omenti

seven billion

It is impossible to know how many people are currently alive, but the best estimate suggests today the figure passes seven billion people.  One worries about what the world will look like in 2050 or 2100.    Some argue, as they do with energy, that some magic bullet will be found - after all, mechanized farming and two green revolutions allowed us to move from one to seven billion people.  Unfortunately past revolutions are no guarantee new and sufficiently good revolutions will appear.  There is also the sad fact that the world currently does not support seven billion people without hunger - as currently about a billion people are malnourished and few of us seem to worry very much.

 

I spend a lot of time thinking about energy and its flow through society.  One of the larger components is associated with food and it is clear we are up against several severe limits - available farmland, water and climate change to name a few.  One can imagine several back of the envelope changes that would make enormous differences, but how practical are they and how do they interact with other pieces of the puzzle?

 

Several communities are focused on the problem.  One of the more articulate researchers who has been looking at possible paths that don't require the invocation of miracles is Jonathan Foley of the University of Minnesota.  Check out his TED talk

 

He has a piece in the November, 2011 Scientific American on feeding the planet that explores the subject a bit more deeply focusing on miracle-free steps that could ensure enough food production to nourish the likely 2050 population.  I strongly recommend reading it.  (the magazine is currently on the newsstands and in most libraries - the digital copy is here).  For those of you with a scientific background I strongly recommend a piece that appeared a few weeks ago in Nature:

 

Solutions for a cultivated planet

Jonathan Foley et al.

 Nature 478, 337–342  (20 October 2011

  doi:10.1038/nature10452            

 12 October 2011

Increasing population and consumption are placing unprecedented demands on agriculture and natural resources. Today, approximately a billion people are chronically malnourished while our agricultural systems are concurrently degrading land, water, biodiversity and climate on a global scale. To meet the world’s future food security and sustainability needs, food production must grow substantially while, at the same time, agriculture’s environmental footprint must shrink dramatically. Here we analyse solutions to this dilemma, showing that tremendous progress could be made by halting agricultural expansion, closing ‘yield gaps’ on underperforming lands, increasing cropping efficiency, shifting diets and reducing waste. Together, these strategies could double food production while greatly reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture.

 

The good news is there is an enormous amount of inefficiency in the current system.  Some of it is cultural, some political, some economic - but much of it is the result of doing things the way we have been doing and not thinking.  There is a lot of hope for creativity and we don't have to rely on solutions that may not appear in the necessary timeframe.  If we get busy perhaps we can even save the billion or so people who are starving.

 

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 by 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 just unboxed the 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 curious 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.  I rather suspect my next camera will be part of a smartphone. The optical limits are far from tested and there is so much that can be done with increasing computer power.  Smartphones are really just sensor studded computers with a link to the 'net.  The space will expand dramatically over the next decade.  Hopefully the UX will be well thought out.

 

________

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.   

 

running

About three years ago I became interested in the fluid dynamics of volleyball and found a nice result that introduced me to the science of sport.  While most of my work has focused on beach and indoor volleyball, I've had contact with folks who puzzle the motion of elite athletes.  Their work deals with the fundamentals of everything from how muscles work, to the efficiency of motion and even neurological and psychological issues.  A fantastic playground working with amazing people at the extreme edge of human performance and a huge question generation machine.

 

Last week one of them noted a paper on age related decline in performance.  The authors looked at a large number of German marathon runners and their analysis led them to a somewhat surprising result that may be of interest to some of you as at least four of you - Jheri, Magi, Pip and Dave - participate in marathons for sport.  

 

The abstract says gets to the gist of the matter:

 

 

Background

Physical performance often declines in middle age, but it is unclear to what extent this is due to biological aging. It can be difficult to determine whether such physical changes are truly age-related, as they might alternatively be explained as the negative consequences of a sedentary lifestyle.

Methods

We assessed the endurance of a physically active subgroup of the population by performing an age- and sex-stratified analysis of over 900 000 running times of marathon and half-marathon participants aged 20 to 79. We also analyzed the responses of 13 171 marathon and half-marathon runners to a questionnaire about sports, lifestyle, and health.

Results

No significant age-related decline in performance appears before age 55. Moreover, only a moderate decline is seen thereafter; in fact, 25% of the 65- to 69-year-old runners were faster than 50% of the 20- to 54-year-old runners. Our survey also revealed that more than 25% of the 50- to 69-year-old runners had started their marathon training only in the past 5 years.

Conclusion

Performance losses in middle age are mainly due to a sedentary lifestyle, rather than biological aging. The large contingent of older “newcomers” among marathon runners demonstrates that, even at an advanced age, non-athletes can achieve high levels of performance through regular training.

