Tech Talk

In that wonderful mixed-up world of governments trying to support business development (presumably to grow the greater economy) and at the same time maintain tax revenues, the UK government has just unleashed a classic.

Over at TNTLog, which has first-hand knowledge of the subject being that itâ''s London based, they are decrying the recent announcement by the UK government to raise the capital gains tax (CGT) on businesses from 10% to 18% by April 2008.

It was all well intentioned to be sure. More than likely they were aiming at imposing this tax increase on large private equity firms that buy a company for half-a-billion dollars and then sell it two years later for $2 billion.

While that was likely the design, the large private equity firms the tax increase is targeted for will likely find different ways of structuring deals so that they donâ''t feel the effects. And for those small entrepreneurs who built up a business and have an opportunity to sell it and make their fortuneâ'¿well, they are on the short end of the stick.

They will need to wait to see if they can double the price of the sale to make up for the doubling of the tax increase. Or, more likely, sell at a discounted price before April 2008 to the private equity companies for which the tax was intended.

Meanwhile the UK government through its Trade and Investment arm is running a conference to highlight all the wonderful nanotech companies that have been developed in the Kingdom. Luckily the conference is this November, just before all the companies either pack up their bags and move out of the country or get sold off to disappear into the nether world of â''reorganizationâ''.

And where are all the nanotech industry associations that have popped all over the UK that are supposed to be supporting these small companies while this bit of legislation promises to decimate the few companies that exist? Why theyâ''re working out new codes of ethics for these companies.

We all remember when the Internet bubble burst. If not, hereâ''s a quick reminder. Internet-related companies that had billion-dollar valuations on the stock market based on virtually no revenues started to smack up against reality in March of 2000, and then became a complete mess for investors and the general economy by 2001.

This was hard on investors and the companies, many of which closed their doors and others that are still trying to recover.

But perhaps it was hardest on the pundit community, a collection of investment tip gurus, Internet industry magazines and other assorted peddlers of so-called wisdom on where the real money could be made on the Internet.

But 2001 was a fortuitous year for the Internet economy to come crashing down because it coincided with the creation of the National Nanotechnology Initiative and talk of a $1 trillion market by 2015.

To be sure investors started to see sugar-plum fairies dancing in their heads with the prospect of somewhere to make their next million, but investors are a wary lotâ''itâ''s money after all.

The real group that took off with this idea of nanotech investing was the pundit community, still reeling from the loss of the best cash cow they ever had. Only this time they came equipped with a new name and a whole new vocabulary. â''Revolutionaryâ'' and â''a new industrial revolutionâ'' and a whole lexicon of hyperbole that would get those investors just afraid and greedy enough to give it a shot.

This community from small to large even went so far as to establish â''nanotechnology indexesâ'' (Merrill Lynch Nanotechnology Index, PowerShares Lux Nanotech, Global Crown Capital Nanotechnology Index, Nanotechnology.com Small Technology Index), which present a weird assortment of small companies with no revenues to industrial leaders from other markets, like Toyota, as representing the "nanotechnology industry".

But alas, there has been no quick buck to be made in nanotechnology (it hasnâ''t even enjoyed the bubble of the Internet with its accompanying huge IPOs). Just yesterday I received a bitter e-mail (the contents can be found on the senderâ''s blog) outlining how disappointing nanotech investing has been, accompanied with claims that this is what they warned against all along despite authoring a book prophetically entitled "Nanotech Fortunes".

No, investing in nanotech has been an unhappy game: withdrawn IPOs, publicly traded â''high flyersâ'' suddenly losing 80% of their market value, and private companies tied up in usually fruitless quests to find financing.

Of course, the companies making stuff with nanotech have chugged along quite nicely. But they were doing that before the term â''nanotechâ'' came along, you can include most of the worldâ''s large chemical companies on that list.

The big disappointment from all of this has been for the pundit community. But they are resilient and flexible lot. They just take on a new incarnation: CleanTech investing, or whatever may be the idea du jour.

