Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: Arrrrr Is For Robot, Following the Genomics Learning Curve, More Public Finance Follies

Talk like a pirate day for bots? Just as plenty of alternative uses have been found for formerly mil-only spy sats, so the applications for robots keep expanding. Here a report that a US Navy underwater droid trial resulted in finding new artifacts near a Revolutionary era ship wreck. Development budget hurting? Try turning your AUV loose in certain Caribbean and Florida waters, maybe.

Tick. Reports of an inaugural meeting of would-be hobbyist biological engineers. Today Cambridge, MA - tomorrow, ?

Tick. Biologist Richard Lenski at my alma mater, Michigan State has a long-running experiment to follow evolutionary trends in thousands of generations of fast-reproducing E. coli. Seems he's now made the first observation of a two-step mutational change that gave his bacteria the ability to utilize a different nutrient. If you don't know enough to engineer what you want, get nature to do it for you.

GOOG + Open Office = LUV? Should Google embrace Open Office? It's hard to see what they'd have to lose by doing so. My own experiments with Google Docs showed it can hit scaling limits due to bandwidth and/or server scheduling pretty quickly. Sometimes you just need a locally-hosted interface or computational engine. Microsoft has long been engaged in gilding the --- something nastier than a lily --- on Office. Each generation has a little more feature creep, cuts off more backward compatibility, and fails to address long-standing usability problems. Apple's shown there's a need for a light and usable alternative. Google could simply exploit this opportunity in a more mainstream fashion than Jobs & Co. ever will, and could create a smooth transition from/back to their SaaS offering. I'd say go for it!

The land of negative ROI. In what world does every dollar sunk into capex guarantee you will lose more operationally? That would be government-run mass transit in the US. Long viewed as a combination of make-work spoils program and welfare for the riders, every buck 'invested' means a larger system that can't cover its opex, let along depreciation and additional capex. Out here in the Bay Area, we have a heavy rail system running at near capacity due to the gas price rise, and it still can't cover its costs. Something smells rotten.

Fleecing NYC of a half billion bucks. That's apparently the amount of unfunded public pension liability covered up by an actuary who just happened to be an employee of the city, and therefore a beneficiary of the programs he was supposed to be vetting. Someone who did this in private industry would be in jail for fraud. Why isn't he? And people are running for office based on the idea of government controlling more of the economy.

The Roving Eye: Someone Poke Fake Steve, Spybots Invade England!, Genetic Nannyism

Reality sets in at Facebook: Low entry barrier, low CPM. Even Fake Steve has noticed that most Facebook apps are fluff. More pointedly, developers are seeing very low effective CPM rates. CPM being a rather obsolete concept, I'd prefer to see data presented in revenue-per-user terms, as here. But it's clear that the open, easy, widely adopted Facebook is struggling to monetize, while the smaller, focused, and closed LinkedIn is claiming much higher effective rates (see interesting discussion here.) I'm still picking Facebook to be the Pointcast story of this decade.

Winning the War with Rhino Snot. Letting the troops (as versus the Pentagon) name your products can have interesting results. This company looks like it's self-supporting, but it would be fun to see its CEO try to get through a VC pitch without cracking a grin. It would definitely earn a place on the 'best name' honor roll.

Better see what's hiding in the closet. Following the precedent of DARPA's robotic Grand Challenge, Great Britain's Ministry of Defense (MoD) is mounting its own competition for automatons, with a twist. This time the robots are for surveillance purposes, meant to spy out snipers, IEDs and armed vehicles and soldiers in a village sized trial area. The task specific element of the challenge ups the ante from DARPA's trials, which were mostly about success in navigation. The MoD's competition also allows cooperating teams of bots, which could be of different types. One team anticipates coordinating a team of flying and earthborne bots. The MoD trial will take place in August.

The best things IBM ever made... were those clicky, battleship-weight PC keyboards. Dan's Data sings the praises of the 'buckling spring' design. (Via Derek Miller). Having spent many hours banging on an awesome converted Selectric used as the console on a IBM 1800 way back when, the PC keyboard was a welcome relief from the mushy action of the VT series and other 'glass TTYs' of the time. Almost worth having to put up with segment registers. The economics of the PC industry and weight requirements for portability put these things into the museum, but I still miss 'em.

