Tech Talk

As of this writing, Tropical Storm Chris has weakened into a depression in the eastern Caribbean and headed into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center, in Miami, Fla., expect the storm to strengthen somewhat over the next five days but not to reach hurricane force before hitting the Texas/Mexico border area by early Wednesday. This level of predictive power was available before last year's disastrous Hurricane Katrina landfall, but for various reasons government officials delayed an evacuation of the New Orleans area. In this month's feature "It's Hurricane Season: Do you know where your storm is?", authors Robert Gall and David Parsons update us on the efforts to answer this important meteorological question.

We couldn't ask for better guides to take us on a tour of state-of-the-art weather forecasting—particularly that of dangerous storms. Gall is director of the Developmental Testbed Center at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in Boulder, Colo. And Parsons is a senior scientist at NCAR and co-lead for North American activities under the World Meteorological Organization's Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment.

As they explain, there are three technologies driving the progress of forecasting: supercomputers, satellites, and advances in the scientific understanding of weather dynamics. Supercomputer processing power, for example, is projected to increase 16-fold during the next decade, from today's 2 trillion floating-point mathematical operations per second (FLOPS) to a speed approaching 32 trillion FLOPS, Gall and Parsons note. In the meantime, nine additional advanced weather-specific satellites will likely join the fleet orbiting Earth, providing the first direct measurements of winds and the structure of clouds. And all that data and computer power will be used to better effect, as a result of research already under way on the details of how storms intensify.

To create a three-dimensional weather model of the world, the computer models require in principle that all individual pieces of data for the 1 billion or so points on the globe refer to the same instant in time. In practice, of course, they never do, the authors admit. The process is not straightforward, because the atmosphere is a nonlinear system—it can behave chaotically and, therefore, be impossible to model with complete accuracy. In a nonlinear system, a minor alteration of initial conditions is typically magnified into an enormous change (the "butterfly effect"). And the most nonlinear weather phenomena, and the most difficult to forecast, are low-pressure systems, fronts, and thunderstorms.

Still, meteorologists around the world are hard at work collapsing the margins of error in their predictions. With enhancements in their technological resources, they are trying to arrive at a level of certainty about storm behavior that will soon enable them to make pinpoint forecasts of large storms, such as killer hurricanes, with enough warning time to allow officials and the public, in general, to take the measures necessary to prevent dramatic loss of life and property as much as possible. The hope is that, at some point in the future, the days of Katrina and her vicious relatives will be numbered as killers.

Mark Twain once famously remarked that "everyone talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it." That's becoming less and less true all the time—as we all realize that we must support the efforts of those who really are trying to do something about it.

[Editor's Note: For more information on the science of weather prediction, see http://www.ucar.edu/research/prediction. For up-to-the-minute information about the current hurricane season, as well as historical data about past storms, see http://www.nhc.noaa.gov. And read our Tech Talk on submitting your comments to the Federal Communications Commission on how the U.S. government should prepare for the next killer hurricane at: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul06/comments/1461.]

In this month's Science of Hollywood column, "Inside the Academy's Science and Technology Council", author David Kushner tells us that the people in charge of setting technical standards for the motion picture industry are looking for a few good engineers to join them. "We need the renaissance engineers," said Andrew Maltz, director of the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. So if you've ever entertained thoughts of becoming a star in the movie business, this might be the ticket.

Kushner notes that the council's roots go back to the founding of the Academy in 1927 but that it has only been in the last few years that it has been given any authority to take action. Its primary functions are threefold: preserving technology history, administering public education, and advancing technical innovation. For example, the council is currently archiving documentation—often drawn from applications for the academy's technical awards—into a database they intend to put online, as well as using the equipment they uncover along the way in a future movie technology museum.

"This won't be a theme park," Maltz told Kushner. "It will be a world-class and interesting museum that deals with all aspects of production."

