Tech Talk

Chinese officials can effectively block all websites describing Tienanmen Square, but porn is almost completely eluding the Great Firewall, according to an interesting article on VNUnet.

Chinese porn sites raking in millions

Offshore operators of Chinese-language porn websites are making huge profits, Chinese government officials said earlier this week.

The article cites "high demand" for porn and how profitable it can be to fulfill it. But that leaves unclear why it's so much harder to block.

China uses a nationwide firewall to block access to a large number of websites that contain content which the government deems unsuitable. Many of these are political in nature, but also include sites dealing with religion and pornography.

It is not clear why this approach is failing to prove effective against the thousands of sites targeted in the latest crackdown.

A June 2005 article in Spectrum described how the Great Firewall works.

Sites are blocked, automatically and by hand, in two ways — by IP address or URL, and by keywords.

According to testing down back in 2005, the Chinese had, and still seem to have, a cautious strategy when it comes to keyword blocking. So it's easy for the authorities to block "Tienanmen Square," but they're not going to block, say, the word "sex." They can block "hot girls" but not every variation such as "hot girlz." And many sites will have only pictures or video, with no text at all to block. The government can block "sex.com" and "playboy.com" but not the 400,000 other sites with less explicit names.

Lastly, not only is it harder, but blocking porn may not have the same priority as anti-government politics or Falun Gong. The Chinese strategy seems to place a high priority to political, cultural, and economic stability. Those in control of the key branches of government may not be as socially conservative as they have been in the country's past, or as they are in some other countries around the world today.

Kieron Murphy

Searching for information on the Internet can be a trying task. Contemporary search engines require you to know enough about the subject you're investigating in order to enter the right words to find out more about it. Then the process gets iterative. The more you learn about the subject, the better you get at refining search terms to get more specific information.

Most everyone has come to accept this model. Not the folks at the Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE), though, who today announced a new method for doing research using networked data.

Known as semantic search, the idea is to improve traditional research searching by using XML data from semantic networks of information and then rank return results for their meaning--as opposed to predicted relevancy to keywords. This has been something of a holy grail for scientists in the field of informatics in recent years. Today, Xerox said it has come up with an implementation. Called FactSpotter, the new Xerox tool enables users to more effectively find relevant information by analyzing the meaning and context of queries in everyday language.

Xerox claims that FactSpotter combines a powerful linguistic engine with an easy-to-use interface to: comb through almost any document regardless of the language, location, format, or type; take advantage of the way humans think, speak, and ask questions; and discriminate the results, highlighting just a handful of relevant answers instead of returning thousands of unrelated responses.

"Our advanced search engine goes beyond today's typical 'keyword' search or current data-mining programs, which typically end up searching only 40 percent of all the documents that are relevant, because the keywords are too limiting," said Frédérique Segond, manager of parsing and semantics research at XRCE.

"Xerox's tool is more accurate because it delves into documents, extracting the concepts and the relationships among them. By 'understanding' the context, it returns the right information to the searcher, and it even highlights the exact location of the answer within the document."

Xerox plans to deploy FactSpotter initially as part of a new toolkit for legal and regulatory researchers. The office equipment giant, which also pioneered many of the personal computer controls we now take for granted, such as the mouse cursor and the graphical user interface, said by way of example that FactSpotter could allow specific facts to be found quickly and easily among thousands (and often millions) of different documents in the discovery phase of a trial.

Separately, in response to pressure from officials in the U.S., Microsoft has agreed to open the search functionality in its new Vista operating system to third-party applications such as those provided by Google and Yahoo!--and now maybe Xerox's FactSpotter.

Who knows? Maybe the folks in Redmond got a little nervous about a search engine automatically poring through all its documents in a future legal standoff. It would make for some interesting queries.

[Editor's Note: For more on semantic searching, please see our special report " Weaving a Web of Ideas".]

Kieron Murphy

There must be a clear-cut connection between search engines and automobiles, especially environmentally friendly ones. That's the only explanation for the two largest Internet search providers announcing hybrid car initiatives over the last few weeks.

