Are touch-screens Nuclear power’s From green hero the new mice? renaissance to green heretic TechnologyQuarterly September 8th 2007
Smile, you’re on Google Earth Putting the real world online
Artist Joe Magee Republication, copying or redistribution by any means is expressly prohibited without the prior written permission of The Economist The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Monitor 1
On the cover More and more information about the real world is being put online, from satellite images to environmental data. As the internet becomes intertwined with reality, many new applications are emerging. But there are security and privacy concerns, too: pages 10-12 A new old idea Monitor 1 Optical wireless networking, everlasting light bulbs, cleaning up coal, the evolution of the oil platform, an historical jigsaw, electric buses, planes and cars that turn into boats, ultimate Telecommunications: The idea of sending information through the air in the video-gaming accessories, form of ashes of light is being given a high-tech makeover proton therapy, detecting heartbeats at a distance, and HEN most people switch on a desk extremely fast internet downloads. Since the rise of user-generated Wlamp, they usually want a little extra light does not travel through walls, there health information illumination. But not John Goodey, an en- would be no need to worry about neigh- gineering student at Oxford University. bours snooping on your e-mail, or piggy- When he icks the switch and turns on backing on your broadband connection. Computing FSO 10 Smile, you’re on Google Earth his lamp, a sensor on his desk downloads Futuristic though this sounds, is Information about the real world, music tracks digitally encoded within by no means a new idea. Soldiers in an- plus internet, equals geoweb tiny ickers in the lamp’s light. The music cient Greece used polished shields to is then relayed through a pair of nearby send battle orders to each other over vast Computer interfaces speakers. This unusual set-up o ers a distances in the form of ashes of sun- 13 A change of control glimpse of a future in which light, rather light. More recently, so-called helio- The advent of the mouse changed than radio waves, is used to send in- graphs have been used to relay military computing. What comes next? formation. The concept, known as optical signals in a similar way. And it is only in wireless or free-space optics (FSO) prom- the past ten years that the British navy Case history ises better security and higher data-trans- has phased out its use of Aldis lamps to 15 Nuclear dawn fer rates (up to 10 gigabits per second) convey Morse code signals from ship to They are making a comeback. How than existing radio-based communica- ship. Yet just as this old analogue technol- do nuclear power stations work? tions technologies, says Dominic O’Brien, ogy was being retired, its new digital a leading engineer in the eld and Mr counterpart was making its debut. In the Goodey’s research supervisor at Oxford. past few years a small number of compa- Patents FSO 18 Opening things up is already used in a few niches: to nies, such as Terabeam, LightPointe and A new scheme could help to x connect networks in nearby o ces with- Cablefree Solutions, began o ering busi- the creaking patent system out having to string cables between them, nesses point-to-point optical systems that for example. But plans are afoot to extend could send data between buildings. Biomimetics the idea into a number of new areas. For These early optical systems were ca- example, the subtle ickering of car head- pable of sending information at a rate of 20 Borrowing from nature M How architects are using natural lights and tail-lights could be used to hundreds of megabits per second ( bps), designs in high-tech buildings transmit speed and braking information but customers usually wanted only to other vehicles, to help prevent colli- about 10Mbps, says Stephen Patrick of Brain scan sions. Tra c lights could alert cars when Cablefree. Back then the attraction was 22 Jolly green heretic they are about to change, or broadcast the not speed but convenience, he says. Ad- latest congestion update to waiting vehi- vocates of FSO like to say it has the speed A pro le of Stewart Brand, an FSO outspoken environmentalist cles. In the home, could be used to- of a bre-optic link, and the convenience gether with interior lighting to provide of a wireless link. It is easy to set up: sim- 1 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007
2 ply hook up infra-red laser transceivers lighting. In Japan the Visible Light Com- electrodes. Although electrodes are un- on top of two buildings and then align munications Consortium, made up of in- deniably convenient for plugging bulbs them. The cost to install is very low, dustrial giants such as Sony, Toshiba and directly into the lighting system, they are says Mr Patrick. NEC, is pursuing just that goal. FSO is not also the main reason why lamps fail. The There is no messing about with radio- possible with existing indoor lighting be- electrodes wear out. They can react spectrum licences or digging up roads, cause incandescent bulbs cannot switch chemically with the gas inside the light and FSO can also bypass prohibitive on and o fast enough. But that is not a bulb, making it grow dimmer. They are planning restrictions. In places where problem for white light-emitting diodes also di cult to seal into the structure of transmitters are not allowed on roofs, for (LEDs), which are expected to become far the bulb, making the rupture of these example, indoor FSO transceivers can more widespread in the coming years, seals another potential source of failure. simply send and receive data through because they use less energy and are Scientists working for Ceravision, a closed windows. FSO is also secure: the more versatile than incandescent bulbs. company based in Milton Keynes, in Brit- only way to intercept the signal is physi- The combination of LEDs and FSO could ain, have designed a new form of lamp cally to intercept the beam. then be used to provide internet coverage that eliminates the need for electrodes. As a result, hundreds of businesses, throughout a home or o ce. Could it be Their device uses microwaves to trans- hospitals and universities are already us- lights out for radio networking? 7 form electricity into light. It consists of a ing FSO. City skylines are not criss- relatively small lump of aluminium ox- crossed with grids of laser beams be- ide into which a hole has been bored. cause it is all done using invisible When the aluminium oxide is bom- infra-red light, says Dr O’Brien. Today’s barded with microwaves generated from technology can transmit data up to 4km Everlasting light the same sort of device that powers a mi- (2.5 miles) at speeds of 1-3 gigabits per sec- crowave oven, a concentrated electric ond (Gbps). eld is created inside the void. Telecoms operators are starting to take If a cylindrical capsule containing a an interest in the technology as an alter- suitable gas is inserted into the hole, the native to the microwave-radio back- Energy: Researchers have developed atoms of the gas become ionised. As elec- haul links that are used to link an environmentally friendly light trons accelerate in the electric eld, they mobile-phone base-stations to operators’ bulb that uses very little energy and gain energy that they pass on to the at- FSO core networks. ’s main drawback is should never need changing oms and molecules of the gas as they col- that bad weather, such as rain or fog, can lide with them, creating a glowing interrupt the signal. But Mr Patrick notes LTHOUGH it symbolises a bright idea, plasma. The resulting light is bright, and that microwave links are also prone to at- Athe traditional incandescent light the process is energy-e cient. Indeed, mospheric interference. Provided FSO is bulb is a dud. It wastes huge amounts of whereas traditional light bulbs emit just set up over relatively short distances say electricity, radiating 95% of the energy it 5% of their energy as light, and uores- several hundred metres it is a reliable consumes as heat rather than light. Its life cent tubes about 15%, the Ceravision technology, he says. is also relatively short, culminating in a lamp has an e ciency greater than 50%. There is no need to worry about bad dull pop as its lament fractures. Now a Because the lamp has no lament, the weather when using FSO indoors, of team of researchers has devised a light scientists who developed it think it will course. But maintaining a line of sight can bulb that is not only much more energy- last for thousands of hours of use in be a problem for a laptop that is being e cient it is also expected to last longer other words, for decades. Moreover, the carried around within a home or o ce. than the devices into which it is inserted. light it generates comes from what is al- One solution is to use a di use light Moreover, the lamp could be used for most a single point, which means that the source rather than a laser beam, says Dr rear-projection televisions as well as gen- bulbs can be used in projectors and tele- O’Brien. Using the natural re ectivity of eral illumination. visions. Because of this, the light is much ceilings and walls, a transmitted infra-red The trick to a longer life, for light bulbs more directional and the lamp could thus signal can be received by any number of at least, is to ensure that the lamp has no prove more e cient than bulbs that scat- receivers within a room. But this ap- ter light in all directions. Its long life proach reduces the pace at which in- would make the new light ideal for build- formation can be transferred. Most of ings in which the architecture makes the light doesn’t go where you want it to, changing light bulbs complicated and ex- says Dr O’Brien. Nor is it possible simply pensive. The lamps’ small size makes to crank up the power of the source them comparable to light-emitting beam, because infra-red light at high in- diodes but the new lamp generates much tensity can cause eye damage. brighter light than those semiconductor So Dr O’Brien has been working on a devices do. A single microwave generator ceiling-based system that tracks where a can be used to power several lamps. receiving device is, and then sends it a sig- Another environmental advantage of nal using several laser beams from a di- the new design is that it does not need rectional transmitter. He has built a mercury, a highly toxic metal found in prototype that runs at 300Mbps, nearly most of the bulbs used today, including six times faster than today’s typical Wi-Fi energy-saving uorescent bulbs, uores- links and reckons that speeds of up to 10 cent tubes and the high-pressure bulbs Gbps are feasible. That is not to say that used in projectors. And Ceravision also Wi-Fi is obsolete. Instead, the two tech- reckons it should be cheap to make. With nologies may end up being used together: lighting accounting for some 20% of elec- Wi-Fi as the uplink, and FSO for the much tricity use worldwide, switching to a faster downlink. more e cient system could both save en- The long-term hope is to transmit data ergy and reduce emissions of climate- using visible light emitted by indoor changing greenhouse gases. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Monitor 3
utility, at its Redhawk plant. Another test build it back in the mid-1980s. It has since is planned in Louisiana. spent around £700m on improvements, GreenFuel claims that over the course and plans to spend £150m more. And Al- Old clean coal of a year, a hectare (2.5 acres) of its reac- wyn North is just one of 435 platforms in tors should be able to produce 30,000 li- the British portion of the North Sea. tres (8,000 American gallons) of oil, Then there are running costs. Up to which could be used as biodiesel, and 300 people live on the platform at a time, enough carbohydrates to be fermented but keeping it fully manned involves Energy: Using photosynthesis to into 9,000 litres of ethanol, which can be more than twice that gure, since most capture exhaust gases from power used as a substitute for petrol. sta get three weeks o for every two plants could reduce the emissions There is, of course, no free lunch. As that they work. Simply ying them all produced by coal- red stations Rob Carlson of the University of Wash- from Aberdeen to the platform costs ington points out, if money is to be made about £1,000 per person per trip. (Aber- OR its supporters, the idea of growing selling products made from exhaust gas, deen boasts the world’s busiest civilian Fsingle-celled algae on exhaust gas then that gas goes from being waste mat- heliport, thanks to all the o shore tra c.) piped from power stations is the ultimate ter to being a valuable resource. Far from Food and other supplies are brought in by in recycling. For its detractors, it is a mere giving it away, power companies might boat. Another vessel is kept on standby pipe dream. Whoever turns out to be even start charging for it. That would, in- near the platform all the time, in case of right, though, it is an intriguing idea: in- deed, be a reversal of fortune. 7 emergency. Generators and desalinators stead of releasing the carbon dioxide pro- run around the clock to provide power duced by burning fossil fuels into the and drinking water. atmosphere, why not recapture it by According to Oil and Gas UK, an in- photosynthesis? The result could then be dustry group, oil rms spent over £11 bil- turned into biodiesel (since many species Sea change lion last year building and running of algae store their food reserves as oil), o shore facilities in British waters. That or even simply dried and fed back into puts production costs, at $22 per barrel, the power station. Of course, if it were among the highest in the world. And they really that easy, someone would have are rising rapidly. Deutsche Bank esti- done it already. But although no one has O shore technology: Rising costs mates that in ation in the oil business yet commercialised the technology, sev- and clever kit are transforming the has run at 30% a year over the past two eral groups are trying. oil platform and could even do away years, and will continue to rise by at least One of them is GS CleanTech, which with it altogether 15% a year this year and next. has developed a bioreactor based on a No wonder, then, that rms are deter- patent held by a group of scientists at the ROM the helipad on top of the Alwyn mined to reduce the expense of produc- Ohio Coal Research Centre, at the Univer- FNorth oil and gas platform, the hori- ing oil at sea, in the North Sea and sity of Ohio. The GS Cleantech bioreactor zon looks crowded. The massive struc- elsewhere. One of the simplest ways to uses a parabolic mirror to funnel sunlight ture stands in the middle of the North cut costs is to minimise the number of into bre-optic cables that carry the light Sea, miles from land, but it is far from iso- people working on platforms and in- to acrylic glow plates inside the reactor. lated. Another 20-odd platforms are visi- crease their productivity with the help of These di use the light over vertical sheets ble, plus several drilling rigs, not to modern communications. Alwyn North of polyester that form the platform on mention all the ships and helicopters is connected to the mainland by bre-op- which the algae grow. Eventually the carting sta and supplies around. Waters tic cable. That allows geologists onshore polyester is unable to support the weight that look featureless and deserted on the to analyse data from drilling as it occurs, of the algae, and they fall o into a collec- map turn out to be littered with teeming suggest adjustments and design future tion duct positioned underneath. settlements. drilling plans without ever leaving their GreenFuel Technologies, based in All this activity comes at tremendous o ces. It also provides continuity be- Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a di er- cost. Total, the oil giant that owns Alwyn tween shifts: Jon Starkebye of IBM, a com- ent approach. Its reactor is composed of a North, spent £1.5 billion ($2.4 billion) to puter giant that provides services to oil 1 series of clear tubes, each with a second, opaque tube nested inside. This arrange- ment makes it possible to bubble the ex- haust gas down through the outer compartment and then bubble it back up through the opaque middle. The bub- bling gas causes turbulence and circu- lates the algae around the reactor. The constant shift between light and dark- ness as the algal cells circulate increases the amount of carbon that they x, prob- ably by promoting chemical reactions that occur naturally only at night. A preliminary test of GreenFuel’s reac- tor design, which was performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus power plant, suggested that it can remove 75% of the carbon dioxide from a power station’s exhaust. A more serious test is now being carried out by Arizona Public Service, that state’s power An endangered species? 4 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007