Then there is the advanced technology program. The council has a subcommittee dedicated to pressing issues such as the industry's rapid conversion to digital media. Today, approximately 500 movie theaters are using electronic projectors with files coming from a digital-cinema server. The evolution is happening at each major stage of film production and distribution, Kushner relates. For the past year and a half, leading imaging and processing experts have been convening at the academy to discuss the standardization project. The council's role is to make sure that competitive interests don't hamper innovation.

"We're here to be the Switzerland," Maltz said. "There are competitors in the room, but they have to lay down their swords at the door."

Kushner tells us that with such issues closing in on the industry, there's a greater need than ever for qualified engineers with an interest in filmmaking to join the academy. So if you're ready for your close-up, the Science and Technology Council could be just the place to get your big break in Hollywood.

In the latest round of auctions for new wireless bandwidth, the surprise bids are coming from non-traditional players, namely satellite and cable content providers. The bidding for slices of the airwaves—known as Auction 66—kicked off today, with 168 groups vying for 1122 licenses to lease portions of the 90-megahertz band, to be used for advanced wireless services. As reported by Reuters today, among the Cingulars and Sprints of the world, the bidders also include the DirectTVs and the Time Warners.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is hoping to raise about US $15 billion in revenue from the leases. Already, $4.3 billion has been deposited by interested parties, according to Reuters. The auction will proceed throughout today, with two rounds of bidding, and continue through tomorrow, with three more rounds, and subsequent business days until the bidders stop. (The FCC reports that Round 1 has concluded with 731 bids valued at a gross of nearly $769 million.)

Interested parties in this auction consist of a myriad of communications firms, both large and small. The biggest deposit, $972.5 million, has been made by a joint venture formed by satellite TV providers DirecTV Group and EchoStar Communications, along with media conglomerate Liberty Media. It is followed closely by a group consisting of cable operators Comcast Corp. and Time Warner and wireless carrier Sprint Nextel Corp., with a downpayment of $637.7 million.

An analyst for investment house Bear Stearns wrote in a recent research note, "We are surprised with the strong interest from the satellite and cable companies." Insiders are apparently not sure what to make of the strong interest from the newcomers, which have disclosed no plans so far for the leases.

In a follow-up report by Reuters, the early frontrunner in the auction appears to be wireless carrier T-Mobile USA, a unit of Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG, which has bid a total of $437 million for 31 licenses. (T-Mobile may be using the current auction to boost its presence in large markets, such as the New York metro area, where it has less spectrum than the other national wireless carriers, according to analysts.)

In our new wireless age, the distinctions between who is a communications company and who is a services or a content one are becoming blurrier, so it might not be as important anymore to ask who your provider is as it is to ask how they are doing the job.

These days, almost anything that happens has a good chance of being recorded on a video camera, especially with so many camera phones in so many hands. And it's just as likely that something special caught on video will make its way onto the Internet or circulate amongst the countless TV shows dedicated to everything from police chases to celebrity bloopers. With the exception of hard news, almost all of these recordings are trivial and could easily be allowed to disappear from the world of multimedia altogether. So when you hear that the original videotapes of one of the most important moments in human history have gone missing, you have to hang your head in wonder.

According to Reuters, the American space agency has lost the original tapes of the first walk on the moon. A spokesman for NASA told the news agency yesterday that the tapes of the famous first step onto another celestial surface, along with hundreds of other recordings of the Apollo 11 mission, can not be found after an extensive search for them.

"We haven't seen them for quite a while. We've been looking for over a year and they haven't turned up," spokesman Grey Hautaloma said. He quickly added that the space agency has copies of the recordings and that they were still looking for the originals. "I wouldn't say we're worried—we've got all the data. Everything on the tapes we have in one form or another."

As a product of the technology of the late 1960s, the Apollo 11 tapes are curiosities of a sort. NASA's video equipment was custom-made for its purposes. Incompatible with the standard gear used by the TV broadcasters, the live pictures of Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" on 20 July 1969 had to be shown on the mission control display screen and then re-shot by a conventional TV camera for broadcast to the public, causing those images to be degraded. The original tapes, if still in good condition, could be useful in producing an enhanced version of the historic imagery.