 

 Really good news for once!

 

There are some difficult issues to tease apart (self selection and a skewed sample size for example), but the paper appears fairly robust.  It would be interesting to see what others did with the same database as well as similar databases in other countries to see if this is generally true.  

 

For fun I plotted the times for the average marathon runners and then moved the curve for the best runners normalizing it so performance for elite and middle of the pack 25 year olds matched. This is far from a robust numerical technique, but I'm only trying to compare the relative shape of the curves to notice how performance deteriorates with age.  The elite athletes turn out to always be better runners by definition, but the performance of that group deteriorates more quickly with age.  You have no real hope of being an elite performer past the age of 40, but you can certainly have good recreational performances into your mid 50s and beyond.  We won't break records, but those of us in the middle can retain our level of performance for a long time.

 

 _______

 

I have always been terrible at sprinting and jumping, but am not bad at endurance work.  Some foot issues keep me from running, but I row and don't find two hour sessions impossible.  As a student I averaged a few century level bike rides a month and did my share of double centuries.  Both of my nieces are runners and one even runs ultra-marathons in the mountains of Arizona.  The three of us have very similar body types (sadly for them) and it is likely we have a high percentage of slow twitch muscles.

 

It turns out people have several types of muscles.  The skeletal muscles involved in moving our limbs come in two basic flavors - slow and fast twitch¹.  Fast twitch muscles are associated with bursts of power and are sometimes called white muscles.  Their slow twitch counterparts are associated with much lower levels of power, but they can function at those levels for much longer periods of time- often hundreds of times longer - before fatigue occurs.

 

Most people have about a 50-50 mix of slow and fast twitch muscles.  Elite sprinters can have as much as 80% fast twitch and elite marathon runners can have 70 to 80% slow twitch.  Even good recreational distance runners tend to have a much higher percentage of slow twitch muscles than an average person.  

 

When we push ourselves there are a few basic power levels we can produce that depends on the muscle type and fuel supply.  I'll mention the main four.

 

A very short term bust of power can be had for a few seconds from ATP stored inside the muscle, followed by about 10 seconds of a somewhat lower power mode.  Both of these exhaust fuel local to the muscle and neither require externally supplied oxygen.  Fast twitch muscles are ideally suited for this type of power generation.²  As the blood doesn't have to be well oxygenated, these muscles often have a white appearance.

 

For up to about two minutes another form of anaerobic respiration takes place as glycogen breaks down into glucose.  The muscles can convert glycogen into ATP with or without oxygen, but the problem is anaerobic conversion forms lactic acid while leads to extreme fatigue and pain.³  Sports that live in the twenty second to two minute range are dominated by this process.  Running a mile is well beyond the anerobic barrier.

 

The difference in power can be startling.  A world class 100 meter dash specialist or 200 meter bicycle sprinter can develop 2000 to 2500 watts - for about 10 seconds.  Colleen, when she was competing, could develop over 700 watts for 30 seconds and over 550 watts for a minute.  For scale consider that a horsepower is about 750 watts.

 

These bursts come with an enormous cost - you have to get rid of the heat somehow. The ten second sports are that for a reason - any longer and you have to shift gears to the next level of respiration and performance would drop dramatically.  Internal core body temperature soars to the level where a few more seconds would cause a stroke. We're very lucky our muscles don't have enough internal fuel to push the body to that level.  The amount of thermal energy that must be dissipated isn't huge, but the power pulse is great.⁴

 

 

After the local fuel supply runs out fuel and oxygen must be brought in from elsewhere.  Now the body shifts to a mode where glycogen that is circulating in your blood converts to ATP aerobically.⁵  The power levels are low, but the process can go for a long time - theoretically until you run out of fuel from your digesting food and stores of fat.  The slow twitch muscles are centers for this type of aerobic power and the oxygenated blood gives them a red appearance. This is the world of the distance runner.  

 

 

In my recreational rowing I usually plug away at about 150 watts output generated about 600 watts of waste heat in the process.  I can step up my power level for short amount of times, but my performance is very lame compared to average male athletes or an elite female athlete.  I have plotted some power vs time curves for different types of people.⁶   My excuse is that I'm not trying for bursts, but rather just for long durations.  Of course I'm far from an athlete.