2 companies, notes that a platform’s out- shore. Norsk Hydro, another Norwegian Claudi Santiago of GE, the vision is that put can fall by as much as 7% during energy rm on the verge of merging with o shore platforms will disappear. hand-overs between di erent teams. Statoil, has developed another gas eld, Or maybe not. If some way can be With access to more powerful com- Ormen Lange, in the same way. But in a found to liquefy gas o shore, Mr Santi- puters onshore, rms can crunch more few years a compressor that can work un- ago points out, then deposits that are cur- numbers and so model more accurately derwater will be needed to supplement rently too remote for the construction of what is going on in their elds. That al- the falling pressure in the eld. Last year, pipelines could be developed, and the lows them to anticipate and pre-empt the Norsk Hydro hired General Electric (GE), gas transported in liquid form by ship in- intrusion of water into their wells, say, or an American industrial giant, to build a stead. That would give o shore platforms the failure of equipment. Such tech- prototype. Fifteen years from now, says a whole new lease on life. 7 niques have enabled Statoil, a Norwe- gian oil rm, to stretch out the period between shutdowns for repairs at one eld from 750 hours to 4,000, and to re- duce the annual hours of engineering Piecing history together work at another from 20,000 to 6,000. These e ciencies, in turn, permit much smaller crews: whereas a typical older platform needed 100 workers, new ones can make do with as few as 29, says Computing: The German Democratic Republic bequeathed a 600m-piece Adolfo Henriquez, who is in charge of puzzle to the reuni ed country. It is about to be solved using software disseminating such integrated opera- tions through the rm. Adopting similar HEN the shredding machines failed techniques at all of Norway’s o shore Wand the mob was at the gates, the elds would yield an extra 250 billion spooks at East Germany’s State Security Norwegian kroner ($43.6 billion) in reve- Service, better known as the Stasi, tried nues, according to a study published last turning their les into mush by dunking year by the local oil-industry association. them in water. But the number of bath- Another way for rms operating o - tubs in their headquarters in Norman- shore to economise is by developing mul- nenstrasse was as unequal to the task as tiple elds from a single platform. Oil the machines had been. In the end, they platforms used to stand directly above resorted to tearing each page up by hand. the elds they drilled, as Alwyn North The fact that many of the resulting shreds does over the oil and gas deposits of the are only a few millimetres across is testa- same name. But Total has since discov- ment to just how much the soon-to-be- ered several other pockets of hydrocar- ex-members of the intelligence service bons nearby. The closest ones can be did not want their work to fall into the tapped from the platform, since it is now public domain. possible to drill sideways as well as up If Bertram Nickolay of the Fraunhofer and down: a total of 20 wells snake out Institute for Production Systems and De- from Alwyn North in di erent directions. sign Technology, in Berlin, has his way, Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil broke the however, the public domain is exactly record for this sort of long-distance drill- where they will soon end up. Using the ing with a well over 11km (7 miles) long. institute’s expertise in pattern-matching Look, an edge piece! Even more distant elds can be tied technology, he and his colleagues are back to a platform using pipelines along about to embark on one of the biggest jig- ture of the paper each shred is made the sea oor. In a tie-back, the valves that saw puzzles of all time or, rather, 45m of from, whether that paper is lined or not, open and close the well are located not them. For that is the number of pages the colour of the ink used, whether that on the rig, but on the sea oor; engineers which the 600m fragments of paper, ink represents a picture, a piece of type- operate them by remote control. Several stored in more than 16,000 bags that written text or a piece of handwriting, deposits of oil and gas, including Nug- were recovered from Normannenstrasse, and if it is handwriting what style. gets, a cluster of gas elds over 40km are thought to represent. Only when a group of related shreds away, are linked to Alwyn North in this At rst glance the task of joining that has been found using these criteria does way. Next, Total plans to connect a new many shreds looks impossible, even the actual puzzling begin. That is done discovery called Jura to the platform. As a when each shred has been scanned so the way human puzzlers do it, by paying result the lifespan of Alwyn North, esti- that the matching can be done by mach- attention to shapes and sizes of the mated at 10 years when it rst started pro- ine. The secret, as with any computing pieces, and the contours of their edges. If duction in 1987, has been extended to task, is to break the problem into smaller, two shreds can be connected, they are re- over 40 years, while its projected output more manageable chunks. The rst stage garded as one larger shred, and are has almost quadrupled. of this breakdown was done, unwit- thrown back into the heap of images to The next logical step is to put more tingly, by the Stasi themselves. Since they be analysed and compared with the oth- equipment underwater, in the hope of were in a hurry, the shredders tended to ers. Thus, as with a real jigsaw, areas get dispensing with platforms altogether. stu all the bits of a given document into progressively lled in until the whole pic- Statoil, for example, is tapping a gas eld a single bag. That greatly simpli es the ture is nally complete. called Snohvit, which lies 143km o - problem, so that rather than being nearly Like a human, the program that does shore, without using a platform. But this impossible it becomes merely unwieldy. the puzzling is capable of learning. It is possible only because the pressure of The next stage is to group the shreds spawns slightly altered versions of itself the eld is strong enough to keep the gas from a single bag according to various cri- that compete for computer time on the owing through the long pipeline back to teria. These include the colour and tex- basis of their success at nding matches. 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Monitor 5
2 The most successful are then mutated the program really cannot make up its ited range because of the weight of their again, in a process similar to biological mind whether two shreds match or not, it batteries. The electrobus needed 1.5 evolution. This is necessary because un- refers the matter to a human operator. tonnes of lead-acid batteries to carry its like a real jigsaw or a machine-shredded Dr Nickolay is planning to process 34 passengers. It could travel 60km (38 document, in which the pieces t per- about 400 bags over the course of the miles) on one charge. So at lunchtime the fectly, the shreds of a torn document are next two years as a nal test of the tech- buses went to a garage in Victoria and slightly distorted and frayed at the edges. nology. If that works, it will just be a drove up a ramp. The batteries, slung un- Deciding what matches what therefore question of adding more scanners and der the electrobus, were lowered onto a requires judgment, which is notoriously computers to expose the truth about East trolley and replaced with fresh ones. It all di cult to program in advance. Indeed, if Germany’s dark past. 7 took three minutes. It just goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun, says Mark Hairr, of the Advanced Transporta- tion Technology Institute. That’s almost exactly what we do here in Chattanooga. What is this that roareth thus? And we knew nothing about this. In April 1906 the London Electrobus Company oated on the stockmarket. It wanted £300,000 to put 300 buses on the Transport: The untold story of a failed attempt to introduce electric buses in streets of the capital. On the rst day the London a century ago o ers a cautionary technological tale otation raised £120,000 and the share o er was on course to be fully sub- N MONDAY July 15th 1907 an un- trials on anything approaching the same scribed. But the next day some awkward Ousual bus picked up its rst passen- scale. For the past 15 years Chattanooga questions surfaced. The rm was buying gers at London’s Victoria Station before has had a dozen battery buses. Today the rights to a patent for £20,000 (£7.5m, or gliding smoothly o to Liverpool Street. It world’s biggest eet, excluding mini- $15m, in today’s money) from the Baron was the beginning of what was then the buses, is in Santa Barbara, California. The de Martigny. But the patent was old and world’s biggest trial of battery-powered city has 20 buses and is buying ve more. had nothing to do with battery buses. It buses. The London Electrobus Company The replacement of horses by inter- was a scam. Investors asked for their had high hopes that this quiet and fume- nal-combustion engines may now look money back, and the rm had to return free form of transport would replace the to have been inevitable, but it certainly £80,000. The investors would have been horse. At its peak, the rm had a eet of did not seem so at the time. At the begin- even less impressed had they known the 20 buses. But despite being popular with ning of 1906 there were only 230 motor true identity of the Baron , who was a passengers the service collapsed in 1909. buses in London. They were widely re- Canadian music-hall artist. The history books imply that the collapse viled for their evil smells and noise. At Martigny was only the front man. The was caused by technical drawbacks and a any one time a quarter of them were o mastermind behind this and a clutch of price war. It was not. The untold story is the road for repairs. In 1907 The Econo- subsequent scams was Edward Lehwess, that the collapse was caused by system- mist predicted the triumph of the horse . a German lawyer and serial con-artist atic fraud that set back the cause of bat- The future of public-transport technol- with a taste for fast cars and expensive tery buses by a hundred years. ogy was up for grabs. champagne. After this initial asco the Indeed, the London electrobus trial re- The paradox at the heart of the electro- London Electrobus Company struggled mained the largest for the rest of the 20th bus story is that the electrobuses them- to raise money. But Lehwess had set up a century. Only recently has American in- selves were well engineered and well network of front companies to siphon o terest in keeping city air clean encouraged managed. All battery buses have a lim- its funds. Chief among these was the Electric Vehicle Company of West Nor- wood, which built the buses. The London Electrobus Company paid the Electric Vehicle Company over £31,000 in advance for 50 buses. Only 20 were ever delivered. The buses were hugely overpriced. Eventually the Lon- don Electrobus Company went into liqui- dation. Even then the scams continued. Lehwess bought eight buses for £800 from the liquidators and sold them to Brighton for £3,500 a mark-up of 340% where they ran for another six years. At the time, the life of a motor bus was mea- sured in months. Whether the fraud was truly a tipping point for electric vehicles is, of course, im- possible to say. But it is a commonplace of innovation from railway gauges to semiconductors to software that the best technology is not always the most successful. Once an industry standard has been established, it is hard to dis- place. If Lehwess and Martigny had not pulled their scam when they did, modern Can it be a motor bus? cities might be an awful lot cleaner. 7 6 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007
A car that runs on water IS IT an aquatic car or a terrestrial boat? The Aquada, a three-seater vehicle with wheels A plane that that fold up, James Bond-style, is due to go into production in 2008 and will sell for around $85,000, according to its maker, Gibbs Technologies. In 2004 an early prototype, piloted by Richard Branson, a British entrepreneur, became the fastest amphibious thinks it’s a boat vehicle ever to cross the English Channel. Powered by a V-6 engine, the Aquada is capable of 175kph (110mph) on land and 50kph on water. The company’s founder and Transport: After a long gestation, president, Alan Gibbs, wanted to be able to drive onto the beach in front of his home in ground-e ect vehicles that y on New Zealand, which is often inaccessible because of high tides. But Gibbs Technologies’ cushions of air could nally be ready chief executive, Neil Jenkins, reckons the Aquada will appeal to a broad range of buyers, for take-o including urbanites in London or New York, who could use the amphibious craft to circumvent tra c-clogged roads. ALK along the River Warnow, in The Aquada will be built in America, and several states are vying to attract the plant. Wnorthern Germany, and you may Personally, I’d like to do it in Detroit, says Mr Gibbs. He hopes to employ 1,500 be lucky enough to spot a SeaFalcon, a workers and produce 100,000 vehicles within ve years. The Aquada certainly has sleek, white machine with two propel- novelty value. But its success depends on there being enough paying customers who lers, two wings and a distinctly un-bird- decide that it oats their boat. like tail. It looks like an aircraft. Which is what it is. Except, it isn’t. It is a ship at least in the eyes of the International Ma- rine Organisation, which regulates such things. That matters, because ships are much more lightly regulated than aircraft. The SeaFalcon is really a ground-e ect vehicle. It ies only over water and only two metres above that water. This means the air beneath its wings is compressed, giving it additional lift. In e ect, it is oat- ing on a cushion of air. That makes it far cheaper to run than a plane of equivalent size, while the fact that it is ying means it is far faster at 80-100 knots than a ship of any size. Its designer, Dieter Puls, thus hopes it will ll a niche for the rapid transport of people and light goods in parts of the world where land and sea ex- ist in similar proportions. The theory of ground-e ect vehicles goes back to the 1920s, when Carl Wie- selsberger, a German physicist, described how the ground e ect works. There was then a period of silence, followed by a The next stage, of course, is to begin false start. In the 1960s the Soviet armed production in earnest and that seems to forces thought that ground-e ect vehicles be about to happen. Dr Puls says he has would be ideal for shifting heavy kit signed a deal with an Indonesian rm for The ultimate around places like the Black Sea. Their an initial order of ten, while both he and prototypes did y, but were never de- Dr Fischer are in discussions with Wiget- game gear ployed in earnest and their jet engines works, a Singaporean company, with a consumed huge amounts of fuel. view to starting production next year. This did, however, prove that the idea South-East Asia, with its plethora of is- Video games: New furniture, worked. And two German engineers, Dr lands and high rate of economic growth controllers and screens are helping Puls and Hanno Fischer (whose version is just the sort of place where ground- to make video games even more is called Air sh 8), have taken it up and e ect vehicles should do well. immersive and realistic made it work by using modern, compos- All of which sounds optimistic. But a ite materials for the airframes, and pro- note of caution is needed. For another UDRA MCIVER, a publicist, was at- pellers rather than jets for propulsion. sort of ground-e ect vehicle was also ex- Atending the New York Toy Fair in Feb- One reason the Soviet design was so pected to do well and ended up going no- ruary when she came across a display of thirsty is that the power needed to lift a where. The hovercraft di ered from the gaming chairs seats designed speci - ground-e ect vehicle is far greater than vehicles designed by Dr Puls and Dr Fi- cally for playing video games. She sat that needed to sustain it in level ight. scher in that it relied on creating its own down to try one, and the experience The Soviet design used heavy jet engines cushion of air, rather than having one proved to be so engrossing that she re- to deliver the power needed for take-o . provided naturally. That meant it could mained in the chair, glued to the screen But the SeaFalcon uses a hydrofoil to lift go on land as well as sea which was and playing Project Gotham Racing 3 , itself out of the water, and Air sh 8 uses thought at the time (the 1950s) to be a for several hours. Passers by began asking what Dr Fischer calls a hoverwing a sys- winning combination. Sadly, it was not. her for product details, thinking she tem of pipes that takes air which has Hovercraft have almost disappeared. But worked for the chair’s manufacturer, at passed through the propeller and blasts it then, in the eyes of the regulators, they which point she realised just how long out under the craft during take-o . counted as aircraft. 7 she had been sitting in it. That was a 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Monitor 7
