Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: Carlson Curves Updated, Troubled Metro WiFi, Tasty Media Bits

The Pace of Genomics Learning. Rob Carlson revisits and updates his charts on gene sequencing learning curves. Carlson is commendably modest about this effort: "I have cautioned both the private sector and governments from attempting to use this data to forecast trends." However, that's overlooking a collateral benefit of well-defined learning curves such as Moore's Law: They serve as a synchronizing vision among current and potential creators and users of a technology. Users start working on applications in advance of economic feasibility, with a fair amount of comfort that time will fix that problem. Innovators and infrastructure creators on the sell side proceed with greater confidence that new demand will appear to reward their efforts in reducing costs. Carlson uses a 'Thousand Dollar Genome' as a way to think about the possible consequences and limits of demand. While that's undoubtedly useful, it has some risk of falling into the 'Who needs an IBM machine in their home?' trap from the computing world. Make the technology cheap enough, and all sorts of uses pop up that defy the original idea of how it should be packaged. (Note Carlson also has some interesting but less well established curves for gene synthesis. Well worth watching for futurists and would-be biotech investors.

WiFi not so fine. A lot of the Bay Area's attempts to turn 802.11 into a metro access solution are shutting down. WiFi's ubiquity and consequent low costs got a lot of people, from engineers to investors to city councils, excited about the possibility of bending it to a use for which it was never designed. While I've seen some ingenuous attempts at things like meshing and remote management, the crux of the matter seems to be operations, which is often overlooked by those who've never run a network. Earthlink, at any rate, has been finding out the hard way that running an outdoor WiFi access network is a bit tougher than remotely managing racks of modems in Telco central offices. (Via Jeff Nolan.)

California ablaze. It's a tragedy for those caught up in the wildfires, but it can also make for some stunning photography.

You say you'd prefer a somewhat damper location? In the Navy.... Those waves are breaking over the equivalent of a six story building.

The Science of Scotch. The New York Academy of Sciences hosts a podcast with the brew master of Laphroig, one of my favorite tipples. Turns out the flavor is due in part to ancient seaweed. Here's some music to go with your wee drop.

The Roving Eye: Energy, Blackmail and Memorial Day

Freeman Dyson gives a take on global warming and energy policy, in the form of a book review of William Nordhaus' "A Question of Balance". Written in Dyson's usual clear and concise style, it spells out conclusions for the layman and policy maker. Being an old modeling wonk, I'd like to know more about Nordhaus' DICE simulation that underlies the comparisons, but the lessons are pretty clear: The only clear policy winner out there, other than getting lucky with technology fixes for cheap energy, is a carbon tax. Direct government regulation is an economic catastrophe, and the more arbitrary and heavy-handed the worse. Al Gore's prescription comes out as a tens of trillions disaster, no surprise from someone who doesn't seem to have grip on either economics or engineering. If we're to get lucky with technology fixes, the best way to improve our chances is a carbon tax that creates a reliable incentive for inventors and investors. The current ethanol subsidy/tariff fiasco stands as an example of the outcome when winners are picked by political fiat.

Meanwhile, what's happening with the price we currently paying for energy? We're handing a cool trillion dollars a year to OPEC, according to an article by Bob Zubrin, whose work I've reviewed here. Not only is that crippling to our economy, but a good fraction of the money goes to prop up regimes pursuing policies inimical to our welfare, such as promoting socialism and Islamism. So while we're talking about a carbon tax, we should be discussing an additional levy on imported petroleum and gas. Meanwhile, go full bore after tar sands, oil shale, and - yes - drill offshore and in ANWR. If the right can get around the need for carbon taxes, it's time for the left to quit whinging about doing what we need to survive a transitional period. Reduce impact, but drill and dig. Those who oppose are effectively voting for more tombstones in our military cemeteries. There's only so long that the citizenry are going to put up with blackmail by those who happen to live on top a pool of oil, but add little value and often seek our harm, a fact likely obscured by the political battles of the moment. We can fix the problem by sweat and innovation, starting now, or by force later.

As we start the summer holiday season, and remember those who sacrificed for our freedom, it's also good to recall how good Americans have it. We live in a style beyond the dreams of our ancestors, and are not - yet - in a mortal struggle for survival. We're in a season when politicians of every stripe are incented to convince us we have bad problems that only they can solve. That's a siren song well worth ignoring. When political interests give us an ethanol fiasco, or prove unable to face simple actuarial realities, it's fair to ask what confidence we should have that government can fix the energy (or any other) mess with regulation and prescription. The best Memorial Day gift the government and politicians could give the American people is to get out of the way.

