Tech Talk

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.

In our annual poll of IEEE Fellows, a lot of tech hype was tossed in the trash bin, but a lot of hope was sifted from the remainder of the speculation to offer plenty of encouragement to those who are working on the technology of tomorrow. In "Bursting Tech Bubbles Before They Balloon", authors Marina Gorbis and David Pescovitz summarize the findings of the joint survey conducted by IEEE Spectrum and the Institute for the Future (IFTF).

Yesterday, we wrote about the findings of the Pew Internet and American Life Project report, "The Future of the Internet II." Today, we'll overview what our own experts have to say about technology a couple of decades down the road. We polled more than 700 IEEE Fellows for their views on future developments in computer science, telecommunications, electronics, sensors and robotics, physics, space and earth sciences, and materials and nanotechnology. Here's a sampling of some of the things they forecast.

• Computer Science: Will a universal language translator become commercially available? Unlikely 15.1%. Equal chances 20.1%. Likely 64.8%. When is this likely to occur? 10 years or less 19.8%. 11 to 20 years 50%.

• Telecommunications: Will terabit optical networks be common? Unlikely 3.5%. Equal chances 6.9%. Likely 80.6%. When is this likely to occur? 10 years or less 42.2%. 11 to 20 years 46.9%.

• Electronics: Will the semiconductor industry hit the "Moore's Law" wall? Unlikely 12.5%. Equal chances 15.4%. Likely 70.7%. When is this likely to occur? 10 years or less 29.6%. 11 to 20 years 53.5%.

• Sensors and Robotics: Will household robotics be widely adopted? Unlikely 17.8%. Equal chances 29.5%. Likely 48.8%. When is this likely to occur? 10 years or less 16.1%. 11 to 20 years 50%.

• Space and Earth Sciences: Will microelectromechanical systems be widely applied to medicine? Unlikely 15.4%. Equal chances 22.1%. Likely 59.6%. When is this likely to occur? 10 years or less 19.6%. 11 to 20 years 50%.

• Materials and Nanotechnology: Will microscale robotics become viable? Unlikely 15.4%. Equal chances 26.9%. Likely 52.9%. When is this likely to occur? 10 years or less 9.6%. 11 to 20 years 53.8%.

As Gorbis and Pescovitz, of the IFTF, write: "[O]ur survey does not try to predict the sci-tech future but merely to uncover key directions. So although we may not be able to say that in 2015 a space elevator will be shuttling goods and people into orbit or that in 2020 we'll all have robot servants, we can foresee that in the next several decades we will be building our infrastructure in a new way: we will have unlimited computing resources, live in a sensory-rich computing environment, and reengineer ourselves and the biological world around us. Understanding these larger trends helps organizations think about adapting to the future, and thus shaping it. Alan Kay's prescription: 'The best way to predict the future is to invent it.'"

We can think of no better way to approach what lies ahead for technology.

p>The maverick British billionaire whose team built the first private spacecraft to reach sub-orbital flight has his sights set on commercializing the high frontier in the not so distant future. Yesterday, in New York City, Sir Richard Branson showed off a design of the customized cabin for the first of the new SpaceShipTwo (SS2) vehicles—to be christened the Enterprise.

Branson said the Virgin Galactic spacecraft, to be built by Scaled Composites, of Mojave, Calif., will be completed in the second half of 2007, begin testing in early 2008, and start commercial operations in 2009. Speaking at Wired Magazine's NextFest conference, the British entrepreneur said: "Construction of SS2 is underway at Burt Rutan's factory ... and this is the first opportunity for the public to get a sneak preview of the sheer scale of what is under construction there."

The cabin mockup was designed by leading British product designer Seymour Powell. It accommodates a crew of eight—two pilots and six passengers—who will have to fly to sub-orbital space experiencing a 3-G force and then recline during the period the vehicle is under zero G. During this time, expected to only last a few minutes, passengers will be allowed to unbuckle and float freely before they return to their seats for the descent to the surface. The price tag for the ride of a lifetime will initially be US $250 000, according to Branson.

The music and travel tycoon has planned for a fleet of five SS2s in the coming years. Each will be hoisted into launch position, mid-air, by carrier craft known as WhiteKnightTwos. The work being done on the new project extends the successful effort culminated two years ago by launches of SpaceShipOne, which soared to an altitude of 100 kilometers to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the first privately owned vehicle to fly to outer space.

"Our vision is to successfully build the world's first environmentally benign space launch system and prove once and for all the commercial viability of a safe space launch system that we believe will eventually be capable of taking payload and science into space as well as people," Branson said yesterday, promising to make the SpaceShipTwo program as ecologically friendly as possible (last week, he pledged $3 billion of his fotune to support environmental causes). "If you're going to build a spaceship, you've got to build a green spaceship."

