january 2006 / greg goebel
* Entries include: The Movies machinima, terrorist threat to chemical plants, space Learjet, e-gold troubles, junk patents, Chinese net censorship, C.K. Prahalad's economic ideas, prayer rug scam, advertising in odd places, backhoe threat to fiber-optic lines, Hofstader's paranoid style essay, conversion to digital TV, virtual conferencing systems, US Army training grounds, Chinese net cops, medical malpractice lawsuits, Electroplankon digital environment, continuously variable transmissions, technology for old Japanese, ultra-tech Smartwrap house, Canadian butter wars, microdot ID systems, economic hardship in the Great Plains, click fraud, Japanese car plants in the USA, tsunami alert system, fun and games with product rebates, political issues over vaccine production, gift card scams, promoting commercial space, military blogs.
* MACHINA REVISITED: Back in these pages in November, I ran an article on "machinima" -- videos constructed using video games -- and speculated that video games might soon be designed with "hooks" to allow users to manipulate them for video productions. According to an article in WIRED Online ("Machinima for the Masses" by Annalee Newitz), things have already advanced well beyond that. A new Activision game titled "The Movies" has been released that is actually designed for making machinima, and has already led to an online hit -- THE FRENCH DEMOCRACY, a 13-minute video by French designer Alex Chan that tells a story of how discrimination in French society led to the country-wide riots of 2005.
The Movies is, on the face of it, a simulation game where players build a movie studio and then use it to produce movies, employing a toolkit to help with movie production. Peter Molyneux, whose UK-based Lionhead Studios developed The Movies, sasy it's a no-brainer: "A game about the movie industry that doesn't allow you to make movies would be pretty weird. We wanted you to be able to make your own unique movie in no way controlled or defined by us. I think that's what we've achieved."
Up to this time, machinima has been limited to the characters and props defined for specific games and restricted by the ability of game users to hack into games or otherwise manipulate them. The Movies provides machinima producers with a kit of sets, props, and actors that can be pasted onto "storyboards", with body movements, facial expressions, dialogue, sound, and subtitles pieced in as needed.
The Movies has made it much easier to put together machinima, and even in the short time the game has been available floods of videos have been built with it -- mostly junk, to be sure, but with a few gems like THE FRENCH DEMOCRACY among them. The Movies game is actually geared to support movie production in various styles -- 1920s silents, 1940s film noir, and so on -- and in various genres -- sci-fi, horror, mystery, romance, western, et cetera.
The Movies comes with a fixed set of sets, props, and characters, which tends to lead to a certain sameness after a while, but a number of "modders" like British computer science student Robert Ashton have been developing tools to extend the game. His "Pak Poker" tool allows users to modify the game's ".pak" files, which provide textures for backgrounds, and his new "The Movies Editor (MED)" even allows users to export the digital modeling files for props and costumes, modify them in a 3D modeling package, and then import them back in again.
Peter Molyneux is doing everything he can to encourage the modders: "In no way do I want to stifle them." He is, however, discouraging users who want to use The Movies for porn productions -- that's one genre not supported by the game. It's not even possible to get the characters to appear in the nude. Another issue that is likely to arise is litigation when machinima producers begin to model real actors or Hollywood movies. So far, machinima has been too marginal to attract such unwanted attention, but as tools for producing machinima videos continue to improve, it's sure to happen.
* ED: Obviously, machinima is still more or less a toy, and likely to remain a toy for some time. However, it seems likely that in the not-too-distant future, tools will be available to allow somebody tinkering on a PC to create video productions comparable in quality to a typical 2006 animated cartoon. Users will be able to buy or trade add-ons, such as characters or props, in much the same way that flight simulator users can obtain new types of aircraft, featuring different paint schemes or "skins".
One scenario is that machinima productions will become the Internet equivalent of amateur stage productions, but with a global audience. They may also provide a training ground for aspiring film-makers, as well as a way to cheaply prototype -- OK, "storyboard" -- a more professional video production. However, machinima productions might also be used for purposes other than entertainment -- say, a simulation of a crime scene for a criminal investigation, or a simulation of a manufacturing line prior to implementing the real thing. We may laugh at machinima now, but in a generation it may be such a common and widely-used tool that nobody will think twice about it.
* CHEMICAL TERROR: On 3 December 1984, a Union Carbide chemical plant at Bhopal, India, suffered a system breakdown and released a cloud of toxic chemicals. Thousands of people were killed, tens of thousands injured. After the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, there was worry that plants manufacturing toxic chemicals and sited near large urban areas might make very attractive targets for further attacks that could kill hundreds of thousands. However, according to US NEWS & WORLD REPORT ("The Toxic Politics Of Chemicals" by Angie C. Marek, 23 January), so far not much has been done to safeguard American chemical plants from terrorist attack.
While security has been tightened somewhat at airports, seaports, and borders, chemical plants remain largely insecure. Including chemical factories, oil refineries, and waste treatment plants, there are about 15,000 such facilities, with about 100 presenting a threat to over a million people in the worst-case scenarios. Some of the big players have worked hard to beef up their security -- they have good reason to worry about the destruction of their facilities even ignoring the threat to the public -- but the US government has done little to encourage or assist in the effort.
Environmentalists claim that chemical industry lobbies have blocked attempts to mandate security measures for chemical plants. The American Chemistry Council (ACC), a major industry group, says its members have invested nearly $3 billion USD since 9-11 on a voluntary program to improve security, but even some industry security officials call current measures "a joke". The money has gone for more cameras, better fencing, and network security that might keep out a small group of monkey-wrenchers but would hardly slow down an organized attack by a well-armed terrorist group. A good number of the companies running high-risk sites aren't even on voluntary programs, and a few won't allow Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials on their sites without a warrant.
Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has introduced a bill to give the DHS much greater powers over the chemical industry, with the DHS able to impose security requirements and shut down plants that don't meet them. There is interest in the proposal in Congress -- though the ACC has come out against a clause in the bill that allows states to have tougher requirements than the Feds, the ACC plausibly claiming that inconsistent standards make life unnecessarily difficult for industry. The issue will work its way through the legislature over the coming months.
* SPACE LEARJET: According to FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL Online, anyone interested in an exciting airplane ride will get all that could be hoped for come early 2007, when the four-passenger "Rocketplane XP" spaceplane goes into service.
The XP hardly seems to be all that exotic on the surface, consisting of a Learjet 25 executive jet -- but with some special modifications. The XP will fly to 7,600 meters (25,000 feet) using its twin GE CJ610 turbojets, and then will light a Rocketdyne RS-88 liquid-fuel rocket engine will kick in, boosting the aircraft to 45,700 meters (150,000 feet) at burnout. The XP will continue to coast upward to a peak of 100,600 meters (330,000 feet), with flight control provided by a nose and wingtip thruster system. The aircraft will then glide back down into the atmosphere, relight its turbojet engines, and fly back to its home base. The passengers will experience over three minutes of weightlessness on the flight.
* TAINTED GOLD: Everybody now realizes that the Internet has its seedy side, having become a productive environment for shady business and outright crime. An article in BUSINESS WEEK ("Gold Rush" by Brian Grow, 9 January 2006) shows how seemingly straightforward Internet operations, in the form of a online named "e-gold LTD", can be drawn into the whirlpool of sleaze and thievery.
On the evening of 19 December 2005, officials of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Secret Services raided the offices of e-gold's parent company, Gold & Silver Reserve INC, as well as the home of its CEO, 49-year-old Douglas L. Jackson, a medical doctor who decided to go into the "digital currency" business. Dr. Jackson was not charged with any crime, but the investigators seized records and other materials.
There are about a dozen digital currency operations online at this time. They permit users to perform financial transactions with each other, with the service operator charging a small fee on transactions to make a profit. About eight of the digital currency operations, including e-gold, claim that their accounts are backed by hard bullion.
Digital currency hasn't really caught on in general; E-Bay's PayPal service is popular, but it's regarded as a credit card processing operation, not a digital currency scheme as such, since it maintains accounts in national currencies. Digital currency does have its attractions to a few specific groups of users. The virtue of e-gold from a user's point of view is its convenience. Units of gold can be purchased by wire transfer or credit card, establishing an account. The company has $58 million USD in gold, kept in secure locations in London and Dubai. Once an account has been set up, transfers can be made from account to account with little fuss -- or accountability.
The fact that e-gold accounts are based on gold appeals to "gold bugs", or folks want to go back to a previous era where currencies were backed by precious metals -- a notion regarded by mainstream economists as crackpottery. The lack of accountability makes e-gold attractive to criminals. Investigators have run across online sites such as "CC-cards", where criminals blatantly sell stolen credit-card information, and child pornography sites where payment is taken in e-gold, instead of VISA or Mastercard. It's played a role in some online scams, and there is a worry that terrorists are catching on to the scheme as well.
Dr. Jackson's e-gold LTD was one of the pioneering digital currency operations. He became interested in libertarianism and Ayn Rand in the mid-1990s, reading up on monetary policy and becoming a gold bug. Governments having given up on the idea of gold-backed currencies, he decided to create his own, setting up e-gold in 1996 in collaboration with a friend, attorney Barry K. Downey.
Dr. Jackson finally left his medical practice in 1998 to run e-gold full time. He had hoped his scheme would catch on in a big way, but e-gold has remained a niche operation -- a niche, unfortunately, that crooks seem to have found very useful for their purposes. Nobody has accused Dr. Jackson of complicity in criminal activities, but government investigators think he has turned a blind eye to some of the things going on in his operation.
