information visualization

Novelties

Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data

Data can be organized many ways on Many Eyes. Above is a chart of Olympic medals.

By ANNE EISENBERG

Published: August 30, 2008

PEOPLE share their videos on YouTube and their photos at Flickr. Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text.

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Above shows occurrences of names in the New Testament.

At an experimental Web site, Many Eyes, (www.many-eyes.com), users can upload the data they want to visualize, then try sophisticated tools to generate interactive displays. These might range from maps of relationships in the New Testament to a display of the comparative frequency of words used in speeches by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The site was created by scientists at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M. in Cambridge, Mass., to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. Those who register at the site can comment on one another’s work, perhaps visualizing the same information with different tools and discovering unexpected patterns in the data.

Collaboration like this can be an effective way to spur insight, said Pat Hanrahan, a professor of computer science at Stanford whose research includes scientific visualization. “When analyzing information, no single person knows it all,” he said. “When you have a group look at data, you protect against bias. You get more perspectives, and this can lead to more reliable decisions.”

The site is the brainchild of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two I.B.M. researchers at the Cambridge lab. Dr. Wattenberg, a computer scientist and mathematician, says sophisticated visualization tools have historically been the province of professionals in academia, business and government. “We want to bring visualization to a whole new audience,” he said — to people who have had relatively few ways to create and discuss such use of data.

“The conversation about the data is as important as the flow of data from the database,” he said.

The Many Eyes site, begun in January 2007, offers 16 ways to present data, from stack graphs and bar charts to diagrams that let people map relationships. TreeMaps, showing information in colorful rectangles, are among the popular tools.

Initially, the site offered only analytical tools like graphs for visualizing numerical data. “The interesting thing we noticed was that users kept trying to upload blog posts, and entire books,” Dr. Viégas said, so the site added techniques for unstructured text. One tool, called an interleaved tag cloud, lets users compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in two passages — for instance, President Bush’s State of the Union addresses in 2002 and 2003.

Almost all the tools are interactive, allowing users to change parameters, zoom in or out or show more information when the mouse moves over an image, Dr. Wattenberg said.

Users can embed images and links to their visualizations in their Web sites or blogs, just as they can embed YouTube videos. “It’s great that people can paste in a YouTube video of cats” on their blogs, Dr. Viégas said. “So why not a visual that gives you some insight into the sea of data that surrounds us? I might find one thing; someone else, something completely different, and that’s where the conversation starts.”

Rich Hoeg, a technology manager who lives in New Hope, Minn., and has a blog at econtent.typepad.com, was so taken with the possibilities for group collaboration that he wrote a tutorial on using Many Eyes as part of his series called “NorthStar Nerd Tutorials.”

“Many Eyes is unusual, because it takes advantage of the collective intelligence of a group to get more out of a data set,” he said. For the tutorial, Mr. Hoeg exported enrollment data for graduate engineering students to the site, then used one of the tools there to display the information in various ways.

“I wanted people to understand that you can take the same data and have it tell lots of different stories,” he said.

Dr. Wattenberg noted an example from the site. In charting a particular topic — deaths resulting from human violence in the 20th century — one user originally presented a bubble graph in which the size of the circles represented the number of casualties tied to an event — for instance, World War I or World War II. After discussion on the site about the substantial growth in population during the 20th century, the originator offered two new time-based visualizations of the data, one a line graph and the other a stack graph — plotting the number of casualties against this growing population.

“You could see a new downward trend emerge,” Dr. Wattenberg said. “Violent deaths declined in the latter decades of the century. It’s a slightly more optimistic view.”

Ben Shneiderman, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a pioneer in information visualization, says sites like Many Eyes are helping to democratize the tools of visualization. “The gift of the Internet is that everyone can participate, and the tools can be brought to a much wider audience,” he said.

Presenting results in a static spreadsheet or table may do the job. “But sometimes it’s like driving with your eyes closed,” he said. “With visualization, it might be possible to open your eyes and see something that will help you” — for instance, patterns, clusters, gaps or outliers in the data.

“The great fun of information visualization,” he said, “is that it gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.”

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

數位偶 還有可吃的robot 都是幼兒教育

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【聯合報╱陳思嫻】 2008.08.31 04:02 am

到印度僅第三天，沿途的風景已經餵飽了數位相機的記憶卡，一百零一張照片吶，顧不了數位相機的生理時鐘，我的手指不斷地按下快門，記憶卡就被迫吞下這些風景。後來，風景真的被吃掉了，但不是裝進天狗的肚腹裡。 我走進招牌寫著「SONY」字樣的相機器材館，打算再買一張記憶卡，容納接下來七天的行旅：「one memory card……」印度老闆拉開各式抽屜，東翻西找，拆開新包裝，把一張簇新的記憶卡，塞進數位相機胸膛的一側，那張記憶卡的型號，很顯然與我的數位相機不 符，卡在裡頭動彈不得。像在進行器官移植手術那般，印度老闆取來一堆鑷子和夾子，使勁地抽拔出記憶卡。足足花費了半小時。....... 連同原先的舊記憶卡，不知怎麼地，也被印度老闆夾壞了：「我在印度失憶了啊！」望著玻璃桌上損毀的兩張記憶卡，我無聲地吶喊，彷彿鑷子隱隱夾痛了聲帶。

Olfactory diagnostics

Olfactory diagnostics

Smelling bad

Aug 28th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Doctors may soon have a new diagnostic tool in their kit bags

Illustration by Stephen Jeffrey

SINCE time immemorial—or at least as far back as Hippocrates—novice physicians have been taught to smell patients’ breath for signs of illness. Though unpleasant for the doctor, it is a useful trick. The sweet smell of rotten apples, for instance, indicates diabetes. Liver disease, by contrast, often causes the breath to smell fishy. But the human nose cannot detect all the chemical changes brought about by disease. Science, therefore, seeks to smell what human doctors cannot. The aim is to create a diagnostic nose as discriminating as those of perfume mixers or wine buyers. Such a nose would, however, be sensitive not to life’s pleasures, but to its pains.

The idea of creating a diagnostic nose goes back to the 1970s. In that decade Linus Pauling, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist, performed the first serious scientific analysis of human breath. He used a technique called gas chromatography, which enables complex mixtures to be separated into their components, to detect some 250 volatile organic compounds in the air exhaled from lungs. Gas chromatography by itself, however, does not allow you to identify each component—it is merely a way of separating them. To make the identifications, you need to add a second step, called mass spectrometry. This, as its name suggests, works out the weight of the molecules in each component. Often, weight is enough by itself to identify a molecule. But if two molecules happen to have the same weight, they can be analysed by breaking them up into smaller, daughter molecules. These are almost certain to differ in weight.

Using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, researchers have, over the years, identified more than 3,000 compounds that are regularly exhaled, excreted or exuded from the body. The search, now, is to understand how changes in the mixture of these compounds may indicate disease, and to find ways of recognising such changes routinely and robustly.

Exhaustive analysis

One of the first practitioners of the field of olfactory diagnosis, Carolyn Willis of Amersham Hospital in Britain, decided to contract the job out to dogs. They, she reckoned, have the necessary nasal apparatus to sniff out illness, and there was already some anecdotal evidence that they could, indeed, smell people with cancer. It worked. For the past four years her sniffer dogs have been diagnosing bladder cancer. She is now training them to detect prostate cancer and skin cancer as well.

