EyeOnTechnology

First, I want to thank the large number of readers who have taken the time to add comments to my blog. I've been blogging for about three years now, and this is the highest volume of comments, and the kindest words in them, that I've ever encountered. It's very encouraging.

Second, I should apologize for being lazy about adding new posts. I've been busy with books. The third edition of my How-To book entitled How to Set Up Your Motorcycle Workshop is coming out momentarily (it was supposed to be out in mid-January, but the publisher warned me it would be delayed at the printer). I have a collection of short stories entitled Shakedown Blues, which is just out. I'm also hammering hard and heavy on the keyboard with my first full novel, provisionally entitled Red. I hope to have Red out sometime in the second quarter of 2010. I'll have more to say about these books later in this post.

The main subject of this posting, however, is blogging itself. I've received multiple requests for advice about blogging. Now, I do not consider myself an expert. Lots of other folks have blogs that generate a lot more traffic than mine. But, I've been at it awhile, so here goes.

Blogging is basically another in a long list of publishing methods. It fills a niche between social networking, and professionally produced news websites. Professional journalists treat blogging as the online equivalent of newspaper or magazine editorial writing. That is, they commit to a regular deadline schedule, and write more-or-less to a set length. Usually, they draft the copy for their postings using a word processor (WP), such as Microsoft Word (I use the Open Source equivalent: OpenOffice Writer). They revise and polish articles extensively in their WP, and transfer them to the blogging software for publication. I do a final polish in the blogging software, where I can see what the final result will look like, and then hit the "publish" button.

Blogging software was developed a few years ago to make it easier for journalists, who are generally not web experts, to create copy for Internet publication. I believe the original idea was to make it possible for journalists to bang out short, highly formatted articles quickly. The folks who wrote the software imagined that writers would type their articles directly into the blogging software, skipping the word processing step.

That goes to show that blogging software developers had no clue as to how professional writers work. Professional writers start by spending a pile of time researching what they're going to write, so they know what facts they'll use, and have organized and checked them beforehand. By the time they pull out the electronic equivalent of a blank sheet of paper, they already have a clear idea of what the article will be about, what facts they will include, what will be their "lead" (which is the first few sentences designed to pique the reader's interest). They also have a pretty clear outline in their heads.

They then bang out copy based on that plan. The idea is to avoid writer's block by typing whatever comes into their heads, no matter how inane, confused, or inappropriate. Then, they go back and revise the article to make sure it's clear, concise, interesting, and complete. They especially try to weed out extraneous material that shouldn't have been included, anyway. Finally, they go back to check for typos, spelling errors, bad sentence structures, and so forth. All this work is best done using fully functional word processing software. Blogging software just isn't up to the task.

Once the writer is happy with his or her manuscript in Word format, he or she can transfer it to the blogging software. The blogging software provides, usually, a window for entering the title, and another for entering the text. It also provides a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) view of the posting as it will appear on the website, and some means of adding images.

Professional writers are all familiar with the effect that text seems different when seen in its final form. It's a strange phenomenon where, when you look at the final copy in a letter, magazine, book, or whatever, you always see things that you wish you'd done differently. Typos appear out of nowhere. Sentences that looked great in the manuscript seem clumsy in the final form, and so forth. So, professionals always look at a final proof of their articles as the readers will see them before releasing them on an unsuspecting world. Blogging software provides that opportunity.

Another thing blogging software does is pre-format the article. The writer doesn't have to think about where to put the ads, where to put the navigation bar, what type face to use for the title, and so forth. That's all done ahead of time by a layout designer (who might be the author some time in the past), and enforced by the software itself. The author only has to worry about the words.

Don't agonize over what blogging software to use. All the blogging software I've used, and I've used four different systems, does pretty much the same thing, can be used pretty much the same way, and produces pretty much the same result. For this blog, I chose MoveableType for its compatibility with Google AdSense. I wanted to run Google ads, so I made sure the blogging software worked well with them.

I do not, generally, design my own layout, or set up the software. I hired a professional team through my Internet service provider (ISP) to set it all up and make sure it worked. I then did some minor tweaking to the blog's look and feel. I could do that because forty years ago I made the commitment to learn computer programming, and fifteen years ago I made the effort to learn how to build websites using HTML (the programming language of websites), and seven or eight years ago I taught myself how to write PHP (a language folks use to control all the fancy databases and such needed for interactive websites). Tweaking blog formats is a dawdle after that.

Most bloggers, who don't have the programming background, just use the templates the blogging software provides. That's what it's for, anyway.

So, that's a rundown on what it takes to write a blog. To be successful, you should post at least two entries a week. More is better. The most successful bloggers post every day. Some even post more than once a day.