When last seen, the magnetic tapes had been transferred from the U.S. National Archives (where they probably should be kept) to a NASA facility sometime in the late 1970s. "We're looking for paperwork to see where they last were," Hautaloma told Reuters.

Maybe they should check in that big warehouse in the last scene of Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark," where everything else important seems to be kept by the government. For heaven's sake.

[Update 1 (16 August): "NASA puts a rocket up to hunt for missing moonwalk tape" from Sydney Morning Herald.]

>Veteran technology journalist Charles Babcock has written a terrific article for Information Week called "What's the Greatest Software Ever Written?". His selections are sure to spark a flood of e-mail responses to the weekly IT publication from software developers (who are well known to be passionate about this topic in particular). In general, though, he should get high marks from most. He's clearly done his homework.

Let's cut right to the chase and run down Babcock's 12 inaugural choices for the software hall of fame. Coming in at Number 12 is The Morris Worm. This nasty little program was crafted by a college student named Robert Morris, who when arrested by the FBI claimed that he had only the best intentions in mind when he released his worm onto the world's networks and brought machines to their knees around the globe. He said he was only attempting to determine the size of the Internet. Clever defense.

Number 11, according to Babcock, is the Google ranking algorithm. It wasn't the first search engine, not by a long shot. But it made search friendly for even the least technical among us. "The value of an academic paper is measured by the number of times it's mentioned in other papers and footnotes," one of Babcock's sources told him. "Google adapted that convention to the Web."

In a brilliant choice, in our opinion, Babcock slots NASA's Apollo guidance system at Number 10. Using 8 kilobytes of memory on a circa 1968 Raytheon computer, it controlled the systems that enabled astronauts to navigate to the moon, separate their lunar module from its docked orbiter, descend to the sphere's surface and find their way home again, in a round trip of a half million miles. Not bad for something so tiny.

Babcock's Number 9 is Microsoft Excel. His rationale? Spreadsheet programs had been around for years before the folks at Redmond took their stab at one; but when they did, they got things right. And then went about the business of making their competitors obsolete.

Number 8 on the list is the original Macintosh OS. It has been duly criticized as being derivative, taking much of its inspiration from Xerox's Alto, one of the very first personal computers. Rightly so. But greatness is also measured by success and historical impact, Babcock argues. The original Mac was a landmark OS.

The Number 7 position goes to American Airline's Sabre reservation system. It was the grand-daddy of travel service automation. Sure, it had its critics in its day, including the U.S. government's anti-trust division, but it was also revolutionary, blazing a path in tactical and strategic business applications.

Number 6 on the Babcock hit parade is the Mosaic browser. Developed by graduate students to help navigate the new World Wide Web, it created a world of its own, and we have never stopped relying on its successors ever since. Spawning everything from Netscape's Navigator to Apple's Safari, this essential app was the originator of the Internet boom.

Registering at Number 5 is the Java programming language. Critics will point to this choice and bemoan the "network programming language" (Time magazine's 1996 Product of the Year) as the Internet's first great hype machine. Babcock admits that he was an early critic of Java, but he says that he has since come around to admiring the sophistication of its approach.

He gives the IBM System 360 OS the Number 4 spot. This 1964 operating system for big iron was a revolution and a revelation. Many of the fundamentals of computer system design were ironed out by IBM in this historic project. To this day, IBM systems rely on the breakthroughs it made forty years ago.

Number 3 on the list is one of the most profound applications ever attempted: the Institute for Genomic Research's human genome sequencing program. This ambitious application set out to beat a U.S government project to map the DNA composition of 20 000 human genes. It did just that. As one of Babcock's sources commented, "[O]n sheer technical brilliance, it gets 10 out of 10."

Babcock awards the runner-up prize to IBM's System R, the progenitor of relational databases—from DB2, to Oracle, to Sybase, to MySQL, and others. It took set theory and applied it to data storage and retrieval. As a result, relational database management systems have become the underpinning of much of our modern computing infrastructure.

