omenti

sharpen your dot connection skills...

Scientists are skilled dot connecters as that is one of the more powerful tools of the trade.  Years ago Greg, another physicist, recommended visiting "companies that make stuff"and see if they'll give you a tour of their process.  Making physical things presents multiple challenges including human factors and social challenges and, if you get someone who is proud of what they're doing, you can dive in and ask a lot of questions getting some real depth in the process.  

 

Over the years I've visited companies that brew beer, cartoon, make rocket engines, fabricate ICs, build large gas turbines, do precision wood work, build submarines, bake cakes, make ultrasound machines, pull wire, smelt copper, make exotic steels, make potato chips, make electric motors, make dresses (many companies here - it is a rich area), craft bespoke shoes for athletes, build exotic batteries, make LED lamps, and build bikes (that is a small list - it has been going on for years).  

 

All of these tours have been worthwhile and some of the visits have given serious insight for problems I have worked on years later - the potato chip factory visit provided just the right clue in thinking about mesh networking. Although the reasoning is a bit difficult to explain, all of a sudden the network problem became obvious in light of the clues I had learned watching a quality control step at the Utz factory in Pennsylvania.  

 

Post 9/11 it has been more difficult to get tours (I tired for a few years to get a tour of the place that makes water tanks for buildings in Manhattan before having success) and many companies are giving up the fabrication phase at this point.  But don't let that stop you - there are a lot of places that are thrilled to have someone take an interest.  Except for the Mars company (M&Ms) - one I will probably never crack...

 

I've learned a lot from bicycles including their design and fabrication.  Simple machines  hold a special interest as you can easily wrap your head around the integrated design.  So this 1945 film on the fabrication of Raleigh bikes is particularly good.  I'm keeping this short today as I spent the 17 or so minutes watching.  Comments from the company:

Our resident historian (HR Manager Frank Ellis) tells us that the bike was a “Low Gravity Carrier” (a Butcher’s Bike to you and I) and “The guy putting ball bearings in the bottom bracket took me back….he had that authentic piecework dance…people used to say that if you worked at Raleigh long enough you started doing the dance in your sleep!” 

Frank, who carried out time and motion studies when he joined Raleigh as an apprentice in the 70s, said: “The hub lacing shot towards the end was great to see. It used to be done by hand by women and the first frames capture the classic fanned spokes that the women achieved with a simple flick of the wrist…try that one and see if you can get them anywhere near as evenly spaced! I’m always telling people the top women pieceworkers were faster than the automatic hub lacer, but I might be exaggerating just a little.”

Give it a view - great stuff!

 

 

Bike manufacture has changed considerably in the 65+ years since then and that is another story...  I've been involved in it a bit myself and for someone without a mechanical engineering background it has been a terrific education and has expanded the pool of dots in my quiver.

 

Nothing like ending on a mixed metaphor...

 

 

a pre-review

Jon Gertner's new book on Bell Labs has just been published and a few people have written to ask what I think about it.  I haven't read it yet, but am very curious as I was part of that organization from the end of its golden years through its demise.  It was a unique and amazing place - a fundamentally different approach to "innovation" than what is common today.  It isn't clear to me which approaches are better or worse - the old Bell Labs approach doesn't square with how companies work these days.

 

The old AT&T was a regulated monopoly divestiture in 1984.  A few percent of its income was channeled into running the labs - known as the Bell Telephone Laboratories and, through a series of regulatory consent decrees - funding was incredibly stable and sufficient to insure very long term research and development projects.  After a decree in 1956, inventions were licensed under very liberal terms to the rest of the nation and the Labs had become something of a national laboratory.  

 

I won't go into the history of the place and will be interested to see how it is charted in Gertner's book, but the core DNA of the place needs to be explained.

 

Innovation had a very specific meaning.  It didn't mean invention or discovery, but rather was discovery taken through stages of development and finally implemented at a scale that would change society.  

 

The Labs was primarily advanced and applied development with a core basic research arm (area 10 - later renamed area 11 about the time I joined it).  Fundamental researchers were presented with an amazing array from curious problems.  The notion was not the standard approach of engineering where you attack a problem by tallying your resources and try to build an optimal result, but rather something a bit more zen.

 

In the research unit you defined and attacked problems by looking for the unknown and then trying to understand as much as your could about it.  You had to go deeply into uncharted territory not knowing if your efforts would pay off or if you had the right intellectual tools for the job.

 

This approach - solving a jigsaw puzzle not by identifying your pieces and putting them together, but rather looking for the missing pieces and trying to solve a puzzle by understanding what was missing - required a multidisciplinary approach.  It is close to the approach of physics and basic research had a high percentage of Ph.D. physicists.  Really good ones.  Their specialties were not as important a their taste in problem solving.  I was an experimental particle physicist.  Bell Labs never dabbled in particle physics, but that was "the right stuff" and they saw an immediate match.

 

We worked with computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, opticians, chemists, acoustics experts, material scientists, psychologists, neurologists, biologists, musicians and artists to name a few backgrounds.  The central laboratory at Murray Hill, New Jersey was built around a five story corridor a quarter mile long with a sometimes maze-like structure of smaller buildings.  Going to lunch or visiting someone else's lab would force interaction with others. It was said a researcher going to lunch was like a magnet rolling by iron filings.  It was a brilliant architecture and aspects of it have been duplicated elsewhere.¹

 

Some of the projects had very long horizons - digital communications took about four decades and thousands of researchers years of effort.  This type of time frame is only seen universities and national laboratories these days and is rarely directly coupled efficiently with commercial development.

 

But the next step in innovation - and one where the majority of Bell Labs people worked - was development research and engineering.  This is enormously difficult to get right. Most of the projects were defined by either Bell Labs management based on needs of the Bell System or by the government for national defense.  Many were difficult projects that advanced the state of the art by an order of magnitude and this was something of a model for DARPA, which came about in the 1950s with a clearer focus on military needs.