I find that my readers prefer longer posts. I know bloggers, however, who post a few lines once or twice a day. I feel they'd be better off on Facebook or Twitter, but that's just my opinion.

Changing the subject, I promised to provide a little more information about my books for those readers who might be interested.

For some reason, the third edition of How to Set Up Your Motorcycle Workshop was delayed. It was supposed to come off the printing press by 15 January, but still isn't out. You can, however, preorder it on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and other online booksellers. A few collector copies of the first and second editions are also available online for exhorbitant prices. Most motorcycle hobbyists are familiar with the book, but I think it might be of interest to more general readers who just like reading my stuff.

Shakedown Blues is a collection of motorcycle touring stories written originally for enthusiast magazines. I think they'd also be interesting to more general readers who like reading about road trips. Stealing an idea from Herman Melville, I've embedded the stories themselves in explanatory chapters that would be of interest to general readers, and to folks interested in some of what goes on behind the scenes at national magazine editorial departments.

The novel I'm working on now, Red, involves a transcontinental motorcycle trip; a six-foot three-inch red head with a chip on her shoulder; a mysterious biker with apparently limitless resources and a Zen attitude; an evil step father; and a lost gold mine. The title refers to our heroine's nickname, which she got for the color of her hair, and those cute little freckles she has all over ... . The story includes elements of science fiction, a murder mystery, sex, a love story (or four), more sex, eastern philosophy, a look behind the scenes at the biker lifestyle, a peek into how engineers develop advanced technology, and some hair-raising adventure. Did I mention the sex?

It'll be out in a few months, if I ever finish writing the thing.

In every economic downturn, Chicken-Little pundits squawk about how we can't have a sustainable recovery until employment figures show improvement. Any investor, and here I use the word "investor" in its broadest sense to include those who put resources to work, not just those who invest in stocks and bonds, who listens to this drivel is destined to fail, and fail disasterously.

Macroeconomics - the study of large-scale economic trends affecting an economy as a whole - is based feedback loops that drive business activity. These loops describe causal relationships between economic factors affecting business. For example, an increase in production levels generally pushes employment up. Each of these causal relationships involve a time delay. So, when production levels increase, especially from a depressed level, employment does not rise until production levels exceed capacity at the current employment level. This takes time, as does the process of hiring new employees.

These delays are what cause business cycles in the first place. If we use, say, buggywhip manufacture as a hypothetical example, we might say that it takes 18 months for the buggywhip business to respond to a sudden change in the overall demand for buggywhips. So, if New York City should pass a law banning motorized vehicles, so all the Yellow Cabs in the city had to be replaced by horse-drawn surries overnight, that would ratchet up demand for buggywhips. Because it takes 18 months for buggywhip manufacturers to respond, actual sales of buggywhips would not stabilize at a level reflecting the new demand until a year and a half later.

Business cycles occur because it is not possible for businesses to precisely meet demand. In the buggywhip example, assume that there are two buggywhip manufacturers in business at the time the New York law passes. They will both attempt to grab more than their fair share of the enormous new market. Part of driving sales is assuring customers that you can actually deliver the goods ordered. So, both manufacturers will expand production faster than necessary to just meet demand. In addition, during that first 18 months, it will be clear that the established manufacturers won't be able to meet demand. Outside entrepreneurs will see this as an opportunity to jump in to the expanding market, by starting rival buggywhip manufacturing operations.

The result is that some 18 months after the new law passes, worldwide buggywhip manufacturing capacity will greatly exceed demand. Inventories of unsold buggywhips will expand. Buggywhip prices will fall. Marginal buggywhip manufacturers will fail. Buggywhip production capacity will drop. By three years into the process, we'd be back to having inadequate production capacity to meet demand, and the whole thing would start over again.

Boom and bust cycles like that are not some aberration, or the result of faulty business strategies, or some market inefficiency that politicians can erase by passing laws, it's how things inevitably work. In fact, most complex systems, such as economies, consist of multiple such cycles that operate on multiple time scales. Basically, they're all chaotic systems, which is why long term charts of practically every economic indicator - from long-term jobs trends to prices for individual stocks - look like profiles of the Andes Mountains. They're all fractals, which is the pattern most often associated with chaotic systems.

Economic expansions, recessions, depressions, and recoveries are actually just business-cycle components. As any Taoist sage could tell you, whenever the economy is expanding, you know that a contraction is on its way. Similarly, a depression always presages a recovery. It's inevitable. The Great Depression of the 1930s was, when looked at from a longer perspective, just a particularly deep bottom of the overall business cycle. The huge expansion we experienced during the 1990s was, conversely, a particularly robust phase of the overall business cycle.