 

No matter what your muscle composition is, getting some regular exercise is a good thing and now it appears that we can maintain reasonable performance levels throughout middle age and perhaps give ourselves increasingly difficult goals - for those who are into such things.  The rewards are great.  I've been increasing my fitness level to where it probably was in grad school and during my last physical my doctor's notes described me as a "thin athletic male"...  not terrible for a middle aged guy who had been seriously out of shape.  Vital signs like blood pressure and pulse fall right into line without drugs.  A larger benefit is that the exercise periods are good for clearly the mind.  Highly recommended.

 

And to those of you who are in an upcoming marathon - good luck!!

 

Somewhere down the line I'll go into the physics of volleyball - there are some amazing things are taking place and it is even more interesting in the beach game.

 

_______

¹  There are more types, but for a high level discussion it is fair to use this categorization.

 

²  There are several types of fuels our body can use.  Ultimately muscles use ATP, which is the only fuel they can use to power their contraction.  There are several mechanisms that produce ATP and ultimately all of these come from the food you eat.  Some of these can supply energy immediately in short bursts and others can be used at slower rates over long periods of time. 

 The muscle has two fuels that can be used immediately.  One is a very small reserve of ATP that can supply great bursts of power for a second or two - just the sort of thing if you have to jump or start a sprint.  There is also a substance called phosophocretine (PCr) that can quickly be turned into ATP. Together these are called the phosphagen, but you can think of it as an very high power, but short duration anaerobic fuel supply.

After the stored ATP is gone PCr being turned into ATP, but there is only about ten seconds worth.

 The muscle does not require oxygen to use ATP or to convert PCr to ATP and these processes are anaerobic.  They only generate work and heat.  Immediately available and offering high power, they are the reason why some athletic events that require enormous power - weight lifting or the 100 meter dash for example - take place in about ten seconds or less.

 

³   Our muscles have stores of a glycogen.  Glycogen is a complex carbohydrate that is just a string of glucose molecules.  Cells in the muscles break glycogen into glucose.  Your body can turn the glucose into the ATP you need without or without oxygen, but there is a trade off.  The aerobic process that uses oxygen completely breaks the glucose down with water, heat and carbon dioxide as waste products.  It also happens to be a slower process and although your heart and lungs are starting to work hard , they don’t have their act together yet.

 At this point you need immediate power and that means turning the glucose into ATP anaerobically.  The process isn’t as fast as the phosphagen system and it isn’t terribly efficient, but this is the only good source of energy ten seconds into the run.  

An 80 kilogram person in good physical shape has about a pound - maybe 400 grams - of glycogen stored in the muscles.  Since carbohydrates are about four calories per gram, that is about 1600 calories of stored energy.  But there is a fly in the ointment.

 Converting glucose into ATP anaerobically produces lactic acid as a waste product.  

 Carbohydrates can supply the energy required to go beyond ten seconds of endurance.  These can be simple sugar glucose, glycogen (otherwise known as starch), and a partially metabolized form of starch called lactate.  These fuels can be used in several ways.

 Glucose and glycogen can be used anaerobically producing a lot of power for and leaving lactic acid as a waste product.  The lactic acid buildup is painful and will cause you to fatigue quickly.  Your body can’t remove it quickly enough when you are running hard.  This glycose-lactic acid system is good for about two of three minutes of hard running before you need to shift gears again.

 As you continue your  heart rate is increasing and you is breathing much harder.  You have been running for nearly two minutes and your heart and lungs are now working well.  Rich oxygenated blood is flowing through her body and the oxygen is used with the glucose to produce ATP without the nasty lactic acid buildup.  your muscles are shifting from the anaerobic glycose-lactic acid system to aerobic respiration.

 

⁴  At 20% efficiency a 2500 watt 9.5 second 100 meter dash would generate 10,000 watts of power - or 100,000 watt seconds of thermal energy that must go somewhere.  We radiate some, a bit is conducted away, but the majority makes use of our ability to sweat which relies on some oddities of the physics of water molecules. 

 

⁵  There is fair amount of glycogen in your muscles and glycogen in your liver is being broken down into glucose which goes directly into her blood stream to fuel the muscles.  You're also getting some glucose from food you've been eating as it gets absorbed by the intestine and placed into the blood.

Glucose circulates in the blood along with oxygen and can be turned into ATP slowly, but for as long as there is fuel coming from the digestion of food.  The power levels provided by this aerobic metabolism are much lower than those produced anaerobically, but they are sustainable for hours.

 During aerobic respiration, your muscles can convert ATP to work at about fifty percent efficiency - the rest of the energy is heat.  The aerobic conversion of glucose to ATP is about fifty percent efficient, so the efficiency of turning glucose into work is the product of the two - about twenty five percent.  This is similar to the peak efficiency of the engine in your car.  Specific motions lose a bit more efficiency several common motions people perform get the work done that moves you or propels a ball about a twenty percent efficiency.

