some patients’ psychotic delusions,

Image: State Farm

As collectors of natural-history trivia know, the pit viper’s pit is not the one it lives in, but the directional infrared-sensing dimple between its eye and nostril. If snakes can do it, why shouldn’t my smartphone?

Jacob Fraden and David Pintsov have patented (and are looking for licensees for) their new scanning IR device. This 2.5-mm IR sensor is built into the phone next to the digital camera and can measure temperatures from -30 C to about 200 C—and measure them accurately enough for clinical use.

The prolific Fraden, founder of Fraden Corporation, invented the ThermoScan Ear Thermometer. From a kid's perspective, that innovation was bad enough, when it came to faking a fever to stay home from school by rubbing the thermometer between the sheets, or, if closely watched, rubbing it against your teeth (no, mom, I'm a journalist, of course I never did this myself). Now it looks as though the new device finishes the job, with a point-and-shoot thermometer that takes less than a second to tell your mother that you’re malingering.

The device’s quick response, “minimal incremental cost,” digital-image targeting, and wide range make it useful for also gauging the temperatures of engine parts, of roasting turkeys, and of the babies’ bathwater. (So that’s one more component of the Star Trek Tricorder ticked off the checklist. Maybe someone really will claim the Tricorder X Prize  by producing a working prototype of the all-purpose medicomagical gadget by the end of 2015.)

Images: Fraden Corp.

Last week, I wrote about my ride with "disaster forensics" expert Alexis Kwasinski as he assessed damage to New York's telecom infrastructure in the wake of "Superstorm" Sandy. Touring the most devastated areas, Kwasinski identified several central telecom offices that had flooded during the surge. One was a Verizon office in lower Manhattan, a block from the World Trade Center. Kwasinski suspected that since the office had lost power during the storm, its copper telecom cables had lost the pressurized air that is normally pumped into them to keep water out. When the surge struck, the seawater likely seeped into the depressurized cables, damaging the copper wires.

Turns out Kwasinski was right. He pointed me to this video, recently released by Verizon, explaining the equipment damage and what the company is doing to repair it.

Verizon says the restoration process provides an opportunity to upgrade many of its copper cables to fiber.

For the last year, Bitcoin has been kind of like the kid who moves to a new town right in the middle of high school. Sitting alone at lunch. Quiet, but proud. Widely suspected of dealing drugs. He doesn't have any friends and he's not sure he wants them.

Well, that's all over, because this week Bitcoin started hanging out with one of the most popular kids in school.

WordPress, the most widely used blogging platform on the Internet, announced last night that it now accepts Bitcoin payments. (The basic platform is free, but it charges for a number of add-on services.) This is the most high-profile company to link up with Bitcoin since the cryptocurrency went online in 2009 and quite possibly the biggest boost to its reputation as well.

In his announcement Andy Skelton, a developer for WordPress, explained the company's decision as an effort to further democratize blogging. He explains that WordPress has taken umbrage with PayPal (and, to a lesser extent, credit cards) due to a policy that restricts access to a large number of countries. Most, like Afghanistan and Pakistan, are either war-torn or suffering through economic or political upheaval. Individuals in these countries can set up free blogs with the WordPress software, but until now they've had no way of buying add-ons like advertisement-free content and customized design.

According to Skelton, the choice was mainly ideological:

PayPal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, and many credit card companies have similar restrictions. Some are blocked for political reasons, some because of higher fraud rates, and some for other financial reasons. Whatever the reason, we don’t think an individual blogger from Haiti, Ethiopia, or Kenya should have diminished access to the blogosphere because of payment issues they can’t control. Our goal is to enable people, not block them.

Because Bitcoin transactions are processed by a peer-to-peer network, there is no feasible way for a third party to intervene on payments. Furthermore, the system is blind to the identity of both the donor and the recipient. Nationality doesn't even come into question.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, says he wants to bring this same approach to blogging. "The philosophy and equality of access in Bitcoin is very much in line with our goal to democratize publishing. We want to put the power of the printing press in everybody's hands."