This latest contraction, which started about 2005, and will probably not completely play out until 2015, was another particularly nasty dip in the more or less regular cycle. It's as inevitable as the tide.

So, getting back to jobs data, and the usual panicky predictions of a so-called "jobless recovery," the reason employment data have not significantly improved is that it's just too early in the process for it to show up. Those who ask: "How can sales recover when employment is down?" simply don't understand how the business cycle works. Sales aren't driven by jobs, it's the other way around, with a significant time lag between.

Jobs are driven by production requirements. As any industrial engineer could tell you, production is driven by inventories, not by demand. Demand is an intangible that is very difficult to predict or measure. Inventory levels, on the other hand, are easily measured and better reflect a company's ability to sell the products it makes.

In the real business world, the first thing to recover after a recession is demand. It begins to recover when end users have had their belts cinched so tight for so long, that they have no choice but to by new stuff. Demand for food starts to rise, for example, when pantries start to look bare. It makes no difference whether the family bread-winner has a job or not, when there's nothing for dinner, somebody makes a run to the store. Even if you have to beg a cup of sugar from the neighbors, that sends the neighbors off to the store for more sugar, increasing the demand for sugar. Therein lies the disconnect between jobs and demand.

Demand seems to have hit bottom about six months ago. Since then, we've been working off inventory that built up at the start of the downturn, when production still exceeded demand. Next, production has to rise (pulled by further increases in demand) until it exceeds capacity at the present depressed employment levels. Only then will employment figures begin to rise.

Don't look for employment metrics to turn up until at least the end of the first quarter 2010. The reason it hasn't happened yet is that it's just too darn early.

Over the next week or so, I hope to share with you results of studies pointing the directions we can expect technology trends likely will take next year, and in the decade ahead. The good news for Americans, and for many national economies around the world, is that the recovery is exactly on track. Yammering about "jobless recovery" and doubts over the U.S. economy's ability to expand until full employment returns simply demonstrate the commentators' ignorance of how economies work.

Garden variety depressions, which is what we've experienced over the past five years, take many years to play out. Calendar year 2008 saw the acute contraction phase, but things had been unraveling since late 2005. After a contraction, comes a bottoming, followed by an expansion phase.

Economic recoveries - that is the bottoming and expansion phases of a dip in economic activity - start with stock markets, which anticipate the turn around in general economic conditions by some months. The reason stock markets anticipate recoveries is that investment professionals, unlike media commentators, do understand economics, and recognize harbingers of business improvement long before the improvement happens. Just as meteorologists know that when days start getting longer, Spring is just a few months away, investors know that economic harbingers, such as inventory levels stabilizing at high levels, pre-announce changes in economic trends by several months, and stock prices rise as these investors put themselves in a position to capitalize on the new trend.

After stock prices hit bottom and begin to rise, we start seeing signs that the downward pressure on business activity begins to ease off. High inventory levels, for example, begin to drop. Productivity begins to rise as businesses streamline to cut costs. Later, these more efficient businesses begin reporting better than anticipated earnings on still-falling revenue. Still months later, revenues begin to rise as individuals and businesses can no longer put off purchases that have been delayed since the beginning of the downturn. More months later, employment figures, which conventional wisdom seems to think should lead the recovery despite the fact that it never happens, begin to recover as the productivity gains of a few months ago prove insufficient to meet the growing demand for goods and services. Finally, very late in the recovery, large capital investments, such as in real estate, reach their bottoms and start to recover.

At present, the U.S. economy, as well as that of most of the world, is recovering nicely. Trends in measures like corporate earnings are showing the correct patterns in the correct order and with the anticipated timing. Even the jobless numbers are tracking exactly as they're supposed to. Back at the end of 2008, when the depth of the dip became apparent, knowledgeable pundits were able to predict that the unemployment rate would reach just above 10%, which is just what it did, and begin to recover in late 2009, which it also has done.

By the way, don't listen to all that emotional drivel about some fictional "real" unemployment rate being something like 18% instead of the published 10% level. "The unemployment rate" is a real, clearly defined metric that we use to compare one time period with another. The "real unemployment rate" that Chicken-Little types yammer on about is poorly defined and very difficult to measure, so it's useless as an economic metric. It's only use is to give fear merchants something to shoot their mouths off about to their poorly educated audiences.

One extremely useful metric that can provide prescience about general industrial trends is expectations among industrial automation buyers and sellers about their purchases and sales (respectively) in the coming year.