 

⁶  The male athletes were from a sample of college athletes in the early 1960s measured by NASA as they were trying to understand human performance.  The average men were about 80 kg.  Colleen weighs 80 kg and this is a fairly average curve for elite 80 kg women these days. The 20 year old male sample was from college non-varsity teams in the early 1960s.  All of these measurements are on calibrated ergometers.  Mine is a Concept2 rowing ergometer.

 

 

 

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.

 

2:38:17 pm indeed ...

Jheri sent a note complaining about being jet-lagged after a flight from Nanjing to Copenhagen - six hours difference.  It should have been more, but China ticks to UTC+06:00.

 

Someone asked me to think about major changes that I thought technology might inspire.  Things that may even be quietly taking place now, but will grow and make themselves known a few decades from now.   Like speculating about what would really impress someone from 125 years ago (it probably isn't the Internet or television), these are interesting exercises that hopefully give a bit of insight into the interaction between society and technology.

 

I've thought about this before but wouldn't claim great insight.   I do find myself with the same candidate every time I think about this namely our relationship with time.  Specifically cutting the tight bindings we have with synchronized time.

 

It is interesting to think about when the concept of modern time began to take hold.  Once we responded to natural rhythms - sunrise, sunset, the seasons and so on ..  but a mechanical means of dividing days up didn’t become very practical until about the 14^th century and then only as expensive devices that showed hours.  It took another four centuries or so for hands to appear.

 

Local solar time was still widely used in much of the 19^th century - the concept of “high noon” ruled, but the advent of the telegraph and railroads required a synchronization of time.  In the US there was railroad standard time with each railroad with its own flavor.  Large stations had multiple clocks each showing different times.  The concept of a timezone was invented and finally implemented in 1883 on the day of two noons.

 

The concept of modern time - 2:38:17 pm EDT eastern time being a meaningful point - dovetailed nicely with the needs of the industrial revolution and tied us to schedules driven by clocks.  Efficiency and the concept of “scientific management” was promoted by Taylor and others.  Many people became widgets and most of us became obsessed with this synchronization of time. 

 

Einstein found himself working in a patent office while he was working on his Ph.D. remotely using the mail system.  His speciality was looking at patents of schemes to synchronize time - meshing rather nicely with the physics he was working on at the time. Very deep thinking about simultaneity led to special relativity in 1905.

 

Today most of us know where we are in time and space to a fair degree of accuracy due to the global positioning system our cellphones use.  

 

Clearly useful, but is it on target?  Are the lives we lead - private and work - really much better than the world where 2:38:17 pm EDT was a ludicrous concept and “between lunch and dinner” was accurate enough?

 

Early in my Bell Labs career I found myself in a laboratory where personal time for creativity was a valued concept.  There were meetings during the day as well as scheduled talks.  The lunchroom opened and closed at a fixed time and there was tea every day at 4 pm.  But much of the day was more flexible.  The lab director was a believer in the need for an uninterrupted stretch of time where you set the pace.  

 

We all had individual offices with doors on them.  For three hours a day - our choice of morning or afternoon - our phones would go dead and we had a flag outside our office door indicating if we were in “cave mode” or if it was ok to have visitors.  Most people collaborated, but you could get three full hours in the event you had achieved a state of Csíkszentmihályian flow.  Of course the brain handles a many tasks simultaneously, but I find my conscious mind, whatever that is, tends to task switch single processes rather than multitask and there is a serious overhead associated with saving and restoring state.  We had control over interruption.

 

We were held accountable during our yearly merit reviews, but researchers in the lab were carefully vetted and trusted. 

 

Our lab was extremely productive - I would even use the word creative.  

 

Several years later I transferred to another lab that didn’t have this boundary and felt an enormous difference.  Fortunately I was able to move to another area where people could pretty much establish their own workflow.  It was a negotiation with collaborators, but we had a reputation for doing great work and being difficult to schedule.

 

When I began to consult I mentioned this to an extremely creative company I have ties with and, mirabile dictu, they were fascinated and experimentally adopted the three hour block.  I’ve been told it is something of a secret weapon for them.  It does require people to get used to a different way of working and thinking. 

 

Yet most of us are micro scheduled and are forced to deal with a stream of interruptions that destroy any kind of deep thinking.

 

“Overnight” or at most two days is the period that some assemblage of atoms should require to be sent from any point on the planet to our desk.  A flood of people travel to and from work mostly during the same hours artificially clogging the roads and making the commutes much worse than they might otherwise be.  We schedule “quality time” with families and even schedule blocks of time for our kid’s activities.  