In May, Yahoo! launched its Greenest City in America Challenge (see "New York's Famous Yellow Cabs Go Green" in this space), promising a fleet of hybrid taxis to the U.S. city it judges to have made the best effort to improve its environmental conditions. Today, Google got into the act by sponsoring a hybrid electric car effort aimed at developing a 100-mile-per-gallon street vehicle.

The Google endeavor is called RechargeIT. It aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. The Mountain View, Calif., Web services firm said it is offering US $1 million in grants, as well as providing another $10 million in subsequent funding, to those developing plug-ins able to get 70 to 100 miles per gallon. Google said it will also switchover its corporate fleet of autos to the hybrid electric form and finish a 1.6 megawatt solar-power facility to fuel the fleet, among other environmental measures.

"Since most Americans drive less than 35 miles per day, you easily could drive mostly on electricity with the gas tank as a safety net," Dan Reicher, director of Climate and Energy Initiatives for Google.org, wrote on the organization's Web site. "In preliminary results from our test fleet, on average the plug-in hybrid gas mileage was 30-plus mpg higher than that of the regular hybrids."

Google said it is awarding the first $1 million grant to: the Brookings Institution to run a conference on plug-ins; CalCars and Plug-In America to educate the public about plug-ins; and the Electrical Power Research Institute, the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Willett Kempton from the University of Delaware for plug-in R&D.

"Linking the U.S. transportation system to the electricity grid maximizes the efficiency of our energy system," Reicher added. "Our goal is to demonstrate the plug-in hybrid and V2G technology, get people excited about having their own plug-in hybrid, and encourage car companies to start building them soon."

[Editor's Note: See our Automotive Section for more stories on hybrid electric cars. Also see a report in this space, "Engineering an Auto Engineering Contest", on our automotive correspondent's recent exclusive inside look at the upcoming Automotive X Prize competition.]

Kieron Murphy

Scientists and engineers working for Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) on Friday announced the successful test firing of a small vehicle equipped with a scramjet that accelerated to a maximum velocity of Mach 10 (11 000 km per hour). The test run was part of an ongoing U.S.-Australian campaign to explore the possibilities of scramjet flight technology.

Flight controllers launched the scramjet from a conventional booster rocket at the Woomera Test Facility in South Australia. At 530 kilometers altitude traveling at supersonic speed, the HyCAUSE scramjet engine was fired and the vehicle shot through the atmosphere on its own, reaching the record velocity during its descent.

A scramjet is a supersonic combustion ramjet engine that compresses intake air at high-velocity and mixes it with fuel in a combustion chamber to produce extremely fast discharge. Aeronautical scientists believe scramjets are capable of reaching speeds of between Mach 12 and Mach 24 (orbital velocity).

"This research is a major boost to Australian and international scramjet technology research," Peter Lindsay, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Defence, said of the achievement. "Scramjet research has taken place in Australia for over three decades. We have active research programs in niche technologies of scramjet propulsion, as well as guidance and control at hypersonic speeds."

The hypersonic HyCAUSE engine is a joint effort sponsored by Australia's DSTO and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). A spokesperson for DARPA, Steven Walker, Deputy Director of the Tactical Technology Office, said the American agency will review telemetry and other data from the flight in coming weeks and compare it to that from ground-test data measured on the same engine configuration in the U.S.

"This test has obtained the first ever flight data on the inward-turning scramjet engine design," said Walker. "We are pleased with this joint effort between the U.S. and Australia and believe that a hypersonic airplane could be a reality in the not too distant future."

The hypersonic scramjet test program is part of the US $74 million Hypersonics International Flight Research Experimentation (HiFire) Agreement with the U.S. Air Force. The researchers have plans for up to ten flight experiments at Woomera over the next five years under the agreement.

Sometimes you have nowhere to go but down. As part of our special package this month on the future of big cities, we asked Associate Editor Sandra Upson to look at the foundation of booming urban centers, literally. She found that there's more to megacities than meets the eye. When urban planners can no longer find the surface space to install vital infrastructure components, they go underground, she writes in "How to See the Unseen City".