What happened to 'Know Thyself'? Our self-appointed guardians in New York and California are on watch, making sure you can't get your genome analyzed at your own expense. Because it raises big concerns: 'What will patients do with this information? " Gee, would you suppose that might be their own business? if you wanted to freeze private investment into this area, you couldn't have picked a better way than this kind of statist fear-mongering. And maybe that's the point.

The Roving Eye: Eqyptian Unrest News Source, Howl's Moving Moonbase, Yahoo's Ad Platform

Unofficial Eqyptian Media. The Egyptian Sand Monkey is blogging up a storm about the revolt and riots there. There don't seem to be any Western journalists on the scene, and the police are trying to shut down the city and strikers, so Internet reports funneled out through blogs are the best information source.

Miyazaki On The Moon? Fans of a certain Japanese animated film might get a bit of déja vu from this NASA proposal for a mobile moon base for astronauts. Miyazaki always loved airships, but this is above and beyond.

Ad Vapor From Yahoo. Yahoo preannounces an ad management platform, that might help to enable the kind of site ad network that I blogged about before. The catch is that the rollout won't start until Q3, which won't have any impact on the current Microsoft takeover attempt. On the other hand, this could enable the type of destination site grand alliance that I mentioned in that post, combining the Microsoft and Yahoo properties and other big exposure ad venues, where the Google approach to ads hasn't worked so well.

Mistitled Robot Article. New Scientist has an interesting article titled "The Rise of Emotional Robots". The title, however, is pretty much backwards, as the content largely describes humans that get emotional about their bots, including milbots that get blown up in Iraq. For those who've followed the area of human computer interaction, finding humans projecting emotions - often unconsciously - onto machine displaying complex behaviors is not a surprise at all. More interesting is one cited study showing people when questioned about robot interactions don't believe the bots are 'thinking', perhaps due to their skepticism about current technical capabilities. Matching the likely human reaction to the task being accomplished by the robot is a very complex problem.

The Roving Eye: Tiny UAVs, So Long Brett, The Pachinko Effect

Itty-Bitty UAVs. Check out these pix from a recent unmanned vehicle conference in DC. The first one looks like one of those scale models you see displayed as a trophy in an aerospace exec or pilot's office. But no, it's a fully functioning drone - get it airborne with a bungee cord or using a grenade launcher attachment for a rifle. Have a fat wallet and an urge to build your own, or start a UAV venture for that matter? Check the next image for an assortment of controller components from tiny to chunky. If you're into things robotic, check out the main DIYDrones home page and feeds for everything from hobbyist to milbot news. Organized by Chris Anderson (yes, that one) - which is a good recommend given his record as a trend spotter.

The Roving Eye: Special Cluelessness Edition

Maybe it's Leap Year madness, maybe it's terminal election ennui, maybe it's the mind chilling effects of global warmening, but it sure seems like there's a spate of "what were they thinking" caliber cluelessness out there in the last week or so. Let me count the culprits:

The Associated Press sends its attorneys after a website that has highlighted their sad history of carrying 'fauxtography' - doctored images that amount to uncritical propaganda - often for terrorists. Yup, that'll make sure no one pays attention to the AP's issues.

The US Air Force tries to make sure our airmen can't see blogspot, or maybe even the blogosphere itself, 'cause something might happen. Never mind the blogosphere is a source of open source intelligence and a major IO theatre itself. La-la-la-la-la, I can't hear you! And these guys are supposed to be in charge of mounting the military's cyberdefense? I feel safer already.

Comcast, starring on this page for the nth time, can't just promise transparency on its broadband traffic policies, which seems to be all the FCC chairman really wants. No, they have to try to pack a public hearing at Harvard. Yeah, these guys look just like who I'd expect to see at a Cambridge Internet gathering. Heh. As far as I can tell, Comcast is where flaks and public affairs wonks end up when the USAF or AP finally fire them.

Publicity chasing AI professor Noel Sharkey says we're all in danger from kill-happy milbots with their virtual fingers on the trigger. (I don't usually link the Register, since much of their 'analysis' is unresearched snark, but ridicule is quite appropriate here.) While I've been following the military development thread in robotics for some time, it takes minimal research to find out that logistics and scouting are the designed uses and no-one's even close to having 'bots adjudicate rules of engagement. The history of academics forecasting commercial developments is a sad one, and it gets even worse when looking at military futures where their biases are engaged. Anyone else old enough to remember how we were told SDI was impossible by a bunch of CS profs? How'd that forecast work out?.