Dr. Jackson denies that he has conveniently overlooked illegal transactions on his service. He is, after all, a libertarian, and it is a fundamental belief of libertarians that people should be able to conduct their own business in privacy. He also points out that he is under little legal obligation to snoop on the business of his users, since even government officials admit that regulations designed for banks and other mainstream financial institutions, such as the Bank Secrecy Act, don't cover digital currency operations like e-gold. He admits that his single in-house investigator is swamped, trying to keep up with the "pile of subpoenas" on his desk.
Some e-gold users became skeptical of the operation's loose methods and jumped ship to GoldMoney.com, operated out of the British Channel Island of Jersey. GoldMoney is another gold-based digital currency, but users are required to provide positive ID before opening an account, with their IDs checked against known lists of money launderers. An independent accounting firm periodically checks GoldMoney's books.
Dr. Jackson claims these procedures are unnecessary and add to the overhead of doing business. In fact, he makes little secret of his efforts to avoid scrutiny, even going so far as to avoid using terms such as "deposit" and "withdrawal" in favor of "in-exchange" and "out-exchange" to make his service sound less like a bank, which would imply banking regulations. Although Gold & Silver Reserve INC operates out of Florida, the company is actually registered on the Caribbean island of Nevis, where banking regulation is thin. Again, this is consistent with his libertarian beliefs, and investigators say that when they make requests to Gold & Silver Reserve INC for data, the company is always responsive. Dr. Jackson has also been very energetic in dealing with kiddie pornsite operators using e-gold services.
It is hard not to see Dr. Jackson as a honest man with a vision that happens to include antiestablishment ideas. Unfortunately, he seems to be a bit out of his depth, and it also seems unlikely his troubles will go away any time soon -- not merely because of the government's specific interest in his operation but because regulations covering digital currency operations are sure to be tightened up. Even if e-gold crashes and burns, however, the cat's out of the bag: there are other digital currency schemes elsewhere, such as WebMoney in Russia, that will take up the slack and which won't be so easy to monitor. The fight's just getting warmed up.
* JUNK PATENTS: According to a BUSINESS WEEK article ("The Patent Epidemic" by Michael Orey, 9 January 2006), when Canadian auto parts supplier KSR International was asked by American car giant General Motors (GM) to supply a gas pedal, KSR officials thought it looked like a straightforward deal. GM wanted a pedal that could be adjusted to the heights of different drivers, and which would also use a electrical signal instead of a mechanical linkage to control the throttle.
Both features had been around for a time, so the combination of them seemed no problem -- until lawyers of Teleflex INC of Limerick, Pennsylvania, told KSR that the Canadian company was in violation of Teleflex's patent, which covered the combination of an adjustable pedal and electrical throttle control. KSR, so said the lawyers, would have to pay a royalty. KSR ignored Teleflex and shipped pedals to GM without paying Teleflex off.
KSR and Teleflex are now fighting the matter out in US court. KSR has a good case to make in principle, since American patent law specifically states that a patent must be "non-obvious". In other words, somebody might patent the light bulb and somebody might patent the refrigerator, but nobody can patent the notion of putting a light bulb in a refrigerator. Teleflex insists their patent is not obvious, and the case is being pushed up to the US Supreme Court.
Critics of the current US patent system claim it is being swamped in a sea of "junk patents". A group of American companies is throwing its weight behind KSR in the patent dispute with Teleflex, and several dozen intellectual-property law professors have begun similar legal actions, claiming that massive overpatenting is a "drag on innovation."
In 1990, the US Patent & Trademark Office issued 99,000 patents; in 2004, the number was 181,000, and patent applications are being filed at 400,000 per year. An attorney named Barry Schindler wrote that companies seek patent rights on "every conceivable business operation, such as methods of billing clients, hiring employees, marketing products or service ... or simply obtaining funding." The most famous of these junk patents was Amazon's patent on "one-click shopping", which amazingly the courts backed up. A joker came up with a fake patent on the procedure for "walking and chewing gum at the same time."
Instead of encouraging innovation, junk patents end up becoming a form of parasitic speculation, with phony "inventors" simply accumulating portfolios of dubious patents so they can extort royalties from people who actually produce things. The result is continuous litigation over patent rights, and designers never knowing if some minor change they make will cause a patent dispute. Apparel maker VF Corporation finds even implementing a simple brassiere a tricky business, since any tweak they make might end up in court. Says an attorney involved with patent reform: "How many bra patents could you possibly have?"
Trying to dodge the patent bullet is troublesome and expensive. Even if a patent is bogus, companies may end up spending millions fighting it. As a defensive measure, companies have been forced to pile up junk patents of their own, in hopes of being able to counterchallenge anyone who claims a patent infringement.
Critics believe that the real problem is the failure of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to enforce the non-obviousness provision. When a Federal court in Detroit ruled in favor of KSR in the gas-pedal dispute, the judge stating that the concept was an obvious combination of existing technologies, an appeals court overturned the verdict, claiming that there was no mention of the concept in any earlier literature and so it was not in fact obvious.
The condition of prior citation applied by the appeals court is reasonable on the face of it, since it's common experience that something that seems obvious in hindsight may not have been obvious at all before the fact. However, the result is an out-of-control and literally counterproductive patent system, and it's not clear when the law will get the flood under control.
* SEE NO EVIL: Google just made headlines that reported the search-engine giant had agreed to requests by the Chinese government to filter out web pages deemed unacceptable by the authorities. It is a bit odd that this made news, since this is business as usual in China.
According to an article in BUSINESS WEEK ("The Great Firewall Of China" by Bruce Einhorn and Ben Elgin), when US voice IP / instant messaging company Skype decided to penetrate the China market, partnering with TOM Online INC of Hong Kong as a local partner, the Americans got a lesson in how things are done in China. They were flatly told that any services installed would have to include filters to block messages that contained words and phrases such as "Dalai Lama", "Taiwan independence", "Falun Gong", "Tianamen massacre", or even "democracy". Skype officials protested, but it did no good: either they did as they were told, or they didn't do business in China. They caved in and installed the filters.
Welcome to China, where the main target of email filters is political dissidence and not spam. Any foreign firm that does business there immediately learns to play by the rules. If Microsoft is informed by the authorities that a blogger on the MSN service isn't acceptable, he is removed from the system, no argument about it. Internet companies are given regular updates on what is not acceptable, and are held accountable if users of their services break the rules. In short, companies have been pressured into maintaining security for the state.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Chinese internal security services employ about 30,000 people to spy on Chinese Web surfers; in comparison, the US Central Intelligence Agency has only 16,000 employees. Bloggers who don't post to controlled commercial sites must register with the authorities. Internet cafes keep files on their users. All Internet traffic into and out of China is run through government-controlled gateways, where it is filtered for content; troublesome sites like CNN, BBC, and Amnesty International are blocked. The censorship is an irritant even to people who don't have any inclination to rock the boat, since the government gateways are chokepoints that make obtaining materials from the outside world very slow and difficult.
When new Internet technologies arrive, the net police are quick to slap controls on them. The continuous introduction of such new technologies is a real challenge to the authorities, and there are those who think that China's heavy-handed government is fighting the tide. So far, however, the net police seem to be doing a fairly successful job of it. Whether they can continue to do so in the face of spiraling use not only of the Internet, but also mobile phones with text-messaging services, remains to be seen.
* Along this line, in the "news too bizarre to be taken seriously" category, the police in Shenzhen, China, have come up with an interesting innovation on the Internet gateways of the city: two cutesy anime-style cartoon police, a guy cop named "JingJing" and a girl cop named "ChaCha". In Chinese, the word for "police" is "JingCha", so there you have the derivation.
They are not there for amusement value. Their function is to remind Web surfers that WE ARE WATCHING YOU. Clicking on them takes a surfer straight to a live cop, who will be happy to hear about anyone who seems inclined to deviate from the acceptable. The police are refreshingly honest about the little cartoon cops, flatly admitting that the duo's function is to intimidate. Think of JingJing and ChaCha as the iron fist in the Mickey Mouse glove.
* PRAHALAD'S PYRAMID: BUSINESS WEEK correspondent Pete Engardio, working on a profile of 64-year-old University of Michigan Professor Coimbatore Krishnarao ("C.K.") Prahalad for the 23 January issue, got a dynamic lesson in his subject's ways of thinking during a drive through Mumbai. The reporter's first impressions were of poverty, but Dr. Prahalad claimed that there was more going on than sheer misery: there were floods of people trying to get ahead and demonstrating a lot of ingenuity in doing it.
Dr. Prahalad pointed to a cubbyhole of a shop in which the proprietor was sending faxes for customers, charging them small sums for the service: "That guy probably started with a single phone and then added a fax and a printer. Now he has a self-contained communications center, offering extremely low prices." Dr. Prahalad then took the reporter into a tiny dry-goods shop, pointing out that the single-serving containers of soap, toothpaste, and other household goods being sold for tiny sums were all major brand names, like Colgate, Lifebuoy, Lux: "Low quality won't sell."
C.K. Prahalad made his name encouraging major corporations to rethink their business models, becoming a sought-after consultant and hitting the business best-seller lists with books written along with his colleague Gary Hamel. Dr. Prahalad's 2004 book THE FORTUNE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PYRAMID brought to center stage one of his particularly radical assertions: that there is a fortune to be made at the bottom of the economic pyramid, where people are generally assumed to be mired in hopeless poverty.