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'.

Electric Skyline

So I was driving back from a hike up along Skyline above Portola Valley, and stopped off at the parking lot across from Alice's in Sky Londa to change from boots to something more comfortable. And there was the glittering object of both techie and green lust, one of the prototype Tesla electric roadsters, apparently about to go for a test drive along the twisty roads west of Skyline.
It wasn't clear if it was a real test or a reviewer's excursion, but I wasn't the only one pulling out a camera.

The trailer in back of the car carried the Tesla Motors logo - not clear if it had brought the roadster up the hill, was a mobile shop 'just in case', or carried a big ass battery charger 'just in case'. Let's hope a few more years on the battery learning curve makes this experience a more common one.

More on Japan Demographics

Further to my previous post mentioned the demographic imperative for development of robotics in Japan, here's a survey article from the Economist on the general topic of Japanese demographics. The population pyramid charts are quite remarkable, bearing in mind that while continuation of the current birth rate trends aren't guaranteed, that's the best bet. Even the 40+ year-out chart is better than half a done deal already.

The article digs beyond the obvious eldercare and pensions implications to issues such as how to downsize cities and towns, and the political impact of pensions becoming the #1 issue. That last point at least sounds familiar. And while I don't know enough about Japanese politics to know whether pensions were a driving issue, the ruling LDP did take a hammering in Upper House elections this past week.

Could Your Next Temp Be A Bot?

If you're in Japan, maybe. From the curiously named Pink Tentacle blog comes a report of a temporary labor agency buying a small batch of Mitsubishi's Wakamaru semi-humanoid robots. They will apparently be tasked to escort visitors to offices to their destinations, and can play music and carry on some sort of conversation using a 10,000 word vocabulary while wheeling along beside the guest. R. Daneel it's not, but it may chip a few tasks off the usual Office Lady functions in a Japanese office.

The chances of these fine yellow fellows turning up in the U.S. at this point are minimal. Japan is dealing with an increasing labor shortage issue due to a less than replacement birth rate. Here, the native reproduction rate is near equilibrium and the population is still growing due to immigration, legal and illegal. We also seem to be more willing to change business social conventions over time. Being escorted by an OL is still de riguer in Japan. In the Valley an admin only comes down to greet you if you are visited someone rather senior; juniors can fetch their guests themselves.

The packaging might have trouble here as well. Kawaii plays well in Japan, and crosses cultures with anime and other entertainment products, but I'd hazard the style would not be well received in American business. However, both cuteness and anthropomorphism are continuing themes in Japanese robotics, from the original Aibo to Asimo to other bots for routine office tasks. Consciously or not, the Japanese are spending a lot of effort at making bots 'socially acceptable' in every day life. This is a demographic necessity. Unable to cover the need with immigrants, Japan will face a huge eldercare problem in a very few years. If it's to avoid cannibalizing the dwindling pool of workers to care for the elderly, then it must make delivery of a portion of care by bots acceptable to those who had no exposure to them in their previous life.

Japan faces an irreversible forcing function that requires progress in bots that can interact and dwelll alongside humans. The particular packaging that results may or may not work well elsewhere in the world, but the functionality that is developed will certainly be exportable.

Via Global Voices

The Dinochrome Platoon

Via the Blogfather, a well-written piece in the WaPo tells the story of our battlebots and the troops who work with them. It sounds rather familiar to anyone who grew up on Keith Laumer's SF stories of the Bolos, gigantic autonomous battle tanks of the future. Laumer wrote in the 60s, when the images of WWII armor battles still lingered, when counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare were still minor military specialties, and before the miniaturizing effects of Moore's Law had really kicked in. A real 21st century PackBot would be dust under the ten foot wide treads of a Bolo Mark XXVIII.

What's in common between fiction and fact is the tendency of the warriors to give names, ranks and even decorations to the bots, and go well beyond the call of duty in attempting to preserve and repair them. Perhaps unsurprising given the tendency of teamwork under stress to create strong relationships- and a phenomenon fairly well know in the literature. Back in the day... (flashback dissolve) I and a team of folks at Apple showed that you could get people to attribute human emotions to a 32x32 pixel black and white icon fronting for a simple database algorithm (skip to 'Guides' heading here). Then a couple of Stanford profs systematically showed just how simple it is to get someone to project human motivations and social roles onto computing or communications devices, with very modest amounts of cueing. This is so easy that it's likely an evolved pattern - when something shows even a small amount of the behaviors that we associate with humanity, it gets attributed with the whole boatload, because that's been the safe bet over time.

