An 1891 "Fuel Spill"

I was fascinated by this historical tidbit from our local paper, The Arlington Advocate (February 3-9, 2011):

1891 ... After having his load of hay weighed at the municipal hay scales next to the old town hall, ... Joseph Butterfield’s wagon tipped over on the trolley car tracks. For two hours, this became the temporary “end of the line” while what humorously could be called “an old-fashioned fuel spill” was cleaned up.

This brief item tells us a number of things:

• The town government was even then in the business of ensuring uniform measurements of “fuel” -- in this case, hay, which fed the horses that were still the chief form of motive power for transportation. These days, checking the quality of gas pumps has, of course, become a state responsibility.
• New technologies present new challenges. Although Arlington (then named West Cambridge) had had horse-drawn trolley service since 1859, electric trolley service had begun only three years before Butterfield’s incident.
• And yes, even back then, an accidental “spill” could cause a traffic tie-up for many people not directly involved. Of course, now the number of people likely to be affected is much larger because there are so many more of us. But proportionately?

I wonder how many people back then bemoaned the complications inflicted on their lives by the newly emerging technologies.

IEEE — “Advancing Technology for Humanity”

The IEEE has just unveiled a new tagline: “Advancing Technology for Humanity.”

When I first read it, I thought, “Well, that’s a bit much. All of technology? I thought the IEEE was only about electrical and electronic engineering.”

But it made me stop and realize how pervasive electronics is in all our technologies.

Think how thoroughly the World Wide Web has invaded all our lives.

Think of how many of the recent Winter Olympics events have been decided by hundredths of a second — decisions made possible by electronic timing.

My son trained in mechanical engineering at USC, but had to learn about electrical signal integrity issues to do his first job.

The recent highly publicized if relatively infrequent failures of Toyota acceleration systems have reminded us of how integral electronics are to the safe operation of our automobiles.

Medical technology? Highly electronic. MRI, CT scans, electronic record keeping, pacemakers, laparoscopic laser surgery....

Pharmaceutical and biochemical research? Electronic instruments such as nanotiter arrays make it possible to do billions of experiments in a very short time.

And it boggled my mind to learn that people are now using inkjet printer technology to build 3D replacement bladders from human cells — and that the bladders are being used in seven people already.

So, yeah, Advancing Technology (in General) for Humanity. Not too much after all!

I feel privileged to be a part of it.

The iPad: Convergent and Disruptive

I’ve been mildly amused by some of the commentary on the iPad. Much of it, while true, misses the point.

For example, IEEE Spectrum’s Tech Talk trumpets that “The iPad is Not A Kindle Killer.” True enough. You reportedly can’t yet read a book on the iPad in direct sunlight. Not yet.

But the same article quotes Jason Heikenfeld of the University of Cincinnati as saying that the iPad “will increase the movement to digital media”. Why? Because you’ll be able to download magazines and other publications as easily as you can iTunes?

Well, that raises the question as to how much longer we’ll have print publications around, doesn’t it? As it is, one school library has already given up on having print books available.

My friend Peter Dupre grokked the importance of the iPad immediately. He calls it a game changer. If you’re not on Facebook, you can access his blog directly. Peter expects books to become obsolete, iPads to replace laptops and TVs and daytimers, iWork to displace Microsoft Office, and Apple to trump Microsoft, all in about five years or so. Perhaps optimistic, but the trends are there.

Others have complained that there’s nothing really new in the iPad. That misses the point too. Consider:

• Apple has done a masterful job of converging a number of important trends in a single unit.


• The existing concerns and hesitations will be overcome through incremental innovation.

Incremental innovation?

A few years ago, Harvard’s Clayton M. Christensen published a paradigm shifting book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. In it he distinguished incremental (or sustaining) innovation from disruptive innovation. As products mature, companies keep making them incrementally better and better, until the capabilities eventually improve enough to exceed what the vast majority of users need. But the most important customers — that is, those who can afford to buy a lot — keep demanding those improvements, and this siphons off enough resources to keep companies from making anything really different.

And then along comes something very different that at first meets the needs of only a small share of the market, but does so in a way that is cheaper (ink jet printers), safer (hydraulic shovels), more fun (dirt bikes), or easier to use (an iPod). Initially it meets the needs of only a small part of the market, but its makers then begin their own cycle of incremental improvement until they eat the bottom out of the the older technology’s market.

In my opinion, the iPad is a disruptive technology. What is disruptive is the combination — the convergence — of a bunch of leading edge technologies. Pads with the same form factor and detachable keyboards already exist, but they don’t have (I presume) the apps that an iPhone does, nor the ability to download media as easily as you can for an iPod.

And even if not the iPad, something like it will gradually make its disparate competing technologies more and more obsolete. The price will drop, the battery life will extend, more apps will show up, someone will figure out how to read the thing in bright sunlight....

Composing for Video Games -- and Adaptability

Until this recent article from the Boston Globe, it hadn’t occurred to me that composing music for video games would be different enough to warrant a whole subcurriculum. The Berklee College of Music is offering five separate courses this term alone in video game audio or game (musical) scoring.

What makes composing for video games different? Video games are interactive. What happens in the game changes each time someone plays. Traditional compositions, on the other hand, are written to be played sequentially from start to finish.

Adaptation in music as it is performed live, of course, is not unknown. Consider a good jam session, or music that is played as stars walk to the podium to receive their awards. In the former case, the jammers only have to sense and adapt to each other (and perhaps to the enthusiasm of the listeners), while the music used at award shows is pretty much a set of preplanned snippets. Music written for a video game, on the other hand, has to be able to branch in specific ways at many different points.