It probably doesn't hurt that in doing so they will open up a new market for themselves in each of these countries.

This is a major score for BitPay, as well, the company that WordPress has chosen to handle its Bitcoin payments. WordPress won't actually accept Bitcoins directly. Rather they have set up an account with BitPay, which will receive payments in Bitcoin and immediately convert them into U.S. dollars. BitPay will also be solely responsible for quoting rates as the price of Bitcoin rises and falls. This service has expanded impressively over the past year (it now has over 1100 clients), and is certainly one of the reasons more merchants are willing to take a chance with Bitcoin.

Alas, it must be said that while it's getting easier to get rid of your Bitcoins, it's still not getting any easier to buy into the currency. It's the cryptocurrency catch-22.

Image credit: Bitcoin

Gas-powered generators were a boon to those going days and weeks without power after Hurricane Sandy blasted through their East Coast neighborhoods. The generators dotted the landscape—at least in the areas of New Jersey I found myself in—dotting  dark neighborhoods with welcome pools of light, their hum and fumes filling the air and their owners filling the lines at gas stations.

A green alternative exists—solar generators. But these aren’t exactly flying off the shelves of Home Depot. Actually, they aren’t even on the shelves of Home Depot; they’re just not suited for the average homeowner who loses power for a day or two once or twice a year. But, in a situation like Sandy, with large numbers of people without power for weeks, they have a role.

And they have some advantages over gas generators: They don’t require earplugs, careful placement for proper ventilation, or, most importantly constant refueling with expensive and hard-to-obtain gasoline.

They are, to be sure, of limited utility—fine for recharging your laptop and other battery-operated devices, not so good for powering your TV and surround-sound system after the sun sets. “The user has to balance the amount of power being used with the amount charging the batteries from the sun, ” says Christopher Meija of Consolidated Solar, a company that rents these mobile solar power stations. He compares “battery-state-of-charge anxiety” to electric car “range anxiety." (Solar generators will charge on cloudy days, just not as fast.)

They also take up more room than a fossil fuel generator, have to be carefully placed out of the shade, and are vastly more expensive—in the US $70 000 to $100 000 range, Meija says. Still, he points out, when rented, they typically save money over the costs of operating a gas-powered generator.

And they are being used in the wake of Sandy, thanks to a group of solar power organizations who have teamed up to provide solar generators free of charge to hard hit communities.

The Solar Sandy Project, as the organizations call it, has so far installed five 10-kilowatt solar generators in the Rockaways, and will be installing additional generators in Staten Island and Brooklyn in the next few days. They’re intended for neighborhood gathering points, where people can plug in laptops, cellphones, and power tools and heat food. The generators are being paid for by Solar City, a company that installs and maintains consumer solar power stations for a monthly fee akin to a utility bill, and are being provided by Consolidated Solar. Also involved is Solar One, a green energy education center in New York City.

The Solar Sandy Project is looking for help, including donations of solar generating equipment or cash as well as direct help from volunteers experienced in solar power installation or maintenance. They are also asking community organizations in the affected areas who would benefit from a solar generating station to apply on their website.

PHOTO: A mobile solar charger en route to the Rockaways. Source: Solar One

Two weeks after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast, and still a few hundred thousand people of the millions initially hit are without power. Those in the dark, told repeatedly that their power would be back in “a couple of days”, “the weekend,” “Friday,” etc., have been purchasing emergency generators and extra blankets—there hasn’t been a lot of reason for them to hope that their utility’s latest reassurances are true.

Meanwhile, city and state governments have been blasting utilities for not recovering fast enough, in particular, the Long Island Power Authority is being charged with failure to properly manage the recovery. But given a hurricane like Sandy, it’s hard to say what “fast enough” really means.