Nanotechnology has received the imprimatur to say that the materials phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance (GMR) is one of its first applications from none other than the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

GMR â''can be considered one of the first real applications of the promising field of nanotechnology,â'' says the Nobel citation that awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics to Albert Fert of Université Paris-Sud in France and Peter Grÿnberg of Forschungszentrum Jÿlich in Germany for their independent co-discovery of GMR back in 1988.

Beyond this being a boost to the field of nanotechnology (basically nanotechnology is now attributed with the technology that makes it possible to read data on todayâ''s hard disk drives), it represents one of the most astonishingly fast developments of the discovery of a physical phenomenon to a commercial product.

From the weird world of quantum physics a quantum mechanical effect is discovered and in the span of less than 10 years it makes possible the extremely large hard disk drives we currently enjoy in our computers.

Much of the credit for that feat should go to Stuart Parkin at IBMâ''s Almaden Research Center. He did much of the work that took GMR from a material phenomenon to a practical device for the electronics industry.

I am not sure how the Nobel Prize committee chooses their winners, but this seems an odd omission not to have included Parkin in the prize.

But this doesnâ''t seem to have affected Parkin in the slightest. He is right back at it by proposing a novel memory device that uses nanowires that could â''reinventâ'' memory.

For most people, middle school didnâ''t exactly represent the best years of their lives. But for the folks at RE-SEED, middle school is prime time to capture a childâ''s interest in engineering and science. All it takes is a few good engineers and scientists willing to get back into an eighth grade classroom.

RE-SEED, or Retirees Enhancing Science Education through Experiments and Demonstrations, began with a program working out of Northeastern University in 1991, expanding to include engineers and scientists in Decatur, Alabama; Palo Alto California; Denver, Colorado; Montgomery County, Maryland; Biddeford, Maine; Charlottesville and Fairfax County, Virginia; and Greenville, South Carolina. Itâ''s supported by the IEEE Life Member Foundation, and a handful of corporate and nonprofit sponsors. Silicon Valley engineers have been participating for about a decade.

IEEE Member Steve Fields, a former engineer with National Semiconductor who is now vice president of business development for Vasucorp, brought his engineering skills last year to Jordan Middle School in Palo Alto. At first, he says, he simply helped solve problems for the teacher; he changed batteries in timers, he ran to the store for replacement flints for propane lighters, he passed out papers. Even passing out papers, he says, felt good, because it was an opportunity to contribute. Once the students felt comfortable enough with him to ask questions, he could do more.

â''We were studying the periodic chart,â'' he says. â''When we got to silicon, a kid asked why this is called Silicon Valley, given thereâ''s no sand here. I told them about when I came here in the 60s, and how the semiconductor industry grew, and how a chip is made. I drew a transistor on the board, and talked about chemistry and etching. A regular teacher couldnâ''t do that.â''

When the students got to talking about uranium, Fields taught another brief lesson. â''This was about the time that the Russian spy was poisoned, we talked about that. And a kid asked how you create an atomic bomb, I told them enough so they could understand how an atomic bomb works.â''

Fields focused, in particular, on encouraging the girls to jump in. â''A couple of the girls were interested, you could see it in their faces, but were afraid to ask questions. I would go over to one of them and say, â''Whatâ''s on your mind?â'' And sheâ''d ask a question, and then Iâ''d see the sparkle in her eye when she really got it.â''

Being a RESEED volunteer requires making a weekly commitment for the school year and attending a training class. Silicon Valley RESEED volunteers are scheduled to be trained in late November. Theyâ''ve got 31 recruits so far for the 2007-2008 school year but are looking for more. It is not too late to go back to middle school.

For those interested in working with the program, contact Peter K. Mueller, RE-SEED coordinator, pklausmATmac.com

Talk about lighting a fire under your behind. An Atlanta TV news outlet reported over the weekend that a man working at the city's international airport was shaken up when his iPod Nano caught fire in his pants. According to station WSB, airport employee Danny Williams didn't realize anything was amiss until he saw flames lapping up at him.