 

As the applied research and development proceeded it was productized and turned over to Western Electric - the manufacturing arm.  People in the various units spent time with each other.  Small branch development labs were built into Western Electric factories and the development folks often worked directly on the lines to understand the problems.  

 

The approach wasn't as clean as I describe it and there were tensions that had to be dealt with, but it was an innovation engine that changed the world.  It even paid a lot of attention to education creating everything from science and engineering ciricula to identifying promising students - mentoring them and getting them through their Ph.D.s in the best universities at no expense.

 

A very different approach than what is used, and perhaps needed, today.  The model today has universities and national labs doing the basic work with companies mostly engaged in short term development - real corporate research is not common.  Even long term development is rare^.2  True corporate research is mostly dead as is an integrated multi-disciplinary approach.  

 

Companies identify the pieces of the puzzle they have and try to build something optimal rather than trying to understand the missing pieces deeply.

 

As the Labs started to crumble in the late 80s I switched my focus from physics to something more applied - broadband to the home.  The problems were how do you do it and why do you do it.  The later lead to work in digital music and both led me to the notion that I *really* needed to understand social research.  I immersed myself in a human computer interaction department and hopefully helped out a bit with a bit of experimental rigor, very different thinking and a lot of naïve questions that turned out not to be so naïve.  I learned a lot in the process, but the efforts of the group were never coupled to the company at that point.  We did a lot of neat stuff that is finally beginning to be realized now.

 

I still try to search for projects that are looking for a bit of deeper understanding when I consult.  There are a lot of diamonds on the beach these days - as there probably always are.  The approach is rare and I find it odd that I'm sometimes seen as much broader than I see myself.  It is really just a bit of curiosity and the luck of having an amazingly rich chance to work in an environment that makes places like Apple and Pixar look lame when it comes to "multi-disciplinary".  I think there is great value to bits and pieces of the approach as suspect we'll see more of it as the tech world matures and energy becomes a more pressing issue.

 

I don't know what picture the book will paint.  I was witness to an amazing dinosaur and hope some of the better features of the place can be replicated.

 

We had a crisp definition of innovation. The physics people had a crisp definition of data and information.  I find the physics defnition at odds with common usage and I'll post on that in the near future - I've hinted at it before.  Data isn't basic...

 

Om recently commented on creativity talking about John Maeda of RISD.  This caused me to think of some comments from the professor of a graduate physics course I took as an undergrad.  The professor was famous for his creativity having been sprinkled with Swedish holy water.  Somehow he wanted to get over a few points on being creative - he thought you could inspire it.  

 

from my notebook:

 

° be curious about anything and everything. expose yourself to different people and ideas

° don’t be frightened to try the unknown. Many solve puzzles by figuring out what they can do with the puzzle pieces they have. A better approach is to figure out the missing pieces and solve a puzzle you don’t know anything about by learning about them.

° remember it must be play

° the delight is not in finding the answer, but in coming to it yourself

° be totally honest

° deeply know everything about your problem

° real creativity simplifies – aim for simplicity as it is beautiful

° get into something so deeply you forget everything else. you need large pieces of uninterrupted time

 

much more on these later, but back to the old Bell Telephone Laboratories for a bit. When I first started I was delighted to learn that my first director was something of an aurora expert.  He was invovled in the Telstar communications project and was involved in the beginnings of creating the field of what is now called space weather. He would have loved this time lapse of the aurora taken from the ISS a few days ago...

 

 _______

¹ Pixar uses centrally located washrooms and has a design that reminds me of Murray Hill on a much smaller scale.

² IBM, Intel and Microsoft do longer term work in the tech sector. Apple has a ten year horizon for some projects, but anything longer than three years is very rare in industry. One of the longer term interests was video telephony. Here is something on developments in color video telephony .... in 1930.

seeing the future

And inventing it in an industrial lab...

This morning I found myself chatting with an old friend and client.  I did some physics related work for his firm as they were heavy with computer science people, but lacked background in the physical sciences and suddenly found themselves in need.  He noted some of the things he learned from our interaction was outside of the primary work - namely he came to recognize the importance of mobile devices and good user experiences as gating factors for a revolution.  Sadly he retired - he was complaining about all of the fun he had missed.

 

Twenty years ago we had been at the same place - the Bell Laboratories.  He had been there longer than me - I joined shortly before AT&T was broken up into AT&T and the regional Bell Operating Companies and a few other pieces - but both of us had a good window into the most productive and exciting periods of the place.  AT&T had been a regulated monopoly - a mishmash of the good and the bad.  One of the good pieces was a real honest to goodness R&D lab could be supported.  The Bell Telephone Laboratories was probably the best industrial lab of the 20^th century and fundamental research as well as the invention of the scientific and technological underpinning of electronic communications happened there. 

 

These days real industrial soup to nuts R&D is very rare.  While there is a lot of development, there is very little pure research - even applied research is not terribly common.  It exists, but massive laboratories where the atmosphere is charged with the possibilities of chance collaborations and the serendipity that result are gone - relegated to Universities and government laboratories where departmental barriers tend to be high.

 

BTL was where I learned the importance of connecting the dots and learning things outside of my normal areas of math and physics.  That continued even as the place began to crumble and I found myself bridging into areas I didn't know existed.  The trick was being curious and walk around listening to people who were excited by something, learn about it, find a common language and jump in with both feet.  You also had to be open to inviting those who were interested in your projects to your corner of the sandbox.

 

What we have now is still very interesting, but this is a different time and companies have to be more opportunistic.  Some of them, like Apple, have been brilliant about recognizing technology by itself isn't enough and have profited enormously.  A few other companies have been doing this at a smaller scale and we are on the edge of several disruptions.  I see new structures that allow serious dot connection and play beginning to emerge.

 

This morning's a wave of nostalgia caused me to remember some of the old AT&T ads another friend sent a few months ago.  AT&T had a strong public outreach for STEM education as well as general public relations pieces.  Some of this appeared in ads that ran in places young males (sadly not many women were encouraged although we had a few superstars) might find time - these ran in Boy's Life Magazine in the early 1960s a year after Echo, but before Telstar...  

