September 2009 Archives

John M. Facciola (left), United States Magistrate Judge, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issues the first digitally-signed judicial order.

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.

Racks of Cisco Unified Computing Systems gear supporting 23 different labs at VMworld. Source: Cisco Systems

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.

Speakers to describe experiences of overseas healthcare systems.

"The primary purpose of comparative effectiveness research is to inform healthcare related decisions," according to Ted Buckley, Ph.D., Director of Economic Policy at the Biotechnology Industry Organization. While definitions of comparative effectiveness analysis methodology differ (Buckley lists four examples in his white paper The Complexities of Comparative Effectiveness), they commonly include three elements:

• Comparison of one treatment to one or more other treatments;
• Treatments compared are not limited to medications only;
• Both risks and benefits are included in the assessment .

Comparative effectiveness analysis potentially enters the debate over health-care reform as both content and method. Specifically, the role of comparative effectiveness as a method of choosing between clinical options may be institutionalized as part of the reforms mandated. Also, as a decision-making algorithm familiar in the medical profession, comparative effectiveness analysis could be applied to choosing between different reform proposals. Indeed, with suitably chosen effectiveness criteria, the methodology could be applied to essentially any decision in any field, from what to have for dinner to global economic policy.

On 1 October, the Center For Health Care Management & Policy at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine plans to present a one-day conference entitled Comparative Effectiveness: Lessons From Abroad. Sponsored by Kaiser Permanente and the California HealthCare Foundation, the conference program includes talks by expert speakers from Britain, Canada, Germany, and the United States on key issues facing the nation on health care reform. Conference organizers hope to provide a unique venue for dialogue among private and public sector leaders that will help to determine what the U.S. can learn from other countries in using comparative effectiveness (CE) analysis to improve health care quality and efficiency.

The conference is aimed at:

• Physicians and nurses in administrative positions, physicians in private, group or clinical practice;
• Presidents, CEOs, trustees and senior management in provider and insurer organizations;
• Senior executives in pharmaceutical, medical device, biotech and other health care organizations who define strategy and policy;
• Employers who deal with the problem of ever-increasing health care costs while attempting to increase employee choice; and
• Government officials who define and implement health policy.

For more information contact Margaret M. Wong, Associate Director of the Center for Health Care Management & Policy at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California Irvine by telephone at 949-824-8474, or by email at mwong@uci.edu.

Anything repeated ad nauseum is annoying, even Grace Slick's classic White Rabbit. Source: Wikipedia

This morning I received the following email query (sender's name withheld to protect the guilty):

"I know what I'm asking is probably against FCC regulations and all, but I have this really obnoxious old man neighbor who blasts sappy classical music all day long. I am wondering what it takes to broadcast white noise or even better John Denver easy listening hits, the twenty feet up to his radio."

First, recognize that the phrase "sappy classical music" is an oxymoron. The word "classical" means the music (or anything else it is applied to) has been time tested to be of superior quality. The word "sappy" implies that an objective test would determine it to be of inferior quality. You can't have it both ways.

On the other hand, anything repeated ad nauseam is annoying. For example, I just went through a period of having Grace Slick's White Rabbit running through my head - the whole thing, start-to-finish, in order, endlessly repeated.

It took two weeks (because I really, really like that piece) for the thing to become intolerable, but it did. In the end, I had trouble getting to sleep because of it, dreamed of it when I finally got to sleep, and woke up to it in the morning. I finally had to spend a night in a karaoke bar to get rid of it.

But the answer to your question is: yes, it is possible to overwhelm your neighbor's radio receiver (assuming he's using a radio, rather than playing recorded music). It's called "jamming" and, as you surmise, is highly illegal. The trick is to first determine the frequency he's listening to, the modulation method carrying the signal, and the radio signal's field strength at his antenna's location.

If the radio station uses amplitude modulation (unlikely) or frequency modulation (very likely), you can (but should not) interfere with that signal. If it's a digital broadcast you have a snowball's chance in the hot place of effectively jamming it, though. In any case, you have an approximately 100% chance of getting caught.

To do so, obtain a white-noise source by amplifying the thermal noise naturally generated by, say, a 1,000 ohm resistor until it has a useful amplitude (1-10 Volts). That will require a voltage amplifier with a gain of a few thousand. The John Denver idea would likely be less effective, but would be easier to accomplish - just use the output from your CD player.

Then, build (you cannot buy without having a broadcast station license, which you would not get) a radio transmitter that will broadcast at the radio station's frequency using the same modulation method the radio station uses. The transmitter must put out enough power to create an RF field at least 2X greater than that of the radio station at the receiver's antenna. Pipe the noise source into the transmitter's modulation input, and turn the thing on. Finally, wait for the knock on your door from the FCC's Spectrum Enforcement Division. It should take a day or so for the complaints (you'll also interfere with everyone else's radio in the neighborhood, as well as your own) to reach the FCC, and then about 20 minutes for them to trace the interference to your door.

You probably don't have the requisite skills to do the job. The easiest way to get them is to go back to college and get a degree in electrical engineering with a specialty in radio frequency design. At that point, you'll have a very lucrative career beckoning, and won't want to throw it away by antisocial behavior involving RF electronics. Instead, you'll take the best offer, make lots of money, and move to a very nice suburban home where your neighbors will be better behaved.

In the short run, it would be better to knock on the guy's door and ask him to either turn the music down, close his windows, or get some headphones. If that fails, or if you don't want to be confrontational, call the local police and ask them to do it for you. That, after all, is what you pay them for. Disturbing the peace is illegal, too.