"So I look down and I see flames coming up to my chest," Williams told a reporter. "I'm still kind of freaked out that after only a year and a half my iPod caught fire in my pocket."

Williams, of Douglasville, Ga., said he was lucky that a glossy piece of paper in his pocket separated the faulty music player from his skin when the overheated device set his clothing ablaze. Williams was not injured in the incident, which seems to have been caused by a defective lithium-ion battery. Reports of Li-ion batteries erupting in flames have been reported widely over the last few years (see "Bad, Bad Batteries from our August 2006 issue).

Williams, who works at an airport kiosk, told WSB that he was also lucky that airport security personnel were not in the vicinity when the accident happened. "If TSA had come by and seen me smoking, they could have honestly thought I was a terrorist," Williams commented.

Naturally, his mother took a disapproving view of the entire affair. "It could have happened when we were sleeping, it could have happened when he was driving and the outcome could have been much worse," Elaine Williams told the station.

Apple refused to comment on the incident, according to WSB. The station reports, however, that Apple has agreed to exchange the damaged Nano for a new model at no extra charge. Apparently, though, it did not discuss the matter of Williams' burned pants.

That's corporate citizenship.

From our Japan correspondent John Boyd:

While cell phone users in the United States may just be starting to explore 3G mobile phone services, their Japanese counterparts are veterans and have for some time been making good use of sophisticated applications such as ones that turn their mobiles into convenient wallet phone to make electronic cash purchases and credit card payments. So whatâ''s the next big thing, they ask?

If NTT DoCoMo, Japanâ''s biggest cell phone network operator, has its way, the answer is Super 3G, a major upgrade for UMTS, a widely used third generation cell phone technology. DoCoMo has taken on something of a leading role in promoting Super 3G inside the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) a consortium of wireless operators and vendors, including Vodafone, Lucent, Motorola, and Nokia, working to create global specifications for 3G technologies. Essentially, Super 3G is targeting a useable download transmission speed of around 100 Mbps, with an uplink speed of 50 Mbps, and reaching much higher peak speeds in both cases.

At CEATEC DoCoMo gave its first public demonstration of the technology that is still under development and which is not expected to be deployed until 2010. Taking up a major chunk of DoCoMoâ''s large pavilion, the Super 3G demo consists of a streaming server supplying video content to a prototype Base Station developed by Fujitsu. The base station is capable of a peak download transmission speed of around 900 Mbps using multiple input multiple output (MIMO): a technology that multiplexes different data streams using multiple antennas for transmitting and receiving on the same frequency.

The Base Station is connected by wireless to what DoCoMo calls a Mobile Station, a large cabinet full of electronic components that one day will be whittled way down in size and morphed into a Super 3G handset. However, this was the only segment in the system to actually use wireless connectivity, everything else being wired for the demonstration.

Still, the result was impressive, with DoCoMo achieving a steady download data throughput of 200 Mbps over a bandwidth of only 20 MHz using a 4 x4 MIMO arrangement (four transmitting and four receiving antennas) while control latency between idle and active states was just 100 milliseconds.

To show what a throughput of 200 Mbps (300 Mbps at peak) can do, DoCoMo streamed the data into twelve separate channels and displayed the results on twelve monitors. Nine of these displayed separate videos in H.264 format for a combined capacity of 25 Mbps, while the other three monitors displayed videos in the MPEG2 format for a combined 185 Mbps, with the total throughput reaching approximately 200 Mbps. Simultaneously, a video conference set-up employing the uplink mode was used to transmit live video of the attendees viewing the demonstration at a transmission rate of about 25 Mbps.

Super 3G represents a break with the current 3G infrastructure, so it will require a new round of heavy investment before it can be deployed. Thatâ''s the bad news. The good news is that the same infrastructure can be used for future 4G systems. As a DoCoMo staffer said, â''We see Super 3G as being a bridge to 4G.â'' And one that Japanese users no doubt will be the first to step across.