To determine whether the market for industrial automation equipment was beginning to ascend from the depths of this latest downturn, or were destined to remain mired in the muck at the bottom of the pit for awhile longer, our friends at Control Engineering magazine in partnership with analysts at financial services leader Morgan Stanley surveyed participants in the industrial automation market. The reason to look especially at sentiment in this market is that factory automation is arguably the most important trend in industrial technology of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

Early in the 20th Century, factory automation was generally non-existent. We (or more accurately, our ancestors) simply did not have the tools available to automate production facilities in any meaningful way.

By the middle of the 21st Century, on the other hand, we anticipate that factories will run essentially fully automatically. That is, there will be no production tasks that are not done by automated machinery. Humans will generally hold supervisory positions. There will be CEOs, managers, engineers, maintenance technicians, and such like, but the population of assembly line workers, for example, will drop to more or less nil.

So, unlike the situation a few decades ago, perhaps the best measure of industrial activity available at the start of the second decade of this century is the level of activity in the industrial automation sector. That is what the survey set out to study, and that is why it's the first thing we looking at as we peer into our crystal ball.

"I'm happy to report that the survey does, indeed, offer more than few rays of hope," wrote David Greenfield, Control Engineering's editorial director, when reporting the survey findings in his article entitled 2010 Global Automation Industry Outlook. "Overall, the findings appear to indicate that a bottom in the market has been reached, pricing is holding firm, and that customers remain loyal - all positive signs for global automation players."

Greenfield cited four key findings of the survey:

1. The automation market has already bottomed; modest growth will return in 2010;

2. There is no evidence of a price war in automation equipment;

3. There is limited differentiation between the spending outlooks for process versus discrete industries;

4. While highly cyclical, automation is a good business to invest in over the long term.

It is important to note that the second finding belies the fear that inflation might be a an immediate threat. Despite concerns over accommodative monetary policies around the world, this survey shows no sign of inflation's return in the immediate future. It's axiomatic that for inflation to appear, prices must rise. This survey of a significant sector of the economy shows no hint of rapidly rising prices.

Greenfield pointed out that the near-term trend in demand for automation equipment appears brighter than it did in early in 2009 because of the percentage of respondents expecting demand to increase, more budgets going up or staying level versus retreating, and increasing demand to replace aging equipment. In addition, pricing appears to be stabilizing in the near term. Few respondents expect to see prices fall, but neither are they expecting out-of-the-ordinary upward price moves by suppliers to help offset losses in the past year.

These results are exactly what we would expect at this stage of the present economic recovery. Pundits prophesying a double dip, an L-shaped recovery, or any similar pattern find no support for their views in this important economic indicator.

The good news this week is the trend in healthcare reform. It looks like the U.S. Legislature is once again finding itself incapable of passing meaningful healthcare-reform legislation. If this trend continues, what we'll be left with sometime next year is legislation that makes just enough change to allow the President and Congress to claim a victory, but not enough to make any real difference. This is not surprising, since it's been the same story for every major effort taken up by the current crop of Senators and Representatives.

It's good news because it means the Federal Government will at least do no harm. Or, at least no harm that can't easily be undone in the future.

We actually can't fault Congress for failing in fact, even if they find a way to succeed in headlines. There's a basic flaw in our health care system that can't be fixed. It's actually a flaw in the philosophical underpinnings of our society: we are incapable of applying the 95/5 rule from systems engineering to many of our social problems. We're seeing it in healthcare simply because that's the part of our social infrastructure that has most obviously run into a brick wall.

The 95/5 rule, like many systems engineering principles, sounds precise and quantitative, but isn't. It belongs in the realm of fuzzy logic, which only a few academics, and practically nobody else, understands. Unfortunately, nearly all decisions human beings are asked to make must be made using fuzzy logic. Fortunately, the ability to do fuzzy-logic analysis accurately and at blinding speed is one of the human brain's greatest strengths. Even better, the recognition of both fuzzy logic's importance and humans' aptitude for it is growing rapidly.

The 95/5 rule is just one expression of the fuzzy proposition that, as progress is made in any cumulative effort, gains become ever more difficult to achieve. (To the fuzzy-logic mavens out there: I know I've not couched this proposition in any rigorous way, but to do so would require a lot of verbiage that only you and I would want to read. Everyone else would go away, and thus miss out on today's exciting episode.)

The rule is an extreme version of the more familiar 80/20 rule, which says that 80% of the effort must be expended to achieve the last 20% of the gain. Conversely, the first 20% of the effort generally achieves 80% of the gain. Stated more generally, and more accurately, the effort needed to make further gains increases roughly exponentially with the gains already made. More fuzzily: you reach a point of diminishing returns.