Once more, Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry reports from the DEMOfall show in San Diego on the latest gadgets looking to prove themselves to consumers. Here are her thoughts on Day Two. (For her Day One musings, click here.)

Tekla S. Perry

I've seen 67 product demonstrations at a distance and gone one-on-one with about two-thirds of these new products. Some make absolutely no sense to me.

For example, for about 40 cents a pop, I can add cartoon speech bubbles to photos I take with my cellphone and then send the altered images to my friends. I don't have a camera phone; but even if I did, I doubt I'd spend time and money "cranking" the images (which is what the company, photocrank, is calling this editing). Or I can download music for free to my cellphone or MP3 player, with Lirix, as long as I'm willing to listen to advertisements along with my music. I'm not. And then there's the wireless rabbit that will read the New York Times to me when I wake up in the morning and send me secret messages by tilting its ears. The Nabaztag from Violet has an appealing shape, a cross between a Pokemon and a lava lamp; but at US $150, I think not. The developers of those products, however, can console themselves with the fact that, as a 40-something mom, I'm not in their target demographic; they're mostly looking for 18 to 25 year olds, maybe 30 at the outside.

Most of the other products seemed reasonable but, for the most part, blur together in my mind. However, in spite of Demo overload, a few products that I saw on Day Two did manage to stand out. They fill a real need, are well designed and, while I can't be sure without testing them outside of the Demo environment, seem to work.

Living in Silicon Valley, I can't take a walk down the street without seeing people that appear to have Bluetooth earpieces permanently implanted on the sides of their heads. Could be, though, that they're going to want a device transplant after seeing the Mvox Duo. At $199, this unit looks like an ordinary Bluetooth earpiece, but it converts to a speakerphone, with impressive clarity and volume. It uses an omni-directional mike for noise canceling and a directional mike for picking up conversation. The thing I liked most is that Mvox got the little things right. A magnetic switch in the lapel-clip turns on the speakerphone; pull the earpiece out of the clip and the speakerphone switches off; this protects your ear from an accidental up-close overdose of sound. The lapel-clip fits nicely on a seatbelt; a feature I'll need in California very soon, because driving while holding a cellphone will soon be against the law. And a twist of the lapel-clip turns it into a microphone stand for conference table use. Very clever.

As the person in my household who is in charge of tech support, Retrevo is definitely for me. I rarely bother with specialized search engines, but this free one looks for specific solutions to problems, sorting past chit-chat and product reviews. And it looks inside manuals, not just on Web sites and blogs. Given that I tend to lose manuals, I can use this feature several times a year. The Retrevo demo involved figuring out how to reset a Slingbox that had stopped slinging, and easily found the procedure. But I had a trickier test for it. About a month ago the keyless remote for my Mazda MPV died; changing the battery didn't work, it just wasn't talking to the car anymore. I spent over an hour scouring the Internet for a solution beyond "take the car to an authorized service center." Eventually, I found the answer (an arcane combination of key turns and door slams that resembles the chicken dance) buried deep in a blog. When I proposed this search to the executives at Retrevo, they prepared me for failure. A car remote isn't really a consumer electronics product, they pointed out, definitely on the fringe at best, but they would give it a try. Retrevo found that deeply buried answer in about five seconds. We were all amazed.

The idea of having one phone number you can use for all your phones forever isn't a new idea. Call-forwarding is an early implementation; sometimes useful, but not simple or powerful enough to bother with regularly. GrandCentral gives you that single phone number and a Web interface. You can manage incoming callers by phone number, sending them selectively to your different phone numbers (work, cell, or home) directly into voice mail, or into the purgatory that is a spam folder. The voicemail service alone seems worth the price of admission—Grand Central's $14.99 a month is cheaper than the monthly fee for my AT&T voice-mailbox. And I like that you can use voicemail to record conversations; I can't do that with my existing voicemail.

I'll try Grand Central, and you can to, for free, for the next 60 days. You can also try Retrevo for free as well—can you come up with a better challenge than I did? Contact me at tDOTperryATieeeDOTorg to tell me about your experiences.

Surgeons are generally perceived as cool, precise operators who focus on their work with the concentration of a machine. One day soon, though, critical-care patients in places where immediate surgical response is not possible may find themselves under the scalpels of wireless robotic systems, which could be even more cool and precise than the skilled doctors at their controls. In our cover story this month "Doc at a Distance", authors Jacob Rosen and Blake Hannaford explain how remote surgery technologies are maturing and where they could be headed in the future.

