Tech Talk

The computer pioneer who developed the Fortran programming language in the 1950s, launching the software revolution of the modern era, passed away on 17 March at the age of 82, according to numerous media sources. The recipient of the IEEE W. Wallace McDowell Award for technical accomplishment in 1967, John W. Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Ore., according to IBM Corp., where he spent his career. As reported by the Associated Press, Backus famously once said: "Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."

There's no such thing as a free lunch, as economists like to remind us, but you can get something pretty close to one from a company called Free Lunch Design. It's pretty much a one-man shop—run by Johan Peitz, of Göteborg, Sweden—and it gives away downloadable games and pulls in no more than a trickle of revenue from the ads it hosts.

By far the most popular of Peitz's games is Icy Tower, which has been downloaded 6 million times since it was launched six years ago.

In this month's issue, Senior Editor Harry Goldstein presents an interview he conducted in Mumbai recently with Sudhinder Thakur, executive director of corporate planning for the Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd. (NPCIL), a government enterprise charged with building and running the country's nuclear power plants. Their conversation covered topics from last year's agreement between the United States and India on nuclear power to the potential of the latter's own variety of nuclear technology based on thorium. Here are some highlights.

Thakur said India's total nuclear-generating capacity currently produces nearly 4000 megawatts (MW) of power, with over 3000 MW of capacity presently under construction. Asked by Goldstein about India's own fast-breeder reactor program, Thakur said that the country's first such commercial reactor, rated at 500 MW, is being built now and that they anticipate the unit, in Chennai, will become operational in 2011. "This is the first of its kind," he noted.

Goldstein asked Thakur about the agreement India and the U.S. signed in March 2006 to cooperate on light-water reactors and a stable supply of uranium and where that helps India in its commercial power generation ambitions. He received a complex reply from his subject. Thakur said:

"We have a very limited amount of uranium but plenty of thorium, so we have developed a three-stage program to exploit it. In the first stage, we load pressurized heavy-water reactors with natural uranium, which consists of 99.3 percent uranium 238 and 0.7 percent uranium 235. That 0.7 percent produces most of the power. Some of the uranium 238 does, however, get converted to plutonium, and when the spent fuel comes out, we can separate the plutonium out.

"In the second stage, we load the right mix of plutonium and uranium 238 into fast breeder reactors, which produce energy and more plutonium. Later on, we put a blanket of thorium around the reactor, and some of it converts to uranium 233, which we extract. In the third stage, we use the uranium 233 as fuel.

"We have enough thorium in the country to meet requirements for thousands of years, much more than our supplies of coal or other sources of fuel. So, this three-stage program has great potential, but the technologies needed for the final stage will take decades to fully develop."

As to the nature of the somewhat controversial nuclear negotiations between India and the U.S., Thakur told Goldstein: "We agreed to separate our civilian from our military programs, which will be subjected to the same inspections that other countries are subjected to."

"It is not right to say that first we will separate our activities and then we will sign an agreement," Thakur added. "All these things are happening simultaneously. We will negotiate what is known as the 1-2-3 agreement with the United States—which will mark the conditions for the availability of the technology from the U.S. and nuclear supplies, too—and we will negotiate further international agreements with the Nuclear Suppliers Group [a group of nuclear supplier countries that seeks to contribute to the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons] and the IAEA."

I recently caught up with David Wettergreen, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon's famed Robotics Institute. Wettergreen must have one of the coolest jobs for a tech-minded person: he designs and builds autonomous robots and then sets them loose in extreme environments. A year and a half ago, I followed him and his crew around Chile's Atacama Desert as they field-tested a next-generation planetary rover called Zoe (see "Halfway to Mars").

This winter, Wettergreen has been spending time on a ranch outside Tampico, in northeastern Mexico, putting another bot through its paces. This machine, designed by Bill Stone of Stone Aerospace, is an autonomous underwater vehicle—a smart submersible that operates without tethers, cables, or any real-time guidance from humans. Stone and his crew have been using the robot to explore deep, water-filled sinkholes, or cenotes, of which Mexico has thousands; some go very deep indeed and connect up to underwater caves.

Senior Associate Editor Samuel K. Moore

What do online poker and weird physics have to do with each other? More than you'd think.

Samuel K. Moore

Last September, I went to Geneva to visit ID Quantique, one of three startup companies developing an unbeatable form of encryption that is guaranteed to be unbreakable by the laws of physics (see "Commercializing Quantum Keys" in this issue). It turns sensitive data into impenetrable gibberish for transportation over gigabit-per-second optical fiber lines and then, crucially, turns the gibberish back into data.

You'd expect that kind of cutting-edge technology to be in the works at a state-of-the-art industrial lab, but ID Quantique is on the third floor of an otherwise nondescript building across from a car dealership. In my opinion, though, ID Quantique's low-key digs are a testament to the frugality needed to get a new technology to market. Another testament to that frugal spirit is that the company has made a business out of selling the parts of its quantum cryptography machine, even before it has orders for the whole.

