Tech Talk

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.

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.