february 2006 / greg goebel
* Entries include: virtual human models, quick kill system, New York organleggers, breaking up ice jams, resurrecting the thylacine, modern trains, phishing scams, navsat traffic monitoring, Coast to Coast AM, robot rebellion, smart trash recycling, high-altitude LTA surveillance, electronics for toddlers, Jim Gary scrap dinosaurs, cellphone financial transactions, improved product coatings, micro-windpower, my misadventures with ripping MP3s, medical lawsuits overblown, robot military vehicles, Bush II Administration versus the courts, Russia versus NGOs, hard and soft diplomacy, al-Qaeda versus locals in Iraq.
* VIRTUAL HUMAN: The notion of virtual humans brings up images of characters in computer games or in movies like THE INCREDIBLES, but according to an article in WIRED Online ("Cashing In On Virtual Humans" by John Hudson), the technology has its serious applications as well.
Consider Santos, created by Virtual Soldier Research at the University of Iowa. Santos was originally designed by scanning and digitizing a human model, but he is more flexible than any human, able to change his height or other features on command. He is no mere puppet, either: as he moves around in a simulation, he provides feedback on his joint angles, comfort level, heart rate, body temperature, muscle load, and so on.
Santos can be plugged into computer-design simulations to show how a user would interact with the item being tested. Caterpillar Corporation uses Santos to validate the designs of their heavy equipment, making sure it's comfortable to operate and easy to service; for instance, the simulation can show Santos replacing an oil filter on a dump truck. The US Army uses Santos to model new body armor -- to show if it's too restrictive to be useful -- and validate other gear -- for example demonstrating if an escape hatch on an armored vehicle is workable.
The next step toward modeling humans is being taken in a program named the "Virtual Human", which will digitize a cadaver in slices a third of a millimeter wide. The ultimate goal is to design a human simulation that will respond much like the real thing, capable of showing precisely how a human will survive a crash. People are thinking about models that go down to the cellular level, though nobody expects that to happen soon.
* SHOOT BACK: As reported by AVIATION WEEK, Raytheon has just performed an impressive demonstration of the company's "Quick Kill" self-defense system for armored vehicles. In the test, a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) round was fired from close range at a Stryker armored vehicle fitted with Quick Kill. Quick Kill's electronically scanned radar detected the RPG round; the system then fired an interceptor missile straight up, with the missile pitching over and then destroying the RPG round before it hit the vehicle. I would really like to have seen a video of this.
* ORGANLEGGERS: My tastes in entertainment run towards B-fiction. One of the reasons I like it is because the stuff isn't to be taken seriously: it's not supposed to be for real, and I don't mistake it for the real world. This makes it somewhat confusing when an AP report ("Four Charged For Selling Body Parts" by Tom Hays) presents life imitating B-fiction.
Brooklyn funeral home owner Joseph Nicelli and Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS) of Fort Lee, New Jersey, have been indicted on charges that the two conspired to steal body parts from corpses being embalmed, and sell them. The Brooklyn funeral home was used as a embalming subcontractor by funeral homes in New York City, Rochester, Philadelphia, and various towns in New Jersey. Two other defendants, Lee Crucetta and Christopher Aldorasi, were named. They all pleaded not guilty to charges of enterprise corruption, body stealing and opening graves, unlawful dissection, forgery, and other counts. Other arrests may be in the pipeline.
The defendants allegedly made millions of dollars peddling the stolen body parts. Some cadavers exhumed in the course of the investigation had ordinary home plumbing pipe substituted for leg bones. The defendants attempted to cover their tracks by forging death certificates and organ donor forms. In some cases, the people who the organs were taken from were ill or too old be safe organ donors.
Nicelli's funeral parlor included a secret operating room where Mastromarino, an oral surgeon whose license had been revoked, would remove the body parts, aided by nurses Crucetta and Aldorasi. In late 2004, a Brooklyn detective visited Nicelli's funeral parlor to investigate charges that customers had been cheated out of funeral deposits. The detective got suspicious when she spotted the secret operating room.
The US Food & Drug Administration has shut down BTS. There is some small chance that recipients of the stolen body parts have been exposed to diseases. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes called the whole incident "something out of a cheap horror movie."
* This is roughly in the category of the incident in 2002 when inspectors found out that a Georgia crematorium operator named Ray Brent Marsh had simply been dumping the bodies he received on his grounds or in nearby woods, instead of actually incinerating them. The original story was that the crematorium had broken down, but on investigation it was found to still be in working order. 334 bodies were recovered, with only about 200 identified in the end. Marsh ended up being the target of a class-action suit with a final settlement of $80 million USD, and being hit with concurrent 12-year prison sentences in Georgia and Tennessee.
Since it would have not been all that difficult to have actually cremated the bodies, it seems that Marsh was one of these sorts who was simply incapable of thinking out the obvious -- I used to work with a guy like that, but that's another story. In contrast, the funeral home conspiracy seems to have been fairly well thought out, though the failure to properly conceal the secret operating room was an obvious bad move. In any case, "they make TV movies about such things". Given that all four defendants had Italian names, I could imagine good cheesy titles like MAFIA BODY-SNATCHERS.
* BREAKING THE ICE: Towns that are sited far enough north to permit flowing streams and rivers to freeze over every now and then can suffer from "ice jams", where floes of ice pile up to create a temporary dam that causes flooding. Damage to American towns due to floods caused by ice jams runs to about $125 million USD a year -- not in a league with hurricane damage, but not peanuts either.
Traditionally, dams with piers have been used as a control mechanism, but as reported by a POPULAR MECHANICS article ("Taming An Icy River" by David Dobbs, February 2006), the US Army Corps of Engineer's Cold Regions Research & Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) has come up with a more elegant solution, just installed in a Cazenovia Creek near Buffalo, New York: a string of concrete piers running across the creek.
The piers are cylindrical columns 3 meters (10 feet) tall and 1.5 meters (5 feet) in diameter, spaced 3.7 meters (12 feet) apart. The pier array was designed to force an ice jam well upstream from human habitation, in an area where it will do no harm; once the ice floes melt or fracture down enough to slip between the piers, they are too small to do any damage. To find the least number of piers needed to do the job right, CCREL used a computer simulation to evaluate candidates, then prototyped the most promising at 1:15 scale using a river model in a refrigerated room.
Ice jams can generate a lot of pressure, and so the piers were designed to withstand forces of up to 2,000 kN (204,000 kgp / 450,000 lbf), which CRREL engineers compare to two Boeing 747 jumbo jetliners at full throttle -- well more than the pressure exerted by the biggest recorded ice jams. The piers are mounted on a reinforced concrete slab poured into the creek bed, and anchored 11.6 meters (38 feet) into the bedrock with hefty braided steel cables.
Building the pier array wasn't easy, particularly since the place where it was built wasn't very accessible, but it was still far cheaper than a conventional dam, and will require much less maintenance. It also presents no obstruction to fish or boaters using the creek.