ID Quantique supports itself mainly by selling one component of a quantum key distribution system, the random number generator. This is a quantum optics module that does the equivalent of tossing a coin millions of times per second. Sending a stream of photons of a certain polarization through a type of beam splitter randomly reorients them into one of two polarizations, providing a perfect bunch of random bits.

There are, CEO Gregoire Ribordy told me, lots of uses for perfectly random numbers beyond generating cryptographic keys. "What really is driving this market right now is gaming and online lotteries," he says. "We did not expect that." His company sells four-megabit generators and boards with four generators each, and it does so well from them that the revenue covers all operations except R&D. So for a business born to temporarily turn clear information into gibberish, it turns out that the gibberish itself is quite valuable.

Our current poll question asks whether you would allow someone to implant a radio chip in your body if it could make life more convenient. Just being able to ask such a question without laughing out loud shows how far we've changed in our mindset over the years when it comes to human-machine interfaces. As of today, voting is running about dead even on the issue. We asked the question because our cover story this month concerns a young entrepreneur who decided to be one of the first to have a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag implanted under his skin. In "Hands On", Amal Graafstra explains what drove him to take this extraordinary step and what he has learned from the experience.

An ardent RFID enthusiast, Graafstra writes that he first considered the unique move in order to solve the very practical problem of dealing with the large amount of key cards he had to use to access the medical servers he managed in his job at the time as a computer troubleshooter. Bothered by lugging around bulky key rings, he opted to sort of become a living key card. So now, as he notes, instead of reaching for a key when he comes to a door, he just waves his hand in front of it and he's in business. As the current catchphrase goes: So how's that working out for him? Apparently, by his own account, not too bad (he even persuaded his girlfriend to join him in the experiment).

Graafstra isn't the first person to have tried this novel idea, of course. In 1998, Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, in England, implanted an RFID tag above his left elbow, which he used to control doors, lights, and computers around his office. Since then, more than 2000 people worldwide have willingly had RFID tags implanted into themselves. The most common reason is to alert doctors to medical conditions, such as diabetes, should they be admitted to a hospital unconscious. By scanning the tag, doctors can identify the patient and access personal medical information. Although, in some cases, the rationale might be more frivolous: some nightclubs have used them to let patrons enter VIP rooms and bill drinks directly to their accounts.

The bold (or as some have called him, the "nutty") Graafstra admits that his RFID implants never did solve the problem of getting rid of all the keys in his life. Still, he seems to be enjoying his futuristic fling at the edge of technological limitations. He has set up a Web site, naturally, for other RFID techies to discuss their possibilities and says that, for now, he's just happy to observe how others develop this trend and see where the technology may lead next. It's an intriguing story.

Microsoft Corp. yesterday announced a new file format for digital photography that promises higher image quality and greater data preservation than current software standards such as JPEG. Introduced at the Photo Marketing Association Convention in Las Vegas, the new HD Photo technology offers, according to the company, compression with up to twice the efficiency of JPEG, which should produce greater image fidelity.

All digital imaging standards are based on algorithms that compress and decompress the data in a scanned or photographed image so that it can be easily stored and re-created within an application such as a browser or a photo-editing toolkit. Microsoft said that HD Photo (previously known as Windows Media Photo) offers users the ability to decode only the information needed for any resolution or region, as well as the option to manipulate the image as compressed data.

"With HD Photo, we're taking a new approach to creating and editing photos that simply isn't available to photographers with today's formats," said Amir Majidimehr, corporate vice president of the Consumer Media Technology Group in Redmond. "HD Photo fully preserves the original image fidelity with high dynamic range while still allowing for significant improvement in compression size."

The software giant noted that HD Photo will run on "popular platforms" such as Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X, and that it supports industry-standard metadata formats. Microsoft said it will submit the new format to an "appropriate standards organization" in the near future.

It will be interesting to see what the software industry makes of the new competitor to the venerable JPEG standard (which has been the format of choice for over a decade). Conventional wisdom holds that when it comes to software the most advanced offering is not always the winner in the marketplace of end users—a fact that the software marketers in Redmond must be keenly aware of.

By Senior Associate Editor Samuel K. Moore

A Swiss engineer brings animal-inspired locomotion to robots and robot-inspired research to animals.

Samuel K. Moore

I knew I was on the right path when I passed a cramped two-seat car on the side of which was printed Asimov's first law of robotics: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." The quotation was small comfort as the car began to follow me down the street, and I realized that neither of the two young men within, both comically too tall for the vehicle, were steering.