The primary example of a major city expanding into its own depths is New York, Upson notes. It followed the lead of many of the European capitals, notably London and Paris, during the Industrial Revolution in digging beneath its existing streets to situate crucial arteries for transportation, sanitation, water, gas and electricity and kept on going the same route into the Information Age.

Today, few--if an--cities can rival New York in the density and complexity of its subterranean networks, Upson reports. New York's urban underground contains a haphazard network of wires, cables, and water mains interspersed with a hodgepodge of corroded pipes and forgotten chambers. To many city dwellers--and even to many city officials--underground infrastructure is both out of sight and out of mind.

How do planners know where all the lines are buried? That's increasingly becoming a significant challenge as 21st Century projects are being developed. The answer lies in something called geospatial-information services (GIS), a new field in which the Japanese are the recognized leaders. Japan has created an underground mapping system that consists of utility grids layered over a road map that utilities and builders consult before breaking new ground. (Doing the same thing in the U.S. has been hampered by national-security concerns, Upson discovered.)

Looking to the future, officials in Oslo, Norway, may be the next underground pioneers. In their capital, developers have created a whole sub-urban community. Troubled by the city's hilly terrain, engineers have built all sorts of structures--such as power plants, an air-traffic-control tower, and a dairy processing operation--under the surface. As a result, some of the world's most sophisticated air-circulation systems can be found in Oslo, as well as underground lighting that's tweaked to mimic the movement of the sun throughout the day.

Wealthy cities are increasingly facing a premium on space, Upson concludes. As metropolitan areas grow denser and richer, the urban underground is likewise poised to mirror the congestion above.

[Editor's Note: Click here to see all of Spectrum's special report on "The Megacity," including online extras and audio and video exclusives.]

Kieron Murphy

A series of technical glitches is hampering the work of the crews of the International Space Station (ISS) and the Space Shuttle Atlantis. NASA reported today that the current crew of the ISS, known as Expedition 15, is working hand in hand with their visiting colleagues aboard the docked shuttle, called STS-117, to investigate the causes of a power failure, computer shutdowns, and a false alarm in a fire-control system over the last couple of days.

Back on Earth, engineers in the Russian space agency are scrambling to repair backup navigation computers. The primary computers were restarted this morning. Flight controllers continue efforts to bring all units back up to full operation, NASA stated. Officials of the two agencies said they still don't know why the computers failed, adding that they had not heretofore seen that type of failure on the space station, which they believe may be related to the loss of electrical power. In the meantime, systems onboard Atlantis are being operated to keep both orbiting platforms in proper orientation.

The U.S space agency also reported today that before this morning's scheduled wakeup call, the crews were awakened by a false fire alarm on the station, most likely caused by the restart of the Russian computers that provide backup attitude and altitude adjustments.

The crew of Atlantis successfully deployed an 18-ton solar array truss on Monday, attaching it to the side of the ISS. Subsequently, they have worked outside the shuttle to activate the Starboard 3 and 4 (S3/S4) truss segment and its rotating control joint (which positions the array to face the sun). During these two spacewalks, they also retracted arrays on the Port 6 (P6) truss. NASA said a future shuttle crew will finish the job of relocating the P6 from atop the space station to the end of the Port 5. Two more spacewalks are scheduled for this week to work on the arrays.

In addition to the new truss segment, NASA Astronaut Clayton Anderson joined the Expedition 15 crew on Sunday, replacing Flight Engineer Suni Williams. Williams spent six months as an Expedition 15 crew member. Atlantis is scheduled to undock from the station June 19. However, late word on Thursday indicates that this return date may be postponed to help deal with the unexpected problems that have cropped up.

"Hard work never hurt anyone." Everyone's heard the expression. It's true, but there's work and then there's work. For engineers, the work ethic runs deep. It's what keeps you chained to your desk cranking code into the middle of the night or perfecting that design presentation that's due the next morning. If it's consuming you, it may be more than total commitment to excellence. It may, in fact, be a problem. In this month's issue, contributor Carl Selinger looks at the dilemma we all face in trying to balance our workload with our personal lives in a piece called "Workaholism". Give it a read and see if the symptoms he describes can be applied to you. If they do, you might want to take him up on a few of his suggestions.