But training dogs is probably not the best solution. It takes time and needs special skills, so mass-producing sniffer dogs would be hard. Moreover, a dog can give you only a yes-or-no answer. It cannot describe nuances, even if it detects them. Boguslaw Buszewski of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, compares this approach to checking for fever by touching a patient’s forehead. That tells you he is ill. However, it is only by measuring his temperature with a thermometer that you can discover how serious his condition is. In Dr Buszewski’s view the breath-analysis equivalent of the thermometer is the mass spectrometer, and that is where effort should be concentrated.

Other researchers agree. Earlier this month Michelle Gallagher, of the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia, announced the results of a study that uses this approach. She confirmed that the early stages of basal-cell carcinoma, a type of skin cancer, can be detected by analysing the odour of a person’s skin using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. To do so, she sampled the air immediately above the tumours and compared its composition with that of air from the same sites in healthy individuals. She also checked the composition of the air in the room when nobody was present, as an extra control. She found that although air collected from both groups contained the same chemical substances, there was a difference in the amounts of some of them. This finding allowed her to produce what is known as a biomarker profile for the illness. That means it can be diagnosed reliably and—crucially—early on.

The combination of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry thus works. It can, nevertheless, take up to two days to run the tests. Dr Buszewski hopes to refine and speed up the process so that it can be carried out within an hour.

To do this, he has developed a device that can be tuned to pick up and concentrate the most relevant molecules. With patents still pending, he is cagey about the details, but the principle is to trap relevant molecules using columns made of metal or silica that are the width of a human hair. Each column is coated with special polymers tweaked so that they bind preferentially to particular compounds found in the breath. Pass a sample through a forest of these columns and the molecules of interest will be sucked out. They can then be flushed into the analytical machinery and a result quickly emerges.

Dr Buszewski is now tweaking his device so that it works with the biomarker profiles of a range of diseases. If he can do this successfully, olfactory diagnosis could become mainstream without a wagging tail in sight.

李國鼎先生攝於留英時期（1934-1937）

李國鼎照片集

1934年至1937年，李國鼎先生（坐者左一）負笈留學英國劍橋大學，同期之中英庚款留英第二屆公費生唐培經先生（坐者中，數學學門）、伍啟元先生（立者中，經濟學門）、周鴻經先生（坐右一，數學學門）等人去倫敦拜訪李國鼎先生。

李國鼎先生赴英劍橋大學留學時，作低溫超導實驗。

1937年6月，李國鼎先生（第三排右一）於劍橋核子物理研究中心與師長、同學合影。

劍橋大學校園，前為康河（Cam River），後為國王學院（King’s College）大教堂，李國鼎先生攝於留英時期（1934-1937）。

Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: August 29, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,” Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. “We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us.”

Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States.

“Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”

But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. “It’s no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs,” said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. “You wouldn’t want someone owning your roads either.”

Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international Internet service providers.

This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which traffic between two cites in one country will flow through other nations. In January, when a cable was cut in the Mediterranean, Egyptian Internet traffic was nearly paralyzed because it was not being shared by local I.S.P.’s but instead was routed through European operators.

The issue was driven home this month when hackers attacked and immobilized several Georgian government Web sites during the country’s fighting with Russia. Most of Georgia’s access to the global network flowed through Russia and Turkey. A third route through an undersea cable linking Georgia to Bulgaria is scheduled for completion in September.

Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited to developing countries. The Japanese “are on a rampage to build out across India and China so they have alternative routes and so they don’t have to route through the U.S.”

Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet, added, “We discovered the Internet, but we couldn’t keep it a secret.” While the United States carried 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent.

Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business.

That lack of investment mirrors a pattern that has taken place elsewhere in the high-technology industry, from semiconductors to personal computers.

The risk, Internet technologists say, is that upstarts like China and India are making larger investments in next-generation Internet technology that is likely to be crucial in determining the future of the network, with investment, innovation and profits going first to overseas companies.

“Whether it’s a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand,” said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Google’s Internet evangelist and who, with Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early 1970s. “Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it once was? That wasn’t helpful.”

International networks that carry data into and out of the United States are still being expanded at a sharp rate, but the Internet infrastructure in many other regions of the world is growing even more quickly.

While there has been some concern over a looming Internet traffic jam because of the rise in Internet use worldwide, the congestion is generally not on the Internet’s main trunk lines, but on neighborhood switches, routers and the wires into a house.

As Internet traffic moves offshore, it may complicate the task of American intelligence gathering agencies, but would not make Internet surveillance impossible.

“We’re probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit harder,” said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who said the United States had invested far too little in collecting intelligence via the Internet. “We’ve given terrorists a free ride in cyberspace,” he said.

Others say the eclipse of the United States as the central point in cyberspace is one of many indicators that the world is becoming a more level playing field both economically and politically.

“This is one of many dimensions on which we’ll have to adjust to a reduction in American ability to dictate terms of core interests of ours,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “We are, by comparison, militarily weaker, economically poorer and technologically less unique than we were then. We are still a very big player, but not in control.”

China, for instance, surpassed the United States in the number of Internet users in June. Over all, Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the world’s Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market research organization.

By contrast, there were about 237 million Internet users in North America and the growth has nearly peaked; penetration of the Internet in the region has reached about 71 percent.

The increasing role of new competitors has shown up in data collected annually by Renesys, a firm in Manchester, N.H., that monitors the connections between Internet providers. The Renesys rankings of Internet connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the last three years have been the Italian Internet provider Tiscali, China Telecom and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI.

Firms that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet.

“The U.S. telecommunications firms haven’t invested,” said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager for Internet data services at Renesys. “The rest of the world has caught up. I don’t see the AT&T’s and Sprints making the investments because they see Internet service as a commodity.”

卡车工厂改为小型车工厂 (Ford)

　......实现生产车型转变的关键是柔性生产设备，该设备可将经涂装工序和最终组装工序标准化后的部件应用于整车工厂，并可通过改变设备程序支持多种车型的生产。 由于可进行柔性生产的整车工厂要焊接多种尺寸的汽车，因此至少80％的自动装置需要重新编程。目前，福特的装配厂中，能够进行柔性生产的整车工厂占 87％，预计到2012年将达到100％。（记者：栉谷 沙江子）

■日文原文
Ford社が米国密歇根工場に7500万ドルを投資、トラック工場から小型車工場に転換

Data Center: Container vs Module

【IDF】“集裝箱式”數據中心趨於普及，傳統數據中心以模組化抗衡

DATE	2008/08/22

在“2008年英特爾秋季開發者論壇”召開的前一天，美國英特爾舉行了以數據中心為主的、名為“The Eco-Technology Great Debates”的討論會。討論會上，傳統數據中心對抗“集裝箱式”數據中心的議題引人注目。

　　集裝箱式數據中心類似于美國Sun Microsystems開發的“黑盒計劃（Project BlackBox）”，是為了數據中心的運作而把所需伺服器和其他設備封裝于集裝箱的系統。這種單個的集裝箱式數據中心或者多個連接在一起則構成數據中心。

　　討論會上首先由傳統型數據中心推進組提出了新一代“模組式”數據中心。基本的模組型數據中心是將分為多個模組的數據中心安裝于大樓內。“通過採用從其 他業界學到的技術和使用方法，與此前相比可高效利用電力。今後數據中心將繼續向模組化發展”（數據中心設計公司美國IDC Architects主環境主管Sigurd Anderson）。該士強調，由於這種模組型數據中心可以隨著技術進步更換升級模組，因此便於導入新技術。並主張通過採用最尖端的溫度管理技術和其他基 礎設施相關技術，能夠建立與集裝箱式數據中心相比可靠性能更高的數據中心。