Glenn Curtiss and his contemporaries made gasoline engines practical for motor vehicles and aircraft. Source: Glenn H. Curtiss Museum

With all the hoopla about electric vehicles and "carbon neutral" fuels lately, it brings up the question of why gasoline and diesel became the dominant fuel choices for mobile power plants in the first place. There, of course, have always been alternatives. Everything from coal to spermacetti oil have been tried in the past.

Two canards are worth disposing of right away: the inertia and conspiracy arguments.

The inertia argument goes something like this: "We use gasoline and diesel fuel for light trucks and passenger vehicles because that's what we've always used." This idea has appeal only to those who know nothing about early automobile development. From roughly 1890 through as late as 1920, enthusiastic inventors tried to use essentially every kind of engine and every available fuel to produce a commercially viable horseless carriage. The only ones that proved technically and commercially viable were powered by gasoline or diesel fuel. Everything else flopped for one reason or another, and most alternative fuel vehicles flopped for technical reasons related to their engines.

The conspiracy argument (Isn't there always a conspiracy theory?) holds that big oil companies, like Standard Oil, persued nefarious means to sabotage development of any vehicles that ran on anything but the gasoline and diesel fuel they supplied. While corporate leaders in the early 20th Century would gleefully have engaged in such behavior, they just weren't up to it. First, their companies didn't carry that much clout until the boom in automobile transportation - powered by gasoline and diesel engines - grew them into the giants we recall. Second, no amount of chicanery can make a winner out of a clearly technically inferior solution.

That's an important point to keep in mind.

The reasons gasoline and diesel became dominant fuels are simple and technical: power, weight, and storage/handling.

As students of aviation development know quite well, the Otto-cycle piston engine powered by gasoline has an enormous power-to-weight advantage over every other engine type in the sub-500 HP range, with diesel engines running a close second. The only engine type that beats them today is the Brayton-cycle turbine engine. (No, not the "turbocharged" or "turbo" engine, which is really a hotted up piston engine!) Technical issues involving manufacturing make turbine engines smaller than about 500 HP hard to justify, and 500 HP is rediculous overkill for a passenger car or light truck.

Airplanes proved impossible until Glenn Curtiss and his contemporaries made gasoline engines practical. The same power/weight advantages make these engines technically superior for passenger cars and light trucks as well. (Note that Curtiss started out making engines for racing motorcycles and only later adapted them to aircraft.)

Storage and handling make gasoline and diesel fuels technically superior as well. They are both non-volatile liquids, meaning that if you pour them out into an open container, they'll hang around for a useful length of time. Though gasoline will evaporate on the time scale of minutes to hours (depending on the container's geometry), that's long enough to run it through an engine and extract the energy locked inside. Diesel will hang around even longer.

Methane, propane, butane, and the mixture commonly known as natural gas must be kept pressurized or they'll have an instant escape. The same, by the way, goes for hydrogen, which has a host of additional issues. Gasoline and diesel fuel's low volatility makes designing, building, and maintaining in-vehicle fuel storage systems relatively cheap and easy. The skills involved are those of any Medieval Gypsy tinker, not those of a modern refrigeration specialist.

Another storage advantage gasoline and diesel fuel have is the amount of energy packed into every gram of mass and liter of volume. Ten gallons of gasoline, which weighs a mere 60 lb, is enough to push a four-passenger car weighing over a ton a couple of hundred miles without stopping.

This, of course, is the Achilles' heel of electric vehicles. While electricity, being pure energy, takes up no space and has no weight, the equipment needed to safely contain the stuff in quantities practical for motor transportation very definitely takes up large quantities of space and has enormous weight.

"But," you say, "those arguments hold quite well for that darling of the alternative fuels community, alcohol."

What messed up the works for alcohol at the dawn of the 20th Century, and haunts it still today, is the fact that the stuff doesn't occur naturally. Until humans figured out how to harness the sugar-munching-and-alcohol-pooping potential of microbes, alcohol simply did not exist in useful quantities. Fossil oil, on the other hand, occurs in oceanic quantities just below the surface of the Earth's crust. Not only is it laying around practically everywhere, but it's just dying to get out. One of the biggest technical problems for those whose life's work is to get the stuff out of the ground and into your tank is keeping it from spraying out all over the place before they have a chance to capture it in a pipe.

True, the stuff that comes out of the ground won't burn in your engine without some refining. That process, however, mainly involves heating it until the oversize molecules jiggle apart into smaller units, which are easy to separate and grade into various useful fractions - which include gasoline and fuel oil.

Alcohol, on the other hand, is a whole lot more expensive to produce. It is so expensive that nobody has found a way make it economically feasible for motor fuel. The same goes for other alternative fuels. The folks who advocate hydrogen for use as a fuel, for example, have to deal with this disadvantage as well.

Basically, we've disposed of pretty much all alternatives to gasoline and diesel fuel for motor vehicles. What makes the alternatives unable to compete with them are the same things that made our ancestors choose them in the first place. They're simply the best choice by far among many alternatives.

No matter how committed the Obama Administration is, and how politically charged the debate about climate change becomes, alternative fuels just won't displace gasoline and diesel as motor fuels as long as the latter is readily available. It's like King Canute commanding the tide to stay out. All he accomplished was getting his feet wet.

Yes, alternatives will win out eventually, but not until we use up the available fossil fuels. And that will take many decades, yet.