Utilities and governments, who would like to know how effective their recovery efforts have been and how to improve them, could be helped by something as simple as a change in the kind of data gathered and processed in the aftermath of disasters that cause widespread outages, says Chuanyi Ji, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Ji and former Ph.D student Supaporn Erjongmanee began looking at the impact of hurricanes on the communication infrastructure in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina. She and her students collected data on Internet outages in collaboration with colleagues from AT&T (at time, BellSouth), looking at patterns of failure and recovery in an attempt to pinpoint the period of peak impact—the point at which failures were occurring at their fastest rate and recovery at its slowest.

The research, which Ji continued using data from 2008's Hurricane Ike, led to the conclusion that Internet service disruptions were typically caused by power failures. The group also determined that, on the whole, the Internet was fairly reliable, and its work would be more useful if applied to a network more susceptible to severe weather—the power network.

Ji and Ph.D student Yun Wei discovered that one major parameter being tracked in disasters is simply, how many customers are without power? This might make for a nice graph—a steadily (hopefully) dropping number as repairs are made—but it doesn’t provide sufficient information nor insights, Ji said. It doesn’t tell how severe outages are, whether a recovery is fast or slow, or how vulnerable or resilient a regional network is.

“If we can figure out what variables best characterize failure and recovery processes, we would know what to plot for customers and providers. This requires intelligent approaches and smart data processing. For example, we need to plot failure rates, not simply how many users are without power,” Ji says. “If we know how many new failures occur every half an hour, we have information that can tell us how severe outages are, and whether recovery is able to respond accordingly.”

Ji and Wei also suggest utilities put failure rate and recovery together and look at the interaction of the two; this way, they say, utilities see how fast components are failing, how fast or slowly recovery progress, and the disparity between the two. Outage numbers alone don’t give you that information.”

With the right kind of data and intelligent methods in hand, utilities can reassure customers that the rate of recovery is increasing, perhaps, or, based on historical data, that the recovery will either pick up quickly, or slow down, within some amount of time. This would let customers plan their coping strategies better. The utilities can also compare current curves against historical events, to verify that recovery is going well or, perhaps, to test new procedures or technologies and their impact on failure and recovery. They would also have a clear picture of the resilience of their network, compared to other impacted regions.

In the long run, Ji said, the kinds of models developed using large-scale data and intelligent methods could lead to identifying potential failures ahead of time, enabling utilities to be proactive.

``Real-data is pertinent to this research but often unavailable, “ Ji said. “A utility provider provided us data from a hurricane in the past. That helped us greatly with this research.” But she’s scrambling to get data from utilities impacted by Hurricane Sandy to incorporate into her model. “With their data and our algorithms,” she says, “we can contribute to a smarter and more resilient grid.”

Photo: Power crews repair lines after Hurricane Charley in Florida. Source: FEMA

Fig: According to Chuanyi Ji’s model and available data, the typical period of rapid recovery of a power network affected by a hurricane is 12.65 hours; after that, recovery is slow and can take days. In this graph, the red curve represents a typical recovery rate; other curves represent overly optimistic or pessimistic projections.

What do you do when you must entrust a very expensive car to a devil-may-care ruffian like, say, James Bond? If you’re Q, the testy, headmasterish boffin who serves as Bond’s quartermaster, you begin with a lecture, like this one, from the 1995 Bond film “Goldeneye”:

Q: Need I remind you, 007, that you have a license to kill, not to break the traffic laws." 

That done, you cover your posterior by  mocking up a few cheap copies of the car to take the brunt of the action. The producers of the just-released Bond flick, “Skyfall,” did so by means of a replication machine that would have warmed the heart of the original Q.

The VX4000, a massive, three-dimensional printer made by the German company Voxeljet, takes a scanned-in, digital representation of the object to be copied, then lays down thin layers of particles bound together with glue. Layer by layer the object grows, in the process perhaps enclosing spaces—for instance, the interior of a car with all its furnishings.