 

Some of this is necessary and some of it is pushed more than it needs to be.  Having the ability to communicate whenever we want and wherever we are is something that implies choice, but many of us become slaves to it.

 

I have a gut feeling that our mobile networks and a few other technologies have the ability to free us a bit.  In the mid 90s I began to notice that young people with cellphones were discovering that synchronizing meetings could be fuzzy - that you could tell someone roughly when and where you might be able to meet with them and go into hover mode where you might be doing something interesting rather than waiting on a corner for 35 minutes wondering if their train was late.  At AT&T Research we prototyped a conceptual system called air graffiti that put a few other twists on this fuzzier concept of spacetime and could even act as a catalyst for serendipity while supporting normal modes of tight synchronization.  

 

We’re all different.  Some of us might be really creative at 11 am and dead to the world at 3 pm.  I think we have a chance of moving to a world where the Talorized concept of tightly synchronized activities will begin to fade.  

 

Perhaps we can take advantage of the fact that time is indeed relative.  We may be at the beginning of a radical rethinking of what time is and means to us - as radical as when we started treating the artificial concept of 2:38:17 as something rigid. 

 

And Jheri?  Although she is tightly bound to the clock now, her path may lead her to forestry research and she may even find long periods of time where she takes note of and uses sunrise, sunset and the seasons.  

 

 

 

digging for a bit of information in some electrified graphs

Electric cars are interesting for a variety of reasons that I won't belabor here (get in touch if you want more information).  Like any major automotive technology the time scale to get to large numbers is quite long.  We're probably to the point where things get interesting in a bit under a decade plus or minus a couple of years.

 

Several different classes of vehicles have emerged.  The so called megacity cars are probably the most interesting as that is where most of the growth in the industry is likely to occur over the next few decade - think of iPads vs PCs...  Both are around, but one is growing quickly.  Of course time scales are different in these two industries.

 

The megacity cars will be lightweight and many are being designed with physics in mind - namely you worry about stop and go driving and dealing with acceleration. That means keeping weight to a minimum, controlling acceleration preferably using an electric motor rather than an IC engine, regenerative braking and so on.  For higher constant speeds - say anything above about 40 mph, weight isn't an important factor but air resistance is.  In addition to these huge areas of slipperiness and weight there are a few other loads like rolling resistance, a/c and (in EVs) heating loads, lights and even the vehicle's electronics.

 

Like any engineering problem there are several - in this case a boatload - of variables that need to be optimized.  Many of these are non-independent and some, aestics for example, are cross-disciplinary.  There is no such thing as a perfect car and the optimization of the design is close to an artform. 

 

Vehicle efficiency is increasingly important and a standardized test procedures exist.  One of the more interesting suite of tests are chassis dynamometer tests specified by the EPA. Cars are placed on full chassis dynamometers with the rollers adjusted to simulate the effects of weight and air resistance (the later is determined from separate coast-down tests where a car's coasting performance from fixed speeds is measured).  The task is to follow a prescribed acceleration and braking pattern.  The one that will follow has 23 starts and stops simulating city stop and go driving including an excursion to a bit over 55 mph.

 

What follows is some data from the Edison2 electric vehicle.  A very light weight four passenger car with extremely slippery aerodynamics.  It won the automotive X-prize with an internal combustion engine and now an electric version has been made. Really interesting as electrics are naturally about four times as efficient as IC vehicles.

 

The first graph shows the power drawn from the battery on the vertical axis in watts vs speed in mph on the horizontal axis.  There is a lot going on and the power load is anything but constant in most places.  Notice how the excursion to 55 mph uses a lot of power during the acceleration phase, but that drops off as the car is accelerating more slowly approaching its target.  Also notice that the power demand barely exceeds 15 kW once and then only by a bit.  The drive train and electronics are at last 80% efficient in this car, so the power to the wheels is even less.  15 kW is only about 20 horsepower. At speed the car is under 10 kW.  An IC engine in the same car with its great aerodynamics and light weight would need about four times as much power.

 

Also note the area of negative power use.  That's regenerative braking.  Instead of turning the kinetic energy of the car into heat, some of the energy is converted to electricity by a generator and is used to recharge the battery a bit.  The flatness of the line is probably a mechanical limitation on the generator or its controller.  It has reached a very uniform limit.

 

The second graph is really neat. Rather than the continuous plot a time series of points representing the speed and power drain is shown.  I would have done it a bit differently as points might appear on top of one another with a bit of information being lost, but with this limited amount of data that is probably not too much of a bias.   