 

with that, Chip Martin - College Reporter:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

inspiring the right people and creating the right condition for leaps

Prizes are curious things.  Most are recognitions of some event, but a few have been crafted to inspire people to do something very difficult - something that makes a fundamental difference.  

 

Perhaps the most famous prize was the Longitude Prize - a reward by the British government in 1714 for a simple and accurate method to establish a ship’s longitude.  Navigation had become extremely important.  Latitude is easy to determine, but longitude was usually found by dead reckoning - an inherently inaccurate technique.

 

The prizes offered were significant ranging from £10,000 for a method that could determine longitude within 60 nautical miles, £15,000  for 40 nautical miles and £20,000 for 30 nautical miles.  Additionally smaller amounts were offered for significant progress towards a goal and advances were offered for promising methods.  The total prize money was £100,000 - roughly $25 million in today’s money.  

 

This set off a major industry of inquiry and invention involving many of the great minds of the day.  The history is fascinating - I recommend Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time for a great read.

 

The trick to a great prize is to find something that is possible, but is still so difficult that little progress has been made.  It is very easy to offer a target that is too easy or difficult.  There should be enough of a reward - usually a mixture of tangible and intangible - to motivate enough people as the real progress often comes from people who are not directly involved in the field.  John Harrison, the winner of the Longitude Prize, was a complete dark horse.

 

Some prizes have managed to capture long standing human dreams.  

 

In 1959 the British Industrialist Henry Kremmer offered a series of prizes for human powered flight.  The first was £50,000 for the first human-powered aircraft to fly a figure eight pattern around two points separated by a half mile.  The starting and finishing points had to be at least ten feet above the ground.  The second prize was £100,000 was to fly over the English Channel.  A few other prizes were concerned with speed and maneuverability and I think some are still unclaimed.

 

I'm lucky enough to have known the principal character behind winning the first and second prizes.

 

Our bicycle club had a few people who were fascinated by slow flight - low speed aerodynamics.  Hang gliding was becoming popular - at least for a few risk takers - and designs were advancing from simple (and sometimes dangerous) rogallo wings to much more sophisticated designs.  Paul MacCready was a gifted aeronautical engineer who was making serious contributions to the applied science of low speed fluid dynamics.  Paul had been a champion sailplane pilot and had some ideas on what it might take to win the prize.  He determined the first two were possible and enlisted local help.  

 

Paul and Peter Lissaman built the Gossamer Condor - actually there were three versions.  I put a bit of labor into the first aircraft - the Pasadena version.  The Shafter version was piloted by a very lightweight and strong hang glider pilot named Bryan Allen.¹ 

 

In August of 1977 the Gossamer Condor - 70 pounds empty and a 96 foot wingspan - flying at about 10 mph with Bryan as its engine won the first prize.  About two years later an improved aircraft - the Gossamer Albatross/Bryan Allen combination made it across the English Channel in a bit under three hours.  Bryan, at about 140 pounds, weighed twice as much as the aircraft and had to supply about 250 watts - a third of a horsepower - to keep it flying.

 

A dream had been realized.

 

Paul was a fantastically interesting guy to chat with - one of those guys who was obviously interested in many things and topics that are important.  One of those guys who connects dots. Spend the twenty minutes or so to watch his TED talk from 1998 where he talks about change.

 

 

In the talk, starting around minute 13,  you’ll notice some small remotely piloted vehicles.  It is important to recognize this talk was giving in 1998.  These came from Paul’s company AeroVironment.  The company is something of a Skunkworks that specialized in low speed aerodynamics and efficiency.  Human powered flight was cracked there and that opened the way to solar powered flight and electric airplanes.  They’ve explored very small aircraft for the military and have an interest in electric power automobiles.  A neat place.

 

The unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming very important for the military and there are literally dozens of types.  The small camera carrying aircraft are sometimes called first person view (FPV) aircraft and stunning advances have been made by advanced hobbyists.  Check out what you can do for a few thousand dollars.  

AeroVironment has a fantastic project called the hummingbird for DARPA that uses bird flight as a model.  It weighs less than 20 grams (about 3/4 ounce) and currently has a mission endurance of nearly 10 minutes.  We may soon have the ability to collect video and other intelligence at very close range with vehicles that are potentiall very inexpensive and difficult to detect.

 

At a larger scale there is a market for agriculture, utility, rescue and police FPV UAVs. The FAA will announce new rules for UAVs in January as current rules are very restrictive and were created with different technologies in mind.  There may be a market - helicopters start at around $2 million and are expensive to maintain and operate while stable camera platforms with very low operating costs can be had in the $5k to $50k range.  Aerovironment’s offering is the Qube and reportedly goes for about $40k.

 

Fully autonomous UAVs have been built and, along with FPV UAVs there are serious society and technology concerns. Some of us were wondering about the use of these devices in the Occupy movement - demonstrators, news and government.  Advanced hobbyists could easily supply the demonstrators now, although it isn’t clear if flying them would be considered illegal or if permits are required.  

 

Larger versions can have an endurance measured in the hours, can be autonomous and operated thousands of miles from a pilot when necessary and can carry payloads that go beyond surveillance - so called “active” platforms.   Even the toy class vehicles are impressive.²

 

Once again we’re on the edge of what may be a major change in what is considered private. 

__________

¹ Bryan was an excellent rider and could easily drop anyone else in the club.  You may wonder "why use a bike rider?"  It turns out this is all about power to weight.  Power generally increases as the square of an organism's size and weight with the cube.  A really big guy can generate a lot of power, but there is a penalty as you have to build a larger airplane.  You are looking for the sweet spot -  the smallest possible (lightest and lowest air resistance) aircraft. Bike racers tend to have huge leg muscles and a lot of endurance - ideal engines.  The sweet spot is for riders between about 120 and 140 pounds of weight.  A shorter pilot with large legs would be ideal.  There are some female riders who have flown this type of aircraft.