While North American automakers are struggling to get through "one of the deepest auto industry crises in Detroitâ''s history," their Brazilian counterparts are having the best year ever.

Brazilians never bought so many vehicles, according to a report in Exame, Brazil's leading business and economy magazine. (Full disclosure: I worked as a reporter for that magazine years ago.) Sales reached an all-time record of 1.2 million vehicles in the first half of this year. At that pace, assuming it will continue, sales are expected to reach 2.35 million vehicles before the year is over. That means one car sold every 14 seconds, making 2007 the best year in the history of Brazil's auto industry.

Whatâ''s going on in the country of Carnival?

First, to put things into perspective, auto sales in Brazil are one order of magnitude smaller than in the United States. Second, we must emphasize that not all auto makers in North America are having a bad time. You know who we're talking about.

(A summary based on New York Times reports: Ford does not expect to make a profit in North America until 2009; the Chrysler Group reported a loss for this summer of $1.5 billion; and G.M. cut 30,000 jobs and closed nearly a dozen plants. Sales of vehicles in the United States this year could end up below last year's 16.55 million, meaning they would be the lowest since 1998. And the biggest blow, at least symbolically: "Detroit auto companiesâ'' grip on the American automobile market ended in July, when dismal auto sales gave foreign nameplates the lead for the first time ever...")

Now, back to Brazil.

To keep up with demand, Brazilian auto factories shifted into high gear. Factories like Honda's, in the outskirts of São Paulo, which increased daily production in 50 percent.

Marcelo Onaga and Carolina Meyer report in their Exame cover story (read the story in Portuguese or see an OK translation courtesy of Google) that Honda "invested 200 million reais [US $109 million] late last year, introduced a third work shift in April, and recently reduced in 20 minutes the workers' lunchtime." (A decision taken in agreement with the workers union.) The cars produced there, the Honda Fit [photo above] and Civic, don't stay for a minute at the factory lot -- they're immediately trucked to the dealers.

The Brazilian auto makers are also churning out new models (more than 30 this year, or double that of 2006), Exame reports.

But thatâ''s not to say things have always been good for automakers in Brazil. In fact, for the past ten years, the industry has been stuck in second gear, if not reverse.

Back in 1997, the future looked bright and the industry went through a great period of expansion. Eleven new factories were built, at an estimated cost of $16 billion, and seven new auto makers came to Brazil, according to Exame. The industryâ''s production capacity grew to an estimated 3 million cars per year.

But then a series of economic crisis hit the country, sending interest rates through the roof. Sales went south, plummeting 40 percent in the subsequent years. Losses were estimated in $7 billion, Exame reports, making for turbulent times for auto workers and executives. The four largest automakers in Brazil (Fiat, Ford, GM, and Volkswagen) had 15 presidents during the past decade. Chrysler left the country.

Whatâ''s different now? Exame explains that the current scenario resulted from an unprecedented combination of factors. The most important is the economic stability. Lower interest rates help consumers finance their purchases. Brazilians buy their cars by paying for them in as many as 84 monthly installments! As one auto executive told Exame, for consumers, the car's price tag doesn't matter as much as the amount to be paid each month.

Another factor helping the industry is that consumers began looking for more sophisticated cars. Back in 2000, only 38 percent of new cars sold had air conditioning; now 63 percent have. Exame reports that Brazilians are buying larger and more powerful cars as well. Sales of compact sedans with 1-liter-plus engines grew 44.5 percent in the first half of this year. Sales of more sophisticated vehicles means higher profit margins for makers.

(It's all good news for auto makers, but to put things into perspective again, consider that most Brazilians replace their cars every three years or longer; in the United States, where 56 percent of vehicles are leased, consumers switch cars after one year on average.)