　　不過，具有集裝箱式數據中心運作經驗的美國微軟數據研究中心主管Dan Costello熱心於集裝箱式數據中心的推廣。例如，該公司運作的位於美國芝加哥市的數據中心已導入了100個集裝箱式數據中心，每個配備2000台伺 服器。Costello並不主張立即把所有的傳統數據中心更換為集裝箱式數據中心，“我公司已開始運作小規模和大規模集裝箱式數據中心。不過不同之處在 於，數據中心要求技術升級時，只需新增集裝箱即可實現。這樣可以縮短投產時間”（Dan Costello）。

　　關於集裝箱式數據中心的耗電率，Costello介紹說，微軟運作的集裝箱式數據中心每0.09平方米的能量密度為1000W。“在相對狹小 的空間裏，實現了高能量密度”（Costello）。預計2012年之前，集裝箱數據中心的電力效率指標PUE（能源使用效率）將達到1.25。

　　目前存在的問題是：隨著數據中心的相關技術不斷更新，將如何處理封裝了老式技術設備的集裝箱式數據中心。Sun公司的Sun模組化數據中心的技術總監Jud Cooley回答說，“可以把集裝箱式數據中心送回製造商進行修理調整”。

　　在討論開始之前，與會者中有73％認為傳統數據中心具有優勢。不過，當討論結束之後，這些人當中認為集裝箱式數據中心具有優勢的比例則升至57％。(記者：Phil Keys，矽谷支局）

■日文原文
【IDF】『コンテナ型』のデータ センターが普及へ，従来型はモジュール化で対抗

Irradiation of greens

Editorial

Safer Salad

Published: August 27, 2008

Add fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce to the shortlist of foods that companies can zap with radiation to kill off many dangerous pathogens. With concerns about food-borne illnesses rising — tainted spinach and lettuce in 2006 sickened hundreds of people and killed several — the Food and Drug Administration has wisely approved the use of ionizing radiation to kill dangerous bacteria and extend the shelf lives of these vegetables.

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Consumers often cringe at the very mention of radiation, but the technology is a safe way to eliminate the threat posed by E. coli, salmonella and listeria in the food supply. The F.D.A., the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Medical Association all attest to the safety of irradiated foods.

NASA has long fed irradiated meat to astronauts. The F.D.A. has already approved irradiation of meat, poultry, spices, oysters, clams and mussels with no noticeable adverse effect on the small minority of consumers willing to try the products.

Some consumer advocates contend that irradiation could lower the nutritional value of lettuce and spinach and create toxic chemicals within them. But the F.D.A., after a careful review, found little to worry about. The overwhelming majority of studies it reviewed showed no evidence of toxicity. Nor were nutritional values significantly affected. Although some vitamins could be reduced by irradiation, the small losses would have little or no impact on total dietary intake of the vitamins.

Irradiation of greens is still no magic bullet for protecting the country’s vulnerable food supplies. The approved doses will not be strong enough to kill the viruses responsible for many outbreaks of food poisoning. Many food producers may be hesitant to adopt the technology because of consumer resistance and added costs. This country still needs a comprehensive program to keep food products free of pathogens — from farms through the processing and distribution systems to consumers.

Purdue, Citing Research Misconduct, Punishes Scientist

By KENNETH CHANG

Published: August 27, 2008

An appeals committee at Purdue University has upheld findings of misconduct on the part of a professor who claims to have created energy-generating fusion in a tabletop experiment, the university announced on Wednesday.

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With the findings, William R. Woodson, the university’s provost, has imposed punishment on the professor, Rusi P. Taleyarkhan. Dr. Taleyarkhan remains on the Purdue faculty, but his distinction as a “named professor” has been removed, along with an annual allotment of $25,000 that accompanied it.

In addition, he is prohibited from serving as a thesis adviser to graduate students for at least the next three years.

John Lewis, a lawyer for him, said Dr. Taleyarkhan was considering his options, among them challenging the sanctions in court.

Beginning with a paper published in the journal Science in 2002, Dr. Taleyarkhan, who then worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has claimed that the force of sound waves can collapse bubbles in a liquid violently enough to generate conditions that fuse together hydrogen atoms, releasing energy. Scientists working in other laboratories have not been able to reproduce the experiments.

In July, an investigatory committee at Purdue, though coming to no conclusions about that finding itself, determined that Dr. Taleyarkhan had later falsely claimed independent confirmation of the work. Actually, the committee said, he had been involved in supervising the follow-up experiment, which was conducted by a postdoctoral researcher in his laboratory, and in writing the resulting scientific papers.

The committee also found that a graduate student in his laboratory whom Dr. Taleyarkhan added as an author to those follow-up papers had made no substantial contributions.

Dr. Taleyarkhan appealed the decision. The rejection of that appeal, by a three-member panel appointed by Dr. Woodson, the provost, was unanimous.

Responding to a request for comment, Dr. Taleyarkhan referred in an e-mail message to the investigatory committee’s dismissal of 10 other accusations of misconduct, including improper presentation of data.

“The immense three-year-long investigation,” he wrote, “has thrown out all allegations related to fraud and fabrication and therefore represents a success for the science.”

State of the Art

From Snapshots, a 3-D View

Stuart Goldenberg

By DAVID POGUE

Published: August 21, 2008

How do you describe a place? How do you express its essence to people who aren’t there?

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Photosynth technology from Microsoft turns Parthenon photos into a three-dimensional world.

You use the best technology you have available.

In the beginning, there was the printed word (“Dear Queen Isabella: You gotta see this place!”). Then there was audio (“My God, it’s full of stars!”). Eventually, photos (“That’s us in Hawaii. Or is it Cape Cod?”).

Wednesday, Microsoft introduced yet another way to represent a place: Photosynth. This sophisticated technology does a simple thing. It turns a bunch of overlapping photos into a 3-D panorama.

The result, called a photosynth, is a little bit like a virtual world. You can move sideways, up or down into neighboring photos. You can turn around to look behind you. And at any time, you can zoom forward incredibly far into a photo, since it retains all of its original, multi-megapixel resolution.

Creating a photosynth is free and automatic. You visit www.photosynth.com, click to install the necessary Web browser plug-in, and start uploading your photos. (You need a Windows PC and either Internet Explorer or Firefox 3. A Mac version is under development.)

Photosynth is brought to you by a 15-person team at Microsoft Research, a division of Microsoft whose projects aren’t expected to generate income. This team hopes that the popularity of Photosynth will explode and that it will actually become a new medium. In fact, someday Microsoft hopes to design a way to connect these photosynths, eventually building a complete photographic, navigable, digital version of our real world.

In the meantime, Photosynth is a great way to visit a place before you go there, to remember a place after you’ve been there, or to show your inner sanctum to the whole world.

It’s also great for museums, galleries and anyplace else where extremely close-up inspection by the masses would be desirable, but not otherwise practical. And it doesn’t take much imagination to see how Photosynth might appeal to real-estate agents.

In a Photosynth demonstration at the annual TED conference last year, the presenter blew the crowd’s mind with a photosynth of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, made up of photos mined from Flickr.com. In other words, Microsoft had created a seamless, successful photosynth using hundreds of existing photos, taken by different people at different times using all kinds of cameras.

That, frankly, is a far more amazing prospect than what Photosynth is today. If using existing Web photos were an option, you could have a substantial amount of the world photosynthed already.

But for technical and legal reasons, Microsoft has backed away from that approach. Now you have to take the pictures yourself, expressly for the purpose of photosynthing.

You have to take lots and lots of overlapping pictures. Ideally, every inch of the room or space should be included in at least three photos. You stand at each corner of the room and sweep the interior, snapping away; then repeat while standing against the wall. Stand on chairs, walk to a new spot, walk up close to interesting objects.