The other question is "why legs"?  It turns out it is easy to make a very light and efficient transmission that can transmit the power from the motion legs generate on pedals to a propeller - something over 98% efficiency.  It doesn't make sense to use the arms and the legs as power output is metabolically limited.  As long as a person's legs are adequately trained the total output combining power from other muscles doesn't add anything - if you add the arms, power output from the legs decreases.

² I've flown an AR Parrot Drone with an iPhone.  It clearly takes more practice than I had given it and I crashed a few times, but this is a very impressive device for large indoor spaces or calm outdoor settings.  A serious amount of technology for under $300.

 

 

a non recommendation

The right tool for the job - perhaps I can save you a bit of money...

 

Earlier in the week I attended a two day event in Manhattan that brings investors and tech industry types together.   I somewhat belong to the later group and the mixing is interesting - particularly the one-on-one conversations you find yourself in that would probably not occur outside this venue. Mixing people up is often brilliant.

 

As four people asked what I thought about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs it seems reason to write a bit about it.  Usually I stay away from making negative comments about books as I’m not a good writer and it seems wrong to judge someone who is a successful author.  But the book has serious flaws, so here goes...

 

I bought the book with a some misgivings as his book on Einstein biography left me cold.  It was an interesting read, full of details about his life, but Isaacson struck me as an incurious author.  There were technical mistakes (I’m a physicist) and, worse, directions that should have been explored.  It may be just his style and the fact I know the field and had read several biographies (if you have a scientific bent go for Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais)¹, but it left me with enough of a distaste that I wish I would have waited a bit before making the a decision about buying it.

 

I won’t give a review, but there are numerous technical and historical mistakes.  Some quotes are incorrect (for example he has Bill Gates noting a certain type of optical media didn’t make sense because it had too short a latency) - something I don’t like to see from a “name” biographer.  Some of these indicate it was a rush job, and I’m sure it was so it could be on the market at the optimal time, but deeper problems lurk.

 

Jobs told Isaacson he wanted him as the biographer as he could get people to talk.  Fair enough.  A remarkable range of people were interviewed and Isaacson appeared to have great freedom.  The problem is that Isaacson wasn’t curious.  He was getting bits and pieces of a larger story and failed to pursue several interesting paths.  The whole book felt like a series of Time magazine articles stapled together.  If he had been curious and followed these leads the book may have given real insight into how Jobs thought and how Apple, under Jobs, functioned.  As it is there is little new information on those subjects.

 

The personal side of Jobs is something that is of interest and perhaps he got more of this right.  Jobs does come over as the nasty self-important jerk many have reported, but I didn’t get any insight on how this was important to Apple and Pixar.  It didn’t seem to go deep enough.  There are aspects of his personality that I have been exposed to in a few meetings as well as one-on-one conversations that were simply missing.  I saw a bit of the nasty side, but not much.  What struck me was how intellectually curious he could be and how he took delight in playing with concepts.  I was struck by his sense of humor and think that may have been part of how he interacted with people. 

 

I wish someone who understood the industry and happened to be very curious had been anointed as the chief biographer.  To do a reasonable job would probably require quite a bit of time after Jobs’ death.  It seems like a lost opportunity.  Hopefully people close to him will write.  I’d love to hear what Jony Ive would say.  In the meantime we'll probably see more tone-deaf pieces like Gladwell's New Yorker essay on the "tweaker" ...

 

The book did serve the purpose of making it as a best-seller and perhaps that was the primary intention.   

 

I can’t recommend it if you are trying to understand Jobs more deeply and particularly if you want to understand the history of Apple, NeXT and Pixar.

________

 

The flaws of the book  did make me think about what Amazon’s Kindle Fire is. 

 

Apple is very good at discovering the core of something and moving towards simplicity.

 

I have a tendency to disregard consumer electronic reviews from industry pundits.  The lens they view the world from is often that of the engineer, which is one of the reasons Apple has been so successful.  Most of Apple’s competitors are primarily engineering companies making it easy for Apple.  Apple moves towards simplicity and the competition doesn't.  Apple has done a lot of things right, but probably not as much as it seems.  Some of their luster comes from the fact their competition is ill-equipped to make great products.  It is good to have incompetent competition.

 

If someone who understands the space comments, I listen.  Marco Arment does understand tech and user experience. His review, combined with notes from a few user experience people, tell me the Fire is an incompetent tablet measured by the bar set by the iPad.  You would do much better spending your $200 on a used first generation iPad.  You probably don't want to gift one.

 

Perhaps the real question is: "what is the Fire?"  It may look like a tablet, but perhaps it isn’t. 

 

The iPad wasn’t really a tablet as envisioned by Microsoft and many who believed Microsoft’s vision dismissed it initially.  It was a collection of functionality that would be useful to someone who is moving around a house and holding something as they would hold a magazine.  It was also initially seen as a consumption device, but it has much more flexibility and is finding new uses.  The iPad is evolving and creating new niches even now.

 

My gut tells me the Kindle is a pure consumption device that strongly ties you to Amazon.  It is a key piece of their evolving platform and, as such, can be somewhat orthogonal to the iPad class of tablet.  Think of it as an Amazon vending machine that you can carry around.  A machine that Amazon gets you to buy.  Pretty neat for them if they can make it work.  At this point it appears there are issues that may render it frustrating as a vending machine.  Amazon will have to address them if they want to grow their platform.  It probably makes sense for them to support iPads and Android devices too - after all, those are just customers coming in through different doors.

 

It will be interesting to revisit this in six months. 

________

¹ If you want to get a sense of how revolutionary Einstein's ideas are I would recommend learning a bit of special relativity if you haven't tackled it.  It only requires high school level math and is is exceptionally clear and logical.  You get a much deeper insight by playing with it rather than just reading about it.