* RETURN OF THE THYLACINE? In the movie JURASSIC PARK, geneticists managed to recreate dinosaurs by cloning DNA from blood taken from mosquitoes trapped in amber. According to an article in POPULAR SCIENCE ("Resurrecting Extinct Animals" by Sharon Guynup, February 2006), a group of researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia collaborating with American geneticists is working on a less ambitious exercise in resurrection, trying to recreate the thylacine -- also known as the Tasmanian wolf or Tasmanian tiger -- a large predator native to Tasmanian that hasn't been seen since 1936.
The group, led by the USNW dean of science Michael Archer, is obtaining DNA fragments from stuffed thylacines. The researchers have been trying to reassemble the fragments, using the DNA from the Tasmanian devil, the thylacline's closest living relative, as a guide and basis. Once they have a complete genome, they will implant it into a Tasmanian devil ovum, which will be shocked into cell division with electricity or chemicals.
After the embryo reaches a few hundred cells in size, it will be implanted into the womb of a female Tasmanian devil, which will carry it to birth. Although the Tasmanian devil is much smaller than the thylacine, they are both marsupials, which give birth to small and undeveloped infants that remain stuck to the mother's teats for an extended time.
Initial attempts have struck out, due to the difficulty of piecing the DNA back together. The group is now working on improving the technology for DNA recovery. Dr. Archer doesn't think the thylacine will be reborn before 2020. Other researchers are considering recovery of the wooly mammoth, using DNA from the cells of animals trapped in permafrost or ice. Forget about Jurassic Park, though. If it's that difficult to recover the DNA of an animal like the thylacine that's been extinct less than a century, consider the difficulty of recovering DNA of animals that have been extinct for more than 65 million years.
* 21ST CENTURY TRAINS: Imagine a 21st-century hybrid-propulsion vehicle that can haul freight for a third of the fuel of a tractor-trailer rig. It's not too hard to visualize: it's the diesel-electric locomotive, a type of machine that has been in service since 1925. In addition, although the big freight-haulers moving down the tracks may look little different from those of a half-century ago, according to a POPULAR MECHANICS article ("The Rebirth Of Rail" by Josh Dean, January 2006), the modern locomotive is a much improved beast.
About 42% of all US freight moves by rail, amounting to 7.3 billion tonne-kilometers (5 billion ton-miles) per day over 225,000 kilometers (140,000 miles) of track. Traffic volume has steadily increased over the past three years, rising in step with fuel prices.
At the General Electric (GE) locomotive plant in Erie, Pennsylvania, workers are producing the state-of-the-art Evolution locomotive. The Evolution is a more efficient, cleaner locomotive designed in response to US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules that went into effect in 2005. It features a new 12-cylinder diesel engine that produces as much power as the 16-cylinder engine used on the previous generation of GE locomotives, and an innovative new cooling system. Like other modern locomotives, the Evolution features microprocessor engine and system controls, with sensors to indicate when wheels are slipping and energy is being wasted.
GE engineers are now busy at work on their next-generation locomotive. Somewhat oddly, they call it a "hybrid", though the term is broadly applicable to all diesel-electric locomotives. They use the term to indicate that the new machine will have "regenerative braking", converting the power otherwise lost in braking back into electricity for further use. Given the mass of a train, this is a lot of energy, which makes it both useful and tricky -- a huge array of electric storage batteries is needed to store the amounts of power obtained. Using off-the-shelf lead-acid batteries would result in a stack about as big as the locomotive itself, so the engineering team is looking into improved storage technologies, along with a lighter locomotive design using composite materials.
Canada's RailPower Industries already sells a hybrid switchyard locomotive named the "Green Goat". It's easier to implement than a hybrid freight-hauler, since a switchyard engine can use a relatively small engine geared down to tug trains around a yard at low speed. Switchyard engines had traditionally had to sit around idling for long periods, wasting fuel and dumping out air pollutants all the while. The Green Goat emits about a tenth of the nitrous oxide of a conventional switchyard engine, and it's now in widespread use in America.
* Although the US railroads used to be dominated by "point to point" traffic, hauling foodstuffs or materials from the site where they were produced to the plants where they were used, in the past few years "intermodal" traffic -- carrying freight containers offloaded from superfreighters -- has dominated. This means increasingly long trains carrying double-stacked containers.
However, the rail system itself has become a bottleneck, with the system hard-pressed to keep up with container traffic. Adding new track is astronomically expensive, when rights-of-way can even be obtained. That means making better use of the existing rail system.
There's plenty of room for improvement. Traffic is monitored and controlled using a patchwork system based on two-way radios, a loose sensor network, and poorly-integrated software. About 40% of America's freight track is also uncontrolled or "dark", and so trains have to be spaced widely apart, to minimize the possibility of collisions. That means that the rail system is not being used to anywhere near its full capacity.
GE Rail Solutions is working on better ways. The company is developing a "movement planning" system that can direct and keep track of the movements of trains. This is a big challenge; such things have been tried before, but they were never trustworthy enough to be useful.
A related technology is "positive train control (PTC)", in which the train carries a black box that can relay back status over wireless and obtain updates on traffic and track status, with an augmented satellite Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver giving the precise position of the train. PTC can even stop a train whose crew has been incapacitated or, for that matter, not there: in 2001, an engineer accidentally engaged the throttle of his locomotive as he was getting off, and the machine chugged across country for two hours with tanker cars full of chemicals in tow until an employee who had jumped on board managed to shut it down.
Railroad cars themselves are becoming "smarter" as well. "Automatic Equipment Identification (AEI)" ID tags have been mandatory on freight and tanker cars since 1995, with the tags read by trackside sensors that relay the location of the car to a central control station. The sensors also scan the wheels of cars and perform other observations to see if something is wrong. Some classes of cars, such as those carrying hazardous chemicals or perishable goods, are also fitted with black boxes that can relay the augmented GPS location of a car back to a tracking center over wireless. These black boxes may include sensors to monitor the health of the car or check for leaks of hazardous chemicals.
Implementing a completely integrated automated rail system is a big job. Siemens is setting up a combined PTC, movement planner, operations center, and security system for the New York City subway system. GE is operating PTC on a pilot scale. It will cost billions of dollars to upgrade the rail network to such new technologies, but GE officials say the upgrades would pay themselves off in increased productivity in a few years.
* Another innovation on modern trains is improved braking. Traditionally, trains have used pneumatic brakes, with pneumatic couplings between cars to pass the braking signal down the train. There's a delay from car to car, which is one of the reasons trains noisily "pile up" when they brake, with this delay ensuring that the train doesn't brake quickly. A new scheme retains pneumatic brakes, but controls them with electrically-operated valves that allow the brakes of all the cars to be applied at the same time, cutting stopping distance by half or more. The problem with the "electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP)" braking scheme is that all the cars in the train have to be wired for ECP, and so the approach is in very limited use at this time.
* With so much automation being introduced into modern trains, the next logical step would be to eliminate the locomotive crew completely. This is already being done with some switchyard engines. The rationale for doing this is not to cut workforce. Switchyard work is dangerous, with a high likelihood of somebody getting crushed. The traditional system, with switchyard controllers talking to switchyard engineers over two-way radios, is very prone to misunderstandings and dangerous errors. With automated locomotives, the process is under the sole direction of the controller.