To anti-globalism activists, Dr. Prahalad's notion sounds like a plot for new exploitation of the masses, but he stands that notion on its head. The poor have money -- not much for any one of them, but there are a lot of poor -- and they are often both ingenious and energetic in trying to get ahead. Corporations that can help them advance stand to make rewards. On the other side of the coin, Dr. Prahalad says that the emerging economic power of the poor at the bottom of the pyramid represents a challenge to corporations, one which will sweep away the old ways of doing business and leave those who don't adjust high and dry.
Dr. Prahalad's next book, to be published this year, will showcase Indian companies whose innovative ways of doing business demonstrate the changes he believes are coming. Indian telecom operators like Bharti can offer consumer data and voice communications packages for a third of what they would cost in the US; Bangalore's Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital can perform competent heart bypass surgery for only $1,500 USD. Narayana also insures 2.5 million poor Indians against serious illness for 11 cents a month per person. The hospital even operates on hundreds of infants each year for free -- and still shows a profit.
Dr. Prahalad's analyses show that the low wages and cost of living in India don't come close to fully accounting for the economies he observes. The real key, he claims, is management using innovative procedures and financing, and outsourcing as much as possible.
* Management gurus come and go, and there are those who find it hard to take Dr. Prahalad very seriously. Trying to reach the very poor is a low-margin game and even large volume might not make the effort very worthwhile. In response, Dr. Prahalad points out how $100 USD laptop PCs, once thought of as impossible, are now going into production.
C.K. Prahalad is regarded as blunt, pragmatic but innovative, and endlessly curious about the economic life of the world. Some find him overly serious, he himself admitting: "I'm not much fun at parties." He has had his hits and misses, but he points to ICICI Bank in India as one of his successes. He pushed ICICI into the "microcredit" business, lending small sums to the poor, with the bank installing 2,000 ATMs in cities and villages around the country, and setting up self-help groups to provide loans of as little as $100 USD for someone trying to set up a business. ICICI has pushed 75% of its transactions online, greatly reducing costs, with software developed in-house to save money. ICICI has been growing rapidly and the bank thinks its business model is applicable elsewhere.
Dr. Prahalad holds up Bharti as another example of what he's talking about. The telecom company outsourced as much as possible, pushing the use of prepaid call cards that the poor find attractive and which generate up-front revenue. The poor can't usually afford PCs, but they can afford cellphones, and Bharti has built up a huge subscriber base on that premise.
Yet another showcase is Narayan. The hospital does have some cultural advantages: malpractice suits are rare in India, so malpractice insurance isn't much of a financial burden. However, Narayan also does things very differently than in the US, taking an "assembly-line" approach to health care. In America, a surgeon directs the care from beginning to end for a patient, but in Narayan the surgeons focus on surgeries, performing three or four a day, every workday. It might sound robotic, but Narayan insists its mortality rates for heart surgery are half that of the US: practice makes perfect, and Narayan surgeons get a lot of practice.
Narayan's approach would shock American doctors, and there would be strong resistance to such an approach in the US. However, Dr. Prahalad believes the new business models will be irresistible over the long run. The longer the established order tries to protect its turf, the more the lean and agile newcomers will undermine them.
* ED: C.K. Prahalad's vision is an appealing one, if maybe a bit too good on the face of it to be fully believed. Anybody who spent real time in a corporate environment also knows better than to be too taken in by the management fad of the day. However, I think he really scores big on the globalism debate.
To anti-globalists, international corporations are out to exploit the world's poor. There are cases where there's some justification for that view, but it's also simplistic. Boosters of capitalism have long praised the way the system creates wealth, and Dr. Prahalad provides detailed descriptions of how capitalism can provide opportunities for the poor. His may be a simplistic view in some ways as well, but even if so, it provides an effective foil to keep the anti-globalists from dominating the debate.
* PRAYER RUG SCAM: I was fishing through my mailbox today -- my postal mailbox, the one on the corner of my front yard -- and found a letter from "Saint Matthew's Churches" in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was obviously junk mail from the looks of it, but it was covered with Christian fundamentalist verbiage, and that made me curious: How did I get on this mailing list?
I opened it up and things got curiouser. It had a large fold-out image of our Lord Savior Jesus Christ in the form of a prayer rug; a return mail envelope addressed to "Prayer By Letters" of Saint Matthew's Churches in Tulsa; a return letter to be stuffed into the envelope that actually had a checklist asking the Lord to give blessings for (*) a better job, (*) my children, (*) a new car, and (*) money; plus a cover letter that had a woman's picture with the caption: BLESSED WITH $46,000.00 AFTER USING PRAYER RUG ... "My husband listed 7 things that he wanted God to do for Him ... He sent it off the same day and GOD BLESSED US WITH $10,700."
OK, I'd read enough. It screamed out SCAM in neon lights with flashing arrows and heavy-metal rock soundtrack. It wasn't a very good scam, to be sure, but the format was certainly one I hadn't run into before and I was a bit intrigued. As I've said before, I'm a student of scams -- calling myself an expert might be an overstatement, but I certainly read everything I come across on the subject with interest -- and this was something new to me. I Googled ST MATTHEWS PRAYER RUG and ran across a number of interesting comments.
Apparently, the letter was the product of a Reverend James Eugene Ewing, who actually operates out of Los Angeles. There is a Saint Matthew's Church in Tulsa, but the return address on the envelope is to a post-office box and that particular church has nothing to do with it. Ewing began as a tent-show revivalist, finally coming up with the idea of sending a trinket to the masses and asking them to send money to have their prayers come true. It seems he's been raking in tens of millions with this little game.
It appears to be actually legal, this gimmick being in the category of "beneath a scam", the message amounting to: PLEASE SEND ME YOUR MONEY -- without any tangible promise of sending anything back. The law, after all, cannot really protect people from themselves. Put simply, it's trolling for suckers -- doubly contemptuous for targeting the feeble-minded, and for playing such a no-class-at-all con.
I am not a religion-basher. I was raised strictly Catholic, but though acquaintances tell me that ex-Catholics they meet are usually very anti-religious, I maintain a polite truce, having no motive for a quarrel and better things to do with my time. The net commentators included a number of religion-bashers, but they also included practicing Christians who were just as appalled as the rest -- maybe more so. I shrugged either way. Yes, it was sleazy, but there was a bit of humor in it. Since the return envelope was postage paid, I chopped up my other junk mail, sealed it in the envelope, and shipped it back so the Reverend Ewing would have to pay postage on it.
* SIGNS OF TIMES: BUSINESS WEEK had an interesting little list of new advertising venues in the 23 January issue that seems worth repeating here:
* DANGER BACKHOES! Although the digital press has long fretted over various threats to the global computer network, worrying about everything from spam to cyberterrorists, one major threat -- the backhoe -- has been generally overlooked.
A WIRED NEWS article ("The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat" by Kevin Poulsen) shows that errant backhoes can do a great deal of damage. On 9 January 2006, cable TV contractors were laying a line in rural Arizona when the work crew suddenly noticed: "Oops! We've hit something!" It was a high-speed fiber-optic line. Long-distance phone service for millions of Sprint PCS and Nextel wireless users in the West was cut off immediately. Vital communications networks were disrupted for almost four hours. It wasn't the work crew's fault: they had contacted a state "call before you dig" helpline, and the site had been erroneously cleared.
There are hundreds of thousands of excavation accidents in the US each year that involve some damage to underground cables and pipes, with cable dig-ups being the most common cause of telecom outages in the 12-year period up to 2004. Such outages have become more infrequent, but when they happen now they are worse than before.
Statistics on outages are now privileged information. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials started worrying that digup accident data might give terrorists a convenient roadmap for an attack on America's communications infrastructure that would cause major disruption. Although such an infrastructure attack isn't really al-Qaeda's style -- they prefer much more bloodthirsty actions, though cutting communications might help sow confusion in conjunction with more violent attacks -- eco-terrorists, anarchists, and the like would find it right up their alley.
Cutting the line in Arizona shouldn't have knocked out service, since the network was redundant, but another section of the line in California had been damaged in a mudslide a few days before. The massive outage was a fluke. However, the networks are clearly vulnerable to deliberate attacks by groups that have identified the system's chokepoints.
In 2003, Sean Gorman, a doctoral candidate at George Mason University, constructed a map of America's fiber-optic network for his PhD dissertation, demonstrating how straightforward it was to identify and target critical nodes in the system. Gorman went on to form FortiusOne, a data security company that advises financial companies on how to implement secure communications, and consults with other organizations such as the DHS. Gorman says the national datacom network is just as vulnerable as it was, that it would be fairly easy to completely cut fiber-optic communications from the US East Coast to the West Coast.
Gorman claims that the lack of redundancy is partly due to communications industry consolidation. Fewer companies laying fiber-optic trunklines means fewer trunklines, all the more so because companies are reluctant to build redundant capability. Worse, terrain and legal rights-of-way mean that multiple companies tend to lay down their lines along the same paths.
There is an ongoing debate over possible solutions to the problem. Gorman thinks the US government should mandate more redundancy. Critics reply that this is an expensive solution, proposing instead that the government perform research and establish recommendations on building a more secure communications infrastructure, able to reroute communications over fiber optic cable, satellite, or wireless as needed.
In the meantime, efforts are being made to reduce the level of accidental breakages. Under the current system, there are call centers in each state that diggers can contact; the call center then contacts utilities, which send people out to mark the dig area with spray paint. The system is a bit clumsy; worse, a lot of people just go ahead and dig without bothering to call, possibly out of ignorance. Accidents hit gas lines about half the time, telecom lines about a quarter of the time. Usually the damage is minor, but it's like playing Russian roulette: in 2004, a work crew in California hit a petroleum pipeline, lighting off a fireball that killed three people and injured six more.
