Tim Oren's Due Diligence

DARPA Urban Challenge Vids

Some of the teams are posting up their video footage of the qualifying runs at YouTube. Start with this one from the CajunBot team and follow the sidebar links to others. Cool to see some of the stuff working, as opposed to the wreck clips from my last post. The 'ghost town' ambiance of the location adds a little something, too.

I note the judges at the test / obstacle points are well-protected by concrete Y rails / Jersey barriers. I still wouldn't want to be one of the pro drivers taking their cars right in front of the bots - that's beta testing with a vengeance! How many people can say they've been T-boned by a bot? (Might have been worse, could have been this monster.)

Update: Here's another nice one, from Virginia Tech.

DARPA's Urban Challenge Underway

DARPA's race for wheeled bots in a city environment is underway at an old air base near Victorville. I'll be driving down for the finals on Saturday, but there's already been plenty of action in the prelims. Of the initial 35 teams that qualified for the Challenge, six have been knocked out (PDF), and two of the favorites, CMU's Team Tartan and Silicon Valley favorites Stanford Racing are through to the finals. The latter team has some nice team photo coverage and bloggage from an industry team member.

The test activities so far have included parking, merging into traffic, handling yields at stop signs and dealing with road blockages and detours. In fact, the rules for the contest include the entire California DMV driver's handbook. There has been some amount of bent metal along the way. (I'm not sure I'd want to be one of the professional drivers at the steering wheels of the 'city traffic' that's pacing the 'bots.)

Friday is practice day for those teams that make it through to the finals, and I'll be doing pit coverage at this blog and at Winds of Change. The finals will feature a live webcast (URL not yet available, check the main DARPA site) including helicopter views of the action, which could be a little hairy - check out the potential final tasks in Section 4 here (PDF). If you want to make the drive to Victorville, there will be a set of bleachers for the public with a Jumbotron display of the webcast.

The DARPA Challenges have turned into a major sponsorship and media event since their quiet beginnings. The Victorville area is overwhelmed - my hotel room is all the way out in exciting Barstow. Since there will be plenty of 'who won' type coverage from the MSM, I'll do my best at digging out some of the technology and potential investing background of the event.

Update: The cut list is now up to a dozen teams, including the one that had the little problem with the Prius. Six teams are through to the finals, adding Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Braunschweig (Germany) and Virginia tech to the mix. There are up to 20 slots in the finals, and 23 teams remaining in competition.

Automating The Attic

Cory Doctorow recently posted a nice piece on the 'Future of Ignoring Things', describing the common experience of being overwhelmed by messages, events, and content that might have some relevance, but just not right now. Bringing them into focus is processed as an interruption, letting them go by creates anxiety. A little bit of unavoidable mental transaction cost, chipping away at our time and focus. It's the lingering taste of bacn, and it keeps getting worse as search, advertising, social networks and other relevance matchers get better at putting possibly tasty bits in front of us.

I spent a few hours in the last couple of days cleaning out the attic at home, cutting loose old books, reports, zines and notes that had fallen from the 'maybe useful some day' category, without gaining salvation through a 'memorabilia' tag. (All in aid of cramming some newer stuff in there, of course.) Each load into the recycling bins went with a little twinge of parting with the past, but also the relief of cutting loose something I'd never have to worry about again - a tiny piece of mental garbage being collected.

In the virtual world, there's no physical need to part with the old stuff, and storage is always expanding ahead of our ability to manage its content. We even stash away the maybe-kinda-someday interesting flyers that end up in the recycle in the real world - or delegate a script to do so. We've become opportunistic feeders in a sea of information, following our noses to what we hope will be the good stuff, but always with that bit of worry about what we're just missing at the edge of peripheral vision, or are about to forget. Those little bits of mental garbage keep accumulating.

Cory says "The only answer is better ways and new technology to ignore stuff." I'll have one of those, please, and maybe we can do something about the attic at the same time.