Eventually, your photosynth is given a “synthiness” score, meaning the degree of recognizable overlap. The synthiness determines how seamlessly your 3-D panorama flows from view to view.

You can also walk completely around a stationary object, taking at least 24 photos during your circumnavigation. Later, you can rotate that object online using a doughnut-shaped scroll bar.

Once you’ve transferred the photos to your PC, you sign in to Photosynth; bizarrely, you need both a Microsoft Passport account and a Photosynth account, both free. Then you click the Create Photosynth button. Technically, your PC, not the Web site, does the analysis to knit all of those photos together, so the speed of the analysis-and-uploading process depends on your computer’s horsepower.

When it’s all over, your photosynth is live on the Web, visible for all to see. (In this version, you can’t create private photosynths.)

Amazingly, the software figures out how your photos relate, even though they’re taken at different angles, zoom amounts, exposures and so on.

It’s also amazing how, when you’re exploring the resulting photosynth, the full resolution of the original photos is available. You can zoom in, and in, and in, revealing more and more detail along the way, without ever waiting for even the biggest photo files to “load.” In one example on the Photosynth site, you start in the marbled gallery of the National Archives building in Washington — and you can zoom all the way in to the words “We the People” on the Constitution in its display case.

(This is one crucial difference between Photosynth and Apple’s QuickTime VR, which has been around for years. You can zoom in slightly in a QuickTime scene, but you can’t fly nearly infinitely into one of the component photos. Other differences: Making a QuickTime VR scene requires a special, 360-degree tripod apparatus and commercial software. And a QuickTime VR scene is rooted to one spot; you can’t freely walk through a space, as you can with Photosynth.)

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So yes, it’s amazing. But in its current version (“call it beta, call it 1.0, call it whatever you want,” as the Web site puts it), Photosynth is also very frustrating.

First, synthing takes practice and patience. There’s no easy way to track whether you’ve taken enough photos to cover your space. You don’t know that you’ve failed until you’ve uploaded all the pictures and discovered blank spots or clumps of detached photos.

It’s also incredibly frustrating to navigate a photosynth. There are three ways to move around in your 3-D space: the mouse, the arrow keys or the letter keys. But what you press may not be what you get. If you press the up-arrow key, hoping to look upward, you may suddenly be teleported to a totally different part of the room. That can happen, Microsoft explains, if that other photo is the only one showing a patch of ceiling. Well, fine, but it’s totally disorienting.

At other times, you might want to scroll onto an adjoining photo — but all you get is black space and a bunch of white, dusty pixels known as the “point cloud.” That’s because Microsoft has decided that once you’ve magnified a photo enough to fill the screen, you can’t scroll to any other photo until you zoom back out. Frustrating.

These annoyances add up to the most frustrating thing of all: Photosynth’s photo-centric nature. I’ve probably made it sound like a photosynth gives you a seamless virtual environment, but it’s really not that; the component photos very much retain their “photoness.” You see their outlines flicker into view as you move your mouse around a scene. When you scroll between photos, Photosynth makes no effort to make them appear as a single image; one just fades into the next.

Finally, only one photo is ever in sharp focus at a time; neighboring photos are blurred and dimmed, which destroys the illusion of being in a virtual space.

In other words, Microsoft has designed Photosynth to be less a virtual-reality tool than a glorified slideshow, a clever way to arrange a bunch of discrete photos in space. That’s fine, but it does make photosynths less magical than they could be. Compare Photosynth’s one-photo-at-a-time focus with, say, the seamless views of a QuickTime VR scene (Google “QuickTime VR gallery” to see some), where everything is in focus as you look up, down, left, right, forward or back, as if you’re inside a giant wraparound photo.

Even so, Photosynth is wicked cool, and it will find all kinds of new uses. At the very least, it represents another milestone in the evolution of place-description technologies. Until someone comes up with brain-to-brain image sharing, that will have to do.

微軟將推出免費三維場景創建軟件
2008年08月22日13:58


微
軟(Microsoft)有點像是科技領域的通用汽車(General Motors)。當然﹐這個軟件巨頭無論是在財務狀況還是市場份額上都要比那個陷入困境的汽車製造商成功得多。不過﹐和通用汽車一樣﹐微軟的規模──員工人數已逾9萬──及其官僚體系常常讓這家公司看上去比規模較小的競爭對手谷歌(Google)和蘋果公司(Apple)更加遲鈍﹐更缺乏創新。

由於微軟的Windows Vista操作系統獲得的評論不及蘋果的Leopard平台熱烈﹐其Live Web互聯網搜索服務和谷歌的差距也不斷加大﹐近年來﹐創新性上的對比越來越鮮明。此外﹐與蘋果光滑的iPhone和谷歌即將推出的手機操作系統Android相比﹐微軟的手機軟件Windows Mobile看起來要老笨些。



不過在微軟位於華盛頓州雷德蒙德的大片園區裡﹐確實存在著創新。舉例來講﹐去年Microsoft Office進行了大膽、激進的重新設計﹐無論是在口碑方面還是商業上都大獲成功。

現在﹐微軟內部有個專門開發創新產品的“游擊隊”﹐其任務就是更快地設計出更多創新產品。該部門名為Live Labs﹐它致力於更快地把科技理論轉化成現實的、基於Web的產品。這個小組只有約125個人﹐而且還進一步分成了研究不同具體項目的若干小組。

本週﹐微軟的Live Labs將推出首個面向大眾消費者的Web服務──Photosynth。這項服務能將一個場面或是場所──比如一個畫廊或是一座建築物──的多張照片轉換成三維場景﹐讓你在Web上能有置身其中之感。

與很多照片軟件都能用若干張相片創建的二維全景照不同﹐Photosynth的產物synth是虛擬三維場景。它能讓你獲得在一個房間中四下張望、或是環顧一座建築物或一個物體時的視覺感受。你能水平或是垂直地穿越一個場景﹐還能以更高分辨率放大觀看synth裡的物體﹐比如牆上的畫。

舉例來講﹐你不僅可以看到巨石陣或威尼斯大運河的一張長長的二維圖片。你還能感覺身臨其境﹐在各處走動﹐往上看天或是向下看地﹐或是停下來更細緻地察看一塊石頭、一艘船或是一座建築物。

這類三維場景的出現已經有一段時間了﹔比如有些房地產網站用它們來虛擬展示房屋。不過Photosynth使任何人都可以用任何標準的數碼相機創建三維場景﹐甚至是利用不是特意為Photosynth而拍攝的已有圖片。你甚至還能用不同人拍的同一個地方的照片。軟件會對照片進行分析﹐找出哪些有重疊以及重疊的順序﹐然後將那些匹配的圖片轉換成虛擬三維場景。

Photosynth的設計基於微軟2006年收購的技術﹐它是完全免費的﹐而且完全基於Web﹐網站是photosynth.net（將於美東時間週四午夜推出）。在這個網站上﹐你不僅可以看到自己製作的虛擬三維場景﹐還可以看到所有其他用戶的作品。

我已經對這項服務測試了大約一週﹐雖然它有一些缺點﹐但我相信它提供了一種利用照片及分享照片的全新方法。

安裝了一個小插件後﹐你就可以在網絡瀏覽器中使用Photosynth了。目前﹐它只能在Windows操作系統下運行﹐可用的瀏覽器只有微軟的Internet Explorer及其競爭對手的Firefox。用於蘋果電腦的版本還在研發之中﹐目前在蘋果操作系統中你甚至無法看到其他人製作的synth。