They note that surgeons have remotely commanded robotic systems before, even with real patients under the knife—situations that took place in "well-equipped hospitals and relied on dedicated, wired communications channels." Their research, on the other hand, looks at how we might be able to cut the cords and perform true electronic telemedicine operations on severely wounded patients in chaotic conditions, such as battlefields. They ask, essentially, how we can break free from the wires.

Rosen and Hannaford (IEEE Fellow) are the co-directors of the University of Washington's BioRobotics Laboratory. They recently deployed a distance-medicine system to the hills of California for field-testing, under the aegis of the U.S. Army, and ran it through surgical procedures on, thankfully, anatomical dummies. The first conclusion they drew is that "surgical robots need plenty of improvement." They go on to say, however, that future deployments "will use imaging technologies such as ultrasound, MRI, and CT scans as their 'eyes', and they will break free from centuries of surgical convention, entering the body through existing openings and moving inside the patient as they make their way to the surgery area." They surmise:

As the technology matures, surgical robots promise to improve a wide range of procedures in terms of patient recovery time, cost, and safety. Medicine, however, is, as it should be, a conservative field, following Hippocrates' mantra: "I will keep [patients] from harm and injustice." In the next several decades, surgical robots, like many technologies introduced in medicine, will prove their value and become mainstream tools—tools always guided by a physician's judgment and dedication to the delivery of the best health care.

The BioRobotics Laboratory team in Washington participates in another military-funded initiative, the US $12 million Trauma Pod program, begun last year by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and managed by SRI International, of Menlo Park, Calif. It seeks to develop an unmanned, mobile operating room that is equipped with a host of automated surgical systems and could be quickly dispatched anywhere in a war zone, according to the authors. You can learn more about this effort at the Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center.

Robotic medicine is coming—and it's coming faster than you think to a hot-spot near you.

Showing that sometimes you need to maintain your sense of humor in today's world of advanced technology, author Brian R. Santo this month examines the tech-speak we use routinely to convey complex concepts to others—and finds it to often be LOL funny when taken out of context (or sometimes even in context). In "Acronym Addiction", Santo compiles a list of acronyms and initialisms that should leave you shaking your head in wonder that we even manage to communicate effectively with each other at times.

To verify his thesis that the alphabet soup of contemporary technical jargon has spilled over our collective plate, Santo spoke with a number of new IEEE Fellows. Sandra Johnson, chief technology officer for IBM's global small and medium businesses, told Santo that she recalls being at a presentation that was so chock full of esoteric acronyms that she "leaned over to the people next to [her] and asked if they knew what the presenter was talking about, and they didn't." Her question got all the way around the room, but no one was familiar with all of the acronyms being used. "It was amusing," she said. "This guy was going to town, and no one knew what he was talking about."

In that spirit, here are some of our favorites from Santo's feature:

• ABT: Advanced BiCMOS technology. Building BiCMOS chips, which combine bipolar transistors and field-effect transistors, started out as a fairly complicated process; apparently it's become even more so.

• MHEMT: metamorphic high-electron-mobility transistor. An MHEMT is a variation of a high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT), which is a type of really fast switch. MHEMTs are found in adaptive cruise-control radar in cars you probably cannot afford.

• PECL: positive emitter-coupled logic. A way of constructing logic circuits so that they operate faster. PECL is just ECL operated between positive voltage and ground. Another ECL variation is LVPECL (which we dearly wish were pronounced "love peckle").

• SED: surface-conduction electron-emitter display. That should be SCEED, right? We thought so. Normally we disdain cheating, but on the other hand we admire the chutzpah required to simply discard 40 percent of your word count to get to a marketable acronym.

• STRIFE: stress plus life (testing). A portmanteau posing as an acronym—there's no reason for this word to be in all capital letters other than the perversity of whoever minted it. We're fond of it anyway, because it actually means what it says.

• WAF: wife acceptance factor, wife approval factor. A product feature or modification sufficiently appealing to women that they will permit their husbands to buy the product.

Our absolute favorite, though, has got to be TLA: three-letter acronym. As Santo, a senior editor at CED (Communications Engineering and Design) and a former editor at EET (Electronic Engineering Times), notes: 'Two letters are rarely enough. And four letters or more give people the inexplicable urge to try to pronounce them, even if they shouldn't. Thus, the electronics industry's penchant for acronyms is so powerful it has its own acronym.'