Use the 95/5 rule when you've already blown past the 80% level. The next stop, of course, is the 99/1 rule that says you'll need 99% of the already-expended effort to get the next 1% gain. We try not to go there.

How this applies to healthcare is the simple statement that the easy gains have already been made. The reason healthcare costs are rising so rapidly is that we are now trying to push healthcare well past the point of diminishing returns. The Quixotic goal is highlighted by Pres. Obama's stated goal of providing health insurance for every dang American regardless of their ability to walk through the woods without bumping into trees.

Basically, we're trying to keep medical progress moving along a linear track. Ergo, the cost is rising exponentially.

In a misguided attempt to "fix the problem," most of us have, instead, tried to fix the blame on a boogeyman: the health insurance system. The theory seems to be that, if we can come up with a clever enough formula for health insurance, the cost of healthcare will take care of itself. This seems to be the tack Congress is taking, and, thank God, it isn't working. The cost of healthcare is taking care of itself, alright; it's expanding to take over the Universe!

In future blog entries, I hope to take a look at why medical progress is hitting a wall, and why we're fundamentally unable to deal with the situation. By way of a preview:

Medical progress is hitting a wall because most of the medical conditions that killed off our ancestors have already been eradicated. That was the easy stuff - requiring only a half dozen millennia to complete. Now, all we have to do is the hard stuff.

Human society can't deal with the problem because our basic moral and ethical assumptions don't allow us to throw our fellow human beings to the wolves.

To be sure, I do not have an answer. Like almost everyone else on the planet, I'm not ready to walk up to another human being, whether a loved one or stranger, look them in the eye, and say: "You're too old/sick/feeble/whatever to live. Go die!"

I know a lot of people willing to consider it as a philosophical exercise, but not-a-one who could bring themselves to do it in fact. Well, except maybe some inmates of institutions for the criminally insane.

Therein lies our dilemma.

During the 1970s, I conducted an (unpublished) meta-analysis of data Charles Greeley Abbot collected from various sources in the early 20th Century to look for cross correlations between his solar irradiance measurements, sunspot index measurements, and weather patterns in various cities. The meta-analysis showed a significant positive correlation between solar irradiance and sunspot data, and a partial correlation between them and the temperature data.

Abbot, like nearly all astronomers and astrophysicists of his time, firmly believed in a negative correlation between sunspot index and solar irradiance, rather than the positive one his data showed. He noted the partial correlation between sunspot index and temperatures, but his prejudice about the correlation between index and irradiance led him to reject the effect as spurious.

By the end of the 1980s, the positive correlation between solar irradiance variations and sunspot index variations had been confirmed by satellite measurements, overturning astrophysicists' previous view. This allowed partial explanation of historically observed climatic variations, specifically the so-called "Little Ice Age" in the latter half of the second millennium, by reduction of solar activity observed through anomalies in the sunspot index, specifically the Sporer, Maunder, and Dalton minima. This research strongly indicates that solar variability is also an important input to the climate system that is certainly not under human control.

Now, it is becoming clear that the climate system is highly complex, with multiple positive and negative feedback loops, as well as a large number of independent forcing inputs, only a few of which are under human control (see "Aerosols Cloud Climate Picture," Science News, v. 176, n. 11., pp. 5-6 for a brief synopsis). These are characteristics of a chaotic system

Paleontologists and geologists have pieced together a fairly complete, though not necessarily detailed, picture of Earth's climate over the 4.5 billion years of the planet's existence. This picture shows a chaotic climate capable of varying over a wide temperature range. On short time scales, weather patterns are now acknowledged to be chaotic, with a horizon of predictability on the order of a week.

Taken together, these bits of information lead one to the conclusion that Earth's climate exhibits chaotic behavior on all time scales. It is, basically, a chaotic system.

Now, let's look at efforts to control climate change. We are attempting to use a chaotic system (global politics) to harness a second chaotic system (social, economic, and technical institutions) to control a third chaotic system (Earth's climate), when not all the forcing variables (e.g., solar irradiance, geology) are in our hands, anyway.

This sounds like a fool's errand.

I suggest that we could much more effectively apply our energies to developing means to react to climate change that is inevitable, than to the fool's errand of trying to direct it. Climate change, in any direction, has both positive and negative affects. It would be far better to direct our efforts toward engineering social systems, laws, and technologies to take advantage of the positive effects, and ameliorate the negative effects.

Another one bites the dust! Today's issue of Scientific Computing Newswire broke the news that an international team of scientists has finally mapped the genome of the domestic pig. While thousands of fans of both genome mapping and domestic pigs have been waiting with 'bated (and some with baited) breath for this momentous breakthrough, some readers of this blog might greet this news with a resounding "Ho-hum."