Although the US Federal Railroad Administration is now authorizing automated locomotive operation over certain regions of track, nobody imagines that the engineer is going to be replaced any time soon. Innovation is driving massive improvements in America's rail system, but few can forsee when the day will come that it will operate so smoothly and seamlessly that humans won't be needed to ride the freight-haulers rolling down the rails.
* PHISHY BUSINESS: I got an EBay email in my public emailbox today, claiming to be from someone who wanted to know when he was going to get the item he bought from me. This was immediately suspicious, since I don't sell on EBay. I thought: SCAM -- a thought which became much more solid when I checked over the email and noticed it made no reference to any details about the item sold or who I was ... nothing resembling any name I answered to was on it.
What puzzled me was what the scam was. I was supposed to respond through a link in the email. I figured that if I clicked the link, I might get somebody trying to download malware onto my PC, so I simply deleted the email.
I did some checking around on the Web and it turns out this scam has been going around since about last summer. If I clicked on the link, I would get a fake EBay page, which would steal my passwords. This one actually seemed a bit convincing -- it was in a different format than any phishing scam I'd seen before -- but though nobody's immune to scams, my non-involvement with EBay meant the probability that I would fall for this one was very low.
I hear that MS Internet Explorer 7, now in beta test, has the ability to flag phishing pages. If it works well -- it ought to, phishers tend to target the big accounts like PayPal and EBay, it shouldn't have been too hard for MS to talk to them and set up ID mechanisms -- it might make phishing a thing of the past in short order.
* FOLLOW THAT CAR: On 28 November 2005, a Russian-built Soyuz-Fregat booster put the European "Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element A (GIOVE A)" satellite into orbit. GIOVE A was the first of two demonstrators for the European "Galileo" navigation satellite system. The first of 30 operational satellites will be launched in 2008, with the constellation to be complete by 2010 and introduction to service in 2011.
According to a BBC WORLD Online article, Galileo's backers have high hopes for the system. Four types of service packages will be offered: an "open" location service available to all at no cost; a "safety of life" service that provides alerts when the system's accuracy or integrity is compromised; a commercial service using encrypted signals; and a public regulated service for government users. The system will be complementary to the US Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation satellite network, with users able to pick up signals from both on the same receiver, and will give positions to within a meter.
One high-profile application being considered for Galileo would be road-use taxation. While high-end cars already have GPS mapping units, Galileo may also be used to track vehicle movements for "pay as you drive" road-use taxation. The scheme would tax drivers not only for the distance they drive, but for the time, place, and speed of their driving. The approach would also eliminate the need for toll booths and other ground-based traffic charging mechanisms.
Each car would be fitted with a "smart box" with a Galileo receiver and a wireless transmitter system to interface with the network, which would be based not only on the satellite constellation, but also on ground-based control centers to track the vehicles and compute tolls. The smart box would also be able to transmit an alarm if, say, airbags were inflated, with the network guiding other traffic onto alternate routes. There are concerns about privacy, but observers say that the system should be covered by existing privacy regulations.
GPS is already being used to a limited extent in Germany for road-use charging with heavy goods vehicle traffic. Ground-based "tag and beacon" systems, involving "beacons" mounted alongside the road and "tags" in the vehicles, are also in used for heavy goods vehicle traffic in Austria and on an experimental basis in Trondheim, Norway.
In any case, a "pay as you drive" scheme not only promises to make road-use taxes fairer, with the tolls proportional to use, but also may help reduce traffic congestion by raising rates for congested areas, particularly for peak traffic times. In addition, insurers could use the information to modify rates for drivers depending on how much they drive. The European Commission is now investigating how heavy goods vehicles and passenger buses will make use of Galileo services. If the concept works well for commercial road traffic, it will then be extended to private vehicle traffic.
* GOING COASTAL: While I am by no means a fan of late night radio call-in talk shows, an article on the popular "Coast To Coast AM (CTCAM)" radio show in WIRED Online ("Coast To Coast Is No Wack Job" by Randy Dotinga) caught my eye.
CTCAM was originally founded by the well-known Art Bell, who used the show as a vehicle to explore the fringes of knowledge. Bell left the show three years ago, handing it over to George Noory, though Bell does still host on weekends. It gets an estimated 4.5 million listeners every night; it is carried on 500 stations, and is also available in podcasting format through the CTCAM website.
While subjects such as alien visitations, human-alien hybrids, and global conspiracies are grist for the mill at CTCAM, the show's audience and contributors also include respected members of the science community. The soft-spoken, 55-year-old Noory gives everyone a polite hearing, and scientists are pleased to use his show as a moderated forum to explain things to the public.
Well-known debunker Michael Shermer is a frequent contributor: "We want to chase out bad ideas with good ideas, and just explain what science is. Why don't most scientists accept psychic powers as real or UFOs are real? Why do we have high standards of evidence before you accept something?"
Noory himself is inclined to believe in the supernatural or paranormal. He describes the style of the show as "non-confrontational" and suggests that listeners and participants take a similar attitude: "Chill out, relax and have an open mind."
University of Washington paleontologist Peter D. Ward, an occasional contributor, agrees that getting too stressed about some of the subjects discussed on CTCAM is not very constructive, that some of the stories are "so outrageous that you have to really be a nincompoop to take the far-out stuff seriously." Ward describes the show as "entertainment with some good science in it."
* DANGER ROBOTS: Daniel H. Wilson, a PhD researcher at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, has just published what sounds like an interesting book, titled HOW TO SURVIVE A ROBOT UPRISING: TIPS ON DEFENDING YOURSELF FROM THE COMING REBELLION. According to the book: "Any robot could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator, and so it is crucial to learn the strengths and weaknesses of every robot enemy." For example, there is a simple test to figure out if the person you're chatting up is actually a robotic assassin in camouflage: "Does your friend smell like a brand-new soccer ball?"
It started after a bull session in which Wilson and fellow roboticists were laughing about all the stereotypes of robots running amok in TV and movies. Wilson decided to pick up the idea and run with it, having some fun while actually teaching a bit about robotics in the meantime. Wilson's already obtained movie rights. The real joke, of course, is that there will be a few people who will take him seriously.
* SMART RECYCLING: US municipalities were once very enthusiastic about recycling trash and waste, but their excitement flagged when the bottom line for recycled materials didn't come as close to the overhead of sorting out recyclables as had been expected.
However, if recycling didn't turn out quite as expected, it hasn't gone away either, and according to a WIRED Online article ("Machines Pluck Cash From Trash" by Bryan Ball), technology is helping recycling move forward again. A number of municipalities have invested in expensive sorting machines that automate the process, with the machines making use of magnets, sifting screens, optical sensors, weight detectors, and other gadgetry to pick through trash quickly and efficiently.
Trash collection giant Waste Management Incorporated (WMI) has been energetic in promoting such machinery, saying that such "single-stream" sorting makes recycling more convenient. Consumers can place all their recyclables into a single bin, and the greater convenience encourages greater recycling.
Another factor in the resurgence of recycling is that demand for recycled materials is starting to pick up again, having dropped after the initial recycling boom flooded the market. Now countries like China need raw materials, and American trash can help fill their needs.
