*michael parekh on IT*

ON FULFILLING VISIONS

UNEXPECTED FUTURES

Microsoft over the past few days has gotten some buzz with some cool videos on what technology has in store for us over the next decade.  This piece in BoyGeniusReport elaborates:

"At the recent Wharton Business Technology Conference, Steven Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, unveiled the latest future montage video from Microsoft Office Labs.

The video, known simply as 2019, provides a sneak peek at the future according to Microsoft. The widespread use of surface and touchscreen devices coupled with ubiquitous wireless connectivity provides a future worthy of any science fiction novel.

It is an interesting watch and will be even more interesting as the future unfolds and we see which of these technologies come to fruition."

The video, running almost 6 minutes is definitely worth watching. 

Microsoft's name comes up only at the very end, implying of course how the company hopes to enable a lot of this future for us, and presumably profit along the way.

The whole thing made me think of a series of ads that AT&T ran in the early 1990s, with the tag-line "You Will".  YouTube has a 2-minute montage of these ads in case you need a refresher:

Again, it's amazing how much in those videos has come to pass, but it's also instructive how much of this future was made possible by companies that didn't pay for those cool ads over 15 years ago.

ON THE SECRET OF WEIGHT LOSS

JUST DOING IT

Alright, so the secret to losing weight consistently was finally revealed today, and it's a surprise.  Ready? Here's the LA Times teeing it up:

"Two decades after the debate began on which diet is best for weight loss, a conclusion is starting to come into focus. And the winner is . . . not low-carb, not low-fat, not high protein but . . . any diet.
That is, any diet that is low in calories and saturated fats and high in whole grains, fruits and vegetables -- and that an individual can stick with for a lifetime -- is a reasonable choice for people who need to lose weight. That's the conclusion of a study published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, research that represents the longest, largest and most rigorous test of several popular diet strategies."

OK, so maybe not too much of a surprise, but at least it tries to settle it once and for all.  And reveals a couple more tidbits to boot:

"The study refutes the notion that any one nutrient has a special power to accelerate weight loss, said Dr. Frank M. Sacks, lead author of the study and a professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at Harvard. "We used to think there could be a biological effect of certain diets. That is probably not true."
There may be a strong behavioral effect in the success of a diet, however. The people who attended two-thirds or more of the counseling sessions over the two years lost an average of 22 pounds, compared with the average loss of 9 pounds.
The study was highly anticipated because previous research on diets over the last two decades has come to dramatically different conclusions."

As someone who has lost and gained weight so many times over time can attest to, the piece lays out what it takes in a common sense way.  Having worked down this familiar path once again over the last few months, and lost a third of my previous body weight, there's only one other thing I'd add to the article:  don't forget to exercise, even modestly, at least three times a week.  There are no secrets here, just changing one's habits, staying positive and being consistent.

ON "THE HUMMER OF FOOD"

ONE MORE THING...

Just as we're getting our heads around the challenges and opportunities of greening our houses and cars, seems we need to consider the carbon footprint of our food as well.  As this story on Brietbart.com explains:

"When it comes to global warming, hamburgers are the Hummers of food, scientists say.

Simply switching from steak to salad could cut as much carbon as leaving the car at home a couple days a week.

That's because beef is such an incredibly inefficient food to produce and cows release so much harmful methane into the atmosphere, said Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University in Canada.

Pelletier is one of a growing number of scientists studying the environmental costs of food from field to plate.

By looking at everything from how much grain a cow eats before it is ready for slaughter to the emissions released by manure, they are getting a clearer idea of the true costs of food.

The livestock sector is estimated to account for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and beef is the biggest culprit.

Even though beef only accounts for 30 percent of meat consumption in the developed world it's responsible for 78 percent of the emissions, Pelletier said Sunday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

That's because a single kilogram of beef produces 16 kilograms carbon dioxide equivalent emissions: four times higher than pork and more than ten times as much as a kilogram of poultry, Pelletier said.

If people were to simply switch from beef to chicken, emissions would be cut by 70 percent, Pelletier said..."

"If meat consumption in the developed world was cut from the current level of about 90 kilograms a year to the recommended level of 53 kilograms a year, livestock related emissions would fall by 44 percent..."

"...Food is the third largest contributor to the average US household's carbon footprint after driving and utilities, and in Europe - where people drive less and have smaller homes - it has an even greater impact..."

"...The average US household contributes about five tons of carbon dioxide a year by driving and about 3.5 tons of equivalent emissions with what they eat..."

Who knew being a vegetarian was so carbon-footprint efficient?

* Image source.

ON TINY GEOLOCATORS FOR BIRDS

MIGRATION UNPLUGGED

Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated about the prodigious migratory capabilities of birds.  Recent innovations in tracking these patterns by scientists are dramatically adding to our understanding of the migration pattersn.  As this New York Times story start out reporting:

"Birds are famous for airborne speed and endurance. Some have been clocked flying 60 miles per hour or more. Others make annual migrations from Alaska to New Zealand, nonstop."