當Photosynth正常工作時﹐結果令人非常滿意。不過需要一些技巧才能找到匹配良好的一組照片﹐微軟將匹配度高的照片稱為達到了synthy。理想狀況下﹐一個三維場景中的每個局部都應該在至少三張照片中有所體現﹐而且相互之間要有50%的重疊。在你上傳了照片﹐Photosynth將它們轉換成三維場景之後﹐系統會給這些照片用百分制打個分數﹐表示匹配的程度有多高。

在我的測試中﹐我用了已有的照片﹐也試過了為Photosynth而特意拍的快照。其中意大利維羅納一個廣場的照片匹配度只有38%﹐而為Photosynth專門拍攝的酒店房間照片卻有高達73%匹配度。

令我不滿意的是﹐只有在你上傳了照片並等系統將它們合併起來之後﹐Photosynth才會告訴你照片的匹配度。而這個過程在網速較慢的時候要花很長時間。如果這個服務能事先告訴你照片有多匹配就好了。還有一個不足就是﹐Photosynth沒有隱私設置。你創建的所有三維場景都能被任何一位使用Photosynth服務的用戶看到。

不過﹐總的來講﹐Photosynth是看照片、分享照片的一種令人耳目一新的新途徑﹐而且也是展現雷德蒙德仍在創新的一個鼓舞人心的跡象。

Walter S. Mossberg

Findings

Technology That Outthinks Us: A Partner or a Master?

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: August 25, 2008

SAN DIEGO

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Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

FUTURIST Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction writer, at the Geisel Library in San Diego.

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Further Reading

"Signs of the Singularity." Essay by Vernor Vinge. IEEE Spectrum, 2008.

"Synthetic Serendipity." Fiction by Vernor Vinge. IEEE Spectrum, 2004.

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In Vernor Vinge’s version of Southern California in 2025, there is a school named Fairmont High with the motto, “Trying hard not to become obsolete.” It may not sound inspiring, but to the many fans of Dr. Vinge, this is a most ambitious — and perhaps unattainable — goal for any member of our species.

Dr. Vinge is a mathematician and computer scientist in San Diego whose science fiction has won five Hugo Awards and earned good reviews even from engineers analyzing its technical plausibility. He can write space operas with the best of them, but he also suspects that intergalactic sagas could become as obsolete as their human heroes.

The problem is a concept described in Dr. Vinge’s seminal essay in 1993, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” which predicted that computers would be so powerful by 2030 that a new form of superintellligence would emerge. Dr. Vinge compared that point in history to the singularity at the edge of a black hole: a boundary beyond which the old rules no longer applied, because post-human intelligence and technology would be as unknowable to us as our civilization is to a goldfish.

The Singularity is often called “the rapture of the nerds,” but Dr. Vinge doesn’t anticipate immortal bliss. The computer scientist in him may revel in the technological marvels, but the novelist envisions catastrophes and worries about the fate of not-so-marvelous humans like Robert Gu, the protagonist of Dr. Vinge’s latest novel, “Rainbows End.”

Robert is an English professor and famous poet who succumbs to Alzheimer’s, languishing in a nursing home until 2025, when the Singularity seems near and technology is working wonders. He recovers most of his mental faculties; his 75-year-old body is rejuvenated; even his wrinkles vanish.

But he’s so lost in this new world that he has to go back to high school to learn basic survival skills. Wikipedia, Facebook, Second Life, World of Warcraft, iPhones, instant messaging — all these are quaint ancestral technologies now that everyone is connected to everyone and everything.

Thanks to special contact lenses, computers in your clothes and locational sensors scattered everywhere you go, you see a constant stream of text and virtual sights overlaying the real world. As you chat with a distant friend’s quite lifelike image strolling at your side, you can adjust the scenery to your mutual taste — adding, say, medieval turrets to buildings — at the same time you’re each privately communicating with vast networks of humans and computers.

To Robert, a misanthrope who’d barely mastered e-mail in his earlier life, this networked world is a multitasking hell. He retreats to one of his old haunts, the Geisel Library, once the intellectual hub of the University of California, San Diego, but now so rarely visited that its paper books are about to be shredded to make room for a highbrow version of a virtual-reality theme park.

At the library he finds a few other “medical retreads” still reading books and using ancient machines like laptops. Calling themselves the Elder Cabal, they conspire to save the paper library while they’re trying to figure out what, if anything, their skills are good for anymore.

Dr. Vinge, who is 63, can feel the elders’ pain, if only because his books are in that building. He took me up to the Elder Cabal’s meeting room in the library and talked about his own concerns about 2025 — like whether anyone will still be reading books, and whether networked knowledge will do to intellectuals what the Industrial Revolution did to the Luddite textile artisans.

“These people in ‘Rainbows End’ have the attention span of a butterfly,” he said. “They’ll alight on a topic, use it in a particular way and then they’re on to something else. Right now people worry that we don’t have lifetime employment anymore. How extreme could that get? I could imagine a world where everything is piecework and the piece duration is less than a minute.”

It’s an unsettling vision, but Dr. Vinge classifies it as one of the least unpleasant scenarios for the future: intelligence amplification, or I.A., in which humans get steadily smarter by pooling their knowledge with one another and with computers, possibly even wiring the machines directly into their brains.

The alternative to I.A., he figures, could be the triumph of A.I. as artificial intelligence far surpasses the human variety. If that happens, Dr. Vinge says, the superintelligent machines will not content themselves with working for their human masters, nor will they remain securely confined in laboratories. As he wrote in his 1993 essay: “Imagine yourself confined to your house with only limited data access to the outside, to your masters. If those masters thought at a rate — say — one million times slower than you, there is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with ‘helpful advice’ that would incidentally set you free.”

To avoid that scenario, Dr. Vinge has been urging his fellow humans to get smarter by collaborating with computers. (See nytimes.com/tierneylab for some of his proposals.) At the conclusion of “Rainbows End,” even the technophobic protagonist is in sync with his machines, and there are signs that the Singularity has arrived in the form of a superintelligent human-computer network.

Or maybe not. Perhaps this new godlike intelligence mysteriously directing events is pure machine. Dr. Vinge told me he left it purposely ambiguous.

“I think there’s a good possibility that humanity will itself participate in the Singularity,” he said. “But on the other hand, we could just be left behind.”

And what would happen to us if the machines rule? Well, Dr. Vinge said, it’s possible that artificial post-humans would use us the way we’ve used oxen and donkeys. But he preferred to hope they would be more like environmentalists who wanted to protect weaker species, even if it was only out of self-interest. Dr. Vinge imagined the post-humans sitting around and using their exalted powers of reasoning:

“Maybe we need the humans around, because they’re natural critters who could survive in situations where some catastrophe would cause technology to disappear. That way they’d be around to bring back the important things — namely, us.”

New Sphere in Exploring the Abyss

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: August 25, 2008

CUDAHY, Wis. — The deep is legendary for inky darkness. William Beebe, the first person to eye the abyss, called it perpetual night.

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Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

SEAWORTHY Workers at Ladish Forging drove a press onto hot titanium, transforming it into a cup, part of the personnel sphere for the submersible.

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Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

PRESSURE Metalworkers molded two hot titanium disks into hemispheres that will be welded together to form the personnel sphere of the new Alvin.

The darkness is matched by the intense pressure. Four miles down, it amounts to nearly five tons per square inch. That is too much even for Alvin, the most famous of the world’s tiny submersibles, which can take a pilot and two scientists down to a maximum depth of 2.8 miles.

But a new submersible is being built here, and even the process of construction seems a rebuke to the darkness. The work lighted up a cavernous factory with fireworks on a recent visit. Hot reds and oranges burst into showers of spark and flame as blistering metal began to yield to the demands of the submersible’s design.