And although things look good now that doesnâ''t mean theyâ''ll remain good, of course. For one thing, Exame reports that even though internal sales are going up, exports are plummeting. In fact, Brazil's cars are among the world's most expensive (mostly due to a cascade of taxes). And while investments pour into Chinaâ''s and Indiaâ''s auto industry, the next great markets, Brazilâ''s doesnâ''t seem to occupy a place of relevance in the global scenario.

Still, if youâ''re an auto exec, youâ''d probably rather be in Brazil than in Detroit these days. In Brazil, thereâ''s reason to party, and they know how to party there.

Fifty years ago, the world was a simpler place. It was not a less hostile place, but it certainly was simpler. Many of the concerns we have today were with us then, and many of the routines we have today, we had then too. But then along came a little, shiny satellite -- which Saswato R. Das and I wrote about yesterday ("Sputnik: Fifty Years Later") -- and things began to change rapidly. Looking back to early October 1957 reminds us of how far we have progressed and, yet, how little we have changed.

Here are a few examples. In the U.S., the news of the day was dominated by a crisis in Little Rock, Ark., where nine African-American students had attempted to attend classes at a previously segregated high school. They were denied entrance by local forces. It took an order from the President of the United States to ensure the so-called Little Rock Nine received the justice of an equal opportunity for an education.

In Miami, Fla., the Teamsters labor union elected James Riddle Hoffa, under investigation for wiretapping and perjury, to be their new president. On American TV, CBS premiered a new family sitcom called "Leave It to Beaver". In sports, the 1957 World Series pitted the Milwaukee Braves against the iconic New York Yankees, but the Braves prevailed. At the movies, the biggest hit was "The Bridge on the River Kwai", but "Jailhouse Rock" with Elvis Presley would soon give it a run for its money (and the title song also ended up the smash hit of the year).

So distant and yet so familiar. I bring this all up because my writing partner on the Sputnik package, Saswato Das, yesterday penned an op-ed for the Newark Star Ledger called "We Are the Children of Sputnik". In it, Das writes that people in the old days expected the new Space Age to deliver fantastic discoveries and achievements, leading to the stars. He has them wondering, though, fifty years later: 'Where are the moon bases, the hotels in orbit, and spaceports catering to regular spaceflights? Shouldn't we have been vacationing on Mars, or at least the moon, by now?'

Yet, as people, we can only progress so far and change so much before we return to our old ways.

Das reminds us of this in his summation of what happened to the excitement that the space race engendered in the years after the launch of Sputnik:

In the years after Sputnik I, Space Age progress was driven by the competition and macho posturing between two superpowers engaged in the Cold War. Having lost primacy in launching the first satellite, the U.S. took on the challenge to be first to set foot on the moon. The two nations raced to be first not only to prove their technological prowess but to win the hearts and minds of the world. Once the race ended in 1969, the urgency changed, and the Space Age suddenly seemed old news.

What a shame.

Das is a little younger than I am, so he doesn't remember first-hand what the early days of spaceflight felt like. I was just a little boy living in the Sierra Mountain region of California when news of Sputnik arrived. My father was a field surveyor for the U.S. Geological Survey, measuring maps of the rugged region. One night he took me out to look at the stars, which were particularly clear in that part of the country. He had his professional field glasses with him, and after staring up at the sky for a while, he pointed up and handed the binoculars to me, after adjusting the eyepieces. And after a bit of fumbling, I finally saw in the lenses what he had been pointing at: two little moving lights. One was tiny, the other was bigger and longer. "That's the Sputnik," he said, with little emotion. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen, though.

Fifty years later, in speaking with the legendary Fred Durant, I mentioned this story. He replied, "Oh, you saw the dot in the 'i'." Then he explained how most early observers who trudged out into the night to see what the first satellite looked like in person, stared up at the heavens and only saw the longer shape of the two, the orbiting booster rocket, which would soon fall back to Earth, and mistook it for Sputnik. That comment made me almost as thrilled now as I was then.