"But for scientists, tracking birds as they perform those feats has been an intractable problem.
Now researchers think they have cracked it with a novel device — a tiny bird backpack that contains sophisticated sensors and weighs less than a dime."
The new technology has opened up vast new possibilities for bird researchers. Already, it is yielding surprising findings — for example, that some birds fly even faster than previously thought.
But its real importance, biologists say, is the opportunity to unlock mysteries of bird migration that could help preserve species threatened by habitat loss and climate change."

Here's more on the technology itself, pictured on the left in this BBC News article:

"...at a 2006 conference, the British researchers said they had miniaturized their sensors to 1.5 grams. “That for me was a magic number,” she said. “I could put it on a large songbird.”
The instruments Dr. Stutchbury uses actually weigh even less and sit on a bird’s back, just where the hips are.
Each sensor is about the size of the nail on a person’s pinkie. “There’s a little loop that goes around each leg,” she said. “It would be like you wearing a backpack.”
"...The research, reported Friday in the journal Science, involved 34 birds, but only 7 were recovered with their sensors.
Still, the work “is an important step,” said David W. Winkler, an ornithologist at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, where he said researchers were developing similar techniques. “This represents a whole new level of accuracy,” Dr. Winkler said.

The tracking system relies on instruments called solar geolocators that collect and store data on where the birds are in relation to the sun.

Researchers remove the sensors, download the information and calculate where the birds were, and when they were there."

As this Washington Post article explains, the data is not received real-time:

"The devices could not transmit data in real time, but they recorded the exact time of sunrise and sunset, allowing the researchers to download the data later and calculate where each bird was on any given day."

The results have been surprising to say the least:

"Analyzing the sensor data, the researchers found that their birds flew two to six times faster going north than south — up to about 370 miles in a day, which she said was much faster than had been thought. A female martin flew almost 5,000 miles in 13 days, including 4 stopover days."

The first study has resulted in round-trip tracking of seven birds, for the first time anywhere.  More studies are apparently under-way, and should go a lot further in helping understand this fascinating subject.

ON COLORS AND PERFORMANCE

RED WIRE OR BLUE?

The color of one's environment does matter, as this New York Times piece explains:

"Trying to improve your performance at work or write that novel? Maybe it’s time to consider the color of your walls or your computer screen.

If a new study is any guide, the color red can make people’s work more accurate, and blue can make people more creative.

In the study, published Thursday on the Web site of the journal Science, researchers at the University of British Columbia conducted tests with 600 people to determine whether cognitive performance varied when people saw red or blue. Participants performed tasks with words or images displayed against red, blue or neutral backgrounds on computer screens.

Red groups did better on tests of recall and attention to detail, like remembering words or checking spelling and punctuation. Blue groups did better on tests requiring imagination, like inventing creative uses for a brick or creating toys from shapes."

The article goes into additional detail on this and some other studies on the effect of color on our performance and is worth a full read.

ON A TALE OF SUNKEN TREASURE

X MARKS THE SPOT

Here's a story that appeals to the kid in all of us that grew up on stories of sunken treasure ships and long ago naval lore.  The LA Times reports:

"American salvagers say they have discovered the long-sought wreck of HMS Victory, the mightiest and most technologically advanced warship of its time, which sank during a violent storm in the English Channel in 1744.
Armed with as many as 110 massive bronze cannons and carrying a crew of 900 men and 100 supernumeraries, the Victory was lost with all hands and reportedly with a treasure of gold bullion whose value is estimated at $1 billion..."
"This is the naval equivalent of the Titanic, perhaps even more important than the Titanic," said marine archaeologist Sean Kingsley, director of Wreck Watch International, who consulted with Odyssey on the find. "It's the only intact collection of bronze guns from a Royal Navy warship in the world.
The ship, he added in a telephone interview, "was the equivalent in its day of an aircraft carrier armed with nuclear weapons. . . . When it disappeared off the face of the Earth, there was a collective gasp in the establishment and the general public."

The ship has an amazing history, having taken 11 years to build, and been in service for 7 years before she sunk:

"Like the Titanic, the Victory had flaws that rendered it vulnerable to its fate: Its three-deck design was unusually top-heavy, making it susceptible to excessive rolling, and its timbers were not aged properly, leading to premature rot.
Those flaws were corrected when its successor, the sixth and last British warship named Victory, was designed and built three decades later for Admiral Lord Nelson.
By that time as well, the massive bronze cannons had given way to lighter, cheaper cannons made of steel, marking the end of an era."

The whole story is a fascinating read, including the ups and downs of publicly traded treasure hunting company Odyssey Marine Exploration (OMEX).  Especially is interesting is how the company went about finding the HMS Victory,.

"The Victory site was discovered in May during Odyssey's extensive surveying of the English Channel area with ships carrying sensitive magnetometers and other instruments. The location has been kept a closely guarded secret ever since.
Researchers used the company's 8-ton remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Zeus to explore and photograph the site."

Can't wait to see what James Cameron can do with this story if he so chooses.

ON THE DISCOVERER OF ANTIMATTER

PURE GENIUS

This review of a new biography of theoretical physicist Paul Dirac by the Economist caught my attention, primarily by this line:

"He was quite probably the best British theoretical physicist since Isaac Newton."