In hopes of improving matters, in 2002 the US government established the basis for a national "call before you dig" three-digit phone number that, like 911, would route automatically to the caller's local center. The number, which the FCC established as "811", will go live on 10 April 2007. A national advertising campaign will be performed to ensure that the public gets the message.
* PARANOID STYLE: THE ECONOMIST's American observer, Lexington, used as the basis for the column in the 7 January 2006 issue Professor Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". This item is available in full online, and it is worth citing in a criminally edited-down version here:
BEGIN QUOTE:
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content.
The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholder's conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today.
The modern right wing feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old, but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power.
[The rightist] can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms; he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals.
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman -- sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. The paranoid's interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; and so on.
A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it. The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent -- in fact, the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.
Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, [the paranoids] find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
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Lexington's angle on Hofstadter's essay was the shrill and sometimes over-the-top way Democrats have responded to the various outrages -- real, imagined, or some mixture of the two -- of the Bush II Administration. Lexington's suggestion was that the extreme rhetoric is not credible, accomplishing little but making the administration look good in comparison, which is a pity since the administration is vulnerable to rational criticism on a range of counts.
I saw nothing to argue with in Lexington's comments, but I was much more interested in Hofstadter's original essay. Though it might have been focused on the John Birch right of the early 1960s, Hofstadter was careful to describe paranoia as a style, not restricted to right or left, religious or atheistic, techno-scientific or luddite. The mindset is alive and well today, and Hofstadter's description of it remains articulate, accurate, and even witty.
* DTV 2009: Those who have been following the convolutions of America's switch to digital broadcast TV will be pleased to know that, after deliberations through much of the past year, the Congress has finally agreed that America's analog TV channels will cease to exist on 17 February 2009.
Those still stuck with analog sets at that time will be able to use converter box to pick up digital transmissions, with such boxes expected to be available in the $50:$100 USD range. About $1.5 billion USD of the funds the government expects to pick up from the sale of radio spectrum released by killing the analog channels will be used to help poor Americans obtain converter boxes.
Over the short term, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has mandated that all TVs with displays measuring 90 centimeters (36 inches) or more on the diagonal now have to be sold with a digital tuner system; half the TVs in the 60:90 centimeter (24:36 inch) range must also include a digital tuner at present, with all sets in that size range to be digital by 1 March 2006. By 2007, all TVs must be sold with a digital tuner -- though "displays" lacking any sort of tuner, capable of being connected to a DVD player or set-top box, are not covered in the mandates. This will mean higher prices for TVs for a while, but competition is expected to rapidly drive down prices.
* VIRTUAL CONFERENCING: Video conferencing has been around for many years, but it has generally been more impressive in concept than in execution. One who wasn't impressed was movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks Animation, who was so disgusted with existing video conferencing that in 2001 he set an effort in motion to get it right.
The result is now the "Halo" system, built by an alliance between DreamWorks and Hewlett-Packard (HP). Halo is not so much a system that can be put in a room than a system that is the room. Four big plasma panel TVs in each Halo room give a window into a Halo room elsewhere; each room is properly arranged, lit, and covered by cameras. The video is transferred over high-speed datalinks.
The cost of building a Halo room is $550,000 USD, with HP charging $18,000 a month to run one. DreamWorks now has 9 Halo systems, HP 13, Advanced Micro Devices two, and PepsiCo five. More are being sold. Steve Reinemund, boss of PepsiCo, says that every CEO he's let sit in on a Halo session has immediately decided to get a Halo system as well.
Although the system is expensive, it's still cheaper than flying all over the world, with Mr. Katzenberg claiming that it has cut the rate of his trips to the UK from once every three weeks to once every four months. Those who have Halo rooms are running them around the clock. HP, which has been struggling as of late, has a smash hit on their hands, and DreamWorks in turn has shown how the movie technology used to create virtual worlds has applications in the real universe.
* FIGHT AS YOU TRAIN: The American war in Iraq remains hotly argued, but some elements of the story are fairly clear. One was the fact that the US Army was not well prepared for the kind of war the troops found themselves caught up in. According to THE ECONOMIST ("How To Do Better", 17 December 2005), the Army is working hard to adjust to the new reality.
As a prominent example, welcome to the province of Talatha, where American troops spend their days trying come to grips with Islamic terrorists and deal constructively with the local citizenry caught in the crossfire. Trying to find the province of Talatha on the map might be difficult, however, since it's not anywhere near the Middle East, instead being located in Fort Polk, Louisiana, as part of the US military's "Joint Training Readiness Center (JTRC)".
As sham countries go, Talatha -- which is actually supposed to be in Afghanistan rather than Iraq -- is fairly elaborate. There are 160 "hostile" troops playing as al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents, with the al-Qaeda guerillas operating from an off-limits territory marked with signs reading PAKISTAN, and the Taliban operating from 18 mock villages. There are 800 more role-players in Talatha, including about 200 Afghan Americans, with the rest including local Lousianans hired as peasants, plus a smattering of fake journalists, aid workers, and so on.
As the military puts it: "Train as you fight, fight as you train." It's expensive, with a month of training for a combat brigade at the JTRC running about $9 million USD. The Army is similarly building up the service's two other "Combat Training Centers (CTCs)", particularly Fort Irwin in California. Fort Irwin has long been host to desert training exercises, but in the past these were classic wargame exercises, with armies shooting and maneuvering, refighting El Alamein with new weapons and tactics. Now a dozen mock villages have been set up on Fort Irwin, with a $50 million USD mock city in the works. Two Hollywood companies are on contract to provide special effects for the training and to give role-players acting lessons.
* The Army's new approach hasn't come easily. Traditionally, the US Army's mindset might be summed up as: "Find the black hats and kick ass." This is not a particularly appropriate approach for Iraq. In April 2003, jumpy American troops fired into a crowd of protesters in Fallujah, killing and wounding dozens, with matters then escalating and leading to a violent battle over the city. More finesse is required.
The British Army has a better record for dealing with conflicts where civilian populations are a major factor, and US Army officers have admired the ability of British forces to get along with the local population in Iraq. Partly this difference in mindset is cultural, the British being less inclined to the brute-force solution than the Americans; the British also have a very long history of colonial rule. The British Army has been heavy-handed at times, for example in the early days of involvement in Malaya and Northern Ireland, but as a small organization it was able to learn from mistakes more quickly.
The Army is a big bureaucracy and, as with all big bureaucracies, changes are necessarily slow and difficult, but the brass are exerting themselves. For example, facilities have been provided to make sure that all the troops provide inputs to the "tactics, techniques, and procedures (TPPs)" for getting the mission done, with every brigade in Afghanistan and Iraq having their own secure Intranet page where they can discuss matters. A high-level "Battle Command Knowledge System" has now been implemented, in the form of a secure chat room and knowledge base where troops can get answers to questions. A "Center For Army Lessons Learned (CALL)" at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has a large staff to accumulate observations and provide reports.
Critics suggest that this is all more flash than substance. Like many bureaucracies, the military has a tendency to take the reasonable notion of "maintaining a positive attitude" to the extreme of suppressing dissent and stepping on bearers of bad news -- the end result being that everyone claims things are going swimmingly when nothing much is actually getting done. American troops still remain ignorant of the cultures of their host countries, and in the hotter areas of Iraq the brute-force mentality remains in effect -- maybe necessarily, given the tactical situation.
Still, the leadership seems committed to change. The new mindset is in much evidence at the top, with new doctrines being formulated and war colleges changing their curricula to emphasize that there is more to war than simply kicking ass. Certainly, nobody could identify a lack of determination in the massive resources being pumped into the CTCs and the Army's TPP infosystems,
Whether this will be enough to help the US achieve a satisfactory resolution to the conflict in Iraq is of course impossible to say. What can be said is that part of the change in mindset is the creation of a new generation of leadership that, win or lose in Iraq, will have absorbed the lessons for the future.
* LIABILITY TANGLE: One of the major pressures towards tort (civil lawsuit) reform in the US is the way medical malpractice suits have made medical costs skyrocket. An article in THE ECONOMIST ("Scalpel, Scissors, Lawyers", 17 December 2005), outlines of the situation.
Nobody disputes that a patient who has been injured by medical incompetence has a legal right to seek compensation, but the downsides of the current American system are obvious. Trial lawyers claim that malpractice suits keep doctors honest; that may be true, but it also makes them determined to play it safe. An obstetrician named Craig Dickman claims that he will order every possibly relevant test for a patient, even ones that are arguably worthless, since a trial lawyer could use the failure to perform a test as a basis for a lawsuit.
Doctor Dickman estimates that up to 15% of the tests performed on patients in the US are not needed. Due to lawsuits that claimed that a failure to deliver babies by caesarian section resulted in the babies developing cerebral palsy, a notion with no strong medical support, obstetricians will often perform c-sections when they aren't needed. Despite the fact that the number of c-sections has increased by a factor of five, the rate of infantile cerebral palsy is the same as it was before.
Obstetricians are unusually vulnerable to malpractice suits, since they work with patients who are normally healthy; patients who are ill when they come in the door are less likely to sue. Even if the doctor wins the case, it still costs time and money; and when the doctor loses, it costs a lot more money, with jury trials awarding an average of $4.7 million USD in damages to plaintiffs. The result is that medical malpractice insurance rates are astronomical; in the state of Maryland, insurance runs to $118,000 USD a year. It is worse in some other states; to no surprise, doctors have shown a strong tendency to pack up their practice in punitive states and take it elsewhere.