Selinger, the author of Stuff You Don't Learn in Engineering School: Skills for Success in the Real World (Wiley-IEEE Press), has nothing against working hard. He writes that he's a big believer in "work hard, play hard." However, he says, there is a line that's crossed when one becomes a workaholic, one that's not always clear cut. Once crossed, that path can lead to trouble. To be sure, it's a well-trod path, though, as most of us can attest to. Or nearly most. As Selinger points out, a 1999 Gallup poll found that 44 percent of Americans considered themselves workaholics. And probably, at one time or another, you've felt trapped in the overwhelming demands of your job.

So what does Selinger recommend when it seems to be all crashing down on you? The first and most important thing is to step back and assess your work life in terms of your goals for your whole life, he writes. Ask what you want to accomplish in your career and in your personal life, and then ask yourself how itâ''s going. Identify actions you can take to improve your life, at work and away from it. Specifically, he identifies a handful of helpful options to keep from slipping into the meat grinder.

• Manage your time better. Analyze your job, determine which aspects are going well and which are not, and then review your priorities.

• Donâ''t be a perfectionist. This will make you more productive and give you more time for other important things, including your personal life.

• Donâ''t eat lunch at your desk every day. People who eat at their desks are riding into the false canyon of thinking that they're getting more done.

• Learn how to say "no." A good way to respond to someone with another task for you to tackle is to say, "I'd really like to handle this, but I'm swamped right now. Can it wait until later?"

• Work at home more. If work is keeping you in the office a ridiculously high percentage of your life, why donâ''t you try to negotiate working at home on a regular basis?

• Take vacations. Organizations want you to take vacations so you'll come back refreshed and raring to go.

The bottom line, according to Selinger, is that it's up to you to determine what you want in a full, robust life. You're the ultimate boss of you. So take charge. Be a boss who understands that hard work never hurt anyone, but killing yourself to get it done does.

In a time of shifting global alliances, few countries feel completely secure from their neighbors, especially in Asia where ancient feuds still provoke hostile attitudes. So it should come as no surprise that a nation as suddenly capital rich as India is plunging headlong into upgrading its military arsenal. In this month's issue, contributor Seema Singh looks at the new relationship between the world's second largest nation and arms makers in America who are looking to profit from its needs in "Delhi's Defense Spending Spree".

With a five-year defense modernization budget in excess of US $30 billion, arms exporters are courting India like never before, Singh explains. This is particularly true of U.S. contractors, who have only recently gained a foothold in the corridors of India's capital. These days, American defense firms are working closely with the Pentagon and the U.S.-India Business Council, in Washington, D.C., to ensure that they have a fighting chance at snaring a good sized portion of Delhi's new war chest.

"After the enormous growth [of the] U.S.-India strategic and defense relationship over the last three to four years, we want to make a breakthrough in defense sales," the U.S. ambassador to India, David Mulford, said at the international Aero India 2007 air show, held in Bangalore in February.

And the prospects for U.S. manufacturers look good. India's shopping list is substantial: 126 multi-role combat aircraft (about $7.5 billion), eight long-range maritime patrol aircraft (at least $1 billion), 197 light utility helicopters (some $600 million), and a number of tactical transport aircraft (perhaps a hundred million). The big prize is the combat fighter/interceptors. India is accepting bids from Boeing and Lockheed from the U.S., as well as Dassault of France, MiG of Russia, Saab of Sweden, and Eurofighter, a consortium of European manufacturers.

Boeing has even offered the unprecedented measure of building its F/A-18 Super Hornets in India. "India is the largest fighter deal since the beginning of the 1990s. It represents one of Boeing's largest potential growth markets for defense products in Asia," says Mark Kronenberg, Boeing vice president of integrated defense systems for Asia-Pacific.

"Today, nobody buys [defense equipment] like India buys. And it will continue to be one of the world's principal weapon buyers," Rahul Bedi, an analyst at Jane's Defence Weekly in New Delhi told Singh.

It's a cold, hard world out there. India isn't doing anything different than other world powers are doing.