“Amazing,” Tom Furman, a senior engineer at Ladish Forging, said after a big press bore down on an 11-foot disk of hot metal, making the delicate manipulation look as easy as rearranging a gargantuan pat of butter.

The new vehicle is to replace Alvin, which was the first submersible to illuminate the rusting hulk of the Titanic and the first to carry scientists down to discover the bizarre ecosystems of tube worms and other strange creatures that thrive in icy darkness.

The United States used to have several submersibles — tiny submarines that dive extraordinarily deep. Alvin is the only one left, and after more than four decades of probing the sea’s depths it is to be retired. Its replacement, costing some $50 million, is to go deeper, move faster, stay down longer, cut the dark better, carry more scientific gear and maybe — just maybe — open a new era of exploration.

Its architects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod describe it as “the most capable deep-sea research vehicle in the world.”

Alvin can transport a pilot and two scientists down 2.8 miles, providing access to 62 percent of the dark seabed. The new vehicle is expected to descend more than four miles, opening 99 percent of the ocean floor to inquiry. But the greater depth means that the vehicle’s personnel sphere and its many other systems will face added tons of crushing pressure.

“Technologically, it’s quite challenging,” Robert S. Detrick Jr., a senior scientist and vice president for marine facilities and operations at Woods Hole, said of forging the new personnel sphere. “It’s also something that hasn’t been done for a long time in the United States.”

To better resist the sea’s pressure, the wall of the new personnel sphere is to be nearly three inches thick, up from Alvin’s two inches. Deep explorers always use spheres to make crew compartments because that geometry best resists the crushing force.

“We have confidence it can be done,” Dr. Detrick said in January of the sphere’s forging. “But we don’t have a lot of margin for error. If the first forging is bad, it would be quite expensive to redo it.”

That air of uncertainty hung over teams of engineers and oceanographers who gathered in late June at Ladish in the Milwaukee suburb of Cudahy.

The objective of the metalworking company was to transform two giant disks of titanium — stronger and lighter than steel, and perfect for withstanding the vast pressures of the deep — into twin hemispheres. If forged successfully, the cuplike hemispheres would be welded together to form the beginnings of the personnel sphere, initiating the vehicle’s birth.

Ladish, its plant nearly a mile long, is a maze of ovens and workshops, forges and presses — giant versions of the hammers that blacksmiths use to manipulate hot metal. Employees wear hardhats, safety goggles and, when conditions warrant, ear plugs.

“No hot loads,” a sign warned as a group of visitors moved deep inside the factory. “Hardhats required beyond this point,” read another.

A star of the site is hydraulic press No. 154, a behemoth that rises some five stories high. For decades, its operators have quietly advanced the nation’s exploration agenda by turning ingots of hot steel into rocket casings.

Now, the operators have turned their attention to inner space. In late June, after much preparation and computer modeling, sirens wailed and they drove the ram of their giant press down onto blistering hot titanium, the glowing disk half a foot thick and 11 feet wide. Smoke and flame shot upward.

“You have to move fast,” Douglas B. Roberts, a manager at Ladish, said amid the fireworks. “That big a piece cools off quickly.”

In seconds, the big press transformed the radiant disk into an enormous cup. The next day, it made another. Even after an hour of cooling, the big cup still radiated waves of heat.

“It went fantastic,” Mr. Furman, the chief engineer for design engineering at Ladish, told a group of officials and visitors.

The overall process of forging, welding, machining, heat treating, cutting view ports, annealing, finishing and testing the new personnel sphere is to be done at several companies around the country and is expected to take about two years. The completed crew cabin, seven feet across, will be a foot wider than Alvin’s.

Oceanographers say the new sphere will help open the sea’s depths. Its volume is 18 percent larger than Alvin’s, allowing twice as much room inside for racks of scientific equipment and a bit more space for passengers.

Alvin has three thick windows through which the pilot and scientists can peer out at the undersea world. The new vehicle will have five, increasing the field of view and the chance for discovery and careful observation.

“It’s going to be incredible,” said Cindy L. Van Dover, a professor of marine biology at Duke University who has spent hundreds of hours diving in Alvin. She noted that scientists would have two windows that look forward. By contrast, Alvin’s scientific viewports look off to the side, with only the pilot getting the central view.

“Forward is cool,” she said, calling it rich in drama, lights and action.

For instance, Dr. Van Dover said the forward view could best reveal a towering hot spring surrounded by exotic forms of life.

“In Alvin, a scientist can’t see that,” she said. “Also, you want to see where your samples are being taken and how they’re being taken. You want to be able to direct the pilot.”

Dr. Detrick of Woods Hole called forging the new personnel sphere one of three big technical hurdles. The others, he said, are making the vehicle’s foam and its banks of batteries. The foam must be hard enough to resist crushing pressure yet buoyant enough to counteract the vehicle’s great weight. And the batteries must be unusually sturdy and powerful.

If successful, the new batteries will allow the vehicle to stay on the bottom for up to eight hours, compared with six for Alvin. Improvements in the vehicle’s propulsion system, including more powerful thrusters, will let it move faster. And the vehicle’s new lights and cameras will better pierce the darkness.

Still, like its predecessor, the new vehicle, over all, is to be no larger than a small truck.

Dr. Van Dover said one of the big payoffs would be the submersible’s ability to dive deep.

“Depth is a big deal,” she said. “It’s hard to wax lyrical on the subject because we don’t know what’s there. So we can’t guarantee a discovery. Yet we know that every time we extend our ability to go somewhere, we discover new things about how the planet works, about how life on the planet is adapted.”

The new vehicle is also seen as building national pride and international goodwill, because foreign scientists at times join the dives.

Submersibles can also foster geopolitical aims. A year ago, a team of Russians trekked to the North Pole and plunged through the ice pack in a submersible to the dark ocean floor. There, they planted Russia’s flag and, upon surfacing, declared that the feat had strengthened Moscow’s claims to nearly half the Arctic seabed.

Just when the replacement Alvin will join the world’s small fleet of submersibles has become uncertain.

Like many federal projects, it faces cost overruns and financing troubles. When first proposed in 2004, the anticipated bill ran to $21.6 million. But delays set in and the price of materials, planning and contracting ran higher than expected. Officials say titanium alone has seen a fivefold price increase.

The National Science Foundation, the federal agency that sponsors the project, has too many competing needs to meet the new estimated cost of about $50 million. So officials at Woods Hole came up with a phased approach that promises to lower the immediate expense.

In an Aug. 8 letter, Susan K. Avery, the president of Woods Hole, outlined the plan to Deborah Kelley, a University of Washington oceanographer and chairwoman of the Deep Submergence Science Committee, a team of researchers that advises the government on abyssal exploration.

The new personnel sphere, she said, might first be fitted onto Alvin’s body, giving the old submersible a life extension and a capability boost. Alvin would also get new batteries, new electronics, better lights, cameras and video systems. But the hybrid would be limited to Alvin’s depth of 2.8 miles.

The second phase, Dr. Avery said, would build a new submersible body that would let the replacement vehicle dive to the full intended depth of four miles.

How soon? The original schedule of 2004 foresaw the replacement vehicle as ready in 2008. Early this year, amid growing uncertainty, the keepers of the schedule put the date at 2010. Now, the soonest the upgraded Alvin might hit the water is estimated to be 2011. And the full replacement, according to Woods Hole officials, might not materialize until 2015.

“Phase 2 is about finding additional resources,” Dr. Detrick said. “It’s a matter of money.”