And it gets better from there*:

"GENIUS is said to have two forms. There are ordinary geniuses, whose achievements one can imagine others might have emulated, so long as they worked extremely hard and had a dollop of luck.

Then there are extraordinary geniuses (Mark Kac, a mathematician, called them “magicians”) whose insights are so astonishing and run so counter to received wisdom that it is hard to imagine anyone else devising them.

Einstein was one such genius. Paul Dirac, whose equations predicted the existence of antimatter and who died in 1984, was another."

Paul Dirac won the Physics Nobel prize in 1933 for discovering antimatter. 

Which of course gave us the warp drive in Star Trek in 1966.  This biography goes on my reading list for February.

* Image source.

ON THE SCIENCE BEHIND LOVE

LOVE IN RESERVE

John Tierney of the New York Times has a terrific essay outlining some on-going research that seems to get at the scientific drivers of what humans call "love".  It seems it's all about Oxytocin and vasopressin. 
Here's the gist:

"In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding..."

The piece goes into,

"...the benefit of Dr. Young’s research with prairie voles at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University.
These mouselike creatures are among the small minority of mammals — less than 5 percent — who share humans’ propensity for monogamy.
When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex).
After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married. In his Nature essay, Dr. Young speculates that human love is set off by a “biochemical chain of events” that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits involving mother-child bonding, which is stimulated in mammals by the release of oxytocin during labor, delivery and nursing."

The whole piece is really worth reading, as is this post on Mr. Tierney blog where he continues the discussion on where all this might lead, including possibly,:

"...a love potion that would promote attachment, like the “commitment pill” envisioned by my colleague Olivia Judson or the “monogamy injection” discussed by my colleague Walter Kirn."

There's a whole lot more science to this love stuff than humans have recognized for centuries.  The question is in the centuries to come, will humans allow a whole lot more love to make up for what the science makes possible to do or not do.

ON SEARCHING FOR XANADU

ABOUT TIME
As a fan of Ted Nelson for decades, I'm glad to see he's self-publishing a book that claims some credit where a lot is due.  The New York Times explains:

"BEFORE the personal computer, and before the Web, there was Theodor Holm Nelson, who almost half a century ago understood how computers would transform the printed page.

Mr. Nelson anticipated and inspired the World Wide Web, and he coined the term “hypertext,” which embodies the idea of linking a web of objects including text, audio and video.

In his self-published new book, “Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way” (available on lulu.com), Mr. Nelson, 71, takes stock of the computing world. The look back by this forward-thinking man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point both forward and backward.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, organized all the world’s content through a one-way mechanism of uniform source locators, or URLs. Lost in the process was Mr. Nelson’s two-way link concept that simultaneously pointed to the content in any two connected documents, protecting, he has argued in vain, the original intellectual lineage of any object."

Like many computer geeks, if I've been excited about online services in the eighties and the emerging world of the commercial internet in the early nineties, it was due to my exposure to Ted's ideas, especially around his Project Xanadu, which built ferociously on the ideas put forward by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s around the Memex.  As this Wikipedia entry explains:

"In Bush's 1945 paper, he describes a memex as an electromechanical device that an individual could use to read a large self-contained research library, and add or follow associative trails of links and notes created by that individual, or recorded by other researchers.

The technology used would have been a combination of electromechanical controls and microfilm cameras and readers, all integrated into a large desk. Most of the microfilm library would have been contained within the desk, but the user could add or remove microfilm reels at will.

The vision of the memex predates, but is credited as the inspiration for the first practical hypertext systems of the 1960s."

Whether Ted Nelson gets sufficient credit for his contributions to what we now know as the internet, it's good to see a contribution to the record from one of the original folks who was there before the beginning.  I look forward to my copy of "Geeks Bearing Gifts".

ON MARS ROVERS DOING THEIR DUTY

ABOVE AND BEYOND

We all know the children's tale of the little engine that could.  Now we have a real-life story of the two rovers that could.  The New York Times reports:

"NASA expected its two Mars rovers to survive only three months in the dusty and freezing Martian conditions. But Saturday was the five-year anniversary of the first robot’s landing.

The Mars rover Spirit landed on Mars on Jan. 3, 2004. The second, named Opportunity, landed 21 days later. During the past five years, the two rovers have traveled only about 13 miles while sending back a quarter of a million images of Mars.

Data from the rovers, including photos of sedimentary rocks, has proved that there was once water on the planet’s surface.

But the rovers have experienced quite a bit of wear and tear. Spirit has a jammed wheel, according to the BBC, and it must drive backwards. And Opportunity has a broken electrical wire, limiting movement on its robotic arm."

They do evoke the  image of the indomitable Wall-E, last year's Pixar movie.  Only these two don't fall in  love, but they give us enough reason for us to get really curious about Mars again.

As Time magazine put it:

"So far, Spirit and Opportunity have beamed home a quarter of a million images and 36 gigabytes of data and revealed more about Martian history than any other spacecraft in a half-century of space travel. And by all indications, they could be keeping it up for a long time to come."

Here's hoping these two keep phoning home for a little while longer.