Why would anyone have any interest in a map of Porky's genome, or, for that matter, that of any of the roughly two dozen mammalian species whose genomes have been mapped in addition to people?

There are actually a number of good reasons. The excuse given in the article for picking on the poor pig is that medical researchers use domestic pigs as analogs for humans when studying a number of diseases. "The pig is the ideal animal to look at lifestyle and health issues in the United States," said Larry Schook, a University of Illinois in Champaign biomedical science professor who led the DNA sequencing project. The Scientific Computing article says that scientists rely on pigs to study everything from obesity and heart disease to skin disorders.

Of course, the author also gave a nod to the mass-media H1N1 frenzy by speculating that it might help veterinarians come up with a vaccine to keep Porky from getting swine flu. You wouldn't want your favorite pig coming down with swine flu, now would you? It's bad enough that your parakeet died of avian flu, after your local river suffered a bout of west nile virus. These pandemics can be such a pain in the butt!

Anyway, the real reason we applaud mapping of Porky's genome is that the more we know about the genetic makeups of different species, the better we understand life science in general. Genomics has revolutionized a vast array of disciplines, from anthropology to zoology. Like all pure science endeavors, genomics provides insights that improve our understanding of issues far beyond what might be anticipated. Unlike many pure sciences, however, genomics results have often found immediate applications. Within months of cracking the human genetic code, for example, researchers had developed biochips capable of inexpensively screening for an array of genetic disorders.

So, while it's easy to make fun of mapping the domestic pig's genome, it really is research that we should applaud, and, more importantly, support unstintingly. Not only will your pet pig thank you, but future generations of humans, who achieve better health at lower cost will thank you as well.

Buried at the end of Section B (Marketplace) in today's issue of  The Wall Street Journal was a one-sixth-page article (blown up to nearly a half page by an enormous photo of a pretty Japanese lady wearing the modern version of 3-D glasses) discussing the the hurdles 3-D television faces to becoming a commercial success. According to the article, television manufacturers in Korea and Japan (specifically, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Sony, and Panasonic) "... see 3-D as the next big technological breakthrough...." The article intimates that the technology's biggest hurdle is getting consumers to upgrade so soon after paying up for the transition to HDTV.

It fails to mention the possibility that the technology might turn out to be as useless for television as the proverbial enhanced mammary glands on a male Bos taurus.

True 3-D visual experience relies on solving the technical problem of presenting separate images to the viewer's left and right eyes. The two images must differ slightly to allow the viewer to subconciously solve the parallax problem locating the objects in the scene relative to the presumed camera position along the third spatial dimension (range).

An elegant technical solution became commercially available a couple of decades ago, when electron-microscope maker Cambridge Instrument Company introduced a scanning electron microscope (SEM) featuring a display system using circular polarization. Images for one eye were displayed using light with left-handed circular polarization while images for the other eye used right-handed circularly polarized light. The viewer wore glasses with circularly polarized lenses. The lenses on one side passed left-handed light, while the other passed right-handed light. Circular polarization has two advantages as a coding scheme:

• polarization is, in general, color neutral, so full-color images can be displayed;
• circular polarization is maintained during reflection and transmission of light, so the system is harder to accidentally spoof.

So, while the technical challenge is pretty much a thing of the past, there's a big issue with utility. You see, parallax is not the only way to signal range information. More importantly, parallax only works at short distances.

Because human eyes are necessarily spaced only a few inches apart (baseline). Other creatures may enhance parallax perception by mounting their eyes on stalks protruding from the sides of their heads, but humans obviously don't. This limited eye separation combines with the eye's finite angular resolution to restrict the effectiveness of parallax as a range cue to distances smaller than the order of 100 feet. In fact, other means of judging distance become more important at ranges beyond a few tens of feet.

Leonardo Da Vinci pointed out the importance of creating a 3D illusion by depicting distant objects as seen through an intervening mist. While he noticed the related illusion that objects appear magnified when seen through a fog, he missed (no pun intended) the explanation that the fog causes the brain to overestimate the distance to the object. It then solves the resulting cognitive dissonance by percieving a larger object located at the overestimated distance.

Walt Disney solved the problem of portraying distance on a flat screen in his 1942 film Bambi (not to be confused with Marv Newland's 1969 Bambi Meets Godzilla, which I couldn't resist linking to) by the simple expedient of introducing parallax while moving the assumed camera's point of view. He showed nearer objects moving more as the camera dollyed (moved along a track at right angles to the line of sight) than more distant objects.

Both solutions arise naturally in live-action video. These solutions become even more powerful when combined with the immersive experience of wide-screen HDTV.