Group Therapy for ex-Economist Subscribers

After a run of many years, I dropped my subscription to The Economist about three years ago. It had gradually descended from a classical liberal viewpoint on global affairs, with occasional outsider's insights on the American scene, to yet another soft left, US-centric news rag. When the sneers started out-numbering the insights, I gave up. I remember thinking I should blog about it, but no such post exists, so something else must have seemed more important. The Economist just disappears as an occasional source of material, sometime in late 2004.

It seems I'm not alone. Yesterday, the Blogfather linked a post at Samizdata, where one of the denizens lamented the fall of the former icon. Thereupon the comments section turned into a litany of ex- and soon-to-be-ex Economist subscribers, each with their own tale of the decline. As a couple of writers put it, a spontaneous group therapy session, with input from some who seemed to know a bit of the internal history.

About the kindest thing said was "... more substantial than Time or Newsweek." Ouch, that's gotta leave a mark! Alas for the legacy of Bagehot!

(One thing I valued about The Economist was its semi-random selection of stories from points around the world, unmatched it other media outlets. I've found that Global Voices is a good substitute, providing pointers to bloggers and issues worldwide.)

Dubious Distinction: Comcast

Let the record show that I am not a fan of most so-called 'network neutrality' legislation. Tiers of service date back to the oldest profession, and the government shouldn't generally be screwing around with private contract. But while that oldest profession is inherently WYSIWYG, most people have to take the delivery of network services on faith. Few users have the sophistication to analyze IP traffic and find out if they really are getting best efforts service - they need some trust in the good intent of the provider.

Comcast has apparently been caught red-handed, violating that assumption of trust, by disabling network sessions that can be identified as coming from the BitTorrent peer-to-peer application. This apparently also affects Gnutella, another P2P app, as well as IBM's Lotus Notes business collaboration suite. (One presumes the latter is through incompetence.) After a certain amount of shucking and jiving, Comcast seems to have admitted "Yeah, we kinda sorta do that".

I do have some sympathy for Comcast's plight, having managed an ISP back in the mid-90s. Peer to peer and other high duty cycle applications can mess up your assumptions for provisioning both neighborhood and head-end bandwidth and routing resources. With that occurring at the same time as networked video is gaining wide adoption, I'm sure the life of an MSO or LEC IP network planner is an interesting one these days. 'Traffic shaping and grooming' is part of the toolkit to make sure that the higher duty cycle and bandwidth users don't squeeze out the less demanding user who just wants a web page to load, or to run a Skype session. (Disclosure: We have an investment in a company, Bay Microsystems, whose products can be used to construct packet filtering and traffic shaping systems.)

However, Comcast has crossed the line in two ways. First by selectively impeding certain types of traffic, without disclosing the fact to the customers. Whatever boneheaded logic led to this, any perceived PR benefits from concealment have now blown up in its face. Customers with no interest in hosting a Torrent are going to read the stories and wonder if their applications are being treated fairly or not. Slowdowns natural to a shared neighborhood network will lead to new suspicions. Network neutrality regulation and legislation that have been languishing may get new momentum.

Secondly, if the traffic analysis is correct, Comcast has stepped over a technical line in a way that may have legal ramifications: All IP networks dump data packets when they become congested. That's how the Internet works, and any application level protocol running on it is set up to deal with packet loss. But Comcast has been going further, acting as a 'man in the middle' and forging packets that tell both ends of a connection to drop the session. That's deliberate sabotage of the user's system and intent.

The two faults add up to a PR bloody nose, and could skate close to the edge of false advertising and outright fraud. Ironically, session trashing might also invoke a DMCA violation. IANAL, but I expect some of those who are will be looking at the implications, including class action. This could all have been avoided by a full disclosure.

For boneheadedness beyond the call of duty, I hereby bestow on Comcast this blog's Dubious Distinction award for business idiocy. Hey, it's Comcastic!