The expense of the machinery means that the larger cities were the first to come on board. Denver, Colorado, obtained a $4 million USD trash sorting system, and found it very worthwhile: recycling ramped up 18% in the system's first year of operation. With such successes, smaller cities are jumping on the bandwagon as well.
Monroe County, which includes the city of Rochester, New York, includes 350,000 people who produce tens of thousands of tonnes of trash annually. Not long ago, the county's recycling center obtained machines that use vibrating screens to sort paper from wood and cardboard, along with magnets to pull tin and steel from aluminum and plastic. The machines are big, about two stories tall and 15 meters (50 feet) long; they're somewhat noisy, but the sound doesn't carry too far.
Monroe County has also begun to use barcoded trash bins to track the city's trash flow. Their systems are by no means leading edge, but have dramatically improved the efficiency of the county's trash handling. The price of automation has been a smaller payroll: on one station, the number of workers has been cut from six to three.
* SKYWATCH: An AVIATION WEEK article ("The Fringe Of Space" by William B. Scott, 30 January 2006) reports that a teamup of companies named CollaborX and Multimax is now proposing construction of a "near-space" lighter than air (LTS) vehicle named the "MaXflyer", which will be able to float at 30,500 meters (100,000 feet) for weeks at a time.
The MaXflyer will be useful for surveillance and communications relay, and is intended for both military and civil purposes. From its operating altitude, it will be able to observe 415,000 square kilometers (160,000 square miles), an area the size of the state of Colorado. It will be out of range of most surface-to-air missile threats.
The MaXflyer will have an envelope looking something like a flattened loaf of round bread, 67 meters (200 feet) wide, carrying a wedge-shaped gondola. The envelope will be made of Kevlar and other synthetic materials; it will cost about $100,000 USD, and will be discarded after each mission. The MaXflyer's envelope configuration is aerodynamic, and two small electric motors driving propellers will be able to place it and keep it on station.
Power will be supplied by solar panels. Estimated cost, excluding payload, for a MaXflyer will be about $1.5 million USD. The teamup is now looking for a bigger partner to foot the bill for prototype construction.
* According to an AP report, another collaboration, of Space Data Corporation of Arizona and Extende America INC of North Dakota, is proposing a simpler approach to using balloons for communications relay. Their idea is to set small expendable balloons afloat over North Dakota, with each balloon carrying a relay payload. Three balloons could provide full coverage of the sparsely-populated state; it would take over a thousand cellular towers to accomplish the same trick on the ground.
Company officials insist the idea is economically sound. The balloons only cost about $55 USD each; after leaving the state, a balloon would drop its toaster-sized relay payload by parachute, which would send out an alarm allowing it to be picked up. The payload package would also be marked with text promising a reward for recovery. Nine balloons would be in the air at all times, cruising above the altitudes of commercial air traffic.
The concept is not as crazy as it sounds. Space Data is already using a variation of the scheme, which the company calls "SkySite", to track vehicles and monitor facilities for oil companies in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and New Mexico. Thousands of balloons have been launched, day or night, regardless of the weather; they were even launched during Hurricane Katrina. Test flights for the North Dakota cellphone relay scheme are scheduled for the summer of 2006.
* KIDDY GRADE: It had to happen: with the rapid conversion of the general public to MP3 players and digital cameras, the Fisher-Price generation had to jump on the bandwagon as well. According to a CNET News article taken from THE NEW YORK TIMES ("Mommy, Help Put 'Farmer In The Dell' On My MP3 Player" by Michael Barbero), the Mattel division is now preparing to introduce an MP3 player and digital camera for toddlers in the 2006 holiday season, with prices set for now at $70 USD each. Other vendors are moving into the market as well, with Emerson Radio developing a SpongeBob SquarePants speaker system for MP3 players and SpongeBob SquarePants digital camera, and one company named Baby Einstein even working on a rocker with a built-in MP3 player system.
Electronics gadgets for kids are a growth market; digital cameras and MP3 players for primary schoolers are already being sold. Preschoolers are tougher customers, since products designed for little ones must be both simple to operate and very rugged. The Fisher-Price designs have big buttons and can tolerate being thrown against the floor.
Since not all preschoolers can read song titles, the Fisher-Price Digital Song and Story Player uses easily-recognized icons instead, like a star for "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" or a barn for "Old McDonald." The Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Digital Camera has only five buttons; dual view finders, like a pair of binoculars, not the single window found on other digital cameras; two large handles to ensure a solid grip before shooting pictures; and a two-step process for deleting botched shots, not the four- or five-step procedure used on a typical camera.
Fisher-Price sees the tools as supporting children's creative expression, with the camera in particular allowing kids to say: "Mommy, look what I did!" However, Mommy and Daddy will be stuck with downloading tunes to the MP3 player, and uploading pictures from the camera to be printed by a PC. Fisher-Price will provide "easy to use" software to help with these tasks.
Some critics suggest that these toys encourage solitary tinkering at the expense of social interaction. Fisher-Price's rival PlaySkool, a division of Hasbro, is not working on such toys, preferring instead to add new technology to more traditional toys, like teddy bears.
* JIM GARY IN MEMORIAM: I caught a obituary notice in a magazine some time back for Jim Gary, who was described as a sculptor who put together dinosaurs made from scrap car parts. I was intrigued enough to surf the web for his work, and found a marvelous assortment of full-sized dinosaurs in bright flashy colors -- some of them surprisingly authentic-looking despite being made of car parts -- plus oversized red ants, bizarre fantasy creatures, and so on.
Gary appears to have started a movement of sorts, since I see the occasional junk dinosaur around these parts as well. One of the houses in the neighborhood has a little sculpture of a monster plunging up out of the ground, with a truck suspension spring for a body and gaping jagged jaws. I found it downright creepy the first time I saw it -- a lawn gnome it wasn't.
* PLEASE PHONE MONEY: The notion of using a cellphone as an "electronic wallet" has been floating around for the last few years. Now a startup named "TextPayMe" has made it a reality, at least in a limited sense.
According to a WIRED Online article ("TextPayMe: Eliminating The IOU" by Rachel Metz), a TextPayMe user sets up an online account on the service and links to a bank account. Once the account has been set up, a user can send up to $500 USD a month to other TextPayMe users by simply using the "short messaging service (SMS)" typically available on cellphones. For the moment, there's no charge for the TextPayMe service, but the company is considering charging fees for some transactions.
The whole scheme is somewhat reminiscent of the PayPal online transaction service. Mobile users with PDAs or phones that can handle web pages can use PayPal, but PayPal doesn't have an SMS interface. However, PayPal has been recruiting for a new "PayPal Mobile" service, which suggests the company is going to move in on TextPayMe -- though PayPal officials are refusing comment.
* SUPER COATINGS: According to another WIRED ONLINE article ("Nano Coatings Paint Green Future" by John Gartner), nanomaterials research is now leading to the commercial introduction of nanoparticle-based coatings that can provide extreme flexibility, easy adhesion to surfaces, and resistance to corrosion or microbial growth.
A US startup named Ecology Coatings has developed a coating based on mineral oxide nanoparticles that can be used to waterproof paper, cardboard containers, or drywall. The company has similar coatings that could be used to protect the little displays of mobile phones and the like from scratches.