And last but first, Babcock crowns a multi-headed phenomenon known as the Unix family. This famous set of aunts, uncles, and cousins contains some of the most powerful and elegant coding ever created by an individual, team, corporation, or global community of collaborators. Originally, a pet project of an AT&T researcher, Ken Thompson, Unix and its descendants—notably Unix System III, Linux, and BSD 4.3—have had the broadest impact on the world of any computer programs ever written. And of all the Unix family members, in the end, Babcock selects Berkeley Software Distributions' BSD 4.3 as the single "Greatest Piece of Software Ever."

Now, let the passionate discussions begin!

>The current issue of Scientific American has a thought-provoking feature called "The Expert Mind" that challenges the conventional wisdom as to whether genius should be ascribed to innate talent or trained experience. The author, Philip E. Ross, argues that the "preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born." The conclusion that it is "effortful study" that produces masters, though, has touched off some controversy.

Using chess play—Goethe's "touchstone of the intellect"—as the overall basis of this look into the latest theories in cognitive science, Ross notes that "much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought"—a facility known as apperception. "Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once," Ross writes. "And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient."

Ross relates the findings of a study by Herbert A. Simon and William Chase, of Carnegie Mellon University, who concluded that it takes about a decade of intensive training to master any field. In a similar study by K. Anders Ericsson, of Florida State University, the research concluded that masters are created not by experience so much as by "effortful study"—taking on challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. Ross states:

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance—for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam—most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.

The notion that geniuses are made and not born rubs some people the wrong way. Upon being posted to the technology-oriented Web site Slashdot, Ross's article touched off a fiery debate on intelligence. Tomorrow, we'll continue with more on Ross's article and the commentary it's receiving from the technology community.

In our special report on Technology and Terrorism this month, we feature a round-up of nine potential scenarios that, we hope, should stimulate thinking in the ongoing debate over anti-terror preparations. Drafted from discussions with consultants and industry leaders, the scenarios depict troubling "what-if" possibilities that attempt to judge the difficulty and likelihood of each of the imagined attack vectors, as well as the potential damage each could inflict. Then we offer a tech solution aimed at preventing the attack—if possible at all. Edited by Senior Editor Jean Kumagai, "Nine Cautionary Tales" is a sobering reminder that governments and industries around the world have to exercise extraordinary vigilance to thwart the designs of the most determined and imaginative of the terrorists.

Here are a few samples of what could go horribly wrong one day:

• Electroshock: A blackout cripples New York City. This time it's the result of a mysterious and concerted series of attacks on transformers and transmission towers. The ferries and all the major bridges connecting Manhattan to its neighboring boroughs are attacked by grenade-toting terrorists.
• Toxic Train Wreck: A terrorist plants a bomb on a train car carrying 90 000 kilograms of chlorine. The resulting plume floats on the wind toward the nearby Washington Mall. Within minutes, the crowd begins to choke, and thousands die from inhaling the gas or from being trampled.
• Crude Attack: A terror team manages to breach the security of the Western Hemisphere's largest oil refinery, on the north coast of St. Croix. They set off explosives in strategic areas that turn the facility into a raging inferno. Within hours, U.S. drivers face $5-per-gallon gasoline; within days, they'll have trouble buying it at any price.
• Agro-Armageddon: A man walks into the petting zoo of the Houston Livestock Show and casually touches the tip of a fountain pen to his fingers. He then feeds some of the livestock from his hand. A week later the animals begin to show the telltale signs of foot-and-mouth disease. His co-conspirators in Australia and Europe mirror the attack. The blow to the agricultural sector pushes the world economy into a recession.
• Black Christmas: On the Friday after the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, radical anti-consumer activists discreetly deposit shopping bags with open containers of ethyl mercaptan. As panic spreads, the activists remotely detonate a series of smoke grenades, triggering a mallwide panic. Simultaneously, they have mailed fake-anthrax in letters via the U.S. Postal Service. The combined attack paralyzes the American economy.
• Star-Struck: To protest the wearing of fur by Hollywood actresses at the Academy Awards ceremony, animal-rights activists don gas masks and explode canisters of tear gas throughout the theater. They manage to subdue the armed security guards. Then they televise their demand of equal standing for all animals and a ban on all fur and leather products.