So, adding parallax through circularly polarized stereoscopic projection gives a realistic 3D effect only for objects that are a few tens of feet from the camera. Anything farther away, and other range cues are far more important.

I haven't done the study, and I don't know if anyone else has, but it would be interesting to know what percentage of scenes in motion pictures or TV mainly include objects less than, say, 30 feet from the camera.

Photographers making images for the stereoscopic viewers popular in the late 19th Century were fond of creating cityscape views with points of view separated along a baseline many times that of human eyes. Nobody would percieve parallax when visiting the actual scene. All they really accomplished was to make the scene look like a miniature model, reduced in scale by a factor equal to the ratio of the camera baseline to the distance between the viewer's eyes!

Trying to enhance the stereo effect of video content by recording with an overly long baseline will have the same effect for TV. You'd make Jaws look like a 3 foot sand shark. The Grand Canyon would look like a drainage ditch.

In the final analysis, how much extra would you pay for 3D TV? How much would it enhance your enjoyment of sports, for example? If your sport is chess, it might do a lot. If your sport is, say, football, or baseball, or motor racing, or sail boating, on the other hand, not so much.

Whether 3D TV will be a commercial success in the long run has nothing to do with market-introduction timing, or whether folks have already gone through a recent upgrade to HDTV. It's about whether the marginal enhancement of their viewing experience is enough to make folks give a rotten dingo's kidney about it.

Truly successful technologies - those that achieve widespread commercial application - generally exhibit a number of characteristics. Chiefest among them is probably the ability to help humans do a lot of things that they would be doing anyway, but do them faster, cheaper, and more easily.

Automobiles, for example, did not make people peripatetic. People have been wandering around Earth's surface for hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of years. They've been doing it since long before the modern species homo sapiens developed. All the automobile did was up the cruising speed from around 2 mph to several tens of mph. Human behavior didn't change, they still like to go from A to B whenever they can come up with an excuse, the automobile achieved enormous commercial success by making it possible to do it faster, cheaper, and more easily. What pushed the automobile's success to the enormous dimensions it achieved was the fact that its advantages applied to almost everything people do, from enjoying an afternoon tryst to seeking out new worlds to conquer.

Ultrathin, flexible, disposable battery technology should have similar success. It seems like such a simple thing: use thick-film technology to manufacture carbon-zinc batteries on a flexible substrate. How hard can it be to manufacture a battery consisting of a handful of non-moving parts compared to the typical automobile's 3.7 kazillion moving parts? You make the things with a glorified ink-jet printer. What could be easier?

Well, it isn't all that easy to make the things thin enough, reliable enough, and consistent enough for commercial success. It's simple to imagine doing it. The Devil's in the details of doing it right. Only a few companies have managed it.

Blue Spark Technologies is one of them. In an article published in yesterday's Designfax online newsletter, Matt Ream, Blue Spark's marketing manager and an electronics engineer with 20 years of experience in high-tech electronics and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, reviews ultrathin battery technology and presents a cross section of applications.

He says that products using the company's technology rely on convergence of printed electronics and thin, flexible printed battery technologies. Printed electronics is the printing of electronic devices on common media, such as paper, plastic, or textiles, using traditional printing processes. Examples include programmable chips (ICs), RFID antennas and tags, printed displays, and thin, flexible batteries that provide a low-voltage power source. Ream goes on to report that industry analyst IDTechEx predicts that the market potential for printed electronics will grow to over $35 billion by 2018, while NanoMarkets predicts sales of thin film and printed batteries will grow to over $5 billion by 2015.

For product designers of low-voltage electronic products and systems, Ream says his company's 1.5-V printed carbon-zinc batteries offer multiple advantages over traditional button and coin cells, such as:

• Eco-friendly, safe disposability, since they contain no lithium, mercury, or other toxic materials.

• Small form factor, thin profile, and customizable shapes with a thickness range from about 430 to 700 microns (0.017 to 0.027 in.), and peak drain currents of at least 1 mA.

• Lower production and integration costs because they are made using conventional printing processes, and can often be printed or mounted on the same substrate as other printed electronics.

Such batteries can be used in applications where integration of a conventional battery would be too complex and costly. Within limits, users can typically specify size and shape (linear and non-linear), overall voltage, storage capacity, and thickness -- all tailored to the application requirements.

In a CNBC interview, Gary Johnson, the company's CEO, and Michael Liard, RFID Practice Director for ABI Research, described the market potential for ultrathin disposable batteries. Basically, you can look forward to seeing the technology attached to, pasted on, or incorporated into all kinds of disposable items that you use every day. Actually, you won't know that you're seeing them. They'll sit there in the background making it possible to do faster, cheaper, and easier what you were going to do, anyway.