Since 1975, the cost of medical malpractice lawsuits has risen 2,000%, to $26.5 billion USD. A study of malpractice suits in New York state by the Harvard Medical Practice Group found that only about 17% of the suits involved any real negligence on the part of doctors. Patients with small claims can't get a lawyer to help them, while patients with big claims may find the lawyers get up to half of the award.
In the early 1990s, health maintenance organizations (HMOs) tried to cut costs by being conservative on treatments, focusing on those that were known to be cost-effective. After being sued, they gave up trying to economize and simply passed the costs on to the consumer. Americans end up paying twice as much per head for health care as do other rich countries, and medical costs are a major drain on the international competitiveness of American industry. The US medical business swallows up 15% of American GDP, $1.6 trillion USD in 2003. While malpractice suits aren't responsible for all the high cost, they clearly make up a good part of it.
* What can be done? Although soaring health costs hurt poor Americans the worst, Democrats aren't enthusiastic about medical tort reform, since trial lawyers provide generous party support. Republicans, who are supported by insurers and hospitals, are left to lead the charge. During 2005, the US Congress did manage to pass a bill that forced big class-action suits to go through Federal courts, preventing lawyers from hunting around for friendly local courts and placing the decision in the hands of a Federal judge, not a jury. This is likely to help big drug firms over the long run.
Medical malpractice suits against doctors do not involve class-action suits and so are another matter. Maryland's state government has tried to help stop the flow of doctors out of state by partly subsidizing their insurance payments, but few could think this is a satisfactory solution. Philip Howard of Common Good, a group that lobbies for legal reform, thinks the answer is the specialist medical court. In this scenario, medical malpractice suits won't go to a jury trial, instead being handled directly by a judge. The judge would be a specialist in such cases and able to call his or her own expert witnesses as needed. Non-economic compensation for "pain and suffering" would be by a fixed schedule -- so much for loss of an arm, so much for blindness, and so on.
The concept sounds more radical than it is; patent disputes and bankruptcies are already handled in much this way. A lawyer's advocacy group calls the notion "horrific" -- a word which others might apply to the current system. The idea is starting to work its way through the US Senate.
* ELECTROPLANKTON: A WIRED NEWS Online article describes an interesting software application named "Electroplankton" for the Nintendo DS handheld game system. Electroplankton, design by Japanese media artist Toshio Iwai, is not really a game, instead being a "virtual aquarium", in which sea creatures swim around to the tune of one of ten possible soundtracks. It is possible to interact with the software by touching the handheld's screen or speaking at the mike. Soundtracks can be overlaid for different fish, creating harmonies or disharmonies as the case may be.
It's definitely a "smart" aquarium, with a "Volvoice" plankton that records sounds and then plays them back in different ways; "Nanocarp", which consists of a school of tiny plankton whose configuration changes in response to sounds; and "Hanenbow", in which the user spins an aquatic plant to create rhythms as fish bounce off the leaves. If the user just wants to watch, an "Audience" mode is available to allow things to happen pseudorandomly.
As the article pointed out, this is the sort of thing that will bore some and mesmerize others. I would clearly fall into the "mesmerize" category. I've been looking down the road at getting a set-top TV box -- not all that much for digital TV or hard disc recording, VHS tape is working fine for me at the moment, though the day is not far away when I will discard it with no regrets -- but to provide visual environments.
Electroplankton is much along the lines of what I was thinking of: a tour through a virtual world. I wasn't thinking of an interactive tour, but having a choice of semi-active or fully passive viewing would be a nice features. Why not similar tours through the solar system, ancient or future landscapes, and alien worlds? I crack my brains all day, I want to relax a bit before I go to bed so I can get a good night's sleep, and such things would do the trick.
A real challenge would be the soundtrack, since repeating the same tunes over and over again would be tiresome. It would be a challenge to a composer to write a "dynamic composition", in which sets of compatible themes would be chosen semi-randomly but interact in a harmonious way. The user could specify different musical moods or styles. Another option would be to have a library of short tunes that could be spliced together at random, ensuring that the soundtrack remained unpredictable.
Over the long run, such dynamic compositions might become so sophisticated that users would be able to record sessions and put them on the Web as their own compositions, in sort of the same way that some folks create their own videos using game graphics. It would be an even greater challenge to come up with enough variety in dynamic compositions so that we wouldn't be endlessly flooded with electronic elevator music.
* CVTS: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN has a feature each month named "Working Knowledge" that can sometimes be one of the most intriguing things in the issue. The January 2006 issue had a particularly interesting description of the continuously variable transmission (CVT).
The CVT replaces the traditional four / five / six speed transmission of an automobile with a transmission that can vary continuously from its lowest gear ratio to its highest gear ratio. Actually, calling it a "gear ratio" is misleading, since a CVT doesn't have gears as such.
To get the basic idea of a CVT, imagine a small car with a transverse (sideways) mounted engine and front-wheel drive. There's a disk on the engine shaft and a disk on the front-wheel driveshaft, with the two disks linked only by a belt. Obviously, if there's a disk with a small diameter on the engine shaft and a disk with a big diameter on the driveshaft, the gear ratio is low, good for climbing hills; if the engine shaft disk is big and the driveshaft disk small, then the gear ratio is high, good for economical fast cruise.
The magic trick in a CVT is to make the two disks effectively change diameter. This is done by actually making each in the form of two disks, in the shape of shallow cones with the tips together, one of the cones being fixed to the shaft and the other able to be moved up and down the shaft using a hydraulic actuator. Pulling the two cones apart makes the belt ride lower in the space between the cones, reducing the diameter over which the belt is driven, while drawing the cones together makes the belt ride higher, increasing the diameter.
Of course, the two sets of cones have to be adjusted in step, one set closing and the other opening, to ensure that the belt doesn't go slack. The idea that a belt can be manufactured that will put up with this sort of workout is hard to believe; it consists of dual sets of steel bands, held in place with a string of strong metal cross members.
The basic concepts for a CVT go back to Leonardo da Vinci at least, but the first practical CVT design was patented by Dutch inventors Hub and Wim van Dorn in 1958. The first full production car sold in the US to feature a CVT was the 1989 Subaru Justy.
The only shift settings necessary for a CVT are reverse, park, and forward. A CVT works best at relatively low speeds and in stop-and-go traffic. Due to friction losses in the belt, it offers no particular benefits at high speeds, and some critics say CVTs offer poor acceleration. Some drivers also find a car that doesn't shift gears a bit unsettling, and automobile manufacturers have sometimes tweaked CVTs so that they behave somewhat more like a traditional automatic transmission. Some manufacturers have even introduced an "automatic manual" or "sports mode" that allows the driver to override the CVT to an extent and command it with a stick to change gear ratios -- though they don't go so far as to provide a clutch pedal as well.
* OLDTECH: According to an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Hey, Big Spender", 3 December 2005), Japan is rapidly aging. By 2015, 25% of the population will be over 65, a matter which had led to worries about where the nation's future workforce is going to come from.
There is a silver lining to an older Japanese population, in that Japanese manufacturers see it as a potential source of great profits. Old folks may need some lesser or greater level of assistance around the house, and since the Japanese don't promote immigration -- bringing in low-cost household help from, say, the Philippines -- that means that technology is the most attractive solution. For example, Synclayer of Nagoya, which is focused on cable TV and datacom network technology, has developed a system in which oldsters take readings on blood pressure, temperature, and the like, which are relayed to a central hub where any anomalies will trigger an alarm. The Synclayer scheme also includes a sensor that indicates when a refrigerator door is opened, with an alarm sent when nobody opens the fridge after a period of time.
Zojirushi, Japan's biggest manufacturer of rice cookers and electric kettles, has come up with something much like the refrigerator alarm in the form of the "iPot". Japanese like to keep hot water on hand all day for coffee or tea or ramen or miso soup; the iPot logs each time hot water is dispensed, with the usage record sent to a designated email address or mobile phone. The scheme was developed in collaboration with Fujitsu and NTT DoCoMo, Japan's biggest mobile phone provider.
There's a lot of interest in robots for the elderly, and in fact old folks are already buying robots, though for the moment they're basically just glorified toys, used to provide a comforting presence around the house. The Snuggling Ifbot wears a spacesuit can talk about the weather and play quiz games; Primo Puel, an interactive doll that was originally designed to comfort lonely young girls, has become popular with the elderly as well. In the future, however, household robots for the aged will be able to help with simple tasks such as bathing or lifting heavy objects -- one could imagine a robot with attributes resembling those of a baby forklift -- or to keep an eye on their masters to make sure they're still up and around. By 2015, the market for household service robots could amount to the equivalent of billions of dollars.
There is also a market for mainstream products designed specifically for the old. Japanese cellphones, designed for a notoriously gadget-happy general population, are usually full of bells and whistles -- music player and camera capability, navigation systems, and so on -- which leads to a level of complexity that can challenge even a hardcore technophile. Japan's second biggest mobile phone company, KDDI, has sold a hundred thousand subscriptions, generally to seniors, of its Tu-Ka phone service, which uses a cellphone that works like ... an ordinary telephone, no frills attached.
However, old folks are a market for mainstream products as well. Japanese are not only living longer, they are healthier in their old age, and in retirement many have money and free time on their hands. That means that manufacturers can bring in money simply by advertising their products to the top age bracket. The elderly have financial clout, and Japanese businesses dare not ignore it.