Officials talk about a $25 million shortfall and hopes that a private donor might materialize who could close the gap and ensure the speedy debut of the new submersible and its program of deep inquiry.

For explorers like Dr. Van Dover, that day cannot arrive soon enough. “We can apply 40 years of experience and build it right,” she said. “That’s the beauty.”

How Design Can Save Democracy

August 24, 2008, 7:06 pm

How Design Can Save Democracy

By Richard Grefé and Jessica Friedman Hewitt

Related Interactive: Ballot Design Problems and Solutions

Richard Grefé is the executive director of AIGA and Jessica Friedman Hewitt is the managing director of its Design for Democracy program.

As the 2008 presidential election approaches, state and local election officials are increasingly concerned about having enough ballots, workers and equipment to handle the predicted high turnout. And with millions of new voters expected to head to the polls, ballot design will be more important than ever.

Unfortunately, because of technical limitations in voting equipment, misguided local laws, short time frames and tight budgets, many ballots will repeat design mistakes made in past elections. But with access to new ballot design guidelines, officials can now make significant improvements in election accuracy and voter confidence.

During the 2000 presidential election in Palm Beach County in Florida, a confusing “butterfly ballot” design for punch-card voting equipment made it easy to miscast votes for the Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan that were intended for Al Gore. The confusion called national attention to the design of ballots. But even in 2008, flaws that lead to voter uncertainty and error persist and often go unnoticed.

In an attempt to comply with federal legislation calling for more up-to-date voting equipment, many jurisdictions are trying to reduce voting error rates. Indeed, they are replacing older equipment like punch cards and levers with newer electronic touch-screen machines and optical scanners.

But new equipment does not solve fundamental design flaws.

Earlier this year, the United States Election Assistance Commission distributed guidelines created by professional designers to 6,000 local election officials. And recently, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law issued a report outlining the importance of well-designed, easy to understand ballots. This interactive feature identifies common design problems found on optical-scan ballots from previous presidential elections and shows ways to improve clarity and vote accuracy based on the commission’s new guidelines.

Intel Nehalem微架構 /Moves to Free Gadgets of Their Recharging Cords

Intel Moves to Free Gadgets of Their Recharging Cords

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: August 20, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — Intel has made progress in a technology that could lead to the wireless recharging of gadgets and the end of the power-cord spaghetti behind electronic devices.

It says it has increased the efficiency of a technique for wirelessly powering consumer gadgets and computers, a development that could allow a person to simply place a device on a desktop countertop to power it. It could bring the consumer electronics industry a step closer to a world without wires.

On Thursday, the chip maker plans to demonstrate the use of a magnetic field to broadcast up to 60 watts of power two to three feet. It says it can do that losing only 25 percent of the power in transmission.

“Something like this technology could be embedded in tables and work surfaces,” said Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, “so as soon as you put down an appropriately equipped device it would immediately begin drawing power.”

The presentation is part of the company’s Intel Developer Forum, a series of events here that the company uses to showcase new technologies in personal computing and related consumer technologies.

The research project, which is being led by Joshua R. Smith, an Intel researcher at a company laboratory in Seattle, builds on the work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Marin Soljacic, who pioneered the idea of wirelessly transmitting power using resonant magnetic fields. The MIT group refers to the idea as WiTricity, a play on wireless and electricity. Both the M.I.T. group and the Intel researchers are exploring a phenomenon known as “resonant induction,” making it possible to transmit power several feet without wires.

Induction is already used to recharge electric toothbrushes, but that approach is limited by the need for the toothbrush to be placed in the base station.

The M.I.T. group has demonstrated efficiencies of 50 percent at ranges of several meters.

Intel is in the midst of an internal debate over whether the technology may also permit the shift to supercapacitors, which can be recharged far more quickly than today’s batteries. “In the future, your kitchen counters might do it,” Mr. Rattner said. “You’d just drop your espresso maker down on them and you would never have to plug it in.”

The Intel team describes its system as a “wireless resonant energy link,” and is experimenting with antennas less than two feet in diameter to remotely light a 60-watt light bulb.

In 2006, the M.I.T. researchers demonstrated that by sending electromagnetic waves around a waveguide it was possible to produce “evanescent” waves that could permit electricity to wirelessly tunnel to another waveguide “tuned” to the transmitting loop.

Several start-up firms , including WildCharge, based in Boulder, Colo., and WiPower, based in Altamonte Springs, Fla., have already announced related wireless charging technologies. But these demonstrations have required that the consumer gadgets touch the charging station.

The Intel researchers said they were thinking about designing a system that would make it possible to recharge a laptop computer without wires.

“From Intel’s position that seems like the thing to shoot for right now,” Mr. Smith said. The receiving antenna is about the size of something that could easily fit against the bottom of a conventional laptop computer. “It could be that cellphones and P.D.A.’s are even more compelling, but I think we are going to start with the laptop. It’s easy to dial down from laptops,” he said.

The researchers said that Intel could produce a prototype design and that it might contribute to products by developing chip sets for manufacturers. At Thursday’s research presentation, Mr. Smith plans to demonstrate an application using an electric field sensor — a natural capability of some fish — to give added dexterity to robotic arms and hands. He has designed a sensor system that makes it possible for a robot hand to gauge the size of an apple and then grasp it. The hand then carries the apple to an outstretched human hand. When it senses the hand, it drops the apple.

微處理器巨頭英特爾公布新產品

英特爾新一代的Nehalem芯片

電腦微處理器巨頭英特爾公布了2009年以後該公司的微處理器核心產品系列。

英特爾公司在美國舊金山舉行的秋季"英特爾開發者論壇"上，公布了新一代微處理器Core i7的Nehalem微架構詳情。

英特爾說，新一代處理器適用於台式機，服務器和筆記本產品，它不僅功能強大，而且節能高效，並增強了圖像處理能力。

英特爾利用Nehalem微架構的特點，把記憶體與處理器功能放在同一枚芯片之內，而不是分開由兩枚芯片處理。因此在最高階的Core i7處理器內，共安裝了8個處理核心。

英特爾說，新產品系列的創新技術所提供的記憶體頻寬是上一代芯片的三倍，三維動畫的處理能力將會倍升。

Nehalem微架構也具有節能的功能，它的"turbo"模式能把芯片不用的部分關閉。

英特爾公司還說，Nehalem微架構的設計可以讓數據從電腦的記憶體分流到微處理器上，從而加快了電腦的運算速度。

英特爾在芯片上加入了這種技術之後，將具有對手AMD的同一運作能力。AMD在五年前的Opteron處理器上已經用上這種技術。

Zero Tillage Reduces Water Consumption in Farming

Living Planet | 21.08.2008 | 04:30

Zero Tillage Reduces Water Consumption in Farming

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Zero tillage requires special machines like this one that still function even when plants are left on the fields

Zero tillage is a method where fields are cultivated without turning over the soil. Experts hope that it will reduce water consumption, fuel costs and soil erosion.

According to WWF estimates most water – about 70 to 80 percent -- gets used – and wasted – in agriculture. One aspect you might not have thought about is ploughing. Today, most fields are ploughed. Farmers in temperate latitudes invented the plough to fight weeds.

But some experts say ploughing actually wastes water in dry areas through evaporation and leads to more soil erosion. And modern ploughing also uses up a lot of petrol. That’s why some agricultural researchers these days are advocating what’s known as „zero tillage“, meaning farming without turning over the fields.

But a better yield and less water consumption doesn’t mean the method’s a panacea.

Report: Gabor Paal/ Kateri Jochum

In the Art of a DNA Graph, the Colors of Uniqueness

Connecticut State Medical Society

EYE CATCHER Graph of DNA sequences with nearly 24,000 genetic markers.