2 great chair I just loved it, she recalls. Most gamers are quite happy to sit on a sofa or a beanbag when playing Gears of War or Grand Theft Auto . But as other aspects of gaming become more re- alistic, from high-de nition graphics to vibrating controllers, manufacturers sense an opportunity to o er dedicated gaming furniture, controllers designed for speci c gaming genres and new types of fancy screens. The Raptor, for example, made by the Ultimate Game Chair company, has built-in speakers and features 12 motors that provide a full-body version of the vi- bration e ects delivered through hand- held controllers. Pyramat’s S5000 Sound Rocker is another chair with built-in speakers; it uses wireless technology to beam the audio signals from the console. The Nethrone goes further: it is an ergo- such as Unreal or Half-Life 2 , the lighting , in which lights behind and nomic seat in an adjustable chrome monitors can then be arranged to mimic around the screen bathe the room with frame which doubles as a monitor stand. peripheral vision. And ight-simulator the same hues shown on screen. Also The whole thing looks like a machine for fans can simulate the view from an air- available are extra speakers, fans and subjecting astronauts to high G-forces, craft’s cockpit windows. vibration packs, all of which can be trig- but is meant to allow gamers to play Mitsubishi, meanwhile, is adding a gered when necessary by suitably pro- while reclining in comfort. new feature called Game FX to its ultra- grammed games. Several video-game Fancy controllers are another way to large DLP televisions (which measure up publishers, including Codemasters, Gear- increase the realism of certain games. to 73 inches diagonally). This will double box Software and THQ, have agreed to Racing games found in arcades have the usual frame-rate to enable two sepa- support the technology. steering wheels and pedals; wheels such rate sets of images to be interleaved. Us- Where will it all end? Harvey Smith, a as Logitech’s NASCAR Racing Wheel can ing special glasses, players can alternate respected game designer who has now be bought for use at home by those between images for the right and left worked on titles including System truly obsessed with driving simulators. eyes, so that the television becomes a Shock and Thief , says the most immer- The same is true of joysticks. The most ad- three-dimensional display, at least for sive experiences depend not on fancy vanced models, such as the ThrustMaster games that support this feature. technology, but on good design, and the Top Gun Afterburner Force Feedback A di erent approach to immersion ability to create a coherent and believable made by Guillemot, now resemble those comes from Philips, which includes a game world. Despite all the gadgets that found in ghter aircraft in their layout technology called amBX in some of its are now available, he says, nothing is as and complexity. televisions. Its main feature is ambient immersive as a good book. 7 The popularity of the Guitar Hero series of games, in which players must press coloured buttons in time with clas- sic rock tracks, means that many televi- sions in gaming households now have Zap! You’re not dead small, plastic electric-guitar controllers propped up next to them. Rock Band , a game in a similar vein that will be re- leased later this year, will have bass-gui- Medicine: A new approach to proton-beam radiotherapy, which allows tar and drum-kit controllers, too. Players treatment to be precisely targeted, could make it more widely available may look ridiculous, but they would not enjoy such games nearly as much with- ADIOTHERAPY, the use of radiation able since 1990, there are still only about out these special controllers. Rzipping through the DNA of cancer 25 clinics around the world that o er it. A lot of innovation is also going on in cells to kill them or halt their reproduc- An announcement at a meeting of the the eld of displays. PC gamers tend to sit tion, has always had the disadvantage of American Association of Physicists in right in front of their screens while gam- causing collateral damage to healthy tis- Medicine, held in Minneapolis in July, ing, whereas console gamers tend to sit a sue. But some forms of radiation are could change this, however. Thomas bit further away. Sitting close to a large worse than others. One of the best is a Mackie of the University of Wisconsin display, be it a monitor or a widescreen beam of protons. Unlike X-rays, the stan- has a new approach that he hopes will television, provides a particularly immer- dard radiotherapeutic tool, a proton bring the cost of a proton-therapy mach- sive experience, because the game occu- beam can be tuned in a way that causes it ine down to $20m and the space required pies almost all of the player’s eld of to dump its destructive energy at a par- to a smallish room. vision. Taking that a step further, Matrox, ticular depth beneath the skin. This The dielectric-wall accelerator (DWA) a Canadian rm that makes display cards means it can destroy a tumour without that lies at the heart of Dr Mackie’s mach- for PCs, has devised TripleHead2Go . damaging other tissue. Unfortunately, ine was designed in the 1990s at the Law- This is a box that combines three separate the machines needed to generate such rence Livermore National Laboratory in monitors so that they behave like a sin- beams weigh several hundred tonnes California as a portable X-ray source. At gle, very large, very wide monitor. In and cost $100m or more to build. So al- rst, it was used to accelerate electrons games with a rst-person perspective, though proton therapy has been avail- rather than protons. Those electrons were1 8 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007
2 smashed into a metal target to generate conductor. Livermore’s high-gradient in- eld looks like an accelerating electrical the high-energy X-rays that Livermore’s sulator, though, damps down the early pulse, and it is this pulse that picks up physicists needed to peek inside ageing stages of this ripping process and creates and carries the electrons or, if the polar- bombs and check that they were still in a threshold so high that it can support the ity is reversed, the protons. working order. But Dennis Matthews, electric elds the DWA requires. Once Davis’s scientists had pro- one of Livermore’s more medically The second advance is a way of nounced the general idea sound, they minded programme directors, realised switching thousands of volts on and o and Dr Matthews looked around for a that by changing the polarity of the in a few billionths of a second, a previ- commercial collaborator. They lit on a machine it could be used to accelerate ously impossible feat. This requires a trick rm called TomoTherapy, which is positively charged protons, rather than opposite to the rst one suddenly mak- where Dr Mackie came in for, besides negatively charged electrons. He then ing an insulator into a conductor. The in- working at Wisconsin, he is also Tomo- teamed up with the cancer centre at the sulator in question is silicon carbide. Therapy’s co-founder. At the moment the University of California, Davis, to investi- When hit with laser light of the correct rm sells machines that tune traditional, gate the possibility of using a DWA for frequency, it becomes conductive. X-ray-based radiotherapy to make it proton therapy. The DWA, then, is a tube with an in- more e ective. The idea is to adapt the The advantage of the DWA is its small ner wall made of the high-gradient insu- techniques the rm has developed for size. Like all particle accelerators, it uses lator and a series of silicon carbide controlling X-rays to control protons. It an electric eld to speed up electrically switches along its length. As the switches will take a while to determine whether charged particles. Most accelerators, are hit by a carefully timed sequence of this will work. But if it does, radiation however, speed up the particles over a laser pulses, a powerful electric eld is therapy for cancer could become a lot less long distance, using a moderate eld. The created. Viewed from inside the tube, this traumatic and a lot more e ective. 7 DWA employs a succession of enormous elds over just a couple of metres. That it is able to do so is the result of two technical advances. The rst is an ar- rangement of insulating materials and Hearts and minds conductors called a high-gradient insu- lator. Every insulator has a threshold be- yond which the electrons are ripped o its component atoms and it becomes a Medicine: A new device detects new device can pick up the trace of a heartbeats and brain activity at heartbeat from a metre away. It can also a distance, doing away with sense electrical activity in the brain through the hair. uncomfortable electrodes The result is a probe that can easily be picked up by medics and held close to S ANYONE who has undergone an the patient. Wires attached to the back of Aelectrocardiograph (ECG) examina- the probe lead to a computer that trans- tion knows, it is an uncomfortable proce- lates the electrical signals into a picture dure that involves sticky electrodes of the heartbeat, brainwave or whatever. which seem to want to rip out your body A test version developed by the team hair when they are removed. This is be- was the size of a watch and was worn on cause the current the electrodes detect is the wrist. The nal version will be of weak, and a really good contact needs to similar size, but will not touch the skin. be made between apparatus and skin. Dr Prance hopes that his invention Robert Prance and his colleagues at will not merely be more comfortable the University of Sussex, in England, than today’s electrode-based detectors, plan to do away with all that. They have but will also be able to do new things. developed a device that can act as an His team is experimenting with the use ECG or its cranial equivalent, an of many sensors in combination to pro- electroencephalograph without even duce pictures of electrical activity in the touching the skin. It does so by measur- heart. An electrical wave traverses the ing the signal without drawing current, heart each time it beats, co-ordinating using high impedance sensors. the contraction and relaxation of the Impedance is related to resistance chambers that pump blood around the which, as generations of schoolchildren body. By joining 25 sensors together, the have had drummed into them, is the ra- researchers hope to demonstrate the tio of voltage to current. If current and technique’s potential as a medical-imag- voltage are uctuating, however, other ing tool. It would be di cult to do this factors come into play, as the current and trick with conventional detectors. voltage interact with each other. Imped- Nor is the high-impedance technique ance is a measure of electrical resistance restricted to medical applications. It is al- that captures the e ects of this feedback. ready being adapted to look for faults in The advantage of using high-imped- microelectronic circuits, and it might ance sensors is that the signal an elec- eventually be used to test mechanical tric potential can be measured at a components made of stainless steel or distance. This is because the resistance is carbon bre for structural integrity. It so great that a layer of air makes no ap- could thus be used to give machines, as preciable di erence. Indeed, Dr Prance’s well as people, a clean bill of health. Right on target The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Monitor 9
land, which helps companies manage digital information. And too much health information can confuse people, says Health 2.0 Monique Levy of Jupiter. But a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington, DC, suggests that al- though user-generated information of- fers consumers more health options, the Technology and society: Is the outbreak of cancer videos, bulimia blogs and upside outweighs the risk, says Pew’s other forms of user generated medical information a healthy trend? Susannah Fox. Nearly one-third of the 100m Americans who have looked for IDEOS of skateboarding dogs on health information online say that they VYouTube might not appear to have or people they know have been signi - anything to do with blogs about living cantly helped by what they found. In con- with asthma. But the rise of user-gener- trast, only 3% reported that online advice ated content spurred by sites such as had caused serious harm. YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia has A lot of user-generated health in- also infected health care. Millions are formation is accurate. A panel of neurol- now logging on to contribute informa- ogy specialists judged that only 6% of tion about topics stretching from avian- information posted in the epilepsy-sup- u pandemics to the extraction of port group of BrainTalk was factually wisdom teeth or the use of acupuncture wrong, according to a study published in to overcome infertility. You could call it 2004 in the British Medical Journal. And user-generated health care, or Health 2.0. with enough people online, misinforma- In some ways this is nothing new. The tion is often quickly corrected. Inaccurate BrainTalk Communities, an online sup- posts on the website of the Association of port group for neurology patients, began Cancer Online Resources (ACOR), for ex- in 1993. But content now comes in di er- ample, will be pointed out within two ent forms, such as blogs and videos, and hours, says Gilles Frydman, the founder there are many more contributors. More of the association, based in New York. than 20% of American internet users In some cases web-based information have created some sort of health-related from other su erers can be a patient’s content, according to Jupiter, a market-re- best hope. In the BrainTalk study, 40% of search rm. The hype around Web 2.0 respondents said they used the site be- has made people aware of the new pos- cause their doctors did not or could not sibilities, says John Grohol, a psycholo- answer their questions. But the internet’s gist who launched PsychCentral.com, a power to connect people means that a mental-health website, in 1995. The re- person diagnosed with a rare form of sult, he says, has been a snowball e ect others in similar situations. And today’s cancer can nd hundreds of other people of new content and new users. body of medical knowledge is too vast across the world who can recommend To gauge the size of this snowball, look for any one doctor to know it all. Cathy doctors or provide rst-hand information at OrganizedWisdom, a rm based in Fischer, a producer at a non-pro t televi- about treatment, explains Mr Frydman. New York. It launched in October 2006 as sion company in San Francisco, for exam- He founded ACOR in 1996 after his wife a health-care Wikipedia of sorts: a site to ple, was not getting the information she was given inaccurate information about which consumers could contribute their needed from her doctor. So she joined an the treatment she needed for breast can- own nuggets of health wisdom. Yet after online group to connect with others who, cer. Given the potential bene ts, the risk only a few months it transformed itself like her, had undergone broid surgery. of giving up some privacy seems insig- into an index of the existing web content. In some ways it is strange that there is ni cant, he says. If I am diagnosed with The rm’s founders had discovered that so much discussion of health-related a rare cancer, I will think for two minutes, there already was quite enough user-gen- matters online, given that health, like and then I will agree that giving up my erated health information online; the real money, is a topic that many people will privacy is worthwhile. problem was nding the good stu . not discuss even with family members. Some observers expect even greater The explosion of user-generated con- People do not seem to realise how perma- bene ts from user-generated health sites tent in health care is, in part, the result of nent information can be online, warns in future. Patients who live with chronic broader internet trends: more and more Jennifer King, a researcher at the Univer- diseases such as epilepsy often know people have broadband access and the sity of California in Berkeley. She worries more about them than their doctors, con- tools for creating content are getting eas- that personal data could be misused. tends Daniel Hoch, a professor at Har- ier to use. New software, for instance, Some sites mitigate that risk by recom- vard Medical School who helped to makes it easy to launch and maintain a mending the use of pseudonyms. So found BrainTalk. Many doctors, he says, site such as FluWikie (which provides in- Meg7 talks about her family’s struggle don’t get the wisdom of crowds. But he formation about preparing for an in u- with Lou Gehrig’s disease, Aprilly shares thinks the combined knowledge of a enza pandemic), and digital cameras information about babies with colic, and crowd of his patients would be far greater make it a snap to take and upload photos jojo1972 writes about how she handles than his own. A wiki capturing the of, say, epigastric hernia surgery. migraine headaches. knowledge of, say, 300 epileptics could But there are other drivers, too. Those Misinformation is another worry. On be invaluable not only to others with epi- with multiple chronic conditions, such as the internet, as the old saying goes, no- lepsy, but also to the medical profes- diabetes and depression, or lesser- body knows you are a dog or an idiot, sionals who care for them. Their known illnesses such as chronic fatigue notes Dan Keldsen of AIIM, a non-pro t aggregated understanding, he says, syndrome, are anxious to get tips from association based in Silver Spring, Mary- would be helpful to all health care. 7 10 Computing The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007