* SMARTWRAP: POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, that amusing source of technofluff, ran a set of little articles on "beyond leading edge" technologies in the June 2005 issue. One of the articles, "Little Plastic Houses For You And Me", was downright fascinating.
Two Philadelphia architects, Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, have come with a scheme for "smart walls" that they call "SmartWrap". A house built with SmartWrap would be solar-powered, energy efficient, and highly programmable in appearance, able to change colors or create windows in any place as desired. The SmartWrap wall is built in layers:
This idea is certainly sexy, but though it's technically plausible, it's clearly not something that's going happen any time soon. That's OK, the set of articles was explicitly "beyond the horizon", and who knows? Maybe it will happen faster than anyone suspects.
* BUTTER WARS: In the "bureaucratic humor of the month" category, THE ECONOMIST reports ("Let Them Eat Yellow Margarine", 10 December 2005) on the great Quebec butter wars.
In Quebec, it is illegal to sell margarine colored yellow to make it look like butter; it has to be sold in its default white color. This rule is not so ridiculous historically, having been common at a time, but the notion that it is criminal to add food coloring to a product that everyone who has any sense knows is made from plant oils and not dairy products is hard to defend, and the Province of Quebec is one of the last holdouts. The reason is simple: Quebec has half of Canada's 17,000 dairy farmers, and they form a powerful lobby, creating trade barriers to protect their dairy products, and even as of late trying to set up laws to prevent food manufacturers from claiming a "butter flavor" or "creamy consistency" or "cheesy taste" if the products don't actually contain butter, cream, or cheese appropriately.
The white margarine issue was highlighted when enforcers from the agricultural ministry swept down on a Wal-Mart store in Quebec and seized yellow margarine manufactured by Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer products giant. Wal-Mart officials responded, plausibly, that there was no intent to flaunt the law, there had just been a mixup in margarine shipments. Unilever had challenged the law, claiming it took over a million Canadian dollars per year to support separate batches of margarine for Quebec, but the Canadian Supreme Court rejected the challenge, saying that it was within the province's rights and no business of the central government.
How long even Quebec will hold out on this matter is unclear. International trade negotiations are a threat to Quebec's dairy product protections, and oilseed farmers in western Canada are irritated at the barrier set up by Quebec against one of the big ultimate end products of oilseed production. A trade tribunal backed by Alberta's provincial government filed a complaint over the white margarine rule in the summer of 2005, but Quebec did not comply.
Alberta officials have suggested that trade retaliation is in order. I suspect that someone will propose, at least as a joke, that all Quebec butter sold in Alberta will have to be colored white.
* MICRODOTS: According to an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Fingerprints For Car Parts", 10 December), an Australian firm named DataDot Technology is conducting a lively business with their "microdot" technology. These are tiny polyester dots, about a millimeter wide, that can be laser-scribed with a serial number and then sprayed on parts or other items of value. The serial number can be read with a microscope under ultraviolet light. They can be scraped off, but it's hard to get them all. Products protected by microdots are visibly labelled, as a deterrent to theft.
BMW began using microdots in 2001, and Australian statistics say thefts of BMWs have dropped by 60% by that time. Thefts of Subarus have dropped by 90%. Other automobile manufacturers have been using or experimenting with microdots as well. They make it difficult to even break down a stolen car into parts; they can be used to protect almost anything, from laptop computers to farm equipment. In 2004, Florida police planted microdots on coins inserted into parking meters to grab a corrupt official who was robbing from them.
The idea is not new, having been around since the 1940s, but required the introduction of laser etching in the 1990s to be practical. Vegas casinos were one of the first users, applying them to gambling chips to nail counterfeiters. Australian investors, with a eye partly towards car thefts, then bought up the rights to the technology. It seems poised for much greater use.
* BLUES ON THE PLAINS: I live in northeast Colorado, on the border of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain -- flatlands to the east, peaks to the west. It came as something of a shock when an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Not Here, Surely?". 10 December 2005) revealed that I was living on a corner of one of the most impoverished regions of the USA.
It used to be the American Deep South that was regarded as dingy, backward, and poor, but now a majority of the poorest counties in America are on the Great Plains -- in Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, the edge of Wyoming and Colorado. The revelation that the region is poor is a surprise, all the more so because most of those affected are white folk, not minorities -- though tribal reservations in the region aren't necessarily all that prosperous either.
The people who live in the region generally don't feel all that deprived, but the poorest counties feature large numbers of abandoned homesteads, with a good fraction of those families remaining with incomes under the Federal government's poverty line. Populations are declining as youngsters seek opportunities elsewhere and oldsters die off. Some communities are afflicted by "meth" -- methamphetamine or "speed" -- drug dependency and crime, rural America's answer to cocaine-fueled blight in the inner cities.
While locales like Denver continue to grow, fueled by relatively cheap housing prices, the plains regions to the northeast have always been unpopulated, and the population is getting thinner. The land is not all that inspiring -- tending toward the flat, treeless, brown, and windy -- and hasn't attracted outside investment, even with low land prices, with threadbare public facilities playing a part as well. Farming is not booming, being under threat from foreign competition, particularly Brazil, though some plains farmers have moved to new crops that bring in better money.
The main factor in keeping the region alive has been Federal farm subsidies and other government assistance. These grants have helped many families stay afloat, but that is all: the money can hardly be called an investment in the future, since there doesn't appear to be much future there. The poor counties heavily dependent on handouts remain poor, and continue to fade away.
* CLICK FRAUD RAMPANT; According to a WIRED Online article ("How Click Fraud Could Swallow The Internet" by Charles C. Mann"), the development of "pay per click (PPC)" Internet advertising -- in which a website owner is paid whenever a user clicks on an ad on the website -- is now under attack from widespread "click fraud".
In 2002, Stuart Cauff set up a charter-jet service in Miami, Florida, advertising as "JetNetwork" on the Web. Charter jets are not something that have a mass market, and reaching the diverse and thinly-spread groups that need JetNetwork's services would have been difficult using traditional advertising channels. On the Web, a Google query for "charter jet Miami" quickly leads a prospective client to JetNetwork. PPC advertising on the Web seemed to be the ideal solution.
There was, unfortunately, a pitfall, which Cauff discovered when he found out that about 40% of his clicks were from a single Internet address. It turned out to be run by a New York City competitor who was trying to burn up JetNetwork's advertising budget.
Cauff was being victimized by a crude "click fraud" scam. There are others. Website owners generally run banner ads provided by an ad service, most significantly Google's Adsense program. The ad service's systems scan the website page content and assign the most appropriate ads from their advertising client pool to the website, with the website owner being paid on a PPC basis. Of course, website owners are then confronted with the temptation to artificially increase clicks to the banner ads on their own websites. Website owners may also try to artificially increase clicks to their site in order to improve their search-engine ranking.
Another ingenious variation on click fraud is "impression fraud". The banner ads placed on website pages are swapped out if the page is loaded many times but nobody clicks on the ad, and so some companies repeatedly load pages where the banner ads of a competitor appear, making the ads then disappear. Yet another trick is the "splog" or "spam blog", a blog that steals material from legitimate mainstream blogs to generate banner ad revenue -- a scam that hits website owners instead of advertisers.
Internet advertising is now becoming a multibillion dollar industry. Click fraud is threatening the structure. Nobody knows right now how many clicks are fakes, with estimates running from 10% to 50%. A number of Internet firms were set up in India to provide click fraud for hire, with marginally employed people hammering on banner ads all day long. The TIMES OF INDIA blew the whistle on these operations in 2004, and they then effectively disappeared, unable to reach clients without being detected by the law.
Google, Yahoo, and other major search-engine firms offering PPC advertising programs have been trying to figure out ways to deal with the threat, but the click fraud scammers are becoming more sophisticated. Cauff's JetNetwork site was being hammered from a single Internet address, which made click fraud obvious. Now click fraud scammers are disguising the source of the fake clicks, using software to spoof queries for the address of the click. Website owners who trace back such referrals from their usage logs only get a "404": site not found. Networks of "zombiebots" -- virus-infected PCs that can be controlled by the virus writer -- may be used to perform massive click fraud campaigns.
In response, outfits like Yahoo have been building click fraud filters that analyze click inputs to find patterns suggesting click fraud, though unsurprisingly they don't discuss the techniques they are using. Any clicks determined to be phonies are not charged to the advertiser. Companies have sprung up offering analysis services and software to fight click fraud.
Bill Gross, who invented PPC in the late 1990s when he ran the IdeaLab company, thinks PPC is doomed. The ultimate solution will be what he calls "cost per action (CPA)", in which the website owner only gets paid if somebody actually "bites" on the ad -- signing up on a mailing list, joining a forum, or buying a product -- instead of simply clicking on the ad. People are experimenting with the notion, but there are obstacles to the idea, since it requires that the ad service know about the revenues and pricing of their advertisers, who don't like to hand out information like that to third parties if they don't have to. Few are ready to give up on PPC just yet and that means staying in the fray.
At present, PPC attacks are focused on specific advertisers and websites, but there are worries that somebody might try to attack the entire PPC system, setting up a zombinet that scans the Web, clicking on every Adsense ad that it finds. It's not easy to think of what profit there might be in doing such a thing, but there are at least a few people out there who would do it just for the fun of trashing the entire PPC system.
* ED: Every now and then I get a spam from somebody offering to improve my search engine ranking. I wondered what they were proposing for a good long time, but then I realized: They're click fraud scammers. I found the idea annoying on principle, and also annoying because most of the major documents on my site come up at least on the first page of a Google search, and it's not unusual to find them at the top.