We debated whether the hypothetical terrorist scenarios we present could do harm by giving terrorists ideas they may not have thought of (all have been suggested, in one form or another, somewhere in the open literature). In the end, we were swayed by the belief that exposing a danger is, in the long run, better than ignoring it while hoping that evil-doers will not notice it.

[Editor's Note: For more, you can listen online to a discussion of this topic—"Assessing the Risks of Terrorism"—at Spectrum Radio.]

They're just coming and going at the busy International Space Station (ISS). As the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis landed safely today at Cape Canaveral, following their recent visit to the technology hotspot, the crew of Russia's Soyuz TMA-9 pulled up to sign in, relieving an ISS crew ready to return home in their TMA-8.

Normally, the space station is a quiet place, usually the temporary residence of about three cosmonauts or astronauts (it housed only two lonely orbiters for a few years after the tragic Space Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003). This month, however, 12 transient visitors have passed through its door—and it's an international set of jet-setters. Today, American space tourist Anousheh Ansari, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, and American astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria docked at the station and floated into its cozy, weightless confines. They joined German astronaut Thomas Reiter, who is staying on, and Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and American astronaut Jeff Williams, who (in the famous words of Woody Allen) are "due back on the planet Earth" on 29 September, in the same Soyuz vehicle.

Ansari (famous for the Ansari X Prize) is an Iranian-born woman who made a fortune in the telecom industry in the United States. She paid US $20 million to the Russian Space Agency for the weeklong stay, whereupon she'll join Vinogradov and Williams on the ride home. They will leave one German, one Russian, and one American behind on a space station that is certainly living up to the word international in its marquee.

Earlier in the day, Atlantis made a flawless landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after a 12-day mission to install a new solar-panel wing to the ISS. The crew consisted of U.S astronauts Brent Jett, Chris Ferguson Joe Tanner, Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, Dan Burbank, and Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean. Mission Commander Jett summarized things by saying: "It was a pretty tough few days for us, a lot of hard work, a great team effort to get the station assembly restarted on a good note."

Meanwhile, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden, on-hand for the Soyuz mission, said of the equally flawless ascent of the spacecraft to the ISS: "Somehow our Russian friends and partners are able to make these operations look routine, but those of us in the space business know that these matters are not routine and in fact very difficult, and so it's a testament to their skills that they can make it appear to be routine."

It's praise well deserved—for all concerned. Good luck and good flying to all the visitors of the most popular home away from home in all of outer space.

The European Space Agency has just published new, stereo close-ups of the famous "Face" on Mars. Taken by the ESA's Mars Explorer, the images show a rugged massif surrounded by a sloping lava plain that could, with a little imagination (and the right lighting), resemble a human skull.

The ESA site says that its engineers had tried unsuccessfully for two years to capture images of the geologic phenomenon in the Cydonia area, within the Arabia Terra region of Mars, but were frustrated by atmospheric dust and haze. Finally, in July, the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard Mars Express got its shots under just the right conditions.

The "Face" has been a controversial feature of the Martian landscape for decades, after NASA published an image taken by the U.S. agency's Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976. When NASA released a statement that said the outcrop "resembles a human head," the race to create the most wild-eyed speculation as to what the coincidence meant was on. Including a number of surrounding formations in their accounts, the fabulous interpretations ranged from monuments built by space-faring civilizations to an ancient city built by a doomed Martian population. However, science has prevailed over the years and (largely) debunked the efforts of the sci-fi romantics, especially after the area was photographed in 1998 by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor.

According to the ESA, the images of the "Face" and its surroundings were assembled from three HRSC-color channels, creating perspective views calculated from the digital terrain model derived from the stereo and nadir channels.

"These images of the Cydonia region on Mars are truly spectacular," said Dr. Agustin Chicarro, a Mars Express project scientist. "They not only provide a completely fresh and detailed view of an area famous to fans of space myths worldwide, but also provide an impressive close-up over an area of great interest for planetary geologists, and show once more the high capability of the Mars Express camera."

A spokesperson for the "Face" was unavailable for comment.