The world on your desktop
Other data is then overlaid on it, notably a planet. (Google also provides a web- patchwork of satellite imagery and aerial based geobrowser via Google Maps.) Computing: As the internet photography licensed from several public Vincent Tao, GeoTango’s founder and becomes intertwined with the and private providers. The entire planet is now director of Virtual Earth for Micro- covered, with around one-third of all land soft, allows that Microsoft has spent at the real world, the resulting depicted in such detail that individual couple of hundreds of millions of dol- geoweb has many uses trees and cars, and the homes of 3 billion lars level on Virtual Earth. Most of that people, can be seen. All this has long been has been spent on the acquisition of imag- ARTH materialises, rotating majesti- imaginable but has become possible only ery, which now totals 14 petabytes on 900 Ecally in front of his face. Hiro recently, thanks to high-resolution com- servers. (One petabyte is 1m gigabytes.) reaches out and grabs it. He twists it mercial satellite imaging, broadband The company is also adding detail in the around so he’s looking at Oregon. Tells it links and cheap, powerful computers. form of textured three-dimensional mod- to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving Keyhole, an American rm, released els of cities devised from aerial photo- him a crystalline view of the mountains the rst commercial geobrowser in graphs; ten cities are added each month. and the seashore. 2001. Google bought Keyhole in 2004 and For its part, Google is relying on That vision from Neal Stephenson’s launched Google Earth in 2005. Its basic, crowdsourcing enlisting its users to Snow Crash , a science- ction novel free version has since been downloaded build and contribute images, 3-D models published in 1992, aptly describes Google over 250m times, says Michael Jones, one of buildings and other data to enrich its Earth, a computer program that lets users of Keyhole’s founders and now Google digital planet. So far 850,000 users have y over a detailed photographic map of Earth’s chief technologist. contributed millions of annotations and the world. Other information, such as In 2004 America’s space agency, more than 1m images, vetting one an- roads, borders and the locations of co ee NASA, released another geobrowser, other’s contributions. Wikipedia, which shops can be draped on to the view, called World Wind. More than 20m uses a similar system, is itself available which can be panned, rotated, tilted and copies are in use. But Google’s main geo- through Google Earth. Users can read Wi- zoomed with almost seamless continuity. browsing rival is Microsoft. Both Encarta, kipedia articles placed on the globe using First-time users often report an exhilarat- Microsoft’s encyclopedia, and TerraSer- geotags spatial co-ordinates encoded ing revelatory pang as they realise what ver, a database demonstration project, into each entry. Other sites including the software can do. As the globe spins had geobrowser-like features in the 1990s. Flickr, the leading photo-sharing site, and and switches from one viewpoint to an- At the end of 2005 Microsoft bought Geo- Google’s YouTube, also support geotags. other, it can even induce vertigo. Tango, which contributed to the develop- These virtual globes are being put to Google’s virtual globe incorporates ment of Live Search Maps, a web-based an unexpected range of uses. Google elevation data that describe surface fea- geobrowser that uses data from Virtual Earth was used to co-ordinate relief e orts tures such as mountains and valleys. Earth, Microsoft’s digital model of the in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurri-1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Computing 11
An overlay shows destroyed villages in Darfur; sunbathers on Sydney’s Bondi Beach; the city of Berlin, with detailed 3-D buildings
2 cane Katrina in 2005. Tax inspectors in pany added features to Google Maps to bases and wrapped them up in a modi- Buenos Aires are using it to see whether make it easier to create mash-ups. Micro- ed version of NASA’s World Wind geo- people are correctly reporting the size of soft is at work on a similar tool. Another browser. This makes it possible to walk their properties. An Italian programmer site, platial.com, provides free mash-up through a 3-D model of each base and call who was using the software noticed odd tools for bloggers, spawning a new genre up multiple layers of data. A project man- markings on the ground near his home in self-absorption: autobiogeography. ager can view live video from a construc- town which turned out to be a previously The geoweb has obvious appeal to tion site and identify the contractors and unknown Roman villa. Roofers, land- those in the property business. Zil- their vehicles. A planner can assess a pro- scape gardeners and solar-panel installers low.com mashes Microsoft’s Virtual posed building’s e ect on runway visibil- use the virtual maps to scout for potential Earth with other data to create maps of ity. And an environmental engineer, customers. Rebecca Moore, a member of home prices in America. But property is while viewing a plume of contaminated the Google Earth team, used the software just the start. At gasbuddy.com, visitors groundwater, can delve into 45 years’ to galvanise her neighbourhood in the can map local petrol prices to plan ll-ups. worth of documents associated with the Santa Cruz mountains in opposition to a ExploreOurPla.net brings together thou- site. Carla Johnson, Waterstone’s boss, nearby logging project. And the Amazon sands of sources of images and data to let says the project cost less than $1m and is Conservation Team, an American charity, users investigate climate change. expected to save the air force around $5m equipped 26 indigenous tribes in the Am- These examples illustrate the emerg- a year through faster decision-making. azon with hand-held global positioning ing architecture of the geoweb: data, such system units and computers running as information on tra c jams or seismic Smile, you’re on Google Earth Google Earth, to enable them to assert tremors, is hosted separately from the im- Like any technology, the geoweb has both their legal sovereignty in the face of ages and models of the geobrowser, good and bad uses. When geobrowsers threats from loggers and miners. which assembles, combines and displays rst introduced easy access to satellite im- It’s turning into a map of historical the information in new ways. GeoCom- agery, something that had previously signi cance, says John Hanke, head of mons.com hosts data, from crime rates to only been available to intelligence agen- Google’s Earth and Maps division, and melanoma statistics, that can be com- cies, many observers worried that terro- another of Keyhole’s founders. It is going bined to create colour-coded heat maps rists might use such images to plan to be a map of the world that is more de- of intangibles such as hipness . Visitors attacks. Google Earth seems to have been tailed than any map that’s ever been to Heywhatsthat.com can generate a dia- used in this way by Iraqi insurgents plan- created. He may be understating the gram of the view from any high spot to ning attacks on a British base in the city of technology’s importance. see the names of visible mountain peaks. Basra, for example, in which individual Here the neogeographers, as mash-up buildings and vehicles can be clearly The world-wired web enthusiasts are known, have crossed into seen. After this came to light in January, Geobrowsers are a stunningly e ective the terrain of geographic information the images of the area in question were re- means of visualising the planet. But they systems (GIS), the fancy software tools placed with images from 2002, predating are just one part of a broader endeavour, that are used by governments and compa- the construction of the camp. the construction of a geoweb that is still nies to analyse spatial data. Geobrowsers This summer a member of the Assem- in its infancy, much as the world wide are still quite primitive by comparison, bly of the State of New York called on web was in the mid-1990s. The web did but are much easier to use. For its part GIS Google to obscure imagery after the geo- away with many geographical con- deals with critical infrastructure, so its browser was used by plotters in a foiled straints, enabling people with common data tend to be of impeccable quality. Jack airport attack. Yet Mr Jones says Google interests to communicate, regardless of lo- Dangermond, the founder of ESRI, a priv- has been formally contacted by govern- cation. Yet placelessness jettisons some of ate rm that dominates the GIS market, ments in this regard only three times (in- the most useful features of information, says interest stimulated by the geoweb cluding by India and by an unspeci ed which are now attracting new attention. has helped to boost business by 20% this European country), and that in each case At present the most feverish excite- year. Ron Lake of Galdos Systems, a rm the issue was resolved without making ment surrounds the combination of vir- that specialises in integrating civic geo- changes to the imagery in Google Earth. tual maps with other sources of data in data, says geobrowsers have led to a push Although some buildings or areas are mash-ups . One of the earliest examples, for better public access to such data. blurred for security reasons, Google says housingmaps.com, created in 2005, com- When the analytical insights and data this is done by the rms from which it li- bines San Francisco apartment listings quality of GIS are combined with the geo- censes the imagery. Microsoft says it blurs from Craigslist.org with Google Maps. web’s visualisation and networking pro- photos in response to legitimate govern- Mash-ups have since become common- wess, startling e ciencies emerge. Last ment and agency requests . But the im- place Google says its maps are used in year Waterstone, a consultancy, assem- ages are typically between six months more than 4m of them. In April the com- bled the geodata for 13 American air-force and three years old, which limits their tac-1 12 Computing The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007
House prices overlaid on a satellite map at Zillow.com; San Francisco, seen on Google’s Street View; a GIS view of an air-force base
2 tical usefulness; and satellite and aerial gregate, they challenge accepted notions bering: location-based viruses, geohack- images are available from many other of privacy especially for those caught ing and, worst of all, geospam. sources, and have been for some time. So doing something naughty as Google’s Despite these concerns, the potential in some respects, geobrowsers have not specially equipped camera van swoops of the geoweb is not lost on investors. made possible anything that was not pos- past. Shortly after the feature was Since the beginning of last year more than sible before they have just made access launched, users uncovered a car getting a 20 geospatial rms have been the targets to such images much cheaper and easier. ticket from Miami police, a man scaling a of mergers and acquisitions, with Google, It’s a question of the policy and the locked gate in San Francisco and another Microsoft and ESRI among the buyers. But thinking catching up with the technol- man entering a shop selling sex toys. it is not quite time to declare the dawn of ogy, says Mr Hanke. Ease of access al- When the coverage is everything and Web 3.0. For one thing, consumer geo- ters the debate. Google insists that it everywhere, there is going to be a big pro- browsing does not make any money. Mi- takes security concerns very seriously, blem, says Lee Tien, a lawyer at the Elec- crosoft’s Mr Tao says that revenue has to and points out that the American govern- tronic Frontier Foundation, an internet come from advertising for now, until criti- ment’s o cial position is that the bene ts campaign group. Satellite images are not cal mass enables location-based transact- of making satellite images widely avail- detailed enough to allow individual peo- ions. Google, true to form, is investing rst able outweigh the risks. Indeed, some ju- ple or vehicles to be identi ed, but faces and worrying about revenue later. risdictions are embracing the exposure. and licence plates can be seen in Google’s The Canary Islands have donated high- Street View. There are few legal prece- The road to Web 3.0 resolution imagery to Google in the hope dents. In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued to A more immediate hurdle is on the verge that virtual visitors might become real keep her Malibu estate out of an online li- of resolution. Google recently submitted tourists, and the city of Berlin has made brary of images of the California coast. KML, the tagging protocol that describes its painstakingly detailed digital models She lost. Although movie stars are more how objects are placed in Google Earth, to available through Google Earth. stalked than most several sites provide the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), For governments that are used to hid- geobrowser links to celebrities’ homes it a standards body. This will let other rms ing things from each other’s spy satellites, is easy to imagine innocent annotations support it. GML, a protocol developed by the advent of the geobrowsers does not that could be unintentionally dangerous. the OGC to encode spatial-information change things very much. Ordinary Shelters for battered women, for example, models, was formally adopted as an inter- members of the public can now call up often prefer not to make their locations national standard this year. Standards for images of Chinese nuclear submarines widely known. dynamic geodata, the sharing of 3-D mod- via Google Earth, but intelligence agen- Google’s Mr Jones believes the bene- els of buildings and geodata from sensor cies around the world have had access to ts are strong enough to overcome these networks ought to be in place by next far more detailed satellite images for concerns. I think there’s a social barrier year. All this will ensure interoperability years. And the fact that the submarines to everything new, he says. The avail- and do for geodata what the web did for can be seen at all means that China is not ability of useful information will out- other forms of data, says Carl Reed, the trying to keep their existence a secret. weigh concern over surveillance and loss OGC’s chief technologist. Even so, armed forces do nd the geoweb of privacy, he believes. Five or six years At the same time, the incorporation of useful. The American military is a big user ago, he notes, people worried about the satellite-positioning technology into mo- of both World Wind and the enterprise spread of camera phones. But now ev- bile phones and cars could open the version of Google Earth. And some gov- eryone just presumes that everybody has oodgates. When it is available, simply ernments do have grounds for concern: a camera on their phone it’s nothing spe- moving about one’s neighbourhood can the government of Sudan, for example, cial. The lesson of previous technologies, then be tantamount to browsing and gen- would undoubtedly prefer the United he says, is that we all are happy to toler- erating content without doing anything, States Holocaust Memorial Museum not ate things that would have previously as demonstrated by a company called to highlight destroyed villages in Darfur been considered intolerable. Socialight. Its service lets mobile users at- via an overlay in Google Earth. Indeed, all the features good and tach notes to any location, to be read by Close to home, the geoweb turns out to bad of the internet will eventually gain others who come along later. Taken fur- have implications for personal privacy as new dimensions on the geoweb. Bots and ther, the result could end up being a sort well as geopolitics. Google’s new Street intelligent agents will crawl it. It will be of extrasensory information awareness, View feature, launched in May, lets users populated by avatars, as Second Life be- annotation and analysis capability in the of Google Maps move through stitched- comes rst life, and it will enable the in- real world. When that happens , says Mr together street-level imagery of several verse: telepresent machines roaming the Jones, then the map is actually a little American cities, giving private citizens a real world. Ghostly, private worlds will be portal on to life itself. The only thing that taste of crowdsourced surveillance. All overlaid on reality, sensitive only to mem- can hold it back, he believes, is the rate at the views are of public streets yet, in ag- bers. The malicious possibilities are so- which society can adapt. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Computing 13
