Health Futures Digest, which is edited in and runs on open source
software, likes to do its bit to counter the egregious disinformation and
disparagement of the genuine power and value
of open source alternatives to Microsoft software. The much more intensive
and extensive Weather.com operation, which has also gone wholly open source,
would seem to agree with us.

While Microsoft is busy manipulating minds in order to close them to open
source, the corporate-academic complex sees a big future in manipulating
atomic-scale components, starting with electrons for data storage and
single molecules engineered into circuit
elements. Paper is staging a comeback as a data storage medium, this time in
the form of a prototype optical disk, made
half out of paper, that stores five times more data than current disks.

A deceptively simple egg-shaped device that changes color in response to
changes in the stock market, your bathroom scales, or anything else connected to
the Internet, is a form of “ubiquitous” and in a sense “invisible” yet tangible computing.

It seems the Negroponte Flip, which will be fulfilled when what was wired
becomes wireless and vice versa, could be completed in the US within two years,
because that is when wireless
broadband is expected to be ubiquitous. But that does not take into account
emerging holohaptic applications such as touchable holograms of human bodies for
medical research, training, and ultimately diagnosis and therapy, which will
force us to redefine the term “broadband,” and the Negroponte Flip will have to
wait a while longer for fulfillment.

We’ve said it before: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is going to be
significant for healthcare providers, who tend to be heavy users of and heavily
dependent on voice communications. VoIP should reduce the costs of and add
functionality to telephone services. In Australia, VoIP has just surged past traditional
telephone and is soon to do so in the UK, where British Telecom has unveiled
a massive program to switch over entirely to VoIP.

Google may have met its match in a search
engine built by and for the KGB, and now on sale in America. Another new search engine, made in America,
helps engineers quickly locate parts by sketching a 3D drawing of
one.

University of Florida scientists are building a “chaotic computer.” We will
not try to explain the science (see the reference for that); suffice it to say
that a chaotic chip could be reconfigured so rapidly that it could perform
entirely different functions with each tick of the clock and perform many
different logical operations simultaneously. In short, it would be a quantum
jump in both speed and functionality.

The team, reports the Economist, has so far built one chaotic logic
element out of simple electronic components (resistors, capacitors, etc.) and
another out of a pair of leech neurons placed on a microchip.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “Chaotic
computing: Logic from chaos?.” Economist, April 1.

New Level of Reality in Virtual Reality

Whereas Moore’s Law predicts a doubling of the power of CPU chips every 18
months, the power of graphics chips has been doubling every 12 — and the latest
are in fact already far more powerful than Pentium 4 CPU chips, with double the
number of transistors and multiple parallel-processing on-chip processors (in
one case, 32.) With the increasing use of video graphics in PCs, the CPU has
been essentially relegated to peripheral status — the graphics processor has in
a sense become the central processor.

Nvidia and ATI, the two leading makers of graphics chips, have each unveiled
more powerful chips that make computer-generated beings look as lifelike as
those generated on banks of computers to make today’s animated movies. An Nvidia
executive told the Wall Street Journal‘s Tom Clark that its computerized
female model called Dawn has been offered parts in TV commercials. “The chips,”
writes Clark, “will help bring a new level of realism and emotional force in
games by creating characters that are more convincing when they move, talk,
laugh and cry.” Clark points to the likelihood that movies will merge with PC
games.

Reference: Clark, Don (2004). “Videogames
Get Real: Advanced Graphics Chips Make Features More Lifelike; Closing the Gap
With Film.” Wall Street Journal, April 14.

Open Source Advances

Weather.com, the Internet counterpart of cable TV’s Weather Channel, “runs
almost entirely on open-source software,” reports Julia King in
ComputerWorld. Since making the switch from proprietary software four
years ago, Weather.com has cut its IT costs by a third while increasing its
processing capacity by the same magnitude. “Despite the self-serving air of
fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that commercial vendors create around
open-source software,” a Weather.com executive told King, “lots of open-source
products work very well and can be deployed and run for about half the cost of
commercial products.”

The savings arose from replacing $500,000 machines needed to run proprietary
software with $50,000 machines running Linux. They replaced IBM WebSphere
servers and associated DB2 database software with open-source
Tomcat, which they found to be “significantly faster” at least for the
specific application at hand, and are now working to replace their expensive
Oracle database with open-source MySQL.

For hospitals struggling to improve their IT capabilities on very little
money, open source ought to be a no-brainer. CEOs, CFOs and trustees should talk
to their CIOs, and not be put off by spurious repetition of FUD. Open source is
a very real and much-needed alternative.

Reference: King, Julia (2004). “A
Sunny Forecast for Open-Source.” ComputerWorld, April 26.

Spintronics II

The large scale of an IBM-Stanford University joint program to research
spintronics — the use of the spin of electrons to perform computations — shows
not only how seriously the potential is being taken but also “underscores the
reliance of I.B.M. and other big businesses on relationships with major
universities,” writes Barnaby Feder in the New York Times. It “lays the
groundwork for the future in many ways,” one of the project’s leaders told him.

Today’s hard discs owe their high capacity to spintronics, but the phenomenon
has much deeper potential significance. Spintronic chips, for example, could use
magnetism rather than electric current, using less energy, producing less heat,
and retaining data even when power is lost. IBM researchers have already
developed a prototype magnetic RAM (“MRAM”) chip that can store 16 megabytes of
data — not much, but a step toward computers that will store enough data in
fast MRAM to boot up instantly.

