Tech Talk

from the desk of IEEE Spectrum executive editor Glenn Zorpette:

Here's the UN being even more clueless than usual. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will convene in December to demand that everybody in the world stop using so much darned energy. And the meeting will be on the resort island of Bali, in Indonesia! Forget about the spectacle of grossly overpaid bureaucrats feasting on rare delicacies in air-conditioned comfort while they demand that everybody cut their energy use radically. Think about the bazillion gallons (oops, sorry, cubic meters) of jet fuel needed to get all those pampered, overweight desk jockies to the other side of the world and back. And to keep them comfortable and well-fed in tropical heat.

And this is the body that Congress thought John Bolton wasn't good enough to join.

Voluntarily paying for somebody else to reduce carbon emissions to compensate for something youâ''re doing to increase themâ''few other subjects have aroused so much controversy in the last year, inside and outside the environmental community. Climate change skeptics naturally see the whole idea of carbon offsets as silly and pointless. But even those who see carbon reduction as an urgent necessity wonder whether offsets really help.

How do you know whether you're getting real value when you purchase a carbon offset?

Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, thinks on balance that offset programs help individuals see that they â''are neither blameless nor helpless, and can really make a difference.â'' But Daniel F. Becker, director of the Sierra Clubâ''s climate program, has compared offsets to papal indulgencesâ''the get-out-of-hell-free cards that were being peddled in Germany in the early sixteenth century, when Martin Luther launched the Protestant reformation.

The press has been quick to identify cases in which carbon offsets have been purchased to dubious effect, no doubt leaving the environment-minded consumer more confused than ever about whether thereâ''s any way of doing this right. Last week, for example, the Los Angeles Times reported that the makers of Al Goreâ''s film â''An Inconvenient Truthâ'' paid a broker, Native Energy, to purchase offsets to compensate for carbon emitted in making the documentary. If the paper got the facts right, the film makers paid $12 per ton to purchase the credits, but Native Energy sold them to fund a methane collector on a Pennsylvania farm and a small Alaska wind turbine complex, at $2.40 and $4.00 per ton. In both cases, the projects would have gone ahead without the carbon credits, and the offsets provided only a small fraction of their costs.

An obvious moral is that if youâ''re thinking of buying offsets from a broker, try to make sure that the broker isnâ''t skimming two thirds or three quarters of what you pay. But thereâ''s also a larger message, which is that you also shouldnâ''t buy your offsets at too low a price, if you want to really accomplish something. Though it may sound counter-intuitive at first blush, if you look for too good a bargain and end up spending too little for something, the thing youâ''re buying may not be any good.

It helps to think of carbon offsets in the larger context of carbon trading because, after all, when you buy offsets youâ''re doing essentially the same thing that a large coal-burning utility does when it buys emission allowances from some party that has found a way to cut emissions economically. In the carbon trading system that Europe has set up, the initial carbon allowances were made too liberally, and carbon pricesâ''at around $5/tonâ''were much too low to have much impact on corporate decision making. The result was a windfall for the big carbon emitters that got most of the allowances.

For carbon trading to have a really strong impact on investment decisions, says James Cameron, vice president of the trading firm Climate Change Capital in London, prices would have to be in the vicinity of $20 or $25 per ton.

So hereâ''s a rule of thumb: if somebody offers you a carbon offset at less than $20/ton, donâ''t buy it. What you want is something that will prompt somebody to do something good that otherwise would not have happened. At less than $20, you probably wonâ''t be getting that.

Three years ago (in Fall of 2004 to be exact) I authored a report for PIRA entitled â''The Future of Nanotechnology in Printing and Packagingâ''.

Needless to say, when discussing nanotechnology in the printing and packaging industries you have to cover product tagging. I compiled information on nanobarcodes and companies like, NanoInk and Oxonica, Inc, formerly Nanoplex Technologies.

Jumping ahead to today, Converting Magazine has just reprinted an article that is available online and comes from one of PIRAâ''s publications , Brand Protection News, that catalogues many of the companies and technologies I had identified in the report.

But there was a crucial omission. In the Fall of 2004, Singular-ID had not yet been formed so it was not included in the report.

But the company exists now and absolutely, positively needs to be included in article entitled â''Role of nanotechnology in brand protectionâ''. Unfortunately, it was not. It should have been.

Indiaâ''s Economic Times have just reported on research that indicates that Indiaâ''s nanotechnology spending is below global levels.

The operative word here is â''Spendingâ''. It seems they allocate the money they just canâ''t get around to spending it.

This is particularly perplexing given that the current president of India, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, is a great proponent of nanotechnology.

This lack of spending prompted the president to note in January of this year that "more than 20 per cent of the funds [for science spending] had remained under-utilised during 2005â''2006," as reported in the Indian newspaper, The Hindu.