Now you can see at a glance where the vehicle lives in power/speed space by looking for densely populated regions.  Notice the contribution from the regenerative braking doesn't seem to stand out as much and there is a very dense cluster at medium speeds that is mostly below 5 kW.  This informs the design and give some clues to how you might optimize the design.  The bursts to hither power levels are relatively rare - if you were doing a hybrid or were worried about battery costs you might be tempted to use ultracapacitors for  bit of additional help.  The fact that the vehicle don't spend a lot of cluster density during braking tells you maybe the design of that functionality doesn't need to be as perfect as you might have concluded from the first graph.

 

It should be noted that these curves are somewhat different in character and often very different in scale for conventional IC cars and different types of hybrids.  They are approximations of "normal" parts of driving.  The "nut behind the wheel" has a good deal of influence and the standards don't address that.  It is remarkable  how much can be gained if you can change driving behavior - the equivalant of thousands of dollars of technology for nothing.  Sadly the technology game is much easier.  Ideally you would do both.  

 

You need to play with the information to learn what it can say.  A variety of techniques is often necessary to shine a bit of light on what is really taking place.  Of course this is true in almost anything where measurements are being made.  You need to sweat the details and understand where the numbers came from, how the resulting information is manipulated and finally a lot of play can take place during the analaysis of the information.  Frequently experience elsewhere gives the insight you need to notice curious things that other's might miss.

 

 

 

 

how science works

extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence...

 

It is probably safe to say that almost everyone in the physics community is skeptical of the faster than light neutrino result from the OPERA collaboration.  People have begun to carefully examine how the experiment was conducted and, if everything appears in order, new experiments - prepreably using somewhat different experimental approahes - will be required to see if the result can be verified before the skepticism disappears.

 

Science is self correcting and the process can be messy. To the non-scientist it often appears as science making mistakes and can even lead to the conclusion that science can't be trusted.  That is incorrect.  Science is all about giving you the probability that something is likely.  Large claims, like those of evolution, have been verified so many times and in so many ways that the theory is an excellent approximation of how nature works.  To a slightly lesser extent the same can be said about many other phenomena - including anthropomorphic global warming.  Scientists can tell you how good the reults are and you can make use of that knowledge.

 

Understanding how good a theory is and the conditions where it breaks down is incredibly important.  Much of our civilization has been constructed using Newtonian physics.  Gravitational potential energy = mgh, gravitational force = Gm₁m₂/r², kinetic energy = 1/2 mv², and so on.  It is a simple model and calculations with it are very easy.  It turns out to be wrong - but for the world we mostly live in the errors are tiny and completely acceptable.  If you move to the very small you need to invoke quantum mechanics - an extremely accurate representation of the microworld, but very inappropriate for our scale.  If you are moving very fast you need special relativity to get the right answer, but we rarely need it the speeds we use.

 

It would be wonderful if the OPERA result was true.  Just as relativity hasn't destroyed the usefulness of Newtonian physics, this probably wouldn't destroy the usefulness of special relativity as it would be a small effect as all other cases seen to date have verified relativity to a high level of accuracy.  It would force a rethinking of what is fundamental and that is what physicists secretly want - an illumination of a piece of Nature that was heretofore uncharted.    But Nature is the ultimate truth - the ultimate answer and you can't pin hopes on overturned applecarts.  A huge dream that no one has achieved is a general theory that is applicable for all known physics - and one that happens to be very predicative and points the way towards new discoveries.  But that remains elusive and perhaps is not possible.  Nature may or may not work that way - we simply don't know.

 

The reason for noting this is a researcher from  the University of Groningen has found a potentiallly fatal flaw in the OPERA experiment.¹ It appears they may not have considered multiple frames for the GPS time synching.  That is a pretty glaring mistake and the experiment needs to be studied in some depth to see if they missed it, but the size of the flaw is a good match for explaining the experimental result.

 

It is common for experiments to have flawed design and/or analysis. Your competitors will point that out. 

 

A common tshirt at Caltech sums it up:

 

Science, it just works bitches

 

___________

¹ the paper - if you have had special relativity this is a very easy to follow back of the envelope calculation.   Perhaps someone was careless and no one carefully checked the initial assumptions.

 

 

cheating death and thinking more clearly as an added benefit

Damn it!

 

An email just came that said someone I used to work with died yesterday at age 62.  

 

That makes two in a month - John and George.  George was only 49.  Both died way too early.  Heart attacks.

 

damn it!