(Update: Since I already gave this coveted award to Comcast once before, perhaps this time just gives them a poison oak leaf cluster to add to their decorations. The older post makes interesting reading - their corporate culture seems to be intact, let's say.)

(Update 2: Yup, here come the lawyers, right on cue - the post also contains a more detailed analysis of the packet forging technique.)

(Update 3: And the congresscritters are close behind them.)

Making Money on the MSM: Kaus May Have It Figured

Going long on mainstream media stocks can be hazardous to your financial health, as investors in NYT stock have learned. Between retrograde attitudes about the power of networks and erosion of trusted brands by biased attitudes and 'reporting', it's not been a good hold. With everybody from craigslist to blogs picking over the bones, a long term down bet on the MSM is likely good, but many wisely don't like going short, given the myriad factors that can drive stocks in the short run.

So how to play it? Of all folks, Mickey Kaus - largely a political commenter - has a wrinkle. If you take the perennial tendency of media to overstate short term, attention getting events at the expense of long term trends, and combine that with a current politically motivated 'catastrophist bias' (his phrase), you get a recipe for occasional market selloffs driven by bogus memes passed to non-professional investors by the MSM.

Case in point: The thousand point or so selloff of the Dow when the sub-prime mortgage carnage hit the front pages and evening news. None of this was any surprise to those who had followed interest rates and thought through the consequences. But you had the MSM running all the way to England for footage of a bank run, and analysts invoking liquidity crises in the wider credit markets that were rather unlikely, largely to make the story more 'interesting'. Those who bought that dip profited, even given yet another 'recession fears' hiccup last week. (Disclosure: I did not specifically buy the dip. I'm an asset allocator, not a timer.)

So Mickey's plan is:

1) search the papers for bogus liberal memes (like the subprime-dooms-the-economy story line, or the perennial UAW-to-organize-Nissan's-Smyrna-factory line); 2) figure out which stocks are underpriced because people actually believe this bogus meme; and 3) invest in those stocks.... This would be a strategy that could work for a long time, since the basic ideological structure of the MSM doesn't show signs of rapid change (only of slowly diminishing in importance).

That's crazy and cynical enough that it might actually work, for a while at least. Like all plays on inefficiencies, too much use would wear it out.

Bleg: Questions for DARPA Urban Challenge Teams?

I have a long standing interest in semi-autonomous systems ('robots' if you would, but I draw the boundary more widely), from both the technical and investment points of view. As a result, I'll be attending the finals of the DARPA Urban Challenge in southern California at the end of the month. This is the successor to the Grand Challenge of 2005, which saw five autonomous vehicles complete a 132 mile course through desert and mountains, and was one of DARPA's most effective programs ever. This time, the course includes city streets and other vehicles, and requires obeying safety and traffic rules. The ultimate goal is to produce robotic logistics vehicles that can reduce the number of personnel required to handle supplies and support, and to be exposed to IEDs and other hazards.

Thanks to the generosity of Joe Katzman, I'll be attending the event credentialed as a stringer for Defense Industry Daily. I may be posting stories there, at Winds of Change, and here.

So here's the bleg: I've got my own ideas for interesting story angles, points of information and questions to ask the participants. I've also got a very eclectic readership here, with some very deep technologists and investors. What would you like to know? What would you ask? I can't guarantee to follow up on every idea, but anything that strikes a chord or is part of a cluster of interests will be used. Comments are open, and my e-mail is in the 'about'.

What LTG Sanchez Said About The MSM

Over the weekend the NYT and other MSM outlets were all aflutter about some negative comments by retired Lt. Gen. Sanchez, former commander in Iraq, had to say about the administration's policies there. For some strange reason, however, they neglected to pass along the first portion of his speech, which described the part of the MSM themselves in his 'nightmare'. As a public service, the lead paragraphs are below, and the rest follows the break.