While the original article in the Hindu is no longer available online, TNTLog has a crucial quote from the piece:

"One may be tempted to ask what prompted the President to make such a remark now. It is quite likely that, having looked at the 2005-06 expenditure figures, he must have discovered, to his utter despair, that the Rs.200 crores allocated for the national Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Mission (Nano Mission), of which he was the prime moving force, had to be surrendered entirely unspent. The total amount unspent by the DST is 14.68 per cent of the total allocation in the 2005-06 budget, and the Nano Mission alone accounts for 12 per cent."

From an outside perspective it appears to be just bureaucracy gone awry.

India has an annual production of engineering graduates five times higher than the United States, and industries from textiles to automotive already taking advantage of nanotechnologies for both domestic and export markets. It has the scientists, the industries that can exploit nanotechnologies, and even the allocated funds for researchâ''they just canâ''t spend it. A real headshaker.

As previously noted on this blog, there is a lot of concern among Western nations that the rest of the worldâ''primarily Asiaâ''is leaving the West behind in the nanotechnology race. Maybe this news will allay some of those fears.

The folks at Ugobe, an Emeryville, Calif., company building a robotic dinosaur, Pleo, have hit upon a brilliant solution to solving the problem of battery life; theyâ''re changing the productâ''s design to incorporate a removable battery. The bad news is the design change is going to further delay shipping, already nearly a year behind schedule.

A quick recap, for those who havenâ''t been sitting on eggs waiting for Pleo to hatch. (Groan, I know, I couldnâ''t resist.) Pleo, or at least a prototype, debuted back in 2006 at the Demo conference. In spite of not particularly liking robots or dinosaurs, this little creature (itâ''s about the size of a cat) wowed me. It comes out of the box as a newborn,

stretches, and slowly learns about the world. The demo model, at least, was adorable. Lead designer Caleb Chung (the guy who invented the Furby) promised little Pleo would be available by the 2006 holiday season for less than $200.

December 2006 came and went. In January 2007, Spectrumâ''s readers voted the product a loser. Iâ''m not sure if they were skeptical of the technology itself, or the marketability of a robotic dinosaur, I suspected the latter.

But the technology, it turns out, has been harder to develop, and to cost reduce, than anticipated. As of last month, the price had jumped to $349 and the ship date slipped to October 2007.

Today, Ugobe announced another delay. (To be fair to the company, they have been quite proactive in getting news of problems out, rather than allowing rumors to fly.) â''During pre-production testing,â'' stated the announcement, â''the UGOBE team encountered some significant problems with Pleoâ''s battery life.â''

The announcement went on to explain that the product will now incorporate a removable battery and will ship with an external charger, but that this design change will further delay the ship date. Still the company promises that Pleo will be under Christmas trees this year. And Iâ''ll review it as soon as I get my hands on one.

But back to that removable battery. Brilliant. Now, Apple, can we talk about the dead iPod sitting on my kidâ''s desk?

Last month, Samsung-- the Korean behemoth of the semiconductor industry-- suffered a modestly reported power outage at its facility in Giheung, Gyeonggi Province. Analysts said the incident could wipe out "as much as a month's worth of Samsung's total production of NAND flash memory chips." By itself, this is not exactly news, but there's always the butterfly effect.

Commanding 45 percent of the market share, Samsung is the world's leading manufacturer of NAND flash memory chips-- the stuff in iPods, iPhones and digital cameras. But NAND is being eaten alive by the increasing amounts of memory we demand in our gadgetry. Back in April, Apple was in talks with Samsung to supply 500 million 4G NAND flash equivalent chips for its iPhones. But that was about 15% more than the original agreement, and Samsung, already projecting a shortage of NAND flash memory during the second half of 2007, was unsure whether it could meet Apple's demands.

That left the other flash memory manufacturers-- Toshiba among them-- to pick up the slack. Then, on August 3, the power went out. Samsung's hiccup ended up costing the company $41 million. I don't know what that is in semiconductor dollars, but with Toshiba nipping at Samsung's heels for dominance of the NAND market, Samsung can't have been happy to lose it. Toshiba just completed a brand new 300-mm fab in Nagoya, Japan, and at last week's gauntlet-dropping ceremony-- sorry, fab-line opening celebration-- president Atsutoshi Nishida announced that Toshiba is gunning for Samsung.

Then, on September 5, Apple chopped $200 off the iPhone, prompting sales of the toy to reach one million a scant five days later. Sales are still climbing, by a projected 300 percent a week.