However in this case the subcontractor, a British company called Propshop Modelmakers, decided against replicating the entire car in a single unit because that would have required building at a 1:3 scale. Instead, it commissioned Voxeljet to make it in 18 sections that could be mounted on a steel frame, like the one the original car was built on. The filmmakers ordered up three copies of the car, just to be sure.

Why, you may ask, did they care so deeply about keeping the car in pristine condition? Because in “Skyfall,” Bond—played by Daniel Craig—goes all nostalgic on us by driving none other than the iconic 1960s-era Aston Martin that Sean Connery drove in “Goldfinger,” way back in 1964. That fabulous silver sports car was sold two years ago for 2.6 million British pounds, a price that’s hardly surprising because the car came fully loaded—oil slick gizmo, fold-out machine gun pods, and changeable license plates (as if there could ever be two such cars).

Most memorable is the feature Q mentions to a bemused Sean Connery at the very end of his tour of the car (view it for yourself on YouTube):

Q: Now this one I’m particularly keen about. See the gear lever here? If you take the top off, you’ll find a little red button. Now, whatever you do, don’t touch it.

Bond: Why not?

Q: Because you’ll release this section of the roof and engage and fire the passenger ejection seat. Sshwoop! [makes an upward movement with his arms]

Bond: Ejector seat? Surely you’re joking!

Q: I never joke about my work, 007.

Language barriers are starting to crumble. This month Japan's dominant mobile phone operator, NTT DoCoMo, introduced the world's first app for real-time voice translation. When a user with a DoCoMo smartphone places a call through the app, he speaks in Japanese and his words are promptly translated into English, Mandarin, or Korean. To complete the conversational circuit, the other person's words are translated from any of those languages back into Japanese. 

With this debut we've taken one step closer to building a mechanical Babel fish, the extraordinarily useful creature imagined by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As any lover of sci-fi knows, the Babel fish is a leech-like critter that is inserted into the ear and lives in the brain, where it feeds on brain waves and provides simultaneous translation of any language in the universe. NTT DoCoMo's app can't match that universal utility with its current limit of four languages—but at least you don't have to slip something slimy into your ear to make it work. 

AT&T's research lab showed off its own translation service earlier this year, but NTT's is further along and seems better integrated into the phone call itself.

The free DoCoMo app relies on the cloud for the heavy processing, namely speech recognition, machine translation, and voice synthesis. According to a NTT DoCoMo newsletter, the app's reliance on the cloud allows for unobtrusive upgrades and the most important feature, near-instant translation:

Trials have shown that the average processing time takes just about two seconds, fast enough for a reasonably natural conversation under the most unnatural of conditions, i.e., two people conversing easily without understanding each other’s language!

To test the app, the company gave out a beta version that handled Japanese and English to tourist facilities, retail companies, and hospitals. NTT DoCoMo says the trial app had about 90 percent accuracy in recognizing Japanese words, and about 80 percent accuracy in recognizing English words. 

The company didn't say how accurate or artful the translations of those words were, though, so I asked for a demonstration. Spokesman So Hiroki graciously complied, and on Tuesday evening my desk phone rang. When I picked it up, a recording told me that this was an automated translation call, and that I should press 0 to continue. Then I heard a man say "Moshi moshi," a gentle chime, and then a soothing woman's voice (not unlike the lady who lives inside many car navigation systems) say "Good evening!" 

I quickly discovered that the system is great at pleasantries, not so great at more complicated communications. At one point I asked Hiroki and his colleagues on the call which languages would be added to the system next. The English answer I got back: "It is European edition such as French and German to challenge next."

Still, it was an impressive demonstration, and the team declared their determination (in grammatically correct  and understandable English!) to improve translation precision. According to Hiroki, NTT DoCoMo spent two years developing this service because they're looking for ways to fight an alarming trend for the telecom industry: the rapidly declining rate of voice calls. 