It's rubbish like this that makes me cheer every time the legacy media take another hit. I'd rather trust a guy like this, who's there in uniform, or an independent writer who calls it as he sees it, than the whole mob of Howard Kurtz' twittering, spinning colleagues. The sooner the MSM and the associated 'profession' get taken down several more large notches, the better for both our culture and our country.

OK, here's the general, speaking last Friday at the Military Reporters and Editors luncheon in DC (aka "The Lion's Den"):

Today, I will attempt to do two things - first I will give you my assessment of the military and press relationship and then I will provide you some thoughts on the current state of our war effort. As all of you know I have a wide range of relationships and experiences with our nation’s military writers and editors. There are some in your ranks who I consider to be the epitome of journalistic professionalism - Joe Galloway, Thom Shaker, Sig Christensen, and John Burns immediately come to mind. They exemplify what America should demand of our journalists - tough reporting that relies upon integrity, objectivity and fairness to give accurate and thorough accounts that strengthen our freedom of the press and in turn our democracy.

On the other hand, unfortunately, I have issued ultimatums to some of you for unscrupulous reporting that was solely focused on supporting your agenda and preconceived notions of what our military had done. I also refused to talk to the European “Stars and Stripes” for the last two years of my command in Germany for their extreme bias and single minded focus on Abu Gharaib. Let me review some of the descriptive phrases that have been used by some of you that have made my personal interfaces with the press corps difficult:

“Dictatorial and somewhat dense”,
“Not a strategic thought”,
“Liar,”
“Does not get it” and
“The most inexperienced LTG.”

In some cases I have never even met you, yet you feel qualified to make character judgments that are communicated to the world. My experience is not unique and we can find other examples, such as the treatment of Secretary Brown during Katrina. This is the worst display of journalism imaginable by those of us that are bound by a strict value system of selfless service, honor and integrity. Almost invariably, my perception is that the sensationalistic value of these assessments is what provided the edge that you seek for self aggrandizement or to advance your individual quest for getting on the front page with your stories!

Sneak Peek: World's First WVGA Mobile OLED Screen

Earlier this week, Samsung Display announced production of first 480x800 OLED panel in a 3 inch size suitable for mobiles. On one hand, this is very cool, in part because they used Pentile technology from our portfolio company Clairvoyante to make this pixel density possible without burnout. (For those not into this field, OLEDs can burn out over time if too much current is run through them. This is because OLEDs actually emit the light (LE = light emitting), unlike LCDs, which are just light valves. Using Pentile subpixel layouts, the necessary current density levels to achieve acceptable resolution, brightness and gamut are reduced.)

The only thing that was not so cool is that even though - being a board member - I saw this toy in advance, I was also subject to the press embargo. So I got scooped on my own company by the big gadget blogs. Feh.

However, I've got something that they didn't, which is pictures. (Click to see them full size in a separate window.)

You can see the actual module at the FDPI show in Yokohama in a couple of weeks, should you happen to be in the neighborhood. If not, here are a couple of shots straight from the lab, which I'm told are kosher to publish.

The first appears slanted because it's mounted in a black bezel. Don't take the apparent resolution or gamut too seriously - remember the image has been resampled once through the Pentax digicam that took the picture, and again through whatever display and rendering software you are using. You can notice that the blacks are dark enough to fade right into the bezel - a result of OLED's high contrast ratio (1000:1).

Here's another shot to help convince the engineering types out there that it's real and not a Photoshop paste-in. Note the ribbon cable on the left for the display drive and the cheesy power supply and PC connector on the top. (I assure you that SDI will package this up more nicely for the actual show or production!)

OK, how about that, Engadget and Gizmodo!

It's Been A Dry Year

I'm talking weather here, not investing. Last night the Bay Area got a significant rainfall, which feels like the first of the real winter pattern. As the morning talking heads say "The storm door's open". It hasn't come a bit too soon. Last weekend we were driving down by Morgan Hill and stopped to visit a rare sight: The 70 year old Llagas Creek bridge has emerged from the drying Chesbro reservoir - which is now at 9.1% percent of its capacity.