the companies that produce them. Ease of use is one area where technology rms can di erentiate themselves and gain competitive advantage. Just look at Apple, which is able to charge a premium for its products thanks to their elegance and simplicity. Its Macintosh computer, launched in 1984, helped to popularise the window, menu and mouse-based graphical interface a huge step forward from the system of cryptic typed com- mands it replaced. Graphical interfaces became common in the 1990s, but there has been very little progress since. What comes next? In March this year Microsoft assembled a group of HCI ex- perts to discuss this question at a confer- ence near Seville called HCI 2020. Andrew Herbert, managing director of Microsoft’s Cambridge laboratory, told The trouble with attendees that interface simpli cation is vital if the computing world is to be opened up to new consumers such as the computers elderly, children and people with little computer experience. Microsoft says new features in its Windows Vista operating system, such as 3-D graphics intended to make navigation easier, demonstrate its found that 13 clicks were needed to commitment to greater ease of use. change its ringtone. It’s an interface de- Computing: They may be signed by engineers for engineers, he The view from Hollywood powerful, but computers could says. Steven Ky n, a senior researcher at But tweaking an existing window-based Philips, a consumer-electronics giant interface is hardly a radical step. For a still be easier to use. Might new based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, more dramatic vision of what may be to forms of interface help? concedes that computer programmers come, look no further than Minority Re- and engineers, himself included, are of- port (2002), Steven Spielberg’s futuristic T HAS been called a revolution, and ten guilty of designing complicated sys- thriller starring Tom Cruise. Set in the year Irightly so. Over the past 25 years com- tems packed with too many features. 2054, it depicts people operating comput- puters have become a feature of everyday We’re compelled by complexity, Mr ers using hand gestures detected by sen- life in rich countries and, increasingly, in Ky n says. There’s a point where hu- sors. Gesture-based computing might poor ones too. Today’s machines are manity just can’t handle it. Tellingly, the sound odd do you really want to dismiss fast a typical desktop now has ten times eld of interface design even has an un- a document on your computer by airily the number-crunching power of the fast- wieldy name: it is known as human- waving it away? but computer mice est machine on earth in 1983 and wide- computer interaction , or HCI. were derided in 1983. spread, given that the world’s 3 billion or Part of the problem is that program- Today’s gesture-based systems take so mobile phones are, in e ect, pocket mers have traditionally had more power many forms. iO, a company based in Tre- computers. But although computers have than designers. Programmers put in place viso, Italy, sells the Sensitive Wall, a large become cheaper, more capable and more the myriad features they want; interface screen for banks and showrooms that commonplace, they have made much less designers then struggle to wrap them all senses movement within a metre or so. progress when it comes to ease of use. up in a product that is simple to use. The Passers-by can wave their hands to ip the Their potential remains tantalisingly out results, all too often, are clunky interfaces. pages of a virtual brochure through a of reach for people who nd their control But the balance of power may now be shop window, or view promotional im- systems, or user interfaces , too com- shifting to the designers. Ken Wood, dep- ages from di erent angles. The idea is to plex. And even people who have no di - uty director of Microsoft’s research lab- have the digital world melt into the physi- culty navigating menus, dialogue boxes oratory in Cambridge, England, says his cal world, says iO’s Daniele Modesto. and so on, might use computers more pro- company is putting greater emphasis on The multi-touch interface devised by ductively if their interfaces were better. interface design. Three years ago, he says, Je Han, a researcher at New York Univer- Consider the Nokia 6680 mobile none of his lab’s budget was earmarked sity’s Courant Institute, is more elaborate. phone, says Adam Green eld, an expert for pure HCI research. Today, a quarter of It is based on a large touch screen (pic- in computing culture at New York Univer- the lab’s budget goes on it. tured) that can sense more than one touch sity and the author of Everyware , a Making computers simpler to operate at a time. This makes possible two- book about the future of computing. He would help the people who use them and handed gestures such as selecting an area1 14 Computing The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007
2 of an image, rotating it or zooming in and who share documents. It works out which sumptions about their needs and out. He believes this sort of approach will parts of documents people pay the most preferences not least because those as- have far wider appeal than today’s win- attention to, and highlights them accord- sumptions may be wrong. But propo- dows and mouse-based systems, and he ingly. Other HCI researchers are using mi- nents of context-aware computing say it is has founded a start-up, called Perceptive crophones, webcams and other sensors merely the next logical step from existing Pixel, to commercialise the technology. to try to work out what people are doing. systems such as spam lters. The next gen- Another version of a multi-touch But making computers simpler to use eration of e-mail lters, say HCI research- screen, developed at Microsoft, shows will require more than novel input de- ers, will be gradation lters that delay how the technology could be integrated vices. Smarter software is needed, too. For noti cation or delivery of certain e-mails into a home, o ce or shop, in the form of example, much e ort is going into the de- to avoid bothering the recipient. a table. The Microsoft Surface, a horizon- velopment of context aware systems Henry Holtzman, a researcher at the tal touch-screen computer with neither that hide unnecessary clutter and present Massachusetts Institute of Technology, keyboard nor mouse, will go on sale in options that are most likely to be relevant, says vehicles provide the most promising November. Its gesture-based interface al- depending on what the user is doing. environment for context-aware inter- lows images and documents to be manip- faces. Since the position of the driver is ulated; the table-like computer also Giving you what you want xed, cars can be tted with sensing recognises other devices (such as digital The trick, says Patrick Brezillon of Univer- equipment that would be obtrusive in cameras or mobile phones) when they sity Paris VI, is to get computers to size up other contexts. Stopping mobile phones are placed on top of it, and can download the temperament of users and then give from ringing in heavy rain, or during a images from them automatically. them what they want. This can be done sharp turn, he suggests, might prevent ac- Touch screens make computing feasi- by analysing the frequency of keystrokes, cidents. But, he adds, if such decision- ble in new places, especially public ones, the number of typos, the length of work making by computers is to be accepted, by doing away with keyboards, which breaks, internet-search terms and back- people must be convinced to trust it. can get gummed up with grime or spilled ground noise, among other things. That could be di cult. Anind Dey, a re- drinks. iSuppli, a market-research com- All sorts of things can be done with searcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s pany based in El Segundo, California, esti- this information: playing soothing music HCI Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, mates that the wholesale touch-screen for agitated users, proposing a break if the is designing a vehicle-navigation system market will expand by 17% this year to number of errors goes up, or suppressing that tailors driving directions for individ- reach $2.8 billion. The incorporation of noti cation of incoming e-mails to avoid ual drivers. Cars tted with sensors and touch screens into portable devices is one breaking someone’s concentration. Al- cameras collect data on the driving styles driver of this growth. Apple’s iPhone, brecht Schmidt, an HCI expert at the Bonn of test participants, including their accel- launched in June, is a mobile phone with laboratory of the Fraunhofer Institute, eration and braking patterns, assertive- a gesture-sensitive multi-touch screen. one of Europe’s largest research organisa- ness in changing lanes, and so on. The Objects can be moved on the screen by tions, says a mobile phone could even navigation computer then picks a route dragging them with a nger, made bigger change its behaviour depending on its lo- that accommodates each driver’s or smaller by spreading or pinching them cation. One of his prototype systems strengths and weaknesses. The system with two ngers, and discarded with a shu es the queue of voice-mail messages works ne but when drivers are told ick o the screen’s edge. Touch screens to give priority to messages from friends what is happening, they get angry. This have particular appeal in portable de- when the phone is out of the o ce. suggests, says Mr Dey, that contextual vices because virtual buttons and other The problem with all of this is that peo- computing needs to be discreet: such sys- controls appear on screen only when re- ple may not want computers to make as- tems are, in e ect, judging people and try- quired. The lack of a physical keyboard ing to in uence their behaviour. Systems leaves more room for a bigger screen. that manipulate people, he says, may Another alternative to the mouse as a have to keep quiet about it to work. pointing device is to use a gaze-tracking Many futurists and computer experts camera, which works out where you are believe that the logical conclusion of all of looking and moves an on-screen pointer these new input devices, sensors and accordingly. A foot-pedal or keyboard smarter software to anticipate users’ switch then replaces the click of a mouse needs, will be for computing to blend into button. So far such systems appeal chie y the background. In this ubiquitous com- to disabled people who cannot use a con- puting model, computers will no longer ventional mouse. Antonio Tessitore of be things people use explicitly, any more Villa Literno, Italy, had to give up his job than they use electricity when turning after developing a degenerative muscular on a light or a radio. Mr Green eld says a disease. Last year he began a new full- digital dream world that provides one time job at a charitable association, using seamless experience of being immersed a gaze-tracking system that, he says, al- in information hinges on one big if: com- lows him to operate a computer with no puters and their interfaces must become limitations . Manu Kumar, a researcher at so good that, like electricity, they rarely re- Stanford University in California, is de- quire concentrated attention. The trouble veloping a gaze-tracking system called with computers in their current form is GUIDe aimed at a broader market: people They said mice were silly, too that they are still all too conspicuous. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Nuclear power 15
Nuclear experience, and should, their creators say, make new plants safer and easier to operate. They believe the simpler new re- dawn actors, with their longer lifespans and re- duced maintenance costs, will also improve the economics of the industry. All nuclear reactors rely on nuclear s- sion, a process that was discovered in the 1930s. When certain heavy atoms are struck by a neutron, they absorb it, be- come unstable and split apart. This re- sults in two lighter atoms, and two or three neutrons are ejected. The process re- leases large amounts of energy, much of it in the form of the kinetic energy of the fast-moving ssion products. This kinetic energy is converted to heat as the ssion products slow down. If the ejected neutrons go on to strike other unstable atoms nearby, those too Energy: Attitudes to nuclear power are shifting in response to can break apart, releasing further neu- trons in a process known as a chain reac- climate change and fears over the security of the supply of fossil tion. When enough of these neutrons fuels. The technology of nuclear power has been changing, too produce further ssions rather than es- caping, bouncing o or being absorbed by atoms that do not split apart the pro- VER the next few decades global on another of the same design in France. cess becomes self-sustaining. An uncon- Oelectricity consumption is expected Other European countries that had frozen trolled chain reaction within a large to double. At the same time, many power or decided to scrap their nuclear pro- amount of ssionable material can lead plants in rich countries, built back in the grammes are rethinking their plans. to an explosive release of energy, as in 1960s and 1970s, are nearing the end of There are good reasons for this enthu- nuclear weapons. But in nuclear reactors, their projected lifespans. Meanwhile, siasm. Nuclear reactors emit almost none which contain far less ssionable mate- concern is swelling both about global of the greenhouse gases responsible for rial, the chain reaction and the release of warming, and about the Western world’s global warming. They are fuelled by ura- energy are carefully controlled. increasing dependence on a shrinking nium, which is relatively abundant and is number of hostile or unstable countries available from many sources, including War and peace for imports of oil and gas. The solution to reassuringly stable places such as Canada In 1942 the physicist Enrico Fermi led a this conundrum, in the eyes of many gov- and Australia. group of scientists who built the rst nu- ernments, is nuclear power. At the moment 439 nuclear reactors in clear reactor as part of the Manhattan Around the world, 31 reactors are un- 31 countries supply 15% of the world’s Project America’s e ort to build the rst der construction and many more are in electricity. Even without a price on car- atomic bomb. Although the reactor was the planning stages. Some of the most bon emissions, says Fatih Birol, the chief simple in design, it included features that ambitious programmes are under way in economist of the International Energy are part of almost every nuclear power developing countries. Both China and In- Agency (IEA), the worldwide generating plant today. The reactor core consisted of dia are building several reactors and in- capacity of nuclear power plants will pellets of uranium fuel inside bricks tend to increase their nuclear-generating probably increase from about 370 giga- made of graphite, which served as a capacity several times over in the next 15 watts today to 520 gigawatts in 2030. But moderator , reducing the speed of the years. Some countries, such as Turkey if there were a price on carbon dioxide, neutrons in order to maximise their abil- and Vietnam, are considering starting nu- says Mr Birol, it could grow even faster. ity to cause further ssions. (Most reac- clear-power programmes, and others, in- But there are also good reasons for tors today use water as the moderator.) In cluding Argentina and South Africa, plan scepticism. Nuclear plants are expensive: addition, the set-up included control to expand their existing ones. each can cost several billion dollars to rods made of a material that absorbed The rich world is also re-examining build. Worse, in the past, ill-conceived de- neutrons. These rods could be inserted the case for nuclear. America is expecting signs, safety scares and the regulatory de- into the core to slow or shut down the a rush of applications to build new reac- lays they gave rise to made nuclear plants chain reaction if necessary. tors in the coming months the rst in al- even more costly than their hefty price- Although all of this was done with a most 30 years. Britain’s prime minister, tags suggest. Vendors of new nuclear view to building an e ective weapon, the Gordon Brown, recently a rmed his sup- plants, such as Areva, General Electric scientists involved always knew that nu- port for a new generation of nuclear (GE), Hitachi and Westinghouse, argue clear technologies also had promising power plants. Construction of a new one that things are di erent now. The latest peaceful uses. In 1953 America’s presi- in Finland, western Europe’s rst for 15 designs incorporate suggestions from dent, Dwight Eisenhower, gave his fam- years, began in 2005; work is just starting utilities and operators with decades of ous Atoms for Peace speech before the 1 16 Nuclear power The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 The latest generation of reactors includes important improvements over prior designs.