By BINA VENKATARAMAN

Published: June 17, 2008

What is black and white and red all over? Here’s a hint: It is not the newspaper, at least not in this instance.

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When Dr. Gualberto Ruaño, director of genetics research at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, was creating a digital “collage” to promote personalized medicine, he and his team tried blue, green, yellow and even a dull gray scale before settling on this eye-popping — maybe even a bit eye-straining — scheme of red, white and black.

“Being biologists and doctors, red is our blood, red is our fluid,” Dr. Ruaño said, adding that he sought the “staccato effect of contrast.”

“DNA Collage 1” is on the cover of the new issue of Connecticut Medicine. Dr. Ruaño called it a “snapshot” of variations in the genome sequences of 62 people, one to a column, from blood samples taken in clinical studies at the hospital.

Tiny rectangles, making up what appears more a grid than a collage, are each a “fingerprint’’ showing how a person’s DNA sequence varies and what makes the person unique — or not. Differences in the sequences could affect, for example, how likely a person is to have heart problems or suffer side effects from a cholesterol drug.

All people have in common more than 99 percent of our gene sequences. Yet the type of sequence variation portrayed here, caused by a single altered nucleotide, accounts for most of the genetic differences among humans.

The colors show the DNA type inherited from a father, mother or both parents. Red signals a “genetic mosaic” of the parents, with different sequence variants from each. Black and white rectangles show that a person inherited the same sequence variant from both parents.

“We wanted to synthesize variability into a clear pattern,” said Dr. Ruaño, who is president of Genomas Inc., which is developing genomics-based tools for diagnosis and drug prescription. “The eye is the most important pattern recognition instrument that humans have.”

technical news from Japan

月桂冠开发出利用微生物直接将纤维素转化为生物乙醇的技术

DATE	2008/08/20

　　【日经BP社报道】 日本月桂冠开发成功只利用微生物即可直接将非食用植物原料转化为生物乙醇的技术。该技术是通过固体培养麴，大量生产纤维素分解酶来实现的。在麴菌中加入生 产纤维素分解酶的基因，即可在染色体上发现这种具有强大功能的、名为“基因启动子（Promoter）”的碱基排列。该公司把拥有这种功能的麴菌称为“超 级麴菌”。通过使用超级麴菌，可以把稻谷皮和稻秸等固体纤维素分解为乙醇发酵所需的葡萄糖。而以前则需要经过硫酸等化学药品或者高温高压进行水处理。

　　在以非食用植物为原料生产生物乙醇时，首先需要把纤维素分解为葡萄糖。由于纤维素的化学稳定性较好并具有坚固的结构，此前必须利用硫酸等化学 药品、超临界水以及亚临界水（均为高温高压水）等才能使之分解为葡萄糖。使用这些方法，在原料液化处理中需要使用大量水资源，发酵后的蒸馏处理还会消耗大 量能源。

　　酿制日本酒时，固体麴在稻米中进行繁殖时，可生成能够将稻米中的淀粉分解为葡萄糖（液化，糖化）的酶。这种葡萄糖经酵母发酵后可制成乙醇。月 桂冠从酿酒工艺中受到启发，培养出了在固体培养基上繁殖麴的同时，能够将纤维素分解为葡萄糖的麴菌。不但不需要大量用水，还降低了发酵后的蒸馏处理中能源 的耗费。

　　该公司2008年3月培养出了能够把水溶性纤维素（低聚糖，cello-oligosaccharide）分解为葡萄糖，进行乙醇发酵的“超 级酵母”。此前在使用超级酵母的情况下，为了把固体纤维素分解为水溶性纤维素，需要进行使用亚临界水的预处理。而目前通过配合使用超级麴菌和超级酵母，只 要利用超级麴菌把纤维素大致分解为水溶性纤维素，即可利用超级酵母使之进行乙醇发酵。

　　今后将不断推进可大量生产纤维素分解酶的超级麴菌的开发。此外，旨在提高安全性的研究还将不断进行，例如将加入超级麴菌中的生成纤维素分解酶的基因从麴菌自身提取等技术。

　　此项研究作为NEDO（新能源产业技术综合开发机构）“生质能高效转换技术开发”的一个环节，与神户大学和大阪大学共同进行。月桂冠等此次的 研究成果将于8月27～29日，在宫城县仙台市的东北学院大学举行的日本生物工学会2008年度大会上发表（发表日为28日）。（记者：小笠原 阳介）

■日文原文
月桂冠，セルロースから微生物だけで直接バイオエタノールを生産可能にする技術を開発

东京大学利用碳纳米管开发出可伸缩布线

DATE	2008/08/20

　　【日经BP社报道】

用可伸缩布线进行格子状布线的薄片

薄片的放大照片。有机晶体管的X、Y线均为可伸展布线

拉伸至最大38％，导电率亦无变化（红线）。导电率比以往的导电性橡胶高出约3位数。但比金属低4位数

离子性液体

　　东京大学工学系研究科副教授染谷隆夫的研究小组宣布，“全球首次开发出了可伸缩且导电性高的新材料”。由此，采用有机晶体管的大面积电路将可以粘贴在 自由曲面上，从而使有机晶体管的用途大大扩展。而且，“由于新材料具有伸缩性，因此耐机械弯曲性大为提高”（染谷）。有关该新材料的论文已刊登在了美国 Science杂志2008年8月7日快讯版“Science Express”上。

　　新材料由单层碳纳米管（SWNT）、离子性液体以及具有弹性的树脂等构成，呈黑色橡胶状。导电率为57S/cm，比市售导电性橡胶0.1S/cm的导 电性高得多。且在保持这一导电率的情况下，能够拉伸至1.38倍的长度。使用新材料进行网状布线时，加上网眼变形的效果，最大可拉伸至2.34倍。以往虽 然有过将碳纳米管掺入树脂中制成导电性橡胶的例子，但其导电率只有10S/cm，而且只能拉伸至1.1倍。

　　东京大学的染谷认为，此成果最重要的特点是：“全球首次发现了离子性液体与溶于其中且具有弹性的树脂的组合方式”。具体而言，离子性液体采用 了“BMITFSI（1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium bis（trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide）”，弹性树脂采用了氟类树脂的一种——“Daiel-G801”。

　　通常，离子性液体因可溶解SWNT而不凝集的材料而闻名。可以设想，如果可将树脂溶入这种离子性液体中，则可使SWNT均匀地分散于树脂中，从而获得很高的导电性。然而，在此之前未能发现可溶于离子性液体的弹性树脂。

　　此成果的另一个特点是，采用了单根长达2～4mm的SWNT。而SWNT的直径仅为3nm。假如将这种SWNT比作直径为0.3mm的缝纫 线，则其长度达200～400m。“SWNT的长度很可能对导电性及伸张性的强弱起到了重要作用。我们认为，之所以在拉伸的情况下导电性也不变，是因为 SWNT像意大利面条那样缠结着伸展的缘故”（染谷氏）。

　　染谷的研究小组曾在2005年开发出将布线设计成网状，并可粘贴在自由曲面上的“电子人工皮肤”（参阅本站报道）。当时技术下的伸缩性为1.25倍。当时是通过网眼结构变形来伸展，而此次则是布线本身的伸展。“没有伸缩性的材料即使可弯曲，如果触碰到尖锐的东西，恐怕会破损。因此，对于柔性元器件而言，伸缩性非常重要”（染谷）。（记者：野泽 哲生）

■日文原文
東大が伸びる配線を開発，カーボン·ナノチューブを利用