Similarly trying to design a simple interface to something can be an incredible learning experience.  I've done a few and have found it humbling, but I've learned a lot with each try.  

Passive interaction does not lead to depth in a subject. You need to go out and engage in a bit of play.

 

 

on the death of the high fidelity industry

One of the more curious learnings I’ve repeatedly had over the decades is that audio and video quality isn’t terribly important to people.  Some jumps have been important, but at some point quality seems to be “good enough” and people become interested in other metrics like price, mobility, convenience and selection.

 

We did a lot of work on audio compression and there was a drive to make our codec (AAC) the best of its class.  This involved a large amount of human testing and the reference music was mostly compact disc class.  Higher qualities existed, but it was felt compressed music to CD like quality was necessary.  

 

We did it.  By 2000 AAC was recognized as the best of its breed and it was statistically undetectable to most listeners at 128 kilobits per second.¹  A CD is 1440 kbps, so this shrinks the data file for a music track to about 9% of its original size - really useful if your network connection isn’t terribly fast. 

 

Audiophiles had been hoping one of several standards would take off by about that time taking us beyond CD quality, but it never really happened.  Internet delivered music and the iPod fundamentally changed how we listened to music.  A few years ago I came across an article that pointed out the aftermarket for iPod accessories was larger than the entire market for stereo equipment.  Good enough sound quality in our pockets and a large and easy to use library was all we needed - onventional HiFi was dying and some would say it is dead.² 

 

The little white earbuds you see everywhere are not exactly high quality.  For $40 or $50 you can dramatically improve your listening experience and for $150 or so the quality can be fantastic.  But almost no one does it.  The quality issue just doesn’t impact most of us.

 

There are other directions music quality could do - trying to create the sound field - the audio experience - of a concert.  But there is this little problem - outside of multichannel sound for television, no one is spending money on audio equipment and very few people spend serious money on good audio equipment for their televisions.  

 

It just doesn’t matter.

 

mostly³

 

A few years ago some of us revisited the issue of speech quality on telephones.  The frequency range of a normal telephone is small compared with normal human hearing and voices, particularly female voices, are altered.  Mobile phones introduce even more issues with low quality audio compression.  The notion was that expanding the frequency range from about 3 kHz to 7 kHz would make a big difference that people might pay buy.  We did some careful studies on 3 vs 7 vs 20 and came to the conclusion that it isn’t a big deal for most people.   In fact people under 30 had a slight bias to the lower quality sound.

 

I speculate that for music or video there is a point at which the underlying performance is more important.  If we don’t reach that point the performance is merely wallpaper and we don’t pay a lot of attention to it.  As we cross some threshold what is being the performance becomes so engrossing that inferior reproduction isn’t a huge issue to most of us.  I’ve seen this repeated over and over ...  In an earlier post  I noted on an epiphanal moment I had:

 

A good example is that the enjoyment of music often is decoupled with the quality of reproduction.  I was in a classic restored Mustang near Cleveland with the head recording engineer from Telarc Records and a seriously good musician from the Oberlin Conservatory.  We were talking about where music reproduction might go with sound field reconstruction and dramatically more information than CDs could provide when a favorite Beatles tune came up on the 8 track (gasp! - it was an authentically restored Mustang).  The volume came up and the two of them were soon singing along to the music in pure delight.  There is something transcendent about the music - even with the awful reproduction in that noisy environment.  This taught me home stereos might die if we could only give people good enough music that was always with them.  Portable music players with cheap headphones would be good enough.

 

I think live performances are still very important - there is a communication between the performers and the audience and the overall sound field seems to make a difference.  The one way music and video we listen to at home or on the go is a different animal and needs to be considered separately. 

 

This notion of good enough quality is important.  You have to consider the entire user experience and not just some component like audio quality as defined by some engineering metrics that are measured with the listener out of the loop.  

 

It is something to watch for in many other industries.  Most people could care less, and don’t even know what gigahertz, gigabytes and other terms used to sell Wintel based PCs mean.  The same for horsepower and torque.  They are used as sales tools and people might think larger is better, but there is only a vague coupling to the final experience in most cases.  Even non-technical  enthusiasts have trouble with the definitions.

 

Perhaps industries where differentiations are made based on technical terms that are not understood by the customer based are  a good first order cut as those where disruption is possible.

 

Video and theater experiences are another rich and interesting area.  A lot of money is being bet that 3D will cause people to upgrade home TVs as well as go to movies, but there are some good arguments that won't happen.  There are other things that are probably more important in the theater and I tend to doubt the 3D revolution - at least as something that is a sustainable differentiator that will cause people will pay higher ticket prices.  

 

In the meantime I love going to live performances!  In the meantime don't bet on quality metrics unless you understand the complete user experience.

__________

¹  In fact if you increase the rate to 160 kbps statistically no one can tell the difference on normal music.  The guy who was really obsessed with tuning the codec went to Apple and their version of AAC has made great improvements over the years.

We found that some training is necessary to listen closely enough to music to detect artifacts.  It turns out that hearing ability decreases and anyone over about 35 is useless no matter how good their training.   Audiophiles tend to be males over 40 (and more often over 50) who spend tens of thousands on equipment.   

² Apple recently released their Apple Lossless Codec (ALAC) to open source.  Lossless codecs like Apple's and FLAC tend to offer compressions around three to one.  The file that is compressed can be turned into a file idential to the original so they are "perfect".  A few audiophiles use them and some companies even offer music, but this is a very small business.  

ALAC has some advantages over the other lossless codecs as it works with iTunes and iPods.  It can also work with music recorded at much higher than CD quality.  Now that it is an open standard perhaps it will gain some popularity among the enthusiast set.  The fact that Apple is releasing it shows they don't see any commercial value.  

³ At home I still use my 15 year old amplifier and once fine speakers to connect with my MacBook or iPhone or iPad wirelessly.  My 20,000 or so tracks worth of music is completely portable and distributed where I fancy on listening at the moment.