Chemical giant DuPont has licensed yet another nanoparticle-based coating from Ecology Coatings to protect auto parts. The coating can be applied using conventional spray painting gear, then cured by exposing it to ultraviolet light for 10 seconds. Traditional coatings have to be cured in an oven for 40 minutes, which is not only time and energy consuming but a production bottleneck. Even better, the nanocoatings eliminate the need for environmentally-unfriendly solvents and other hazardous chemicals -- though they would require that the manufacturing process be redesigned.
DuPont engineers see the new parts coating scheme dramatically driving down costs of applying coatings, from "a few dimes per article down to one cent per article or less." There would also be no need to design parts to withstand an oven curing process. DuPont officials believe the coatings will be initially used for "under the hood" parts like oil filters or disk brake drums.
* MICRO WINDPOWER: While wind power turbines have been getting bigger and more capable, according to a CNET News article ("Micro Wind Turbines Are Coming To Town" by Marin LaMonica), now there's a new effort to make them smaller, suitable for installing on tops of buildings.
The idea hasn't caught on yet, but a number of companies are working to make it a reality. The AeroVironment company, best known for its human-powered aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles, is developing small turbines that look like large fans mounted in square housings to be set up on top of commercial buildings, along the lines of Home Depot or Wal-Mart retail stores. The turbines can be lined up in rows, and will produce power even in mild breezes.
The company has them in beta test at a few sites to evaluate cost-effectiveness and noise levels. There are also concerns about their impact on birds and bats, though the turbines are screened on both sides. AeroVironment isn't sure that their technology will be salable, but company officials claim that business owners and municipalities are very interested in alternative energy sources, out of a concern for costs, as well as a degree of "green" fashionableness. Since the turbines are unobtrusive, few are concerned about "not in my backyard" resistance from local communities.
The Aerotecture company of Chicago is pursuing the same idea using a different approach, with a helical turbine inside a cylinder about 3 meters (10 feet) tall. The company is talking with city officials about placing the turbines on top of Chicago's tall Daley Center, with some other potential deals on the plate. Companies in Europe are also developing small wind turbines for urban sites. It is likely that the next few years will determine whether the concept is practical or not.
* RIPPED MIXED-UP BURNED: I had a little Rio digital music player for some time that I wore when I was wandering around, and its soft case finally gave way a few weeks back. The player itself still worked, but it had never been very reliable, with a certain tendency to go out to lunch at odd times, requiring that I pull the battery to get it to work again. I poked around on Amazon to see what was new in portable digital players, and I ran into an item from Samsung that seemed very attractive. It was about the size of a pack of chewing gum, could be worn as a pendant, and had 512 gigabytes of flash memory -- twice as much as my Rio.
I was tempted, particularly since it wasn't very expensive, well within my pocket money budget for the month -- and when I found out I could use it to record MP3s, I was sold. I could hook it up to my music keyboard and cut tunes for my website, or record soundtrack tunes off of DVDs running on my PC.
Indeed, when I got the thing I was very impressed with it. It ran on a single AA cell, and the package was just big enough to accommodate the cell with little space for low-profile electronics along the side. I didn't realize as I loaded it up with tunes, however, that I was about to go through a steep learning curve.
* The problem was that though I filled the player with tunes in Microsoft WMA compressed audio format, it would only play a certain selected number of them, over and over again. I tinkered with it repeatedly, trying to see if I could get clues from the user-unfriendly Samsung manual and from the similarly user-unfriendly software that Samsung supplied. After bumbling around for a week or so, I finally realized that the WMAs I was downloading to the player were mostly protected, and the player would only play the files that weren't,
This was sort of a DUH after the fact, but my Rio player had never had any troubles with the same WMAs, and it was a bit confusing that any of the WMAs ran on the Samsung player. As far as I could recall, I had ripped all of them from my CD collection with Windows Media Player, and I would have thought it would have protected all of them.
That being puzzling but unanswerable, I went on to the more constructive question of what to do next. I figured MP3s would be unprotected and a safer bet; the Samsung software had MP3 <-> WMA conversion capabilities, but it wouldn't convert protected WMAs to MP3. DUH again -- that's why they call them "protected".
After a lot more tinkering with the Samsung software and the software that came with the old Rio player, I finally decided to rip all my CD collection again. I certainly didn't want to use Windows Media Player to do it since it would protect the files as before, but fortunately the Rio software could rip tracks in both MPEG and WMA, with the ability to specify the sampling rate of the conversion -- 64 kilosamples per second (KSPS), 96 KSPS, 128 KSPS, and so on. Pilot runs showed the ripped tracks were not protected.
Then there was the question of the rip format. I thought of staying with MP3, but WMA seems popular, and it also supports a 64 KSPS sample rate. MP3 seems to go down to no lower than 96 KSPS, meaning that I could cut WMA files that were 2/3rds as big as MP3 files. Sound quality was adequate over the Samsung player, equivalent to picking up an ordinary radio broadcast transmission, with no interference. Once I got started, it was no big deal to rip my full CD collection over a few days.
* This was not the end of the learning curve, however. My work with the Samsung and Rio software brought back all kinds of old lessons about software product design, or lack thereof. The Samsung software was a bit fragile, but not too bad once I figured out how to run it; its major problem was user-unfriendliness. The thin manual with it said very little useful, and puzzling how to get things to work was a challenge. For example, I couldn't figure out how to download music files to the player until I determined that the "Copy File List" feature did that. I had the impression it was all put together by folks whose first language was not English; then again, I've known some native English speakers who give that impression when they try to write things down.
The Rio software worked well enough and wasn't so troublesome to figure out, but it had problems of its own. One of the features of robust software is how well it recovers from exceptions and faults, and in the case of the Rio software the answer was: "Not worth a bent penny." It locked up every now and then; that might have been a system error, but after lockups, or after attempts to cut off a rip session, it would error out when I tried to rip again. It set up temporary files during the first session and errored out rather than overwrite them during the second try. I finally figured out where the files were, so I could delete them manually. To make matters more obnoxious, on rerunning the software after crashes, it would insist on fully scanning the hard disk for music files, whether I wanted it to or not.
It was said decades ago that if buildings were put together the way most programs are, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. It is a bit discouraging that things haven't advanced all that much.
* While I was fiddling with all this, I was considering how to handle music downloads. I had downloaded a few tracks from Microsoft Network, and to no surprise I found they were all protected. A quick check showed MSN only provided protected WMAs. I checked out various alternatives, but they all had limitations. Selections were poor; or they insisted on a subscription service; or sorting through their stuff online was a pain; or they were based on downloading overbearing software -- Yahoo's service set up so much junk on my PC that it became effectively a Yahoo PC.
I finally realized that I hadn't found downloads all that convenient; that it would be nice to have a CD that I could rip into any format I liked, with any KSPS resolution I wanted; and that it wouldn't be all that expensive to just buy CDs from Amazon -- a lot of the jazz classic stuff I listen to is very cheap. Apparently downloads are almost always protected anyway.
I think should hang on the CD for my old Rio software, though. I suspect that over time, due to legal pressure, music ripping tools will be more and more inclined to protect tracks when they rip them. I understand why producers want to protect their work, but if their protection mechanisms prevent me from even using their stuff, then I have no choice but to bypass protection.