 

so sad for their families

 

The last time I saw them both were in terrible physical shape - delightful people, but pure couch potatoes.  Sports meant stretching out on the couch and watching someone else and neither could be convinced to take even a short walk.  It is difficult coming to the realization they are no longer around and I have to wonder what the story would have been if they would have taken better care of themselves.

 

A few nights ago Grant and I were talking about our mutual love of walking.  I've always enjoyed it and find it a place to think.  Some of you share this addiction and I've been lucky enough to have had some great conversations on longish walks.  Mostly I take them to clear my mind and enjoy a bit of nature, but it is impressive how many unsettled problems managed to connect up and solve themselves during these times.  I'd go so far to say that most of the insight I've had so far has managed to manifest itself on walks and bike rides.

 

It turns out there are additional benefits to this modest form of exercise if it is regular and long enough and this is why I mentioned the sad deaths.  Apparently very little exercise is required to increase your likely lifespan.  I'm not terribly surprised by the numbers reported here ... a third of adults get no regular exercise.  Even 15 minutes a day can make a measurable difference, but the recommended levels are at least 150 minutes a week.   Thowing in a bit of more intense aerobic exercise is even better.

 

It is very difficult to encourage exercise without coming off as sanctimonious.  In light of the deaths I feel compelled to write a bit, so take it in that light.

 

Our need for regular exercise is basic.  Most of us have basal metabolic rates that account for about 70% of our energy expenditure - it is generally felt our bodies are made for the 50% to 60% range.  Seriously inactive people may be as high as 80%.  I probably would be a complete couch potato if it weren't for a couple of benefits - the clarity of mind one gets during long walks, the serendipity that sometimes comes with being a bit closer to the natural world (for several months a vulture accompanied me and I've had a fawn back into me),  and a few hours of a good feeling following aerobic exercise.  Those are seriously positive and enough to recommend activity even if no other benefits existed.  Not to mention it is a relatively inexpensive pleasure - I get about 1600 miles from a pair of Asics.¹ 

 

When I started consulting I swore to myself that I'd take an hour off for a walk every day no matter what the weather and no matter where I was.  I've kept that promise at over the 99% level and even take walks during ice storms.  They are often the highpoints of my day - a period where clarity comes easily.

 

Aerobic exercise is great too.  I'm slowly restarting my rowing after my injury in August and am noticing an improvement in how I feel for hours afterwards as well as my mental alertness.  

 

It is sometimes difficult to budget time, but I timeshift enertainment time from the evening to my early morning rowing sessions with an iPod.  An hour of walking seven days a week and an hour of aerobic exercise five times a week seems to agree with me.  Start a program of your own and give yourself an unfair cognitive advantage over your competition.  You're also likely to be more healthy and live longer - assuming you don't walk in front of taxis in NYC (I can hear Juliette laughing now).

 

One of the companies I consult with considers exercise important enough that they match a half hour.  If you put in an hour of exercise, they'll let half of it count as work.  You also get a free lunch as part of the deal.    Their gym facilities are wonderful and trainers regularly visit to help out. I'm told about a third of their workforce uses their gym at least twice a week.  

 

It is inspiring to realize that some go much further - a few of you are much more serious than me.  Dave and Pip run marathons.  My niece Magi is a very serious runner and took first place in a fifty mile marathon a few weeks ago.  She manages to run about an hour a day for training and "several hours" on Saturdays.  

 

Colleen did serious training on the sand - trying sprinting and jumping in the sand some time for a sense of the added difficulty.  Fueling her was a 6,000 Calorie a day propositon.  Imagine doing routines the one in the video five days a week along with everything else an athlete does.

 

 

It is comforting that you don't have to go to the extreme levels that Magi and Colleen chose.  Fortunately simple walking and maybe a bit of low impact aerobics have a very positive impact...  these days Colleen is down to walking the dogs and kickboxing and some regular gym time these days and still feels great. Even with this comparatively light load her BMR probably only accounts for half of her caloric requirement.

 

Note that unless you are into megaexercise you are unlikely to have much success with it by itself for weight control.  In an hour of rowing I do about 150 watt-hours of work and require about 750 watt-hours of energy.  That is equivalent to roughly 650 Calories - about two Snickers.   It helps, but to remove a pound you need to remove about 3500 Calories.  So exercise for other benefits and enjoy the modest benefits of a slightly higher caloric requirement.

 

Make it a game if you can - just start something and give it some time until you get to the point where it is more of a gift than a burden.  The benefits can be amazing.  I don't want to hear about others going before their time.   And if you have kids teach its value to them!