As part of this month's special report on megacities, we asked Senior Associate Editor Samuel K. Moore to do a little research on the fundamentals of supporting a major metropolis. He found that there is not a lot of hard data available on what makes big cities tick. But he did find some surprising results from a study of one world capital--London--that indicate we should be paying more attention to the overall requirements of these enormous communities. In his report, "How to Measure a City's Metabolism", Moore describes a situation in which the world's cities are literally consuming the resources of the rest of the planet.

The United Nations provides a standard set of data for each country regarding the import, production, and export of key goods such as corn, petroleum, and metals. However, it does not treat cities separately. Instead, an independent group of researchers, called the Global Footprint Network (GFN), based in Oakland, Calif., provides an alternate analysis to describe how much land is commandeered to support cities. This ecological-footprint analysis examines the flow of materials and energy into and out of an area and then determines how much productive land and water is needed to supply the renewable resources involved and to deal with the waste generated.

As Moore informs us, these scientists have established a unit of measure, known as the global hectare, for calculating the surface space required to process the needs of an average community. According to a study called the Living Planet Report 2006 by the GFN and its partners, each person on Earth consumed the renewable resources of 2.2 such global hectares in 2003. Unfortunately, there are only 1.8 global hectares per person available.

So far, the largest urban area to have its ecology measured systematically is London. British researchers found that London's ecological footprint was 49 million global hectares--293 times its geographical area and equivalent to two United Kingdoms. On a per-person basis, Londoners took up 6.6 global hectares, putting them on a par with the Swiss and making them twice as frugal as the average American, but still more than three times as voracious as what the Earth can provide.

It's a sobering statistic. London alone is consuming twice the space on the planet that its entire nation is capable of supporting. For now, that sleight of hand between what the developed world is devouring and what the undeveloped world has left is the geopolitical equivalent of the old pea-in-the-shell game. It's a sure thing--for the one taking the bets. Sooner or later, though, the "suckers" are going to get upset that they've been had. When that happens, all bets are going to be off. And the great cities of the world are going to be left holding the bag.

We've been warned. The real wonder is whether we'll ever do enough to prevent the worst from happening.

Somewhere along the line, the advocates for molecular nanotechnology (MNT) seem to have lost interest in actually seeing molecular manufacturing come to pass if it meant that the concepts of the mechanically engineered approach (Dry) are abandoned in favor of a biologically engineered method (Wet).

The MNT community has been striving over the past six years to bring the focus of nanotechnology back to molecular manufacturingâ''or â''radical nanotechnologyâ'' or â''revolutionary nanotechnologyâ'' after being usurped in attention and funding by the nanomaterials initiative, exemplified by the National Nanotechnology Initiative in the US.

Back in 1986, about the only people talking about nanotechnology was the venerable Foresight Institute (by venerable, I mean old in relative terms).

Of course, there may have been a few who could quote Norio Taniguchiâ''s 1974 paper â''On the basic concept of â''Nano-Technologyâ''â'', or those who could drop Feynmanâ''s 1959 lecture â''Thereâ''s plenty of room at the bottomâ'' into their polite conversation. But by and large there was the Foresight Institute created on the heels of K. Eric Drexlerâ''s â''Engines of Creationâ'' that stood as a lone voice promoting nanotechnology.

Then came the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) and everything changed. After 5 years of development, the NNI was funded and launched in 2001. And, well, the lone voice suddenly got drowned out.

The buzz about nanotechnology was no longer just about universal assemblers (robot-like machines) that would lead to a day of â''table-top factoriesâ'' (See video animation of table-top assembler) but was about how materials on the nanoscale exhibited interesting functionalities that could enable new products, like stain-resistant pants.

Stain-resistant pants clearly donâ''t have the sex appeal of a factory on a table top that could make anything you wanted just by pressing the button: â''Ferrariâ''. But there you have it. The dialogue had been transformed in large part because of money.

The money started flowing into research for exploiting this nanoscale material science from government and industry that saw they could create new products and markets.