* All this being done, I felt the better for it. I just bought a little desktop stereo system that could play MP3/WMA CD-ROMs, and after I was done ripping my CDs, I burned a CD-ROM with 72 techno-style tunes; then a jazz disk with about 170 tunes; and a techno-ambient disk with about 250 tunes. Even cheaper boom-boxes with MP3 capability are just starting to come on the market, and by summer I hope to have finally phased out the little constellation of old cheapo stereos and boom boxes that I mainly run with audio tapes as a low-budget distributed sound system, in favor of MP3 CD units. Bye-bye audio tapes -- not sad to see you go.
On reflecting how I thrashed through all this, I felt good about coming to clean and satisfactory solutions, and marveled at the "rat in the maze" way I did it. I think that's basically the way the world works. There are a lot of people who like to give the impression that they can take on tasks that are new and unfamiliar, and step through them from A to Z without going down any blind alleys. I am sure that a few of these people really are that competent. However, I am even more sure that most of them are liars.
* LIABILITY TANGO? Last month I ran an article on these pages about the impact of malpractice litigation on skyrocketing US medical costs. Now a professor of the University of Connecticut School of Law named Tom Baker has published a book titled THE MEDICAL MALPRACTICE MYTH that challenges the conventional wisdom about malpractice litigation.
According to Professor Baker, about one in every 20 patients suffers unnecessary harm at a physician's hands, and about 1 in 10 of those dies. Only a small portion of those who have suffered malpractice ever take the case to court, and the average award is actually very small -- a few tens of thousands of dollars. The author also cites studies to show that physicians do not tend to overtreat in any major way. In addition, although malpractice insurance is very expensive for some classes of doctors, on the average it's not that bad. Professor Baker chalks up the high premiums on market fluctuations in the insurance industry.
Although critics have suggested that Professor Baker's definition of "malpractice" is overly broad, THE MEDICAL MALPRACTICE MYTH is otherwise getting a lot of respect for its scholarship and dispassionate approach to the subject; certainly Professor Baker is not being dismissed as a mere crank with an axe to grind. Nor is he critical of the whole idea of tort reform, though his angle on it tends to emphasize the rights of plaintiffs as well as defendants.
* As for myself, I admit to being confused, given one set of stats one month and another set another month. However, this sort of debate is healthy. I must admit that I find Professor Baker's citations of the rate of medical malpractice very persuasive. I have a fundamental belief that incompetence is an unavoidable factor in human affairs -- it certainly is in my own case, and my observations lead me to believe that I'm not doing worse for myself than others.
I don't feel that this is a cynical observation, either. A 10% error rate in something as complicated as medical practice strikes me as fairly low; admittedly such errors can have disastrous consequences. One writer commenting on Professor Baker's work pointed out that in the 19th century, a visit to the doctor had about even chances of helping or harming the patient. We've come a long way since then.
* ROBOJEEP: Robot aircraft, or "unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)", have been one of the stars in recent military campaigns, introducing an element of automation into combat. According to an article in POPULAR SCIENCE ("Robots Go To War" by Preston Lerner, January 2006), the military is likely to begin using "unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs)" in the near future.
UAVs have actually been around for a long time; the US used modified Firebee target drones in a big way for reconnaissance missions during the Vietnam War. These "Lightning Bug" drones usually had autonomous guidance systems, not radio control; it wasn't all that hard to give them autonomous control, since their behavior wasn't much more sophisticated than that of a washing machine:
Modern UAVs are much more sophisticated, capable of performing takeoffs and landings autonomously, as well as following complicated preprogrammed flight paths. However, even modern UAVs don't have the smarts required for a UGV. The simple problem is that there's a lot more things to run into on the ground than in the air.
Remote-controlled military vehicles have been around for a long time. During World War II, the Germans fielded a little tracked vehicle called a "Goliath" that was directed over a trailing electrical cable. It looked like a tiny tank without a turret and carried a big explosive charge. The idea was to run it up against an enemy tank or strongpoint and then detonate it. It was used a fair amount on the Eastern Front, though it was fairly easy to disable with small-arms fire and not very successful.
In the early 1990s, the US military worked on a set of teleoperated vehicles, essentially four-wheel all-terrain vehicles with cameras and sensors on a mast, and in some cases weaponry. They trailed a fiber-optic link for control, the fiber-optic link was too easily cut, and in general these machines were clearly not ready for combat. They were not fielded.
However, in the past few years the US military has fielded small teleoperated robots, including the Foster-Miller "Talon" and the iRobot "PackBot". Both of these machines are fairly small, weighing 45 kilograms (100 pounds) or less, with twin tracks, cameras, and a manipulator arm. They are primarily intended for "explosive ordnance disposal (EOD)", or in simpler terms bomb disposal. They can be used for snooping around as well, but they are very short-range machines. Experiments have been performed with Talons carrying light machine guns, but the military has not fielded such robot weapons.
A true UGV will have to be autonomous, with the capability of driving itself. Autonomous ground vehicle guidance is very difficult to implement. In the 1980s, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began an "Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV)" program, eventually building a schoolbus-sized vehicle crammed full of computing power that could move along at a slow walk. The conclusion of the ALV program was that operational autonomous UGVs were not right around the corner.
A lot has happened in two decades. Not only has computer power grown at an astonishing rate, but high-resolution imaging sensors and laser radars are now available, as well as accurate locating capability using the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite constellation. Hierarchical rule-based software has been developed that allows the inputs from sensors to be handled efficiently, working through the most likely rules first and then going on to less likely rules, instead of blindly crunching through the input sensor data in a brute-force fashion.
A few years ago, DARPA initiated a "Grand Challenge" cross-country road race, the first to be run by robot vehicles, to help promote UGV technology. The first race, in the spring of 2004, was a fiasco: not one of the entrants completed the entire 228 kilometer (142 mile) course, and many hardly made it far from the starting line.
Everyone was embarrassed and went back to the drawing board. The 2005 race went much better, with five UGVs completing the course successfully. The winner, picking up the $2 million USD purse, was Stanford University's "Stanley", a roboticized VW Toureg SUV. Stanley's average speed was 30.6 KPH (19 MPH), with its highest speed twice that. It carried five laser radars and a high resolution camera.
It appears that a UGV resupply vehicle is now within reach. The US military is now working on the "Future Combat System (FCS)", which is not a combat system but a system of combat systems. Current FCS concepts envision:
The Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle is no more than an extension of current "battle robots" and not too much of a challenge. It is believed that unmanned supply vehicles should be in service sometime in the next decade. As far as robots with weapons, it is not only much tricker to design a vehicle that can fight and not just drive itself from place to place, it also makes many people nervous.
In the days when the military was tinkering with teleoperated combat vehicles, a reporter called up Dr. Isaac Asimov and asked him what he thought of the idea. The first of his famous Three Laws of Robotics reads: "A robot cannot harm a human being nor, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm." To no great surprise, Dr. Asimov barked back: "I hate it!" -- and hung up. Fans of the TERMINATOR movies will also immediately think of the "War of the Machines", in which a supercomputer tried to exterminate humanity.