With 26 letters in the Roman alphabet, there are a possible 17 576 TLAs in English, and sometimes it seem that every one of them is currently in use. Maybe we should offer a contest at Spectrum Online (SOL) to see who can come up with the most TLAs not in use—and see how long it takes clever technologists to fill them. That would be BAD—broken as designed. Or just plain bad, seriously. Let us know what you think.

>One of the most famous people alive has had to live for nearly 40 years with a lingering cloud over his head—all because of something he supposedly did not say. Recently, though, a technologist in Australia employing software that enhances speech for persons with disabilities stumbled upon a word that had been missing from the historical record for decades. When Neil Armstrong first stepped off the Apollo 11 lunar landing vehicle on 21 July 1969, he spoke the words that he had formulated only after landing on the moon and considering his role in an immensely human-intensive project: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

The problem with these words, of course, is that they were not what was heard back at NASA Mission Control in Houston and subsequently transmitted around the world. Those words were: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Strictly speaking, if you parse the latter statement, you get the rather banal construction: "One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind." Which is, essentially, nonsense. Armstrong believed he had pronounced the sentence correctly; but when he returned to Earth a few days later, he was apprised that his famous statement had been garbled, tainting what should have been one of the towering moments in human achievement. And language mavens and critics of technology have never ceased since to make the remark a subject of mockery.

Then along comes Peter Shann Ford, CEO of Control Bionics, in Sydney, Australia, who while working on software that allows disabled people to communicate through computers using their nerve impulses decided earlier this year to run a sophisticated program on an archival sound file from NASA. Ford, an admitted "space junkie" (and someone who had covered the space program for CNN and NBC during the Eighties), found the missing "a" using a graphical analysis tool. In a brief account on his firm's Web site, "That's one small a...", he relates the story of his discovery and offers several links to relevant information—including his paper "Electronic Evidence and Physiological Reasoning Identifying the Elusive Vowel 'a' in Neil Armstrong's Statement on First Stepping onto the Lunar Surface" on the science of it.

Ford soon contacted Armstrong with his findings, and two weeks ago he presented his analysis to the first man on the moon at a meeting at the U.S. National Air and Space Museum. According to Ford, Armstrong had a vivid recollection of the moment and of the equipment used to transmit his first words from the lunar surface. After reviewing Ford's presentation, the world-famous astronaut offered a statement that said simply: "I have reviewed the data and Peter Ford's analysis of it, and I find the technology interesting and useful... I also find his conclusion persuasive. Persuasive is the appropriate word."

NASA has all along maintained that Armstrong spoke the famous words correctly. In its World Book entry for Neil Armstrong, the space agency states clearly that the first words spoken by a human on the moon, amidst the static, were: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Taken in context, and now proved by modern computer science, those words resonate through time and sound triumphant for all of us. A very humble man once spoke them on behalf of all of humanity. It's only fitting now that we finally give him credit for speaking them properly.

Earlier this month, the United States and Canada issued a final report by the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force on the causes of the August 2003 North American blackout and on recommendations for the prevention of future such events. The task force makes numerous recommendations to both governments to minimize the likelihood of future blackouts, reduce the scope of those that do occur, and improve the security of the North American power grid.

The 14 August 2003 blackout was the largest power outage in North American history, plunging some 50 million citizens of Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey into darkness. The report notes that, while the origin of the blackout may have started in a power system in Ohio, the ultimate impact of the source failure was compounded by "long-standing institutional failures and weaknesses that need to be understood and corrected in order to maintain reliability."

The 221-page report states at the very beginning that: '[T]he blackout could have been prevented and that immediate actions must be taken in both the United States and Canada to ensure that our electric system is more reliable. First and foremost, compliance with reliability rules must be made mandatory with substantial penalties for non-compliance.' To this end, the task force emphasizes that 'significant accomplishments' in the last three years have been achieved.

An accompanying announcement from U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman and Minister of Natural Resources for Canada Gary Lunn states: 'Mandatory reliability standards are being implemented in the United States and in jurisdictions across Canada. The North American Electric Reliability Council is submitting 118 new standards to the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and appropriate authorities in Canada for review and approval. Additional standards are also being developed.'

Bodman writes: "I appreciate the hard work and diligence that went into this important report. It demonstrates that while improvements are being made to enhance grid reliability, we still have a very complex system that is subject to possible mechanical and human failures. We must remain vigilant."

Lunn adds: "The Task Force has been an outstanding example of close cooperation between the governments of Canada and United States, and we have established a Bilateral Electric Reliability Oversight Group for collaboration between authorities in both countries on issues of common concern."

Additional documentation on the response to the blackout is available at the Department of Energy's August 2003 Blackout Web site.