So how do you get the discussion back to your direction, well it goes something like this: â''Okay, okay, but you guys are talking about â''evolutionary nanotechnologyâ'', weâ''re talking about â''revolutionary nanotechnologyâ''.â''

The tag â''evolutionary nanotechnologyâ'' implies that the new brand of nanotechnology is just an incremental step in fields such as surface and material science and colloid science. If you ask a chemist or chemical engineer, they might even boast: â''Nanotechnology?! This is just advanced chemistry.â''

Thatâ''s how the proponents of â''revolutionary nanotechnologyâ'' describe â''evolutionary nanotechnologyâ''. But what is this â''revolutionary nanotechnologyâ''?

Well, revolutionary nanotechnology can be loosely defined as we humans being able to make macro-scale things atom-by-atom or molecule-by-molecule, with the assitance of computers designing and then assembling materials and structures by placing atoms exactly where we want them to go. The proof we have that this can be done, or so the argument goes, is that if nature can do it, so can we . Of course, nature has had a few billion years to perfect this little feat, but weâ''ve got science and technology on our side.

The first method proposed for designing and building these structures atom-by-atom was what is often termed the Drexlerian vision in his book â''Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computationâ''.

This mechanosynthesis approach, often termed molecular nanotechnology (MNT), can be described as mechanical engineering meets the nanoscale. The machinery described involves gears and motors, just like you would find in a large-scale factory.

But mechanical engineering of the macroscale faces some fundamental problems when shrunk down to the nanoscale like Brownian motion or thermal noise that make building these nanoscale gears and motors to the tight tolerances required problematic.

Richard Jones, a professor of Physics at Sheffield University in the UK, and author of the book, Soft Machines, has asked the proponents of this MNT vision to address these issues in Six Challenges for Molecular Nanotechnology.

But Professor Jones, according to his blog, has not received any response to his challenges from the MNT community.

What is odd about this debate (if indeed there were one) is that Professor Jones does believe that a â''revolutionary nanotechnologyâ'' or â''radical nanotechnologyâ'' should be pursued, and even argues that its possibility is confirmed by nature, just as the MNT community does.

But his more biologically oriented approach is that of using and working with nature rather than trying to work against it. His point is made clear at a debate held at Nottingham University in 2005 (full transcript can be found here).

â''My argument is that although biology is an existence proof for radical nanotechnology it is not necessarily an existence proof for Drexlerâ''s particular vision of nanotechnology as we shall now see. The reason is this: biological machines are not actually mechanicalâ'¿

â''Youâ''ve got these different design philosophies: one of which is the mechanical engineering approach. Iâ''m not saying that Drexler is someone who doesnâ''t know physics, of course he does. He talks about Brownian motion, he talks about surface forces. The philosophy of the mechanical engineering approach is to say, I know these things are there, they are problems, letâ''s try to design around them, letâ''s use really stiff materials to avoid the problem of Brownian motion. In contrast, biology doesnâ''t design around it, it actually exploits it. You can see this through the efficiency of biological machines.â''

So, revolutionary nanotechnology: wet or dry? While it seems the established MNT community is attempting to bring the term â''nanotechnologyâ'' back into their own personal dominion by promoting this distinction between â''evolutionaryâ'' and â''revolutionaryâ'' nanotechnology, they are loath to have that vision of a â''revolutionary nanotechnologyâ'' be anything other than the â''hardâ'' mechanosynthesis proposed by Drexler over 25 years ago.

What is curious about all this is that a quick perusal of the Foresight Instituteâ''s blog Nanodot provides a number of examples of research and papers on biologically inspired â''nanobotsâ'' and â''nanotechnologyâ'' and little in experimentation on mechanosynthesis nanotechology:

Meet the Nubot: DNA nanotechnology robots

Natureâ''s nanotechnology motors to inspire future machines

But despite the growing research, despite the direction science is continuing to go, there is loyal adherence to the original precepts of mechanosynthesis â''revolutionary nanotechnologyâ''.

This ideological pushback is perplexing. Why is not science the guiding principle if the real aim is to be able to produce macroscale products that eliminate waste and make possible radical new products for energy and healthcare applications?