It is likely, over the short term at least, that though a killer robot may maneuver and hunt on its own, once it has a target in its crosshairs it will fire only under command from a remote operator. Eventually that decision will be handed over to the machine as well, but traditional military conservatism suggests it won't be until everyone is sure that the machines make fewer mistakes than human soldiers do. At that point, it would be unconscionable not to let the machines fire at will.
* STRAINED PATIENCE: US President George W. Bush has thoroughly enraged his opposition on the left, so much so that it is difficult to know if their accusations -- in particular, the assertion that the president has consistently exceeded the authority of his office -- have any merit or are just sore-headed flaming. It is something of a relief to get a cooler assessment on this issue from THE ECONOMIST ("Under Challenge", 14 January 2006).
The Bush II Administration has consistently claimed that far-reaching presidential authority is required to fight the "global war on terror (GWOT)". To no great surprise, Democrats were only patient with this logic for so long; now they are leading the charge in Congress on Mr. Bush for his authorization of domestic wiretapping.
That much could be expected, and defenders of the administration's wiretaps say they were necessary, limited in extent, and that the whole matter is a tornado in a teacup. However, the courts are now beginning to weigh in against the administration as well. The specific issue concerns an American citizen named Norman Padilla who had been held for more than three years without charge as an "unlawful enemy combatant".
The circumstances that led to him becoming an issue were convoluted: the administration wanted to transfer him from military to civilian custody, where he could stand trial. That would seem like a positive step on the face of it, but the normally conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal denied the action in December, with the court loudly protesting the way the administration had used one set of arguments to justify Mr. Padilla's military detention, and then another set to persuade a Miami grand jury to indict him. The court was also angry about the fact that the administration wanted to shift Mr. Padilla to civilian custody just to prevent a challenge over his detention from reaching the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court backed the administration, but also said that the matter of Mr. Padilla's detention would be addressed "in due course".
In response to the uproar, the administration insisted that they were acting within the rights of executive discretion. Much the same was said last year when Senator John McCain was pushing a bill into law to ban the use of torture. The administration finally caved in and went along with the bill, but when the president signed it, he released a note saying that he would construe it as he saw fit. An understandably irritated Senator McCain replied in effect that he would be watching like a hawk for any attempt to circumvent the new law.
The administration has been backpedaling on some of their more controversial initiatives, for example coming up with a tighter and less appallingly convenient definition of the word "torture". However, the administration's faith in the extent of its executive privilege remains intact, that the GWOT demands such great powers. The problem is that it is hard to say when the GWOT will be ended, the president himself saying it would go on "until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." Good luck.
Few honestly agree with such an open-ended consideration of executive privilege. Even conservative judge Samuel Alito, who has successfully been confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, insists that even in wartime the president does not have a "blank check".
Vice President Dick Cheney, who has doggedly defended the extension of executive privilege, has stated that his boss "has made clear from the outset, both publicly and privately, that our duty to uphold the law of the land admits no exceptions in wartime." This was talking in circles: all Mr. Cheney was saying was that the administration feels perfectly legal in taking such actions as deemed necessary. Such a statement was not likely to calm the waters, and it didn't.
Whether the Supreme Court upholds the Bush II Administration's sense of executive privilege or not remains to be seen, though it's not rocket science to think that even conservative justices may not be eager to uphold the principle that they can be ignored at convenience. Interesting precedents exist. During the Korean War, US President Harry Truman seized steel mills without Congressional approval. The high court judged this action out of bounds, with Justice Robert Jackson neatly stating that the power of the president was at its greatest when he acted with Congressional approval, but when he did not, "his power is at its lowest ebb."
* As a footnote to the subject of the GWOT, according to AVIATION WEEK, Ryan Henry, a deputy undersecretary of defense, told a conference audience that America's biggest win in the war on terror did not involve the use of force: "Our response to the [2004] tsunami in Indonesia and [2005] earthquake in Pakistan did more to counter the ideological support for terrorism than probably any other events." Soft power has its virtues.
* TOE THE LINE: While many of the old Communist nations of Eastern Europe have successfully made the transition to reasonably honest populist government and increasingly prosperous capitalist economies, Russia seems to be moving very strongly back towards the country's traditional authoritarianism and statism. As reported by BBC WORLD Online, one of the latest bits of evidence is Russia's crackdown on foreign-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the country.
New laws will go into effect on 10 April 2006 that will allow Russian officials to dictate the rules to the NGOs; if the NGOs don't obey, they will be shut down. Kremlin officials insist the law is necessary and reasonable, claiming that foreign spies have infiltrated NGOs; that NGOs present a misleading image of Russia; and that NGOs are bound by the rules of their host country anyplace they operate.
The issue erupted to the surface in January, when the Kremlin accused officials at the British embassy in Moscow of working as spies, relaying data with Russian contacts through a hollow rock containing a store-and-forward system -- something like a digital radio answering machine, where one party could leave messages and a second party could pick them up later. Russian officials linked NGOs to the scheme.
Intelligence experts outside Russia are skeptical that NGOs are riddled with spies. One argues that NGO staff are simply too obvious to be used as spies, and that it's no longer all that difficult to plant or turn people in Russia. As far as the distortions propagated by NGOs go, the main irritants to the government seem to be organizations like Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch (HRW), which have carefully tracked civil rights abuses in Russia and tried to help victims. Finally, NGO officials point out that though their organizations are indeed liable to local laws, few countries have even contemplated the level of restrictions that the new Russian law implies.
The main reason for the crackdown may be the Kremlin's perception that foreign-funded NGOs played a key role in bringing down Kremlin-friendly governments in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. The current Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is constitutionally required to step down in 2008, and since setting himself up as a "president for life" would lead to a storm of international outrage -- not to mention reduce Russia to the laughable political status of a banana-republic dictatorship -- it is thought likely that he will leave office. However, Mr. Putin and his people would still like to make sure that the right sort of people will control the next government, and the last thing they want is another Ukrainian "Orange Revolution".
NGOs have indeed attempted to support democratic processes in countries where such processes are weak, but observers suggest that the major reason for the collapse of pro-Moscow governments in some of the former Soviet states was simply widespread popular discontent, not some grand conspiracy of NGOs.
The specific accusations against the NGOs almost don't matter. The Russian government has acquired a tame parliament and a tame press. Now it is time to tame the NGOs as well.
* YIN & YAN: THE ECONOMIST's European columnist, who goes by the alias of "Charlemagne", had some interesting comments on the Iranian nuclear crisis in the 21 January issue ("Playing Soft Or Hard Cop").
During the first term of the Bush II Administration, the president and his men almost flaunted their contempt for diplomacy, but they are all sadder and wiser now. Washington has carefully backed the efforts of the European Union -- in practice represented specifically by Britain, Germany, and France -- to deflate the crisis using "soft power": diplomacy and engagement instead of force and threats. The question of course arises of just how much hope can now be realistically placed in soft power.
Supporters of the approach admit that it is slow -- it's usually easier to get in the door by kicking it down -- but that over the long run it gives a better solution -- breaking a door means having to fix it and all the attendant damage later, which as Iraq has proven may be much greater than anyone expected. The Iranians did give the EU effort a respectful hearing for a while, and it may well have held them back from "going nuclear" for a few years.