Das is completely right about how the public has grown bored over the years by the prospects of spaceflight. In a way, we have all fallen back to the Earth. We have problems we need to address right here: Black children and white children still have trouble getting along in high school, for instance. We have our distractions: movies and TV shows and songs to download (not to mention the World Series).

When I recently asked an old Space Age veteran, Bert Fowler, what he thought it would take to re-energize the American public's interest in the space program, he said, "Perhaps another Sputnik would help?"

Maybe we'll get one. The Chinese are planning for some fairly ambitious missions in the coming years. And a couple of days ago NASA and Roscosmos (the Russian apace agency) announced plans to share equipment in future programs. So maybe what seems so old now will become new again.

As Das wrote in his piece yesterday: 'One thing is for sure: Space is now part of our destiny. We are all children of Sputnik.... For a child in school today, it may not be wrong to dream of a vacation on the moon.'

Let's hope he's right, for the sake of future kids.

Earthmine, presenting at Demofall last week in San Diego, just seemed, at first, to be a rip-off of Google StreetView, ho-hum. But there turned out to be a lot behind those pictures of a San Francisco street. In fact, company senior vice president Kris Kelsay told me later, the pictures are really just an overlay, the user interface to a powerful geospacial database.

In the demonstration, a few mouse clicks outlined a building and the software instantly brought up calculations of the buildingâ''s volume; useful, perhaps, in calculating material volume for teardowns, or, perhaps, scaffolding needs for a renovation. The company also expects customers to include insurance and real estate companies. The software can tag the map to note the exact location of manhole covers; this is not exciting to me, for the average user, itâ''s probably more fun zooming in your neighborâ''s window on Google StreetView, but to city planners and others who have to deal with the city infrastructure, this info is really useful.

Earthmine does a drive-by, using GPS locators and a bank of high resolution SLR cameras, to gather the data; a city the size of San Francisco takes the company three weeks to map. That data can be manipulated or exported to other applications.

But Earthmine is easier to understand when youâ''re looking at it. So Iâ''ll tell you more about the technology while you watch this minute or so of video.

An essay that appeared in the Spring 2007 edition of The New Atlantis entitled â''Nanoethics as a Discipline?â'' is one of the most clear and insightful reports I have yet seen on the state of the all the social, ethical, legal and environmental hullabaloo that has been surrounding nanotechnology for the past few years.

It spares no one, nor should it, in revealing all the weirdness that has transpired in this newly emerging â''disciplineâ''.

This, of course, has raised the measured ire of those who are either directly or indirectly the target of this probing essay, with telling titles to their rebuttals like â''A Necessary Absurdityâ''. Personally, the only necessary absurdity I can think of is a Monty Python sketch.

But I suppose itâ''s all fine and good if people want to set up â''think tanksâ'' to muse over thought experiments about what might, or might not, happen and how to best handle these various scenarios, but is this really the best use of time and resources in an emerging field?

The author, Adam Keiper, rightly emphasizes the lack of progress in determining the safety of engineered nanomaterials, quoting the Royal Societyâ''s disappointment that their recommendations made in 2004 have not been pursued in greater earnest.

However, I am not sure that the research into the toxicology of nanomaterials is quite as â''fundamentally disorganizedâ'' as he claims. I think the appearance of disorganization may be the product of this being an international issue with the need to take many regulatory bodies into accountâ''not just the US ones.

But Keiper finds hope in a group of toxicologists proposing a research agenda that will focus these efforts:

â'¢ Development of instruments for detecting nanomaterials in air and water

â'¢ Methods for evaluating the toxicity of nanomaterials

â'¢ New ways to predict and evaluate the effects of nanomaterials â''from cradle to grave

Pursuing this agenda may or may not bring order to the chaos Keiper perceives. It seems the issue is as much bureaucratic as anything else. But these tools are needed, and it seems to be one of the best places to start for determining the real hazard of engineered nanomaterials.

It seems a more fruitfulâ''and perhaps more ethicalâ''course of effort than considering the ethical challenges of some technology that may not even come into existence.