In another mode, the app can also be used when two people meet face-to-face: They speak their respective languages, and the app provides both voice translation and text on the phone's display screen.  

Image: NTT DoCoMo

Being the first all-electric electric-drive winner of Motor Trend mag’s "Car of the Year" award gives Tesla’s Model S bragging rights that even a non-techie can love. What’s more, it validates what Mitt Romney had dismissed as a “loser” company as one with a future in the marketplace.

As actual techies, we here at Spectrum loved the company even before the first production model of its inaugural car, the Tesla Roadster, hit the road. When it finally did enter the showroom, we gave it more love with a berth on our "Top Ten Tech Cars."

That Roadster’s six-figure price and two-seat capacity made it a impulse buy for hedge-fund managers, the kind of toy you generally see only in Palm Beach or on the cover of one of the glossy auto buff books that populate the news stands. But as its name suggests, the new S is a sedan, and it can seat an entire family—up to seven people, the company claims. And it goes for the low, low price of $90 000.

Now we’re talking. This baby is for the masses—of moderately successful investment bankers, at any rate. Or child-rearing cosmetic surgeons.

The idea, of course, is to establish the car, ramp up production, realize economies of scale, and slowly bring down the price of future models that use some of the same parts. If it ever gets to around $50K, expect an all-electric car that can perform like a BMW to begin selling like one.

Clocks low in the gravity well run slower than those higher up. That’s just a relativistic fact of life—one that we take advantage of every time we use the Global Positioning System. (I remember how cool I thought it was when I first learned that clocks in orbiting GPS satellites have to be programmed to correct for relativistic time dilation.) Within the past year, experimentalists comparing the speeds of widely separated atomic clocks (connected via fiber optic cable) have shown that current chronometers, with uncertainties around 10^-16, are sensitive enough to detect the change in time’s flow that accompanies a shift of a meter or less in relative elevation.

The geoid is the Earth-swaddling surface of equal gravitational potential that more or less coincides with global mean sea level. Or, from the chronometric viewpoint, the surface on which all clocks tick at the same rate. The geoid isn’t smooth. As we have known for years (and continue to prove with increasing detail), the geoid undulates. Its rise and fall betray details of objects and events far below the surface.

Writing in Geophysical Journal International (the paper is also available on arXiv.org), a team of researchers from Switzerland, the United States, and Romania shows that clocks accurate to within 10^-18 could map the geoid to within about a centimeter and show the sizes and locations of mass variations far below the surface. Since the accuracy of standard reference clocks has increased at a steady order-of-magnitude-per-decade since the 1950s—and since newly built optical atomic clocks and proposed designs for highly charged ion and nuclear clocks promise to increase that rate substantially—it is clearly time prepare for an age in which we can map the crust and mantle by watching time slip by.

Imagine a bubble of magma 20 percent denser than the surrounding rock. University of Zurich physicist Ruxandra Bondarescu and her co-workers show that a clock with 10^-18 accuracy can easily detect and locate a 1.5-kilometer-radius, high-density sphere centered 2 km below the surface. It could also unmask a 4 km-radius sphere 45 km below our feet. Time changes can reveal subtler differences, too—such as a 1 percent density anomaly 10 km in radius centered 37 km underground.

Established methods (like those used in a recently published report linking variations in the Earth’s magnetic field to mass flows deep under the Atlantic and Indian Oceans) use satellites to detect variations in gravitational force. Bondarescu, et al maintain that chronometric mapping of the geoid presents some distinct advantages. Clock readings measure the potential surface directly. The researchers point out that force (the first derivative of the potential) must be integrated (over a path) to yield figures for potential, reducing resolution. Though acceleration is a vector, moreover, many instruments record only its magnitude, and not its precise direction. This also, say the chronometrists, compromises accuracy of the geoid measurement, and potentially degrades resolution of subterranean features.

Image: European Space Agency ESA, D. Ducros