It struck me, after thinking about the article, that this nonlinearity, this arbitrary branching, also models how we read the World Wide Web. We might start out looking up what a “Kessel Run” is, for example, only to find ourselves linking to the definition for “parsecs.” A wise web page creator will not design her text and graphics to be processed linearly as if we were leafing through a book, but will rely on hyperlinks to allow her readers to dig further into other issues according to their interests. And with interactive web languages, the pages can even modify themselves dynamically in response to inputs from the user.

And for those of us who are software designers, I’m finding more and more of us adopting the notion, common to a number of Agile methodologies, that requirements are going to be constantly changing on us, so we had better adapt our development methods accordingly. (See a brief example from Damon Poole, as well as Vellenga’s Law of Project Redefinition.) The old waterfall methodology, in which a group first settled on requirements, then used those to drive an agreed-on design, then implemented, then tested, and then delivered, is falling out of favor. I have heard an unconfirmed report, for example, of one project that was completed in 18 months, exactly according to the original requirements, only to be ignored by the customer because that was no longer what the customer needed. (And yes, the customer did agree that the vendor had provided what was contracted and did pay the bill.) In a way, software engineering has something in common with the video game itself, in that it has to constantly respond to new inputs from the user.

Another Globe article briefly reviews the music composed or arranged for five different video games.

Ford's Upgraded Sync System -- Integrated User Interface for Your Car

Ford Motor Co. triggered a lot of news stories when it showed off its upgraded Sync in-car electronic system at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this week. See Gearlog for a fairly comprehensive review of the new features. As it turns out, Kia is unveiling their own in-car infotainment system at the show this week too.

One feature garnering a lot of comment was the new 8-inch touch screen at the center of the dashboard. Some commentators, such as ABC News’s Becky Worley, are concerned about having one more distraction for the driver’s eyes. But after scanning a number of the stories for more detail, including the Gearlog review, I figure the distractions may not be worse than what we already have.

• Many of Sync’s available views replace control buttons, such as those for your air conditioning system, that are already part of your dashboard.
  
• The navigation system reminds us that many of our cars already have touch-based navigation screens.
  
• The touch screen is not the only way to interact with Sync. A 5-way controller will be part of the steering wheel. Voice control has been available with Sync since 2007.
  
• Surfing the web is available only when the transmission is in Park.
  

Sync will support voice-based Internet access, including Internet radio (Pandora). A Twitter app will read incoming tweets aloud to you. This way the tweets will be no more distracting — and no less — than hands-free mobile phone usage.

Overall, it looks like the designers have done a good job of keeping safety in mind. It doesn’t mean that cars aren’t more distracting than they used to be decades ago. For example, fifteen years ago I could change radio stations by the feel of the buttons, which were fairly substantial; now I change stations (or tracks) only when I’m stopped at a light or on a long clear stretch of highway. However, the new Sync seems to be no more and no less distracting than other new-car dashboards.

Google's Chrome browser — fast and simple

When Masoud Shadravan told me recently how fast the Google Chrome browser is, I decided to download it and try it. And yes, it’s noticeably faster — at least compared to Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Is it reliable? That is, can you use it without having lots of crashes? A web search for “Google Chrome browser reliability” indicates that Chrome had some reliability problems about a year ago, but that Google introduced and publicized a “distributed reliability testing” effort around March of 2009. Since then, reliability appears not to have been a serious issue.

Chrome has a “minimalist” user interface. It’s really easy to do all the things that I commonly do, I haven’t found anything that I had a hard time doing. To quote Masoud, who is a usability specialist, “My take on the UI is that it is simple and that’s what’s good about it. It eliminates the flashy stuff that I never use and doesn’t try to get you to use the specific services like IE does.”

So far I’ve had only two problems:

• It took me a few minutes to figure out how to exit full screen mode (which I had not used before in other browsers). I finally bumped against the center of the top of the screen and the appropriate menu item appeared. This is a small weakness in Chrome’s ease of use.

• When I first brought up my usual Bank of America site, Bank of America thought that I needed to update my login info from an older style, and asked me for all sorts of confidential information. At this point I decided to call BoA’s customer service, who told me to exit my browser and try again. It sounded like this occasionally happens to their customers already; the rep didn’t even bother to check what browser I was using, so this may have had nothing to do with Chrome.

It’ll be interesting to see how Firefox (Mozilla) and Internet Explorer (Microsoft) respond. Can either a(nother) large corporation or the open-source community meet the challenge of much improved performance at a possibly reduced range of functionality? Will the Chrome browser be a disruptive technology within the already “free” product space of Internet browsers?

Try it. I think you’ll like it.

Wifi on the Bus -- a New Equalizer

According to a recent article in The Boston Globe, bus companies are boosting their ridership — especially among the young — by offering free wireless connectivity (wifi). A few newer bus companies have been offering the service for over a year; it's also been available in Hong Kong for at least that long. Once again the Internet is equalizing opportunities not only across geographical lines, but also across economic class lines. Although most people seem to be using the wifi recreationally, there's nothing to stop you from doing computerized work tasks while you're on the bus. You can now do e-mail, IM-ing, research, or even web-based buying and selling while you're coaching at cut rates from Boston to New York!

The usual caveats apply against making your proprietary information visible (or audible) to fellow travelers.