It's not so hard to get a high ranking sometimes, actually. Try Googling "radar technology" and this site's INTRODUCTION TO RADAR TECHNOLOGY comes up first in the list. This is for the completely obvious reason that there aren't any other serious radar tutorials on the Web. Who in his right mind would do that kind of work and then just give it away? I ask myself this at times.
* MADE IN THE USA? Anyone who follows US headlines knows that American giant auto-maker General Motors (GM) is in major trouble. According to a TIME article ("How Foreign Plants Are Booming" by Sean Gregory, 5 December 2005), the flip side of that coin is the way that foreign car factories in the US are humming away.
Honda has two plants in Ohio and a third in Alabama, with all being improved and ramping up production. Toyota has eleven plants in the US and is opening a truck factory in San Antonio this year. Stateside BMW and Mercedes-Benz plants are ramping up as well. Employment in foreign car plants has risen 72% since 1993, to 60,000; in the same timeframe, the US automotive manufacturing workforce has fallen from 340,000 to 240,000.
The foreign firms have the edge in profitability. In early 2005, Nissan was making about $1,600 USD on every vehicle sold in North America, while GM was losing about $2,300 USD. There are several reasons for the discrepancy:
One of the biggest killers of all was the fact that Detroit focused on large vehicles, on the basis that they were what Americans wanted, and also offered higher profit margins. That scenario was a fact for a long time, but the tightening energy supply situation led to a nasty wake-up call for both consumers and manufacturers. To be sure, foreign firms didn't ignore larger vehicles, either -- plenty of SUVs on American highways are Japanese designs -- but they already largely owned the small car market and were able to exploit that position when circumstances made small cars more popular. Pushing on energy-efficient hybrids didn't hurt either, though they are only a small slice of the market.
The foreign car firms claim that their American operations add 1.8 million jobs to the US economy, directly or indirectly. Defenders of American business enterprise find that a meager compensation as they watch US car makers in decline.
* TSUNAMI ALERT SYSTEM: A BBC WORLD Online report discussed the efforts to set up a tsunami alert system in the Indian Ocean regions that were devastated a year ago.
The network is being assembled by an international collaboration under the direction of the UN. It uses a variety of sensors. Seismometers will pick up earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but since many such events don't cause tsunamis, seismometers by themselves give a high rate of false alarms. As a result, the seismometers are backed up by undersea pressure gauges and seacoast tidal gauges.
As discussed in these pages in November, the pressure gauges measure wave height from the weight of water above, relaying data periodically to network control centers through a buoy via a communications satellite. Germany are setting up a string of ten such stations as elements of the "Deep-Ocean Assessment & Reporting of Tsunami (DART)" system. India, Thailand, and Australia are working to set up a further network of DART stations along the Sunda Trench, where the tsunami originated.
Since the DART stations are far out to sea, they can give plenty of advance warning of a tsunami, but they are expensive. UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) is working on a complementary network of coastal tidal gauges as the "Global Sea Level Observing System (GLOSS)". Some of the gauges simply use a scheme of tubes and floats to read the sea level, while others use radar or sonar, and still others use shallow-water pressure gauges.
GLOSS stations were actually sited in the Indian Ocean before the tsunami, with about 70 in place there at present. They were originally used simply to monitor sea level for long-term studies and only provided updates on long intervals. Now they are being upgraded to higher sampling rates, with the data relayed by satellite to the network control centers. They are also being fitted with solar panels to ensure a reliable power supply. 23 stations should be updated by the middle of 2006, with the rest following over the next few years.
The sensors are only half the battle; the other half is to get a tsunami warning to the people. The 27 nations bordering the Indian Ocean have been setting up individual warning programs, but they have been squabbling over which nations will host the network alert stations. Thailand, India, and Indonesia are building their own national systems, while Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore are in the planning stage to do so.
Thailand has opened a disaster warning center that receives alerts from Japan and Hawaii. The Thais are setting up 76 siren towers and recently conducted a tsunami emergency alert exercise. India has set up an alert center, which monitors seismographs and 11 tide gauges, and plans to have a fully functional system in two years. The UN is working with other countries on public education and training of emergency officials. The UN's Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System group is also promoting mapping efforts to determine which coastal regions are most at risk and where locals can run to for safety.
* REBATE HOCUS-POCUS: Rebates are popular with manufacturers of consumer products. A BUSINESS WEEK article ("The Great Rebate Runaround" by Brian Grow, 5 December 2005) explains why.
About a third of computer products are sold with mail-in rebates, as are about a fifth of digital camcorders, cameras, and LCD TVs. Roughly 400 million rebates are offered in the US each year, with a total value of $6 billion USD. The office supplies retailer Staples claims to be a conduit for $3.5 million in rebates each week.
Rebates seem like a good deal for consumers, but they turn out to be a better deal for sellers. The trick is that they allow a product to be sold at a cut-rate list price, but in the end only about 60% of rebates are redeemed. People don't get around to sending them in, or feel they're not worth the hassle; sometimes the rebates are rejected. It's free money for the seller.
To the extent this sounds like a problem, the sellers would have to reply it's the customer's problem, but critics are now zeroing in on the practice, saying the game is set up to raise obstacles to customers trying to collect rebates. Filing periods may be as short as a week, the rules may be complicated, the rebates take too long to arrive -- and when they do, the envelope looks like junk mail and may end up being thrown out by accident. Industry terminology refers to failures to submit rebate forms as "breakage", while failures to cash checks are called "slippage". Companies deny there is any intent to defraud consumers, claiming in their own defense that bureaucratic obstacles arise because the companies don't want to be defrauded themselves.
Proctor & Gamble came up with the idea of product rebates in the 1970s; it exploded in the early 1990s when computer and consumer product vendors got on the bandwagon. The size of rebates increased from petty sums to a hundred dollars or more. Complaints have risen in step. Defenders of the system say that the rate of complaints is low and the process is basically working.
Even ignoring suspicious practices, mail-in rebates are clumsy to administer, and some companies are moving away from them. Mail-in rebates were the number-one customer complaint at Staples for a long time, and so the company set up an online system named "EasyRebates" that makes it much simpler to file and track rebates, and also gave customers a quicker turnaround time on their rebate checks. Rebate complaints have dropped by 25%.
Regulators are now paying more attention to the rebate business. The New York state attorney general's office filed a legal complaint against Samsung when the company failed to pay rebates to apartment dwellers, Samsung saying that only one payment could be made to an address and that there was no space for an apartment number on the rebate form. To absolutely no surprise, that line did not fly with the law, and 41 customers got a total of $200,000 USD in rebates. Connecticut authorities are investigating firms that only list prices after rebates, a practice which is illegal in that state, focusing particularly on companies that seem to deny rebates for arbitrary reasons. One Massachusetts state official concerned with rebates compares some of the schemes to the old "bait and switch" sales dodge -- in which a seller advertises a low-cost product that always ends up being out of stock, with a more expensive product sold in its place.
Regulators are now working on tightening up the rules for rebate programs, but industry has been fighting back. A bill submitted to the California state legislature that specified filing periods of at least 30 days, mailing of rebate checks within 60 days of filing, and rules for the format of paperwork was shot down by business lobbyists. It made it through the California house and senate, but was then vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger.
Rebates are not likely to go away, there being no legal basis for objecting to them in principle. Consumers might not like some of the hassles, but given the choice between a rebate and having to buy at a higher price, they'll take the rebate any day.
* ED: I haven't had much trouble with rebates myself. I like to think I never pass one up, though I suppose I might not have bothered with some of the smaller ones. Still, I would feel stupid failing to file a rebate, and I also find jumping through hoops to make a bit of money something of a fun game in itself. Sometimes the effort involved makes the payoff less than minimum wage, but it's still money I wouldn't have had otherwise. (Yes, I have been accused of being tight-fisted.)
As far as accusations that the rebate system incorporates an amount of deliberate crookedness, that may be so, but it is worth remembering the saying that it is unwise to attribute to malice what could just as easily be attributed to stupidity. This remark certainly applies to corporations, which tend to be clumsy bureaucracies.
Unfortunately, there is a fuzzy border between malice and stupidity. Some of the bogus things that I saw when I was in the Corporation -- along the lines of the foolishness over apartment numbers that got Samsung in trouble -- were not due to any corporate policy, instead being the brainstorm of some middle management type trying to impress the brass with a higher profit margin, and becoming so totally focused on the bottom line as to be oblivious to any other consideration.
At a more general level, corporations will wise up to stupidity more quickly when it costs them something than they will when the stupidity brings in profits -- even if the money is a bit shady and may well lead to trouble, possibly disastrously big trouble, over the long run. It's easier to remain fat and dumb when you're happy.
* VACCINE WARS: As discussed in these pages in November, the Bush II Administration has begun an initiative to provide defense against the H5N1 bird flu, with the program including production of vaccines. The article wondered what was going to be done about the liability issue: vaccines have a certain probability of causing big troubles for a small number of subjects, and fear of litigation is a major reason for why US pharmaceutical firms haven't invested much in the way of resources in vaccine production. If the US government wants to encourage vaccine production, the pharmaceutical companies are going to need legal protection.
Something is being done about the liability issue, or at least there's motion in Congress over the matter. According to an article in BUSINESS WEEK ("The Sickening Politics Of Vaccine Legislation" by Richard S. Dunham and John Carey, 5 December 2005), an earnest political tug of war is now in progress on vaccine liability. On one side of the rope are trial lawyers and Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. On the other side are the pharmaceutical companies; the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee; and two Republican senators, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.