But I see no need to upgrade the system and the CDs just sit - I converted them (at 256 kbps AAC) a long time ago...

 

tools that lubricate human communication

The telephone was an imperfect approximation of communicating with others at a distance using voice.  It was, and still is, enormously useful and a number of innovations have kept it advancing.  Perhaps the last major innovation that was realized was mobile telephony.  For good or bad we could reach out - and be reached - almost everywhere and a tool had impacted how we communicate.  

 

Great lubrication!

 

Synchronous and asynchronous data communications became important and one company successfully recognized that adding lightweight text to a mobile phone along with a form of email that was relevant to how one segment of the population would be important.  RIM made billions on the Blackberry, but it is important to realize it is only a rough tool that resonated a bit with our deeper needs. 

 

A few years later the iPhone came along with a new type of interface and a good enough window into the Internet - for most people a much better model than the Blackberry.  Of course there are some for whom the Blackberry tool is better than the iPhone (or Android) tool, but for the most part the iPhone model is richer.  

 

And now we are seeing the beginnings of a voice driven data interfaces from Apple and Google ..  There is something that seems fundamentally "right" about Siri even though it is very early in its development.  In a few years we'll begin to learn some answers.  I'm pretty sure the Google approach to finding information and human/machine communication is far from optimal.

 

All of these tools are windows into something much deeper -  us and our desire to communicate. I would bet a lot that we are much closer to the beginning than the end of a period of great change.  The Industrial Revolution took about one hundred and fifty years and we're only about fifty years into the current revolution.

 

From my vantage point I don't see the younger generation as being more adroit simply because they grew up in a new world.  They were surrounded by different tools and defaulted to them making them their own, but these tools will change.  The term digital native is popular, but I don't see the process of change as abrupt with people on one side or the other of a divide -- a rich continuum of tools has been emerging.  Some will replace old modes of communications entirely and some will serve niche groups differently.  And there are surprises when very old tools prove to be much more robust than imagined.

 

It is probably best to keep up with tools and see what serves your own needs better.  Moving to them because they are "new and improved" is the wrong approach.   This is going to be an increasingly interesting and wild ride.  Just like the Industrial Revolution some companies will have brief moments in the Sun, most will vanish and a  few will endure.

 

My intuition tells me we really haven't made dramatic changes in how we deal with time - the Industrial Revolution made an enormous impact on us that lingers even though it is antiquated and perhaps counterproductive.  Perhaps in ten or twenty years communication tools will emerge that finally rip apart our Victorian perception of time.

 

breaking the darkness and the danger of goats

Imagine how dark the nights were a few hundred years ago.  I remember reading about a party in the 17th century at a wealthy person's home where the writer commented on the extravagance of the affairs - something like a dozen beeswax candles flickered away on the big dinner table even though the moon was nearly full.    

 

It takes nearly fifty candles to equal the amount of visible light that is produced by a single sixty watt incandescent lamp - even the little fifteen watt lamp in your refrigerator produces as much light as a dozen high quality candles.  Of course low light levels present problems as to what people can do.

 

A la chandelle, la chèvre ressemble à une demoiselle  
  - an old French saying dating from before the 17^th century¹ 

 

The cost of artificial lighting has dropped dramatically over the years. Candles were fairly expensive coming in two basic flavors - beeswax and animal tallow.  Tallow candles required constant work, smelled awful and became rancid, but you could make them from the fat of any slaughtered animal.  Beeswax candles were superior but were so expensive only the church and wealthy individuals could afford them.

 

Oil lamps were extensive and a subject of serious technological progress, but b the time petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania, a gallon of lamp oil cost about half the wage of the average worker.  Gas lamps were common and expensive in cities at the time and the advent of electric lights, even though electricity cost about one hundred times as much as it does now, adjusting for inflation, was cost effective.  Breaking the darkness was an enormous problem that consumed an enormous amount of money.

 

We had about 20 hours without electricity yesterday and had to make do with some beeswax candles.  To conserve them we only kept three going at a time - and only one in a room at any time.  Story telling is a good diversion for a few hours, but the fact that our gas furnace has an electric fan caused the temperature to drop and electricity at 15 cents a kWh seemed like a fantastic deal.

 

Apart from wishing for warmth it made me think of a few things - 

 

Without electricity you begin to worry about how much energy is left in your mobile phone. Landlines are powered by batteries in the central office and conventional telephony is fairly bullet-proof as long as the lines aren't broken, but many of us now rely on our own batteries.

 

My iPhone 4 has a 1420 milliwatt 3.7 volt battery - about 5.25 watt-hours of energy.²  I have an external battery pack that holds about 20 watt-hours but, of course, it wasn't charged.

 

Five and a quarter watt-hours is not a lot in human terms and tiny compared with the 25 or so kilowatt-hours of electricity the average home uses in a day.  To move that energy into the phone requires a few hours of charging, but it is interesting to compare it to the energy we use in the form of food.    Converting to units we all are familiar with gives about 4.5 nutritional Calories.    A single M&M contains about 3.5 Calories of energy.  Too bad we don't have a little fuel cell from Mars that burns candy.  Then we could pop an M&M in every few hours and forget about the wall plug.

 

It is amusing to compare the power transfer rates we see eating meals and compare that to what our home wiring can provide.  Food can be a remarkably dense form of chemical energy.  (I leave that as a fun little exercise).

 

The back of the envelope was a quick approximation an athlete friend offered.  She isn't technical, but we had been talking about energy and power as we were writing a few pieces and the question of leaving a light on or turning it off came up and my back of the envelope technique has rubbed off on her.  

 

A compact fluorescent lamp needs more power to start up.  How much energy is required and where is the break-even point for leaving the lamp on rather than turning it off (this doesn't consider the cost of a possible failure from turning a lamp on and off - that turns out to be very low for high quality CF bulbs -- there are other factors that contribute to less than optimal lifetimes).  

 

her reasoning...