Reference: Feder, Barnaby (2004). “I.B.M. Joins
Stanford to Find Uses for Electron Spin.” New York Times, April 26.

Reference: Asaravala, Amit (2004). “Spinning Out
Faster, Better Chips.” Wired News, April 21.

Making Chips Atom by Atom

The potential for molecular computing, and for creating silicon chips that
embody it, has advanced a significant step with the refinement of a technique
for adding single atoms to “Buckyball” (C-60 Fullerene) carbon molecules. A
University of California at Berkeley scientist used a scanning tunneling
microscope to precisely tailor the electronic properties of a single molecule by
adding potassium atoms, one by one. This means that a single molecule could
comprise a circuit element, reducing the size of a powerful chip to a speck of
dust.

Other researchers have come close to achieving this level of manipulation,
but not with the same level of control, reports Anne Eisenberg in the New
York Times. “Other approaches for altering molecules’ electronic properties
are being tried, including chemical synthesis and the use of electrodes as
gates,” she adds, “and much work lies ahead to create molecular circuit
elements.”

Reference: Eisenberg, Anne (2004). “Refining
Semiconductors, One Atom at a Time.” New York Times, April 8.

Back to Paper

Sony and Toppan Printing have developed a new optical disc comprised of 51
percent paper, making it cheap to produce and more readily disposable. It stores
five times more information than current discs, because it is based on
blue-laser instead of the red-laser technology used in today’s DVD players. It
could be on the market in “a few” years.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “Sony,
Toppan Develop Optical Disc Made from Paper.” Reuters, April 16.

Ubiquitous, Tangible, “Glanceable”
Computing

A US$150 wireless, programmable, egg-shaped device changes color in sync with
the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Green means the Dow is up, red means it’s
down, and yellow means it’s not moving.

“Orbs,” as the devices are called, have also been programmed to track the job
market in a city, visits to a website, energy use in an apartment, eBay
auctions, and the size of an e-mail inbox. They are based on work at MIT Media
Lab and other centers researching the human-computer interface, and represent an
alternative to the standard presentation of information in textual, tabular, or
graphical format.

The company that makes them is also developing picture frames that inform the
subject of the picture when someone is close to the picture and therefore
probably “thinking about them,” a watch that alerts a patient to take
medications, a keychain fob that provides traffic information, and other
devices.

Other applications of “tangible computing,” as the approach is known, include
monitoring weight, daily exercise, depression symptoms, and other healthcare
signs from a distance.

Reference: Felberbaum, Michael (2004). “Future
of ‘Glanceable’ Technology Glows.” Associated Press via Los Angeles Times,
April 16.

Ubiquitous Wireless Broadband In Two
Years

The Wall Street Journal‘s Walter Mossberg gives a glowing review of a
new wireless broadband service from Verizon, currently running in San Diego and
Washington DC and planned for nationwide rollout by the end of 2005. The service
is “as fast as most wired DSL lines, and it worked effortlessly almost
everywhere I tried it in a wide swath of Washington and its suburbs,” says
Mossberg.

Reference: Mossberg, Walter S. (2004). “Verizon Is
Crossing The U.S. With Speedy, True Wireless Access.” Wall Street Journal,
April 8.

VoIP Surging

In Australia, sales of VoIP (Voice over IP) — that is, routing phone calls
over the Internet — systems grew by 176 percent in 2003, much of the growth
coming from government, hospitality, manufacturing, education, and healthcare.
In the same period, sales of traditional phone systems fell 13 percent. It is
predicted that VoIP will overtake traditional PABX systems in market share in
Australia in 2004.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “VoIP
to take lead in 2004.” Australian IT, April 7.

New Spin on Spyware

“Some of the pioneers of artificial intelligence,” writes Henry Fountain in
Scientific American, ” . . . would have thought that by the 21st century
a computer would be able to read a book, consider it in the context of other
knowledge and express some thoughtful opinions about it.”

In fact, software called InfoTame comes pretty close. InfoTame
is an artificial intelligence data-mining program able to quickly sift through
terabytes of text in multiple (human) languages to find information of
significance to the user. Originally developed by the KGB, InfoTame is
still maintained by “one of the world’s largest teams of mathematicians in
Moscow,” according to an article in ContactCenterWorld.

It is now being marketed in the US and UK to “Law firms, investment banks,
market research professionals, forensic accountants, academic researchers, news
organizations” and others. We have checked out InfoTame‘s informative website and indeed found the product demos
impressive both conceptually and practically.

Reference: Fountain, Henry (2004). “AI
at the Inception: A 25th-anniversary edition of a classic chronicles the
fledgling science of artificial intelligence.” Scientific American, April
26.

Reference: Unknown (2004). “KGB
Artificial Intelligence Software Comes in from the Cold.”
ContactCenterWorld.com, April 1.

3D Search Engine

Researchers at Purdue, Princeton, and Boeing have developed search engines
that can find matches in a parts catalog for three-dimensional objects, from a
sketch drawn by the user with a mouse of digital pen. Engineers often reinvent
the wheel because they don’t know someone already made one. The new search
engines will accelerate product design and engineering, and have many other
potential uses.

Reference: Bergstein, Brian (2004). “Researchers
Develop 3-D Search Engine.” Associated Press via SiliconValley.com, April
16.