Book Review: Glenn Reynolds' An Army of Davids

(Hey, everyone else seems to have written one; why buck the trend?)

I'm not the first to observe that there are really two books inside the covers of Army of Davids, each occupying about half the page count. In the first, Reynolds speaks of what he knows first hand: citizens' media, the forces that have created them, and much of the social impact. As living proof that you don't have to build a portal to wield influence in the Web, Reynolds brings the credibility that he can surf that particular set of waves. In the second half of the book, he opines on matters such as space, nanotechnology, and biotech, where he has no direct experience. Reynolds is not a technologist or businessman, and it shows.

Humans in the Loop

Just in case Tim O'Reilly is running short on buzz phrases, I'm going to contribute another one suggested by the mix at eTech. In the early days of cybernetics, many applications were in the control of aerospace systems. Many of those control loops unavoidably involved the presence of homo sapiens in the cockpit, leading to the phrase Human in the Loop (HITL). As the linked article dryly observes "The adaptability of human operators made the basic approach of extracting equivalent transfer functions enormously challenging." (Translation: Under carefully controlled conditions, the experimental subject will do what he damn well pleases.)

That particular acronym died along the way, but the concept lived on. It's a portion of the intellectual underpinnings of Col. John Boyd's OODA loop. It moved with practitioners into the growing computer-human interface field. (E.g., old acquaintance Joy Mountford worked on helicopter control systems before running HI for Apple, if memory of old conversations serves me right.)

I think it's time to bring back the notion, with an important modification: Add an 's' to the first word. If it wasn't enough fun to have to model the sensory apparatus and variously trained responses of a single human, now we're awakening to cybernetic systems that incorporate the activities of whole packs of these annoying critters. Cases in point:

Start with Icosystems' Hunch Engine. As far as I can tell, the core of this is a genetic algorithm (GA) using humans as the 'goodness' function evaluator. An elegant hack-around on the famous knowledge acquisition bottleneck: Don't worry about what people say about how they think, just watch what they do. This may allow an attack on domains where evaluation is inherently subjective (design) or on those where experts make judgments based on long experience, with criteria they are unable (or unwilling) to articulate. Icosystems' Bonabeau termed these latter 'heuristocrats' (Bruce Sterling loved it) and one would presume he sells on that feature. Let's just hope it doesn't get along to the subjects of the experiments, or he will likely once again find "extracting equivalent transfer functions challenging."

Or we can look at the Mechanical Turk, where humans can literally be put into a program loop. And not just a single human, a whole marketplace is the big vision. Which are known to get complex. I grew up writing EXTERNAL statements; will the next generation need to write 'EXTERNALITY' declarations on their jobs?

Note in passing that Larry and Sergey literally coded all of us into their system when they created PageRank to follow our gestures in information space. And if you haven't noticed the feedback loop that one generated, you haven't been paying attention at all.

danah boyd observes - along with much else, that a culture of teenagers can make a perfect hash of your computational linguistics system if they decide that lexical tricks are their boundary markers. And scale and diversity, right. Back on the Well and BBS' we had our little flame wars. These days, if you're running a social platform of any scale, those 'clusters' could represent the real thing - your customers may be shooting at each other when they aren't typing - often over those same words and images. And if you don't think there's a feedback loop there, you're also not paying attention.

So other than late night musings, and another buzz phrase, is there a point? Maybe this: Through folks like George Dyson, Michael Goldhaber and Linda Stone, O'Reilly has been encouraging us to remember our intellectual heritage. Maybe we should be including some of the early systems thinkers in that remembrance as well. A lot of their big dreams didn't work out, and a few ended tragically. But we now have something they never had: experimental social cybernetics, at the scale of the whole net. And we can all play, at the price of a web crawl, some analytics, or a bit of a mashup here and there.

The Greatest Futurist

Patrick Belton reminds us of the amazing vision of de Tocqueville. Any time you think technology/immigration/whatever is changing the essence of the US and Americans, pick up a copy of Democracy in America and be humbled. How one French guy wandering through pre-Industrial America for a few weeks could so capture the essence is beyond me. We've now got genetics from all over the world, but the culture is breeding true. Which does give some weight to tracing threads of current American policy all the way back to Jefferson, Jackson and Hamilton.