The bottom line: life is good if you're a NAND-chip manufacturer. According to market research firm iSuppli, the Samsung power glitch helped drive up memory prices, and that helped everyone. Micron said that customers were looking to them to bridge the gap left by Samsung. EETimes reports that NAND flash prices jumped by 15 percent in the first half of August alone, and later to to 20. Even the tragic DRAM prices stopped falling. The price upturn looks good for everyone, but it's not clear how Samsung will be affected by the windfall it has helped bestow on its competitors. Disaster, of course, is by no means imminent. Though Toshiba is Japan's biggest NAND-chip maker, their 28% of market share means that Samsung still has time to regroup.

The dessert portion of this story was found by Mark Osborne over at fabtech.org. The candid "sheer panic" photograph accompanying the Chosun Times story is a "rare and classic" find, Osborne says. Nobody knows how it slipped by Samsung's PR team. "Perhaps it was taken by someone at Samsung and leaked to the press!"

Here is a recent definition of nanotechnology that gave me a chuckle: â''The technology that processes matter so it becomes miniscule.â''

I could just picture the reader of this article conjuring up images of a lab where a big laser shrinks a vessel to nanoscale proportions so it can be injected into someoneâ''s bloodstreamâ'¿a la Fantastic Voyage.

Oddly enough, the rest of the piece is well done with good interviews that informs both on the uses of nanotechnology for beauty products as well as the risks.

German researchers are exploring a new dimension of human-robot interaction: the "interaction" that occurs when a 200-kilogram industrial robot accidentally strikes a 90-kilogram person in the head, torso, or pelvis.

Susanne Oberer and Rolf Dieter Schraft at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart are conducting human-robot "crash tests" to understand what kind of injuries result in such cases and how safety could be improved.

Continue reading this post at IEEE Spectrum's robotics blog, Automaton...

This weekend, firefighters battling the 48,000 acre wildfire just southeast of Silicon Valley, raging since Labor Day, had help from an experimental unmanned aircraft, Ikhana. This was the third time since mid-August that Ikhana took to the skies to help firefighters in California and nearby states.

Ikhana, a remotely piloted aircraft manufactured by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems as part of the Predator B series, carries a scanning system built by NASAâ''s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. The system records images in multiple wavelengths, from visible light through the infrared and thermal parts of the spectrum. A computer on the plane does the image processing and runs a fire detection algorithm, aligning the data to terrain maps, and then sends final images via a communications satellite to a server at NASA Ames, which makes them accessible to firefighters via the web. Firefighters at command centers can overlay these images on Google Earth for easy visualization or insert them into other mapping software [photo].

Ikhana took off Friday evening at 6:11 pm and flew for 20 hours, visiting the so-called â''Lick Fireâ'' twice and covering 10 other fires, all the way up the west coast to the Canadian border. (The Lick Fire got its name from the nearby Lick Observatory)

â''Everything went perfectly!â'' Vince Ambrosia, NASAâ''s principal investigator on the Ikhana project told me this morning.

He expects the sensing system used on Ikhana to begin migrating into the U.S. Forest Serviceâ''s firefighting arsenal within a year, though, he says, it will initially be used on piloted planes. It will likely be a decade before the forest service begins to rely on large unmanned vehicles, although smaller unmanned aircraft might come within the next year or two.

But NASAâ''s demonstration flights, which provide welcome information to firefighters, will continue this fire season.

And today, firefighters expect to finally contain the Lick Fire.

From the 'believe it when we see it' files: The Associated Press reported today that a small firm called EEStor has filed a patent for a new ultracapacitor to be used to power automobiles. The kicker in the application comes in its description, where it claims to offer "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries."

According to a spokesperson for the first customer to license the new ultracapacitor, Toronto's ZENN Motor Co., the EEStor unit represents a "paradigm shift." Its backers claim that, when charged for five minutes in a plug-in hybrid car, drivers can expect to go for 500 miles without a recharge.

"The Achilles' heel to the electric car industry has been energy storage," said Ian Clifford, CEO of ZENN Motor. "By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary." Clifford added that his company expects to begin installing the EEStor units in its line of short-range, low-speed vehicles later this year.

Still, many are skeptical of the claims from the little-known battery maker.

"We've been trying to make this type of thing for 20 years and no one has been able to do it," Robert Hebner, director of the University of Texas Center for Electromechanics, told the AP. "Depending on who you believe, they're at or beyond the limit of what is possible."

He added that vehicles require bursts of energy to accelerate, a task better suited for capacitors than batteries.

"The idea of getting rid of the batteries and putting in capacitors is to get more power back and get it back faster," Hebner said.

Venture backers of the reclusive EEStor include the influential Silicon Valley firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, indicating there may be more to the start-up's claims than hot air.

"They're not saying a lot about how they're making these things," Joseph Perry, a battery researcher at Georgia Tech told the AP. "With these materials [described in the patent], that is a challenging process to carry out in a defect-free fashion."

"I am skeptical but I'd be very happy to be proved wrong," Perry added.