The Roving Eye: 2/21/08

Robot buoys to monitor the spread of oil spills. We could have used some of those in the Bay Area a few months back. Hopefully the Coast Guard will take notice.

What's "Volkswagen" in Hindi? For those who think we can solve the carbon emissions problem in the developed world alone, read 'em and weep. Like Detroit and Toyota before it, Tata knows that increasing prosperity of families and societies will cause demand for more elaborate vehicles to grow, and they are getting in on the ground floor.

Do your hiccups taste fishy? There's a reason for that. Another interesting result from reverse engineering of evolution. Hat tip to Ole Eichhorn.

There are some silly valuations out there right now ($550m for Slide? Gimme a break!), but here's the silliest funded venture I've seen in a while. Take a problem that's wicked for people with decades of experience, where your useful feedback happens in 2-10 years intervals, where many of the deal killer issues are inherently unknowable without executing the plan, and solve it all with AI! Which has been such a great success! (This reminds me of a post I've been meaning to write for a while now...)

The Roving Eye: 2/19/08

Watch out for sneaky fish. They could be spy bots, working for the Navy.

From Rob Carlson, a deeper explanation of Craig Venter & team's synthesis of a complete bacterial genome, and the limits and implications of that achievement.

Don't Be Evil, and don't carry stories about UN corruption.

Politically Incorrect T.J. Rodgers' politically correct solar venture. The publicists for Rodgers and SunPower have been racking up the placements of late. I think the crowing about a "Moore's Law" for solar is premature, we don't have enough of a track record for market growth and reinvestment to go from a conventional cost vs. cumulative units experience curve to a Moore-like improvements vs. time formulation. It'd be nice, though!

Review: Timothy Hornyak's "Loving the Machine"

This book about robots in Japanese culture has been out since late 2006, so I'm coming to it somewhat late. My goal with the book was to fill in background of one of the major non-US innovators in robotics development, both in both cultural and technological terms.

The book succeeds admirably in framing the cultural context for one type of robotics in Japan. While beginning with an OED definition of robots inclusive of non-humanoid 'bots, Hornyak self-admittedly spends almost all of his attention on anthropomorphic devices, which he refers to as 'real robots'. In fact, the swath through humanoid representations is so broad that it includes pure fictions such as Mighty Atom (Astro Boy) and Gundam juxtaposed with actual mechanisms. The device succeeds well, however, in keeping the story moving in the direction of the book's central thesis: The cultural backing for humanoid representations of devices in Japan will mesh with actual social needs to drive robotics development in a more anthropomorphic direction than in the West. Hornyak succeeds in building a solid case for this cultural framing of bots in Japan.

The BOSS at CES

Glenn Reynolds reports, with a nice pic, a sighting of CMU / Tartan Racing's BOSS autonomous vehicle at CES. It's still sporting its vehicle number from November's Urban Challenge. The CES 'course' appears to be just a bunch of traffic cones, little challenge compared to DARPA's multi-bot suburban road race. And yes (indeed!) GM's PR department seems to be getting their money's worth from supporting the CMU team.

(P.S: I'm back from a self-imposed holiday season blog-break. A resolve helped along by taking on a short term consulting gig with an insane schedule including a delivery on Christmas Day. But that was followed by a nice break at a family get-together in Indiana, including a helping of Hoosier madness in the form of a high school basketball game won by a team including my eldest nephew. Way to go, Ben!)

Ooops - Maybe We Need Autonomous Bots For Ships

A Korean container ship has banged into the Bay Bridge. No significant damage to the bridge, but the ship suffered a gash that cut into a fuel tank, dumping 140 gallons of bunker oil into the Bay. That's less than three barrels, fortunately, but the slick drifted over to SF waterfront and a cleanup is underway. That initial report was inaccurate. The actual total dumped was 58,000 - over 1,000 barrels - so we're talking major cleanup.

No word on specific cause, but there was heavy fog in the Bay Area this morning. Apparently a harbor pilot was at the helm when the collision occurred, so the ship owners are presumably clear of blame on this.