curred. In 1986 a reactor at Chernobyl in the Ukraine became unstable, and a power surge inside the core led to two ex- plosions that destroyed the reactor and blew its roof o . As a result, signi cant amounts of radioactive material escaped into the environment. About 30 emer- gency workers died of radiation exposure shortly after the accident. Thousands more people who lived in contaminated areas developed serious health pro- blems, some of them fatal. The cause of the accident was found to be a combina- tion of operator errors and inherent aws in the plant’s design. Industry insiders pointed out that reactors based on this awed design had not been deployed in Western countries. Even so, the accident further undermined public con dence in nuclear power. Although the nuclear industry faced decline or stagnation in many Western countries in the 1980s, it thrived in one of 2 United Nations General Assembly, in this sales ploy turned out to be a money- them: France. After the oil crisis of 1973, which he called for the controlled appli- loser for both rms in the end. France decided to pursue the goal of fos- cation of nuclear energy in a civilian con- The boom in reactor construction co- sil-fuel independence. With few energy text. In the mid-1950s the world’s rst incided with the beginnings of America’s resources of its own, pursuing nuclear civilian nuclear power stations appeared environmental movement and a sense of power seemed like the best strategy. All in America, Britain and Russia. growing unease about nuclear power. By the commercial nuclear plants operating America’s rst civilian nuclear power the early 1970s uncertainties over radio- in France today were based on technol- plant, of a type called a pressurised water active-waste disposal, the e ects of radia- ogy devised by Westinghouse, which li- reactor (PWR), was designed by Westing- tion and the potential consequences of a censed its PWR design to France in the house and adapted from the reactors nuclear accident prompted a backlash. 1960s. Today the country has 59 nuclear used in nuclear submarines. Inside a One frightening scenario was the China reactors supplying 78% of its electricity. PWR, water which is kept under high Syndrome : the idea that molten radioac- Nuclear has worked well in France in pressure to prevent it from boiling has a tive fuel undergoing a runaway reaction part because it is accepted by politicians double function. In a closed primary might burn its way through the bottom of and the public alike, so there are few de- loop, it serves as a coolant for the reactor the reactor’s pressure vessel and contain- lays due to protests or planning pro- core and as a moderator, to slow down ment structure, and then down into the blems. Elsewhere, these have lengthened the fast neutrons created during ssion. Earth. Of course the fuel would never ac- the construction period and enormously As the water in the primary loop circu- tually reach China, but were it to breach increased costs. Once up and running, lates, it becomes very hot. This heat en- the containment structure, the result however, nuclear plants have a distinct ergy is then transferred to a secondary could be a huge release of radioactivity. advantage over those run on coal or natu- loop of water. The resulting steam is used As electricity demand levelled o and ral gas: they need comparatively little fuel to spin turbines that generate electricity. interest rates shot up, applications to to operate. Although the price of uranium build nuclear reactors started to decline, jumped from about $70 per pound in Jan- Nuclear’s golden age at least in America. Then in 1979 a serious uary to about $130 in mid-July, operating In the 1950s the pursuit of atomic energy accident occurred at a plant at Three Mile costs of nuclear power plants have was viewed as a largely positive en- Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A changed very little. (Construction ac- deavour. In a speech in 1954 before a combination of mechanical failures and counts for as much as three-quarters of group of science writers, the head of operator errors caused a partial melting the cost of nuclear generation.) Moreover, America’s Atomic Energy Commission, of the reactor core. Fortunately the pres- the rise in the price has prompted an ex- Lewis Strauss, even declared that one day sure vessel housing the core held, and vir- ploration boom that will ultimately lead nuclear power would be too cheap to tually no dangerous radioactive gases to more mines and greater supply. Ura- meter . By the mid-1960s America’s two escaped from the plant, says J. Samuel nium is not thought to be particularly leading reactor vendors, General Electric Walker, the historian of the Nuclear Regu- scarce it has simply not been very pro t- (GE) and Westinghouse, were involved in latory Commission, the agency that regu- able to look for it recently. an intense competition. GE began to o er lates America’s nuclear power plants. The latest generation of reactors, turnkey contracts to utilities, in which it Although the accident nearly killed o which evolved from models constructed delivered an entire nuclear plant for a America’s nuclear-power industry, it did in the 1970s and 1980s, include important xed price. To keep up, Westinghouse fol- not harm any people. improvements over prior designs. Wes- lowed suit, causing a surge in orders. But But a few years later a true disaster oc- tinghouse’s new AP1000, for example, 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Nuclear power 17
2 has passive safety systems that can pre- they use a moderator to slow down the vent a meltdown during an emergency neutrons and promote ssion. Fast reac- without operator intervention. If the re- tors, in contrast, do not employ modera- actor loses pressure because of a loss of tors and use much faster neutrons to coolant, for example, pressurised tanks produce ssions. So they can consume deliver water to the core, since the pres- many of the long-lived radioactive ma- sure in the tanks is higher than that in the terials that thermal reactors cannot. core, explains Howard Bruschi, who has This approach could extract far more worked for Westinghouse since the 1960s energy from a given amount of nuclear and is now a consultant to the company. fuel while at the same time reducing the The new reactor’s simpli ed design also volume and toxicity of nuclear waste. means that fewer motors, pumps and Proponents of fast reactors reckon that pipes are needed, reducing not only the They don’t build them like they used to most of the remaining waste would need potential for mechanical errors, but also to be stored for only a few centuries, per- costs of maintenance, inspections and re- site. And the uranium fuel is encapsu- haps, rather than hundreds of thousands pairs. Westinghouse recently agreed to lated in rugged pebbles , the size of ten- of years, once the most radioactive ele- provide four new plants to China. nis balls, which are designed to ments had been separated out. According withstand a loss of coolant without dis- to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobby Soul of a new reactor integrating, making the reactor extremely group in Washington, DC, this could Meanwhile, Areva, a French nuclear com- safe. Andrew Kadak, a professor at the mean that America would need only one pany, is engineering ever more powerful Massachusetts Institute of Technology nuclear-waste repository. In the long plants. Its rst reactor, which began op- (MIT), who has been developing a term, a eet of fast reactors could use nu- erating in 1977, was rated at 900 mega- smaller, alternative pebble-bed design clear fuel so e ciently that for all practi- watts; its latest model, the evolutionary with his students, is convinced that cal purposes, the uranium would be power reactor (EPR), is a 1,600-megawatt these reactors cannot melt down. inexhaustible, says William Hannum, a design. The company has already begun Even though new designs for nuclear nuclear physicist who used to work at building two such plants in Europe: one plants may be safer, they still generate America’s Argonne National Laboratory. in Finland, which is now expected to start toxic waste. After about three years of But opponents of this strategy call it a operating in 2011, about two years late, use, the fuel is depleted of most ssile distraction that could hinder the renewal and another in France. Both the EPR and uranium but has accumulated long-lived of the nuclear power industry. For one the AP1000, along with GE’s latest de- radioactive materials that cannot be thing, many new fast reactors and fuel- sign, are among the plants under consid- burned in conventional reactors. At the reprocessing facilities would have to be eration by American utilities. moment most such waste is stored near built, adding billions of dollars to the A demonstration plant of a com- the plant until it can be moved to a per- enormous sums already required for new pletely di erent type, a pebble bed re- manent facility. But no country is yet op- nuclear plants. In addition, some of the actor, is scheduled to be built in South erating a nal disposal site for highly technologies in question have not been Africa starting in 2009. Based on technol- radioactive nuclear waste. America’s demonstrated on a commercial scale yet. ogy that originated in Germany, its de- Yucca Mountain repository, for example, And the GNEP reverses America’s ban on sign is unique in several ways. For one is not expected to be ready for use for civilian reprocessing, which critics say thing, its small size (165 megawatts) many years, if ever. In some countries nu- could encourage the proliferation of should make it comparatively fast and clear waste is reprocessed a procedure weapons-grade materials. cheap to build; depending on power in which plutonium is separated from the In the end, the deployment of new nu- needs, several units sharing a single con- rest of the spent fuel, which can then be clear reactors will depend on many fac- trol room could be constructed on one made into new fuel. Plutonium, of tors, including successful waste and course, can be used to make nuclear proliferation management, improved weapons. Because of concern over nu- economics, and perhaps most important, Best of the bunch clear proliferation, America has not en- convincing the public that nuclear reac- Greenhouse-gas emissions gaged in civilian reprocessing since 1977. tors can be operated safely. Despite these Grams of carbon equivalent per kWh* As part of a new multinational initia- obstacles, there is an undeniable mood of minimum maximum tive called the Global Nuclear Energy optimism in the industry. Whether that Partnership (GNEP), however, America’s will be enough to spark the deployment 010050 150200 250 300 350 Department of Energy is supporting a of the hundreds of reactors that will be Nuclear type of spent fuel reprocessing which needed to help mitigate the e ects of Wind does not separate the plutonium from global warming remains to be seen, cau- Hydro other highly radioactive materials in the tions Richard Lester, a professor of nu- Solar waste, thus making it more resistant to clear science and engineering at MIT. Coal (CCS†) proliferation than traditional reprocess- Were there to be another disaster like ing. This mixture of plutonium and other Chernobyl, or a successful terrorist attack Gas radioactive elements could then be on a nuclear plant, all bets would be o . Coal turned into fuel suitable for use in fast But for now most people in the industry *Includes indirect emissions from life cycle † reactors. Most reactors in operation today agree that nuclear power’s prospects look Source: IAEA Coal with carbon capture and storage are called thermal reactors, because brighter than they have in a long time. 7 18 Patents The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007
up), it can hamper innovation by turning a widely used invention or process into one person’s monopoly. The trouble is that examiners cannot always tell when a patent is unwarranted. To prove that an invention is not novel, the patent examiner must nd evidence that others have already done everything claimed in the patent, a quest known as a prior art search. Prior art is also the basis for determining whether some new step claimed in the invention is obvious and therefore not worthy of a patent. But prior art can be elusive. It might be buried in an obscure technical journal, in conference slides, or in a doctoral thesis tucked away in a university library. It could even be embodied in a machine taken o the mar- ket years earlier. Finding prior art is hard- est in elds where patenting is fairly new, such as software, biotechnology, nan- cial services and business methods. A patent improvement Examiners are usually well versed in the technology they review and are adept at searching their o ce’s collections of patents, along with other databases. But given the specialisation of modern sci- a patent application via the internet. The ence and technology, they cannot be ex- scheme was launched as a one-year pilot pected to keep abreast of all the technical Intellectual property: A new programme in America on June 15th. Sean literature. To complicate matters further, scheme will solicit comments Dennehey of Britain’s IPO, who sits on says Jon Dudas, the director of the USPTO, the project’s advisory board, says his patent applications have become more via the internet to improve the organisation will follow suit by the end of complex as well as more numerous: some vetting of patent applications the year. The project is being supported applications contain thousands of claims. by big technology rms including IBM, A biotech patent may be accompanied by ATENT examiners, who scrutinise Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. gigabytes of computer data. And a quarter Papplications for patents and determine An e cient patent system is essential of the applications handled by the USPTO whether they ought to be granted or not, for the promotion of innovation. Patents contain no references to prior art, adds Mr are used to poring over diagrams of com- give inventors a temporary monopoly on Dudas, while another quarter contain plicated contraptions. But now the patent a new idea in return for disclosing how it more than 25 references. This makes it system itself, just as complex in its own works, so that others can subsequently hard for examiners to decide which ones way, is under increasing scrutiny. build upon it. But if a patent is granted for deserve the closest scrutiny. The number of applications has something that is not novel (people are al- There have already been several at- soared in recent years, but patent o ces ready doing it), or is obvious (any Tom, tempts to overhaul the system. Court have been unable to keep up resulting in Dick, or Harry in the eld could think it cases and regulatory changes have al- huge backlogs and lengthy delays. Stan- tered it in various ways in recent years, dards have slipped and in America the but this has not done away with the per- number of lawsuits over contested pat- Building a backlog ception that the system is in crisis, nor si- ents has shot up (see chart). In an attempt US patent, ’000: lenced those calling for further reform. In to x these problems, the United States applications Innovation and its Discontents , a book lawsuits filed grants Patent and Trademark O ce (USPTO), published in 2004, Adam Ja e and Josh Britain’s Intellectual Property O ce (IPO) 4 400 Lerner argue that some reforms have even and the European Patent O ce are eval- made things worse. And Patent Failure , uating a radical change: opening the pro- 3 300 a forthcoming book by James Bessen and cess up to internet-based collaboration. Michael Meurer, argues that America’s The scheme, known as Peer to Pat- 2 200 system does inventors more harm than ent , was created by Beth Simone Noveck, good. Other critics have called for the a professor at New York Law School. It ap- 1 100 elimination of patents on software, busi- plies an unusual form of peer review to a ness processes and human genes. process which traditionally involves only 0 0 Several independent out ts already a patent applicant and an examiner. Any- 1990 92 94 96 98 200002 04 06 supplement the o cial patent-granting Source: US Patent and Trademark Office body who is interested may comment on institutions. Among them is Patent Lens,1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Patents 19
The information provided should improve patent examiners’ grasp of highly technical elds.