 

The highest power a circuit in my apartment can provide is about 1800 watts as all of the lights are on 15 amp circuit breakers (power is current times voltage).  Since turning on a lamp doesn't trigger a circuit breaker, 1800 watts is an upper limit for the startup power of a CF bulb.    The bulb needs about a second to warm up, so the startup energy for a CF bulb has to be less than 1800 watt-seconds.  My apartment has four  CF bulbs on a circuit and you can turn them on with the circuit breaker switch and not overload it, so the start up power per bulb upper limit is 450 watt-seconds.  The bulbs are 25 watts each, so it would take them 18 seconds of normal use to equal the 450 watt-seconds of startup energy.  The worst case is the break-even point is 18 seconds and is probably much less.  It makes sense to turn off the lights when you leave the room.  

 

________

¹ By candlelight a goat looks like a lady  

           - Thanks to Juliette for the right words.  I'm a poser when it comes to French.  

 

² As rechargeable non-chemical energy storage devices the lithium-ion polymer battery does an excellent job compared to most other technologies.  Moving a 175 pound person about 80 feet vertically stores about 5.25 watt-hours of potential energy in the person.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

uneven rates of progress

I have just unboxed my new camera and am charging its battery.

 

There is enormous choice these days - enough to make Barry Schwartz shake his head with a bit of disgust.  I spent more than a few hours polling friends who know their way around photography and finally tried a half dozen candidates before settling on the compromise that hopefully will cover my needs.  All of the candidates were compromises.

 

There was a time when I loved photography.  My camera was an ancient  second hand Leica M3 that was nearly perfect as far as I was concerned.  It was completely manual in operation, but the controls were perfectly placed and operated smoothly.

 

The Leica was an extension of my eyes and hands.  I would see something and while my mind worried about composition somehow the shutter would fire at the right time.  

 

I spent time worrying about what film to use and the details of processing. That part was expensive so I didn't shoot as much as I would have liked, but the process of photography was enormously satisfying.  Most of the best images I've ever taken came from that period.

 

I stupidly sold the Leica twenty years ago when I bought into a 35mm Nikon SLR system.  The camera was beautifully made and some of the prime lenses were optically amazing, but it was never an extension of my soul.  I tended not to use it.  

 

At one point I found myself helping out on a photoshoot with a famous fashion and portrait photographer.  Alberto used a 6x7cm Bronica and was so comfortable with it that it seemed to be an extension of his mind.  To check the lighting on the model he pulled out an ancient Polaroid camera, fired a few test shots with the strobes, and made the mental adjustments of how he would use his medium format camera.  There were two bodies - his assistant would load the spare with film, while he shot with the other.  It was amazing to watch him practice his art and to see how many of the negatives were usable.   It was also frightening to watch him burn through several thousand dollars of film and processing in the course of a ten hour shoot.  

 

Digital photography finally changed his world and radically altered the fee structure. In the hands of a pro, a $40k Hasselblad quickly pays for itself.  At the high end user interface and experience are critically important and the pros make their choices on that as well as whatever lenses they have.   The process of photography has changed - art directors and models get immediate feedback from tethered computers and ten hour shoots become five hour shoots.  Amazing cameras.

 

The little digital camera I unboxed earlier today has one of the best user interfaces and experiences of the digital cameras in my price range, but it is jarringly awful compared to the UX of my iMac and iPhone.   I doubt I'll ever be comfortable enough with it that it feels like and extension of myself.  On the other hand it takes good photos and, if I don't could the camera's price,  the cost per image is essentially zero.  The images are in a form that are much more useful to me than film.  Positive progress on several fronts and negative progress in one that is very important to me.

 

Shopping for the camera made me think about the marketing of high technical content items.  Many of the aspects that are really important - the modulation transfer function curves of the optical train,  pixel size and response, dark noise, and so on are rarely communicated.  Pixel count is stressed, although it turns out not to be that important.  On-camera image manipulation is pushed although any image editing program is vastly superior.  The marketing message does not overlap well with what the camera really is - you have to spend some time with one and see if it is going to work for you.  For me this means going to a real camera shop - something that has almost disappeared from the landscape.  I find paying list, but being able to audition what I will have to live with for the next 5 to 10 years a small price to pay.

 

I also found myself reflecting on how far digital photography has come.  I've built several cameras over the years.  Pinhole cameras and a Brownie-like wooden camera that used an old lens someone gave me when I was 12.  It had a shutter and iris from a fleamarket camera and took some surprisingly good photos.  There were also a few cameras for my telescope.

 

In 1984 I made my first digital camera.  I was working at Bell Labs where work had been done on CCD cameras for videophones a decade earlier (resulting in a recent Nobel Prize).  I wanted to build a simple digital camera to capture images on my new Mac 128 and faced some roadblocks.  First it was impossible to get a suitable CCD array and second the port on the Mac was a weird RS-422 standard and programming the beast was awful.  

 

Silicon is photosensitive (duh) and I decided to see how good a DRAM chip would be.  A call to someone in chip packaging at the Western Electric Allentown Works produced a small bag of 16 and 32 kilobit DRAMs nicely mounted in ceramic packages with the top protective cap removed.¹  I put one on a scope and found it to be practical for camera experiments.

 

The trick was to put the DRAM in the focal plane of a simple camera lens mounted on a homemade wooden box.  The first camera had a conventional iris and shutter.  It had 16 kilopixels each with 1 grey level.  I could only read a white or black signal.  That was in November and by then my 128k Mac was now a 512k Mac and I could program the beast.  Writing the i/o for the serial port was the big challenge.  The display was really trivial on the little Mac.  Soon there was a second generation camera with an electronic "shutter".  I would write zeros to all of the memory locations and then read them out later. Generation three happened in mid 1985 with an electronic shutter camera with 3 bits of grey level per pixel.  That was as far as I went.