Some years ago, the film Sneakers featured a voice-encoded door lock that required three keys for entry. First, the person desiring entrance swiped a magnetically encoded security card, and then said the phrase "My name is *****. My voice is my passport, verify me." The second key was the person's name substituted for the "*****." The third was biometric recognition of the person's voice as a match for a previously recorded voice associated with that name and key card.

It was very secure.

The main characters in the film had to go through all kinds of (improbable) shenanigans to duplicate all three keys so they could break in to retrieve the secret decoding device.

Very entertaining, but what has that to do with the impact of technology on society?

To find out, fast forward to 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration published 21 CFR Part 11 establishing criteria under which the agency would consider electronic records and signatures equivalent to paper records and hand written signatures. Twelve years later (1 June 2009), the FDA stopped accepting paper submissions for drug establishment registration and listing on the assumption that "moving from a paper-based format to an electronic system will improve the timeliness and accuracy of the submissions." Similar rules have been adopted by other U.S. government agencies.

You can see where this is going. As time goes on, more and more legal transactions will be sealed via electronic signatures rather than written signatures.

Most recently, John M. Facciola, United States Magistrate Judge, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issued the first digitally-signed judicial order on 25 September 2009. This action is seen as transforming the manner in which orders are issued throughout the entire judicial system, according to a news release issued by the National Notary Association (NNA).

"The capability to digitally sign an order or other document should create in the people who receive it an assurance that the document was signed by the judge, and eliminate corrupt attempts to use forged, electronically created documents for improper ends," said Judge Facciola. "It is the next logical development in the transition by the court from paper to electronic filing that will keep the court's way of doing things consistent and contemporary with the actual practices of the society that the court serves," Judge Facciola added.

According to NNA, Judge Facciola received a digital certificate - an electronic identification credential used to sign electronic documents - after having his identification verified and authenticated by Elaine Wright, a District of Columbia Notary Public and Trusted Enrollment Agent. A Trusted Enrollment Agent (TEA) carefully verifies the identity of individuals applying to obtain a digital certificate prior to issuance. TEAs have been certified and background screened by the NNA.

"By utilizing a Trusted Enrollment Agent, parties relying on Judge Facciola's judicial orders can have confidence that his identity was verified for the digital certificate and that the orders were signed by the judge himself," said National Notary Association Chief Executive Officer, Larisa B. Gurnick.

Make the connection between a digital certificate and biometric identification, which is already standard practice in advanced security systems, and you see where this trend ultimately leads. Given time, we may all find that "My voice is my passport, verify me" is how we sign all of our legal records, which are increasingly becoming electronic.

The days when deals were struck with a promise and a handshake may be coming back. The difference being that the promise may be captured in an audio recording with the parties' voices constituting their legally binding signatures.

In previous blog postings, I've attempted to pique your interest in the rapid technological changes that are transforming the data centers that we all rely on. Very soon these changes will revolutionize how folks around the world will use the Internet and what they will be able to do with it.

You don't have to just take my word for it, though. Tomorrow (Wednesday, 9/29) Cisco Systems will host a live Internet TV broadcast and Q&A session to discuss its vision for Data Center 3.0 and how the company's core technologies and new solutions are mapping to its overall corporate business strategy. Best of all, you don't have to be anyone special to attend. The session will be distributed free to all. No registration required. Just visit the event URL at 10:00 a.m. PDT and select "Play" to launch the live presentation.

Presenters will include:

Rajiv Ramaswami, vice president and general manager of the Data Center Switching Technology Group, will discuss how storage networking technology is evolving, including a glimpse at Cisco's future technology for storage networking innovation.

Ed Chapman, vice president of product management, Server Access and Virtualization Group, Cisco, will discuss how IT organizations are evolving their data centers with new protocols such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to reduce operating costs and simplify management. The presentation will include a glimpse at new technology being developed for unifying SAN and LAN networks in the data center.

Derek Masseth, Senior Director for Infrastructure Services at the University of Arizona, will describe how the university recently united its data center networks using Fibre Channel over Ethernet to create a unified fabric. Masseth will explain the reasons for choosing this technology and the upgrade process, as well as benefits and cost reductions achieved.

The event will air Tuesday, September 29, 2009, from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. PDT. Attendees who experience difficulties connecting can contact support at (866) 614-0208 or (617) 778-9652. Phone support is available 30 minutes prior to and after the event, as well as during the videocast. Attendees may also submit an Online Support Request to CiscoTV_help@external.cisco.com or ciscotv_help@btci.com if necessary.