________

¹ inexpensive per hour.  My shoes average $100 a pair so we're looking at six and a quarter cents per mile - a bit more than what I pay for car tires

 

open the pod bay doors, hal

try that request if you have an iPhone 4S...

 

There were several interesting things to note about the iPhone 4S announcement.  For me the most significant are Apple’s ability to use relatively modest hardware and still squeeze out a superior user experience compared with much Android devices using much less energy and Siri.  I’ll concentrate on Siri.

 

Siri was purchased by Apple a few years ago and they’ve clearly done a lot of user interface design and speech recognition work, but Siri has a very interesting background - DARPA”s PAL project.

 

The Personalized Assistant that Learns was a massive five year program that was managed by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).  DARPA focuses on blue sky projects that have the potential to provide enormous change - the internal benchmark is any project should have a tenfold improvement in performance over what current exists - or it should open an entirely new area.  DARPA projects have included the GPS system and what became the Internet.  They’ve also had a lot of failures as many of these are very speculative, but DARPA is all about getting a few home runs.  The only industrial organizations since WWII that have had such speculative projects have been Bell Labs and IBM’s Watson Labs - and both of those pretty much abandoned the highly speculative route by 1980.  

 

The SRI folks called the project the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes - CALO for short.  In their talks they would mention the name was from the Latin calonis - or soldier’s servant.  It was clear where this might be used.

 

It was very multidisciplinary - I’m looking at one of their foil stacks.¹  “Over 300 researchers from 25 of the top research Universities in the US with the goal of building a new generation of cognitive assistants that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.”

 

also from the foils

 

CALO assists its user with six high-level functions:

1. Organizing and Prioritizing Information: As the user works with email, appointments, web pages, files, and so forth, CALO uses machine learning algorithms to build a queryable model of who works on which projects, what role they play, how important they are, how documents and deliverables are related to this, etc.
2. Preparing Information Artifacts: CALO can help its user put together new documents such as PowerPoint presentations, leveraging learning about structure and content from previous documents accessed in the past.
3. Mediating Human Communications: CALO provides assistance as its user interacts with other people, both in electronic forums (e.g. email) and in physical meetings. If given access to participate in a meeting, CALO automatically generates a meeting transcript, tracks action item assignments, detects roles of participants, and so forth. CALO can also put together a "PrepPak" for a meeting containing information to read ahead of time or have at your fingertips as the meeting progresses.
4. Task Management: CALO can automate routine tasks for you (e.g. travel authorizations), and can be taught new procedures and task by observing and interacting with the user.
5. Scheduling and Reasoning in Time: CALO can learn your preferences for when you need things done by, and help you manage your busy schedule.
6. Resource allocation: As part of Task management, CALO can learn to acquire new resources (electronic services and real-world people) to help get a job done.

 

 

Very disruptive stuff if you can pull it off.  There were several commercial spinoffs from the work.  One was a small company called Siri (a play on SRI).  Their intention was to apply some of the tech to mobile phones.  Ideally some mobile tasks could have a viable speech interface - this would get around some of the problems of typing, multiple clicks and screen loading.  This clearly doesn’t work for all tasks, but there is great potential for many.  

 

Apple bought Siri for something like $200M a few years ago.  There was obviously a lot of user interface work as well as getting untrained speaker recognition working.  There is clearly a lot of work to be done.  At the moment their information supplying partners are not very rich.  Wolframalpha is interesting as they provide query responses in the form of images to prevent search engines from mining them.

 

I was amazed by the fact that it worked at all in some of the Youtube videos I’ve seen.  It is not clear to me where this fits in - and that is largely as I haven’t been able to live with it and think about it a lot.  That will have to wait until June for my mobile contract to expire.  There is real potential.  I would guess Siri a year from now will be a very different service.

 

It would be interesting to see how the computational load is distributed.  Just what is happening on the iPhone and how much time is allotted for the various critical steps.  

 

Really interesting stuff!!  You see thing like this and realize that, going forward,  the mobile phone makers without interesting platforms are toast.  Features like Siri may differentiate and seriously enhance Apple's iOS platform even if it is far from a polished state now.  Only time will tell...

 

Oh - Siri is a not too uncommon Nordic women's name.  I know a Norwegian woman named Siri.  She has a very quirky personality and I would hope Apple builds a lot of quirkiness into their Siri.

 

_______

¹ I'm certainly not an expert in AI or NLP, but worked in a research center that had AI and strong NL departments and follow some of the work in industy and moreso at DARPA.

If anyone wants to buy me an unlocked iPhone 4S I'll happily play and investigate:-)  Sadly my AT&T mobile contract is far too restrictive for me to consider getting a new phone before June, 2012.