 

The photo shown is of Meltdown, one of our ferrets, taken with the generation 2 camera with a flash.  The best name ever for a ferret - she was born near the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant.  It turns out the name matched her personality, but such is the case of silvermitt ferrets.  It turns out to be one of our few surviving photos of her.  Somehow it kept getting backed up and moved from machine to machine over the years, while our negatives, slides and many of our albums were in the cool basement for preservation.  That seemed like a good idea until the 8 year warranty hot water heater failed at year 6 and destroyed our archive.   

 

Sixteen kilopixels to sixteen megapixels and one to twelve bits per pixel and amazing autofocus and other capabilities in around 25 years and, in 2011 dollars my current camera is much less expensive.  

 

But the project deepened my ties to the resident artist at Bell Labs and that took me down several extremely paths - an important part of my education.

 

Now all I want is one with a UX that is the equal of my old Leica.  Steve Jobs has legitimized good UX in products that are largely defined by engineering.  Perhaps there is a company that will step up and make a "magical" camera for me.

 

________

¹ This was a home project where I bought everything but the memory chips.  My director thought it was a neat idea and suggested that I get some same chips to play with, although that was probably stretching the rules a bit.   

 

elegant interfaces and insight

Ten years ago today I found myself at the new Tice's Corner Applestore in Woodcliff Lake, NJ first in a line of about 20 people queued up to buy the original iPod.  A call from the store's manager to a wait list told me they would open their doors at 8 am.  I was there before 7 am and we were let in at 7 sharp.  It is possible I had one of the first sold in the US.  There was even a tshirt that is now long gone and I remember someone had brought in a pile of freshly based chocolate chip cookies.

 

I'm not the type who waits in line to be first with a new piece of tech.  Why was I there?

 

A few weeks before Steve Jobs had introduced to a very skeptical press.  The speculation of Apple's special event was basically anything but an mp3 player.   $399 for a 5 GB, Mac only, firewire connected mp3 player.  

 

I knew I had to have one.  

 

Fortunately my wife and I have "fun money" accounts.  Sums of money that each of us has complete control over that the other person can't touch or criticize.  It isn't a lot, but let's me do things like score an original iPod.

 

Since 1998 or so it was clear that small hard disk based mp3 players would be practical sometime in 2001 or possibly 2002.  My HCI department had been working on music at many levels collaborating with other departments at AT&T Research.  Sound field reconstruction, streaming, interface work, music business work, codec tuning, and the anthropology and sociology of music.  We even had a little flanker brand digital music label - perhaps the second or third strangest thing I did at the Labs.

 

Part of this work included some hardware designs including a series of pocket players based on flash memory good for a perhaps a dozen songs.  We had a mule with a "huge" 360 megabyte IBM microdrive that could hold about 100 songs and we quickly discovered the interface that sort of worked with a dozen failed miserably at 100.  Quite a bit of thought went into cracking the problem leading to some other - er - unique interfaces including one that responded to the sound of brushing your fingers together.  But basically nothing worked.

 

I heard about the unveiling of the early iPod in September and saw the scroll wheel.  It instantly hit me they had cracked the problem.  

 

Of course I had to buy one and $399 seemed cheap for a 5 GB player.  I was using a Mac so I was in good shape.  My only wish was that it would use AAC rather than mp3.  AAC was the codec we had been working with and it was vastly superior.  We had several meetings with Apple, including Jobs, showing him that starting in 1999.  He was probably listening to a lot of people.

 

I rushed home - Woodcliff Lake isn't exactly close to Basking Ridge - and started to transfer music.  The interface felt wonderful.  It was beautifully analog and had inertia.  It felt like something worth the money - not the cheap poorly built plastic of everything else on the market.  Although spendy it seemed like a very fair trade for four Franklins.

 

  I still have mine and it still works well.  I take it out for a walk about once a month to remind myself of a watershed in interface design.  It seemed so obvious once I had seen it.  I've read that the scrolling motion created some excitement in Apple and people started looking more deeply into multitouch interfaces- something that had been around in the labs since the late 1980s, but still expensive and researchy.  This is probably about the time they figured they could begin to build insight on a viable tablet - a project that became the iPhone and later the iPad.

 

The early sales were not good and the tech pundits pronounced it another silly Apple failure.  Only Mac users could use it and after the initial small surge there wasn't a big market.    Apple made it work with Windows, added AAC and then came the iTunes music store and a standardization on AAC.  These changes, combined with prices dropping into the $250 to $300 range saw sales begin to boom by 2004.  Back then it was still very popular to talk about the likely failure of Apple, but people interested in music were packing iPods.  A new generation was getting use to Apple products and people were listening to music in different ways.

 

The anthropology of music is fascinating and I think it isn't as investigated to the degree it deserves.  There are many ways to go, but the iPod and iTunes made a fundamental difference.  It also probably saved the music business from a fate worse than what unrolled, but that is a story for another day.  

 

I can think of a lot of things that we haven't seen yet.  Music is still a fundamentally important thing we humans do (it exists in every known culture on the planet) - Steve was right to go after it and his timing was close to perfect.  When I see what Björk and a few others are doing I have a feeling that perhaps the generation coming up now will be much more compositionally literate.  The iPad is the breakthrough device for those efforts and the initial work is - well - very early, but the way composition is approached may take a big leap.  

 

Steve would like that.  Most of the interactions I've had with him have invovled the arts in some way  (odd when you think about it).  A common point he kept coming back to was he would consider what he was doing a success if Apple products became a basis for getting more people doing creative artwork of some kind.  He was fascinated by the notion that music composition may not be as difficult as most of us assume it is.  That gets into the subject of education vs training, but for another day...

 

Once a month is it still nice to plug in the original to a firewire cable and see it come alive.  It is ancient and outmoded, but the leap it made was breathtaking.

 

What a great purchase!

 

There is a curious feature of many disruptive technologies - most of the technical pundits fail to recognize them as disruptive. Many of them have a very different evolutionary path that is rarely foreseen.   I was lucky enough to (a) not have been a technical pundit and (b) have been working on the problem for long enough to recognize the brilliance of the interface.