2 run by CAMBIA, a non-pro t research in- The pilot Peer to Patent scheme allows prior-art searches should gain, too. stitute, which tries to make it easier to examiners and volunteer participants to For all that, some observers are scepti- track down relevant patents in a particu- provide feedback to re ne the process. A cal about bits of the Peer to Patent process. lar eld. Similarly, PatentFizz is a website total of 18 measures will be used to assess They wonder whether people will really that makes it easy to nd out about par- the scheme and evaluate its e ectiveness, volunteer to provide examples of prior ticular patents, comment on them and including the number of items of prior art art, join discussions, and so on. Ms No- even add references to prior art. In both provided by the community that appear veck cites the widespread participation in cases the aim is to open the working of the in o ce actions; the number of claims other online communities such as Wiki- patent system up to greater scrutiny. changed by applicants as a result of que- pedia, a collaborative online encyclope- Peer to Patent builds on these ideas, es- ries raised by the community; and the dia as evidence of the public’s desire to pecially the notion that practitioners and number of volunteer participants signed contribute. But although everyone knows researchers within a particular eld col- up, as well as their level of participation. what an encyclopedia is, and the pages of lectively have all the relevant prior art at Mr Dudas says he considers Peer to Pat- Wikipedia can be edited with a few clicks, their ngertips already. All the patent of- ent to be a natural step in opening up not many people understand the patent ce needs to do, therefore, is to get that the patent system and ful lling its original process, or know how to read a patent. community to tell it what it already goal of encouraging the publication of Another concern is that the people knows. Peer to Patent does this using the new ideas. In Britain, Mr Dennehey re- who take part in the project will represent latest web-based collaboration tools, gards Peer to Patent as a more up-to-date vested interests in particular, big tech- such as voting and tagging, which can way for the public to submit observations nology rms which can assign sta to re- harness the collective knowledge of a during a patent examination, something view patents. There are also worries large number of users. already permitted by law. (In America, about the possibility of tacit collusion third parties are allowed to submit only among large patent-holders, who might The USPTO wants YOU prior art without comments under the attack individual inventors in order to The USPTO’s pilot scheme will scrutinise current system.) Patent lawyers are also keep them out of speci c markets. 250 patent applications in a handful of intrigued. Mark Costello, general patent Ms Noveck, however, is a believer in computer-related elds, with the ap- counsel at Xerox, an American docu- grassroots democracy. If Peer to Patent’s proval of the applicants. The rst exam- ment-management company, says the goal of cleaning up the patent system was ples have been submitted by IBM, Intel, idea has merit, but that he will be watch- not already audacious enough, she thinks Microsoft and other technology giants. ing closely to see whether it remains a the project could also serve as a demon- The text of each application is posted in fair and objective system after competi- stration that the public, helped by tech- full for public scrutiny, and members of tors enter the process . nology, can participate more fully in its the public can sign up to participate in the The scheme’s immediate impact is own governance. Unfortunately, Peer to review process. They can discuss each likely to be minimal. Patent applicants are Patent su ers from the same vulnerabili- application in an online forum, suggest free to ignore the online community’s dis- ties as other democratic institutions. If the examples of prior art, and vote for the cussions and respond only to the o ce ac- public engages with it earnestly, it could prior art they consider most relevant. tion, as they always have. But if Peer to produce marvellous results. But if people Messages that are considered o -topic Patent succeeds, we will have made the tire of it and cede control to special inter- can be agged, and there are plans to al- most signi cant improvement to the pat- ests that do not align with the public inter- low participants to rate each other, so that ent system in decades, and done a great est, Peer to Patent could devolve into just the most highly regarded participants’ rec- service to the public and the economy, another prop for the status quo. The pro- ommendations rise to the top of the pile. says Manny Schecter, a member of the ject’s outcome, at this early stage, remains Tagging, a common feature of many project’s steering committee and an intel- uncertain. But it is surely worth a try. 7 modern websites, is also used. Patents in lectual-property lawyer at IBM. new elds often sound like gobbledy- The hope is that Peer to Patent will re- gook, since each inventor makes up his duce both uncertainty for inventors and own terminology. But a user familiar unnecessary lawsuits because dodgy with the eld in question may realise that applications will be uncovered and re- the invention matches something already jected quickly. This ought to mean that in use under a di erent name. By adding patents issued will be stronger, leading to an appropriate tag, that user can attract fewer challenges by those required to li- the attention of experts with a compre- cense them. Indirectly, the scheme could hensive knowledge of the eld’s prior art. also help innovators to commercialise Eventually, the ten pieces of prior art their ideas, since stronger patents will that receive most votes in the Peer to Pat- make patent-holders’ work more attrac- ent community perusing each patent are tive to investors. sent to the patent examiner. As with con- The information provided by the Peer ventional patent applications, examiners to Patent community should also help will still choose which prior art is referred patent examiners to improve their under- to in their decision on a patent applica- standing of highly technical elds. Inven- tion, known as an o ce action . But the tors and patent lawyers who currently community’s explanations, discussion depend on the patent o ce’s collection of and examples will be taken into account. patents and prior art when conducting 20 Biomimetics The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007
Borrowing from nature
a narrow stretch of land on the coast of Clean technology: Architects believe that biologically inspired Las Palmas in Grand Canaria, the rm designs can help to reduce the environmental impact of buildings came up with the concept of a 3km (1.9 mile) promenade with a theatre and bo- RCHITECTS have long taken inspira- ture. It’s the same principle as the chim- tanic garden as its focus. But rather than Ation from nature. In ancient Egypt col- ney e ect, but a bit more controlled, says creating yet another drain on local re- umns were modelled on palm trees and Professor George Jeronimidis, director of sources the architects wanted the struc- lotus plants, and building designers have the Centre for Biomimetics at the Univer- ture to be cooled and irrigated by natural borrowed the shapes and proportions of sity of Reading. As hot air rises and ows means. We decided to put forward a natural forms ever since as they strived to out through vents at the top of the build- scheme that showed how the island achieve aesthetic perfection. ing, cooler air is drawn in at ground level. could move towards self-su ciency in Some architects now believe that such Dr Jeronimidis is now taking this con- water and energy, without relying on fos- biomimicry has more to o er than simply cept further by using adaptive materials sil fuels, says Mr Pawlyn. making buildings look good. They are that ex in response to the level of mois- This meant nding a way to turn sea- copying functional systems found in na- ture in the air an idea borrowed from the water into clean drinking water without ture to provide cooling, generate energy way pine-cones open and close. Using a expending too much energy. Fog-basking and even to desalinate water. And they in- cellulose-like bre composite, he has beetles, which are found in Namibia, sist that doing these things using biomi- created a vent that changes from one have an ingeniously simple way of doing metic designs is not just a gimmick, but curved shape to another, depending on this. They hide underground during the makes nancial sense. It’s often the case the relative levels of moisture inside and day so that when they come out at night, that green technology is considered to be outside a building. When warm, moist air their dark backs are relatively cool com- commercially unattractive, says Michael builds up inside the building, the vent pared with the ambient night air. As mois- Pawlyn, an architect at Grimshaw, the opens to allow it to escape. But when the ture-laden breezes roll in from the rm behind the Eden Project, a highly ac- air inside is dry, the vent stays shut and Atlantic, the water in the air condenses on claimed biome structure in England. That moist air from outdoors is kept out. In the beetles’ backs (just as a cold bottle of perception, he says, is wrong and he has principle it can be made to respond natu- beer left on a table causes water in the air the designs to prove it. rally, without any additional power, to condense on its surface). The beetles So far, the use of biomimetic features says Dr Jeronimidis. simply have to tilt their bodies to make in buildings has been driven as much by the water trickle into their mouths. A simi- aesthetics as by function, and has been Intelligent designs lar trick is also used by camels to prevent limited to relatively simple, passive sys- Architects have become more interested them losing moisture as they exhale. tems. The Arab World Institute in Paris, for in this sort of thing in recent years, he says, Moisture secreted through the nostrils example, has an array of mechanical, eye- as greater attention is paid to the energy evaporates as the camel breathes in, cool- like irises on its south-facing façade. These consumption and sustainability of build- ing the nostrils in the process. When the open and close to control the amount of ings. Biology o ers solutions to a range of camel breathes out, moisture within the light entering the building, thereby regu- problems. Nature has had the bene t of air then condenses on the nostrils. lating the internal temperature. a pretty long R&D period, says Mr Paw- Inspired by this, Mr Pawlyn and his Similarly there are now several build- lyn, who hopes to take the exploitation of colleagues have designed their theatre ings that have ventilation systems based natural designs to a completely new level. around the same principles. A series of on those found in termite mounds. The His rm has borrowed a trick used by fog- tall, vertical evaporation gills are posi- Eastgate Centre, a shopping centre and of- basking beetles and in the nostrils of cam- tioned so that they face towards the sea ce block in Harare, Zimbabwe, has a me- els for a novel desalination plant. and the incoming coastal breeze. Warm chanical cooling system made up of vents When Grimshaw was given the brief seawater, taken from close to the surface, and ues that help hot air out of the struc- to regenerate the Santa Catalina Isthmus, is pumped so that it trickles down these1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Biomimetics 21
Ideas worth stealing: the Arab World Institute (on previous page); a rendering of the proposed Las Palmas Water Theatre (below); the Eden Project (right)
2 units. As the breeze blows through the costs and resource use. Natural ecosys- spired systems used in architecture are gills some of the seawater evaporates, tems are restorative, notes Mr Pawlyn. simply morphological. This seems to me leaving salt behind. The clean, moist air They operate in a closed loop made up of to lose the point of biomimetics, he says. then continues its journey until it encoun- quite complex webs of di erent organ- There is huge potential, but architects are ters a series of vertical condensing pipes. isms, he says. Man-made structures only just beginning to learn how to apply These are kept cold by pumping deep-sea tend not to do that. Instead, man-made biomimetics in a more functional way, water, from 1,000 metres below the sur- systems tend to be linear, consuming raw says Michael Weinstock, director of the face, through them. As the moist, warm materials at one end and producing waste Architectural Association School of Ar- air hits the pipes the water condenses and at the other. The result is a gradual deple- chitecture in London. Not only large pro- trickles down to be collected. tion of natural resources. jects but smaller homes and o ces can You get a very powerful desalination In an e ort to reproduce a closed-loop bene t from the same principles, he in- e ect, says Mr Pawlyn. This system is system, Grimshaw has developed a de- sists. One of our ambitions is to ensure able to supply enough water for the sign for an indoor tropical rainforest. This that every building ought to be able to 70,000-square-metre complex. A tradi- botanical garden is designed to sit on an generate its own energy, he says. tional ash-distillation desalination plant existing land ll site and be a completely consumes between ve and 12 kilowatt carbon-neutral structure. For most of the Bringing biomimetics home hours (kWh) of energy per cubic metre of year, heat to maintain the hothouse will This need not require elaborate new water. The biomimetic approach, how- be provided by solar heating through a structures like Grimshaw’s theatre or in- ever, requires just 1.6 kWh per cubic me- glazed roof. During the colder months ad- door rainforest. Biomimetics can be ap- tre. And since the water pumps will be ditional heating will come from land ll plied in simpler ways, too. Smart paints mostly powered by a wind turbine, dri- biomass. The building