Senator Kennedy and the trial lawyers are not against government protection of the pharmaceutical companies, but they take an expansive vision of that protection, saying that the government should provide full compensation for anyone harmed by the vaccines. Senator Frist has pointed out this would be impractical, leaving the government liable for up to trillions of dollars in claims. Senators Burr and Gregg are promoting a bill that would set up a compensation program under the direction of the Department of Health & Human Services.
Details of this compensation program remain undefined, one Republican staffer saying: "We just don't have enough information to set one up now." Trial lawyers and their political allies are contemptuous of the idea, feeling it's an attempt to sell them a cat in a sack. Public health officials are trying to take a middle road, asserting that the government really needs to push vaccine production to ensure public safety, while cautioning that the effort should be backed up by a reasonable if not extravagant compensation program to help those who are inevitably going to be hurt.
A compromise of sorts will likely be worked out. Backers of the Burr-Gregg approach are trying to attach it as a rider to a bill that will be appealing to moderate Democrats, particularly prominent New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. The whole matter is somewhat reminiscent of the saying that everyone is better off for not knowing how sausages and laws are made, but would it have ever been anything else?
* GIFT CARD SCAMS: Gift cards are a tidy invention, a shrewd if somewhat impersonal gift. No more worry about what to get someone; give them something that can be turned into anything that's desired. Retailers like them too, since a store can take in money without actually shipping any product for the moment. Sales of gift cards in the US ran to an estimated $19 billion USD in 2005, a big business by anyone's standards.
With all that money involved, it's not surprising that scammers are starting to target gift cards, according to BUSINESS WEEK (5 December 2005, "To Scammers They're Grift Cards"). Gift cards really amount to nothing but a medium for a serial number with an associated barcode. The cards are usually just set up on a display in a store where anyone can pick one up. They're so easily pocketed that they can be stolen with little difficulty, but they have no value until purchased. Once purchased, the retailer sets up a cash account on their own system that tracks purchases using the card, with no concern for who actually is carrying the card.
The scam is simple. The scammer gets the serial number from the card -- either by temporarily "borrowing" the card from the display or simply imaging the serial number -- and then makes inquiries to the retailer's online gift card system to see when the card is activated. The scammer then uses the serial number online to clean out the card account.
The problem is not widespread at the present time, but the US National Retailer's Federation has formed a committee to investigate the matter and recommend countermeasures. This particular scam seems likely to be shut down in the near future.
* PROMOTING SPACE: The history of "commercial space" has been long and torturous, with some major success stories -- such as commercial communications satellites -- but many dead ends. However, for the moment efforts by the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) to promote commercial space seem to be moving along snappily.
According to the 12 December 2005 issue of AVIATION WEEK, NASA is now beginning a multiyear, $500 million USD program to promote commercial launches to the International Space Station (ISS), with an eye to ultimately obtaining supply and even crew flights to the station from commercial vendors. The effort is being directed by the new "Commercial Crew / Cargo Project Office" at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
At present, initial goals specify a demonstration in which a test payload of up to 5 tonnes (5.5 tons) is put into low Earth orbit, then commanded to perform a controlled reentry and safely burn up. Other goals include a flight rate of 2 to 8 missions a year and mission reliability of 95%. Demo flights are expected in the 2008:2010 timeframe.
* In a similar vein, NASA's "Centennial Challenges" office has received a report from the "X Prize Foundation", an offshoot of the Ansari X-Prize organization that promoted the first private spaceflight, on how the agency can use prize money to promote commercial space technology development. The report, which was researched using a $30,000 USD grant from NASA, suggests that a $50 million USD prize should be enough to drive development of a two or three seat human orbital spacecraft, while $150 million USD would do the trick for a comparable reusable spacecraft.
The report suggests that second prizes of half those amounts, as well as modest third prizes, would help spur competition. The sums discussed in the report are small by NASA's standards and could have a major payoff, but the question remains of whether the US Congress will go along.
* BLOGS IN UNIFORM: Modern communications technology has changed the way military operations are performed, not merely allowing combat units to stay in touch with each other, but also giving the folks back home a keyhole into life on the front lines. Now, according to a BBC WORLD Online article, American citizens are able to keep up with the troops through military-oriented blogs.
The first "milblogs" appeared in late 2002. The term was coined by "Greyhawk", a US serviceman stationed in Germany who runs the "Mudville Gazette" blog, which has become a hub for other milbloggers. Milbloggers have various motives for their activity. According to "Matt", who runs the popular "BlackFive" blog, some just want to use a blog to keep in touch with friends and family, others use a blog to organize their thoughts, while still others are aspiring writers.
Pioneers like Greyhawk, LT Smash, Sergeant Hook, and Sergeant Stryker have inspired literally hundreds of milblogs. Some milbloggers have gone on to use their materials to write books, including Jason C. Hartley, who wrote JUST ANOTHER SOLDIER, and Colby Buzzell, who wrote MY WAR: KILLING TIME IN IRAQ.
Those old enough to remember the Vietnam War might think that the milblogs are forums for antimilitary discontent, but this is another generation. In fact much of the discontent is focused on what some milbloggers perceive as biased reporting on events in Iraq, particularly by news media organizations with axes to grind for President George W. Bush. However, the milblogs are still unfiltered and unsanitized, and the brass has disciplined milbloggers who have crossed the line. Greyhawk suggests that milbloggers remember that their writings may be read by somebody's mother, Pentagon brass, or Osama bin Laden.
The military is likely to formalize rules about milblogs. Hopefully the brass will not attempt to simply ban them. Although it is a truth that the US armed services are authoritarian organizations in defense of a representative society, milblogs can work for the military, and trying to suppress them would be counterproductive.
* ANOTHER YEAR: Another year gone by, getting started on the new one. I packed up my plastic Christmas tree today. I always haul down the holiday decorations on 1 January as a way of getting a running start on the new year.
The tree, incidentally, was of fiber-optic configuration, with a rotating color wheel in the base driving myriad stars of light out the ends of fiber-optic threads laced through the branches. It was very pretty but alas, after several years of working fine, the electrics in the thing decided to call it quits in mid-December. The motor appears to have been the weak link. I shrugged; I still had old strings of Christmas lights around and strewed them around the tree. Looked fine.
It did seem a little bare, so I went to the neighborhood K-Mart and picked up some globe-type ornaments -- they were cut-price, since the selling period for holiday ornaments was fading out. I found the ornaments very interesting. Holiday decorations are as a rule about as low-budget as anything comes, but these little shiny globes were labeled as unbreakable. When I got home, I took the ugliest one and tried bouncing it off the floor, even tossing it down hard. It wasn't even chipped, a far cry from traditional glass ornaments that would break if I simply stared at them hard enough.
The new ornaments appear to be some sort of metallized plastic. One of the signs of real advance in technology is not the introduction of bleeding-edge whizzy high-budget items, but the emergence of improved products at the bottom of the pyramid. After all, if the new ornaments hadn't been at least as cheap to manufacture as the old, we'd still be buying the old breakable ones. Now to go on to Christmas lights using LEDs instead of fragile and power-hungry incandescent lamps -- LED decorations are around a bit but haven't displaced the brighter lamps yet -- and even, I should hope, fiber optic trees driven by electronics, with cycling LED arrays instead of motors that break down after a few years.
* I didn't quite make 100,000 visitors on the website this last month, but I would have been a bit surprised if I had: traffic always dips in December. I'm not complaining. I compiled my stats for 2005 and overall traffic had increased by 39% from 2004. That's a doubling time of about 2.1 years. I'm really hoping to improve even on that rate, at least for a few years.
I ended up producing 28 new public-domain illustrations in December, spending almost every spare moment I could scrape up crunching them out. Like I said last month, that's too much -- a dozen, sixteen at most, would be much more comfortable. I start out the month with a plan for illustrations I know I have to build; some don't work out -- I can't get them to look right -- but others work better than expected. Overall, I end up getting more done than I hoped, with highly satisfactory results.
However, I end up getting sidetracked on other illustrations, too. I went down to Denver International Airport (DIA) on 23 December to do some "planespotting" with my Nikon Coolpix 8800 10x zoom camera. There's always a fair amount of flight traffic at DIA, but it's usually the same sorts of aircraft over and over again. There's only so many pictures I can take of United Boeing 737-300s before it gets old, though there is a bit of a knack to getting good pictures of aircraft in flight and the practice is useful. If I go to an airshow and shoot the Blue Angels or Snowbirds, I have to get it right the first time, since they won't be there the next day.
Still, I figured with the holidays, I might see some aircraft I hadn't seen before. What I didn't figure on was ground traffic congestion and security being unusually jumpy. I never stray past any NO TRESPASSING signs and security usually is tolerant of planespotters, but they were a edgier with so many people coming and going.
The drive did pay off, since near the air freighter unloading area I found a Russian Antonov An-124 sitting on the tarmac. If you're not familiar with this aircraft, it's the biggest full-production cargolifter in the world, literally big enough to drive a couple of buses into. I was thoroughly surprised to see it; later reference to the Web suggested that it was there to haul an Atlas booster from the Lockheed Martin plant south of Denver to Cape Canaveral, An-124s having done so several times before. Things change. Incidentally, in a further irony, modern Atlas boosters use Russian main engines.
I got some very nice pix of the An-124 for my article on the type, but that meant overhauling the article and adding drawings as well. I was surprised I managed to get it all done ... and then, not able to leave well enough alone, on 31 December I knocked out two more simple drawings that I couldn't pass up: "Oh, they won't take any time." I'm obsessive. I admit it. It's a curse.