The Bush II Administration's willingness to back the EU effort also did much to help Washington; with the EU leading the charge, nobody could credibly assert that the whole exercise was just another piece of US "hegemonism", much less claim that the mysterious American "Jewish conspiracy" was behind the whole thing. Following the humiliating fiasco of American claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the EU's concerns about the sinister appearance of Iran's nuclear program played far better than anything that Mr. Bush or Dr. Rice could have said -- and helped keep the Russians and Chinese more or less in the tent, if very near the exit.
So it can be said that soft power had positive results when it came to the Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese. It is hard to say so much about Iran. EU intelligence believes that the Iranians have been lying through their teeth over their nuclear program for the last few years, and one prominent Iranian cleric was recently quoted as saying: "Thank Allah, our enemies are idiots." Teheran's hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has done little but emphasize that Iran is going to do what Iran damn well pleases.
Some observers believe, plausibly, that despite the noisy threats against Israel issued by Mr. Ahmadinejad, his country wants the Bomb to make the US think twice before taking military action against Iran. The EU doesn't have the same bargaining chip that the US has -- the ability to give Iran security guarantees. All of the EU together is no major military threat to Iran, America is another matter. In other words, the European pitch also implicitly involves the US.
The Americans have been very patient with the soft power approach, but a consensus is emerging in the US that it's time to take more forceful actions: the soft cop hasn't worked, now it's time for the hard cop to take the lead. However, there are many Europeans who think that soft power should still be the tool of choice, that it's not a case of picking yan over yin. To be sure, outright use of direct military force seems to be ruled out for the time being -- the US is too pinned down in Iraq, and destroying all of Iran's nuclear facilities would be a difficult job -- but they are now going to have to make a convincing case to Washington that they are right, since patience is quickly running out -- and it can only be hoped that when patience finally snaps, it doesn't take the trans-Atlantic rapprochement down with it.
* Another short article in the same issue points out that Israel's president, Moshe Katzav, was born in Iran and grew up speaking Farsi. His military chief of staff is Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, both of whose parents were born in Iran. When Halutz was asked how far Israel was willing to go to stop Iran's nuclear program, he replied dryly: "Two thousand kilometers." Nobody would ever accuse the Israelis of placing too much faith in soft power.
* AT ODDS: On 5 January 2006, as reported in an article in TIME ("A Rebel Crack-Up?" by Tim McGirk), a suicide bomber went into a group of police recruits in the town of Ramadi and blew himself up, killing 70 recruits and two Americans. This might have seemed like more of the same dismal news from Iraq, but there was more to the matter than met the eye. Ramadi is dominated by Sunni Iraqis and is a center of resistance to the occupation; most of the recruits killed were Sunnis. The attack had been staged by foreign al-Qaeda jihadis, led by Jordanian Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. The foreigners were promptly told that they were no longer welcome in Ramadi, and responded by killing several local Sunni leaders. The result was a war between the jihadis and the local Sunnis.
US forces and the Iraqi government have been trying to exploit differences between the various insurgent groups in Iraq. Nowhere are the differences more profound than between foreign jihadis, who are fighting a holy war against America, American allies, and Shiites -- and Iraqi Sunnis, who are fighting to retain their influence in Iraqi society. Iraqi Sunnis have become tired of jihadi attacks on soft targets like markets and mosques; the Americans are fair game, but killing Iraqi women and children, even Shiites, is repellent. In response the jihadis have turned on their Iraqi Sunni allies, leading to a series of escalations. In one case, Iraqi Sunnis wounded a Palestinian jihadi, and then grabbed him out of the hospital where he was convalescing, to hand him over to the Americans. Jihadis attack Sunni leadership, and the Sunnis retaliate in kind.
Iraqi Sunnis are also increasingly willing to come to at least limited terms with the government, engaging in voting and even allowing their young men to join the Iraqi police or national guard. After all, it's either that or let the Shiites and Kurds dominate government forces. Jihadis have proclaimed that anybody who puts on a government uniform -- Kurd, Shiite, or Sunni -- is a legitimate target. A busload of Sunni recruits from Ramadi disappeared on its way to Baghdad; the jihadis had been waiting for them. Their bodies haven't been found.
While divisions among the enemy are encouraging to the Americans and the Iraqi government, nobody thinks that the insurgency is close to falling apart. The foreign jihadis are few in number, acquiring prominence mainly from the appalling bloodthirstiness of their attacks. And if the jihadis leave, they will go to other countries to continue their attacks.
* ANOTHER MONTH: I well cleared 100,000 visitors in January -- February's a short month, so we'll see what happens. 23 new illustrations, the grind continues, I think I should be out of the woods in about four months. I keep a directory of artwork to work on, containing photographs to clean up and drawings to fiddle with; I get it down to less than 50 items, then it shoots back up to 100 -- it was over 150 for a short time this month, though the excess was mostly stuff that merely needed some sorting -- and I try to whittle it down again. Some of the drawings in the directory have been backlogged for years.
Finding time to keep up with blog has been troublesome; in between scrounging through sources and doing the writeups, it runs into time that pushes out other activities. I keep thinking that if I got organized I could get everything done, but there's just no way to cram ten pounds into a five pound bag. I get amused at people who write me up and try to get me to work on some project for them, saying I might find it very interesting. Reminds of when I was in customer support and my boss Chris said: "They think you're the Maytag repairman."
For whatever reason, there was a short resurgence of "referrer spam" on my site in January -- people hammering on the pages just so they could hand off an ad when I checked the backlink. There was a lot of this going around a year or so ago, but they gave it up, almost certainly because it didn't work: relatively few people care about backlinks, and most people who would check backlinks aren't dumb enough to buy off on spam, it annoys them instead. However, there was one site that had "crash&burn" in the title that I was dim enough to check, and yep, it crashed my web browser. It was a booby trap site -- just someone spreading around bad karma.
As far as the blog goes, I got into an extended correspondence with a European visitor, in which I pointed out that the blog may seem haphazard at first, but anyone staying with it for a period of time will notice certain broad technological and ideological themes emerging from the noise. It does generally take a US perspective on things, but I feel like I'm stuck with that. I did a long set of notes on Canada's recent political turmoil, but the next day I junked it. Canadians tend to be touchy about slights, both real and perceived, from Americans, and the current regime in Washington has made them much touchier. I didn't have a dog in their fight, and all I would have got out of it is flak.
I hate to come across as too parochial -- I'm reminded of the old gag about
local newspapers, which could be imagined to have headlines like:
EAST COAST OBLITERATED BY NUCLEAR ATTACK
Local Housing Prices Likely To Be Affected
-- but poking around in other folks' domestic issues is a good way to look
fatuous and get into fights over matters of no direct interest to me.
Of course, I do the blog for amusement and most people will detect a theme of (sometimes black) humor in it as well. This was apparent when I ran across a news item in which al-Qaeda's Number Two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, "taunted" the US for failing to kill him. That provoked a memory: "I fart in your general direction! Now go away before I taunt you a second time!" Life imitates Monty Python.