is designed to be which use a self-cleaning principle bor- ven by the same prevailing winds that anked by a number of large vertical ves- rowed from lotus leaves are now being provide the plant’s air ow, the overall en- sels into which biodegradable waste, tested. Once applied, the surface of the ergy consumption of the site is reduced originally intended for the land ll, will be paint takes the form of densely packed even further. In the process, the same sys- tossed. As the waste breaks down in these ridges or bumps, just like the microscopic tem can also help to cool neighbouring large composting units, it reaches tem- bumps found on lotus leaves. A property buildings, says Mr Pawlyn. peratures of up to 75°C, and this heats the of such tiny bumps is that they prevent indoor garden. drops of water from spreading out: the Build me a rainforest This building will not only be carbon- drops simply roll o the surface instead, Although it is unclear whether this inno- neutral but will also generate income, by taking dirt with them. (Self-cleaning glass vative project will go ahead, the princi- providing the service of waste disposal. relies on a similar principle.) And organic ples have already been tested by Charlie Some countries impose land ll taxes of as solar cells, which mimic photosynthetic Paton, an engineer who collaborated in much as £20 ($40) per tonne of waste. The processes to capture light and convert it the scheme. His organisation, Seawater designers reckon that their proposed into electricity, are arguably a form of bio- Greenhouse, has built pilot greenhouses building could generate as much as £7m mimetic technology, too. that show this idea really works. The ($14m) a year by acting as a substitute for a Part of the challenge, I believe, is to re- catch is that it will only work in certain cli- land ll site. And in the true spirit of restor- connect people with resources, says Mr mates, says Mr Pawlyn. If you have a ative closed-loops, the resulting compost Pawlyn. He makes a strong case that bor- very dry and hot environment, the water can be sold for agricultural use. rowing architectural ideas from nature readily evaporates. Buildings should be able to pay for can help to reduce the environmental im- Nonetheless, Mr Pawlyn and his col- themselves, says Professor Julian Vin- pact of buildings. In the process, it may leagues believe that biomimetic princi- cent, director of the Centre for Biomimet- also encourage people to view natural ples can be taken even further, to generate ics at the University of Bath in England. At systems with greater respect, in more new income as well as reduce running the moment, he says, most biologically in- ways than one. 7 22 Brain scan The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Jolly green heretic
solving greens. Three things that most greens vehemently oppose genetic engi- Stewart Brand, a pioneer of both neering, urbanisation and nuclear environmentalism and online power should, he believes, be embraced communities, has not lost his on environmental grounds. willingness to rock the boat Start with genetic engineering. Many greens object to the idea, fearing a deluge of Frankenfoods and the contamina- N SOME respects Stewart Brand’s green tion of pristine wild species. But Mr Icredentials are impeccable. His mentor Brand points to the work of Norman Bor- was Paul Ehrlich, an environmental laug, the Nobel prize-winner who proved thinker at Stanford university and author the Club of Rome (and Mr Brand) wrong of The Population Bomb , published in with his green revolution in agricul- 1968. That book, and the related Club of tural productivity. Mr Brand now sees Rome movement of the 1970s, famously great promise in using genetic science to predicted that overpopulation would feed the world, and perhaps prevent fu- soon result in the world running out of ture wars, by making crops that are more food, oil and other resources. Though it disease-resistant, drought-tolerant and proved spectacularly wrong, its warning produce higher yields. served as a clarion call for the modern Similarly, he argues that urbanisation environmental movement. can be good for the environment. Man- Mr Brand made his name with a kind has now become a primarily urban publication of his own, which also ap- species for the rst time in its history, and peared in 1968, called The Whole Earth every serious forecast predicts a surge in Catalogue . It was a path-breaking man- the size and number of megacities. Most ual crammed with examples of small- environmentalists are dismayed at this scale technologies to enable individuals trend, and worry about the implications to reduce their environmental impact, of urbanisation for air pollution, resource and is best known for its cover, which fea- consumption and so on. But Mr Brand tured a picture of the Earth from space bluntly rebuts them, insisting that mega- (which Mr Brand helped to persuade cities will increase the Earth’s carrying America’s space agency, NASA, to re- capacity for humans . lease). The book became a bestseller in That may seem an odd argument from anti-corporate and environmental circles. a man who wrote a guide to natural liv- In 1985 Mr Brand co-founded the Well, a ing and going o grid , but it re ects an- pioneering online community that was a other aspect of the maturation of his precursor of today’s social-networking views. Cities are good for the planet, he websites such as MySpace and Facebook. argues, because they are engines of Mr Brand still has a following among wealth creation, and greater prosperity the Birkenstock set, and even lives on a makes promoting greenery easier. When tugboat near San Francisco. But meet him poor people move from bleak subsis- in person and it becomes clear he is not tence farming to the economic opportu- exactly your typical crunchy-granola nities found in urban slums, he insists, green. Sitting down to lunch at a posh they no longer need to chop down en- beach resort on Coronado Island, o San dangered trees or eat bush meat. Nature Diego, he does not order a vegan special grows back, says Mr Brand. He also be- but a hearty Angus burger with bacon, lieves cities unleash innovation point- cheese and French fries, and a side-order ing to the use of mobile phones in slums of lobster bisque. I’m genetically a con- to send money and reckons the next big trarian, he says with a broad smile. trend will come not from Japanese schoolgirls, but slum-dwellers in Africa . Three unpopular ideas Mr Brand’s critics accuse him of ro- That is pretty evident from his recent manticising the potential of megacities. proclamations. Rather than basking in But his support for the revival of nuclear past glories or sailing o to a quiet retire- power is even more controversial. For ment, the 68-year-old counter-cultural years, he held the orthodox environmen- icon remains determined to rock the boat. tal view that nukes were evil. He now But this time his target is the environmen- confesses that this was merely knee-jerk tal movement itself. He has come up with opposition , and not a carefully consid- a series of what he calls environmental ered opinion. His growing concern about heresies , which he hopes will in uence global warming, which he calls the sin- a new generation of pragmatic, problem- gle most important environmental threat 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly September 8th 2007 Brain scan 23 Environmental change changes everything, including environmentalism itself.
2 facing mankind , explains his U-turn in more glaring by the fact that Mr Brand they save the planet. Unlike the roman- favour of this low-carbon but hugely has made a tidy packet from long-term tics and the airy scientists, he says, engi- controversial source of electricity. planning through his Global Business neers focus on solving problems. The turning point came, he says, when Network (GBN), a respected scenario- He points approvingly to Elon Musk, a he visited Yucca Mountain, a remote site planning and futurology out t. Some South African technology entrepreneur, in the Nevada desert where American of- greens grouse that GBN’s work with big and his green engineers at Tesla Motors, cials plan to bury the country’s nuclear oil companies and the American military an electric-car rm. Mr Brand also tips his waste. He was visiting the site as part of is unethical, but Mr Brand has little pa- hat toward Mr Lovins, whom he praises his Long Now project, which aims to tience for such narrow-mindedness. as an early example of a problem-solving build a clock that will last 10,000 years Saying all companies are evil is like say- engineer (he is actually a physicist by or more in the hope of encouraging soci- ing all greens are romantic twits, he says. training) who embraced the green cause. ety to think about very long-term issues. You need to discriminate! To bolster his But this new generation of green engi- While studying the deep hole in the point, he points to what he calls the quiet neers will only be able to transform the ground at Yucca for tips on building his but in uential role that Royal Dutch/ environmental movement, Mr Brand clock the site, like the clock, is being de- Shell played in South Africa’s peaceful reckons, if the old guard allows it to. Let’s signed to survive unscathed for thou- end to apartheid. He also defends his mil- see if there is an allergic reaction to this sands of years he had an epiphany. itary clients with vigour, noting that they infusion or real progress, he quips. Although greens and other anti-nu- are often more serious and longer- Mr Brand’s own pragmatism can be clear activists oppose the Yucca Moun- term thinkers than business clients. seen in his willingness to own up to his tain project, Mr Brand says he realised So how does he respond to the appar- mistakes and learn from them. When his that we are asking the wrong question ent con ict between the long-termism of alarmism over the Y2K computer bug about nuclear power. Rather than asking the Long Now project and the much shor- turned out to be wrong, for example, it how spent nuclear fuel can be kept safe ter-term view of nuclear waste he uses to made him realise that his own personal for 10,000 to 100,000 years, he says, we justify new nuclear power? He neatly computer was a poor proxy for the world should worry about keeping it safe for sidesteps the contradiction. Coal and at large, which is modular, shockproof only 100 years. Because nuclear waste carbon-loading the atmosphere are much and robust . And the key mistake made still contains an enormous amount of en- bigger problems for the future than nu- by the Club of Rome’s forecasts (which he ergy, future generations may be able to clear waste, which is a relatively minor calls self-defeating prophesies ), he now harness it as an energy source through to- risk, he says. acknowledges, was to see the world as morrow’s better technologies. static, and to place too little faith in the His embrace of nuclear power was an- Shades of green possibilities of technological progress. other surprising about-face, and plenty This willingness to get his hands dirty His critics might argue that Mr Brand of energy experts, including some of his and balance one risk against another, now places too much faith in clever engi- close friends, disagree with him. One of rather than clinging to ideologically pure neers and fancy technology to solve the them is Amory Lovins, the head of the positions when confronted with di cult world’s environmental problems. But he Rocky Mountain Institute, a natural-re- choices, sets Mr Brand apart from the can respond that his pragmatic approach sources consultancy. Mr Brand recalls at- many ideologues in the environmental goes back a long way, and has deep roots. tending Mr Lovins’s wedding many years movement. Indeed, he proudly calls him- As he put it in the introduction to The ago in an American Indian sweat tent, self an eco-pragmatist . He argues that Whole Earth Catalogue , written four de- where Mr Lovins and his (now ex) wife two ideological camps have dominated cades ago: We are as gods and might as Hunter exchanged hunting knives in a the green movement for too long: the sci- well get good at it. 7 traditional ceremony. Mr Lovins argues entists and the romantics . The former that the economics of big nuclear power group has been stuck in the ivory tower, O er to readers plants make no sense, and that the future while the latter has held on to noble but Reprints of this special report are available at a belongs to energy e ciency and small- impractical views that, he reckons, have price of £3.50 plus postage and packing. scale, distributed micropower plants often been contrary to rational scienti c A minimum order of ve copies is required. based on renewable energy sources. thinking. The grip that these two rival That friendly debate points to some camps have had on environmentalism, Corporate o er awkward aspects of Mr Brand’s self- he says, explains its malaise. Customisation options on corporate orders of 500 or more are available. Please contact us to styled environmental heresy. For one But growing public awareness of cli- discuss your requirements. thing, the decentralised approach to mate change and other green concerns power generation advocated by Mr promises to end this. Environmental Send all orders to: Lovins seems more in tune with the do-it- change changes everything, he insists, The Rights and Syndication department yourself ethos of The Whole Earth Cata- and among the biggest change of all will 26 Red Lion Square logue than the big nuclear power plants be in environmentalism itself. As envi- London WC1R 4HQ now championed by Mr Brand. And Mr ronmental issues have moved up the Tel +44 (0)20 7576 8000 Brand’s argument for taking a more short- technological agenda, says Mr Brand, Fax +44 (0)20 7576 8492 term view of nuclear safety seems to y there has been a large in ux of engineers e-mail: [email protected] directly in the face of his Long Now pro- into the environmental movement. ject, which is intended to promote a more These techies had previously been long-term perspective. deeply sceptical of greenery, but he now The apparent contradiction is made thinks they may save the cause even as