I was at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale du Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, to see Auke Ijspeert, head of the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group. His research is of a different sort than the robotic car that was trailing me more closely than I would have liked. Instead, Ijspeert is devoted to reproducing in robots the kind of surprisingly robust locomotion control systems in animal spinal cords. These control systems, called central pattern generators (CPGs), govern the basic motion of everything from the lowly lamprey to the sophisticated feline, and they are a hot item in the non-humanoid robot world.

In animals, CPGs are either single neurons or interconnected clusters of neurons called oscillators that reside in the spinal cord of vertebrate animals and in what passes for the brains of more primitive animals, such as snails and lobsters. The output of a single oscillator is a sine wave of neural activity. But if you link oscillators together so that the output of one drives or inhibits the other, you can get all kinds of complicated behavior. Scientists have shown that such linked oscillators produce basic repetitive motions such as slithering in snakes and swimming in salamanders. It's likely that CPGs contribute to walking and other motions in humans, but the science at the moment is not so solid.

Web Editor Philip Ross admits the one thing journalists most hate to admit—being played for a fool by a source.

Philip Ross

Generally, when a company boasts in a press release that it has been chosen to supply a part for some big project, I crumple it up and aim for the basket. It was different, though, when ST Microelectronics, a huge European chipmaker, boasted of having supplied not just any part, but an absolutely critical one, and not just for any project, but for the Wii—Nintendo's superhot game console.

ST told me that without its small, cheap, yet effective 3-dimensional motion sensor, the Wii would not have been practical. What made the story even more interesting was the underdog angle. ST had scored big, despite its rather late entry into quite a different game—the technology known as MEMS, short for micro-electro-mechanical systems. This is the art by which standard photolithographic techniques carve silicon into tiny intricate parts in real, live machines.

ST's chip was the core of the Wii, said Benedetto Vigna, head of the company's MEMS division, in an interview at IEEE Spectrum's New York offices. Asked how come his company alone had been able to supply a 3-D accelerometer with the right performance specifications, at the low, low price of US $3, Vigna said it was "just luck." Other firms experienced in 2-dimensional sensors hadn't sensed the market possibilities for the more complex 3-D kind, he said, and so ST had gotten the jump on them. When ST met up with Nintendo and learned that it was thinking along the same lines, the two companies, as Vigna put it, "got married."

Bigamously, it seems. A few days after my profile of Vigna went live on this site, Howard Wisniowski, a spokesman for Analog Devices Inc., of Norwood, Mass., called to tell me that it was ADI that had supplied the 3-dimensional accelerometer in the Wii's main controller. ST, he added, had merely provided the sensor in the secondary, "nunchuk" controller. It's secondary because most games now available don't even use it. Indeed, I'd played the baseball, tennis, and bowling games myself, all without having had recourse to the nunchuk.

No journalist likes to admit that he has been naïve. In my own defense, I will however note that company representatives do not normally visit one in one's office, eat one's take-out, and pull one's leg on so straightforward a matter as a contract to supply a part. At least, not when they know that their competitors will surely spot the resulting error and rush to expose it.

Indeed, the ADI spokesman was more than pleased to put me in touch with Richard Mannherz, ADI's marketing manager for micromachine products. Mannherz said he'd laughed at a sentence of mine that cited Vigna's success with the Wii as a big reason why ST put him in charge of its MEMS product division.

"Promoted?" he snorted. "Even though he lost the main socket?"

He was talking about the main controller, which he argued was a more desirable contract than that for the nunchuk because more games require it, and so more controllers are sold in the aftermarket. "I was in New York City at Christmas," Mannhertz said, "doing market research on the availability of the Wii, and I saw 'Toys R Us' had three bins, one for the traditional [pre-Wii] Nintendo controller, another for the main Wii controller, and another for the nunchuk. The classic controller was full, the one for nunchuk was half full, the one for the main controller was empty."

"Look, it was always unlikely that Nintendo would choose one company to do them both," he continued. "It had to do an effective job of managing supply risk." Sony learned that lesson the hard way before Christmas, when shortfalls in its Blu-ray diodes kept it from supplying enough PlayStation 3's to meet demand.

Michael Markowitz, a spokesman for ST Microelectronics admitted as much in an email: "The accelerometers in the remote and nunchuk are essentially interchangeable; like many manufacturers, Nintendo prefers to have multiple sources of supply as a sort of insurance policy against problems at any one source."

Now he tells me.

When I called him up, Markowitz told me that Vigna was traveling and unavailable for comment. So I put the question to him: if the two chips were interchangeable, then why had the ADI chip been chosen for use in the main controller? "We would argue that both companies came out very well," he replied.

Why had he and Vigna characterized the ST chip as the "core" of the Wii, essential to its success? "I would say our answers were not misleading; they were precisely accurate. If you didn't do external research to find out about Analog, it's not our job."

Okay, okay, so I screwed up: I trusted these guys, and they hornswoggled me.

In the old days, my only response would have been to say, "fool me once, shame on you." Nowadays, I have more options. I can, for instance, write this blog.