Computer power Why ships are Surveillance in from volunteers going electric the supermarket TechnologyQuarterly December 8th 2007 Even better than the real thing The charm of “augmented reality”
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Contents
Sometimes the best place to display computer graphics is not on a screen, but projected onto, or blended into, a view of the real world. Such augmented reality is still in its infancy, but is proving to have a range of uses in medicine, entertainment, warfare and industry: page 10 Getting serious Monitor 1 Real problems in virtual worlds, storing biological samples, testing drugs with tiny doses, advances in cataract surgery, a better way to trawl for sh, Computing: Virtual worlds are being put to serious real-world roads as solar collectors, uses and are starting to encounter some real-world problems mobile social networks, nano- scale stencils, electronic paper T IS a typical example of the colonisa- tual environments for use in training, in colour, hafnium-infused Ition of a new frontier. A few intrepid ex- management and collaboration. Super - chips, evolutionary design, and plorers stake out some new, unexplored cially, such uses look a lot like playing a who won our Innovation Awards territory. Before long the rst settlers video game. The thing that distinguishes move in and start to look for ways to them from games is the outcome, says Augmented reality make a quick buck. Their success attracts Mr Wortley. Rather than catering to vir- 10 Reality, only better more settlers, and an unruly bonanza en- tual thrill-seekers, the aim is to nd new Blending virtual objects with the sues; nally the policemen, lawyers and ways for people to learn or work together. real world has many exciting uses tax collectors show up. But the territory Blitz Games, for example, the rm be- in question is not a new continent: it is hind Karaoke Revolution and other Volunteer computing the realm of cyberspace, where two games, has applied its technology in a 12 Spreading the load developments suggest that virtual worlds rather more serious eld: the develop- How sharing out computational are coming of age. The rst is the emer- ment of a medical-triage simulator. The tasks boosts research gence of commercial uses for virtual idea is to use it to train paramedics, doc- environments; the second is the advent tors and re ghters in prioritising care Case history of litigation and regulation. immediately after a disaster. We are 15 Unmanned military planes Many of the serious uses of virtual simulating the scene of an explosion on a From the earliest drones to worlds were on show at a conference high street, says Mary Matthews of today’s Predator, and beyond held in September at Coventry Univer- Blitz’s TruSim division. Players observe sity in England. Aptly, people could also the virtual patients and gauge their res- Electric ships take part in the conference by visiting an piration, pallor, bleeding and level of dis- 18 Making waves online re-creation of the university’s Seri- tress; then they use this information to Why electric propulsion will rule ous Games Institute, where they could determine which of them is in greatest the waves and maybe the skies chat with other participants and watch need, all against the clock. Each player’s presentations. David Wortley, the insti- performance is scored according to an in- Retail surveillance tute’s director, says half those attending dustry-recognised training protocol. Real- 20 Watching while you shop did so this way. The focus of the confer- life exercises could achieve the same ob- Supermarkets are keeping tabs ence was the application of computer- jective, but the simulated environment on customers to boost sales game technologies and virtual environ- cuts costs and improves access. ments to real-world business problems. The same technology can also be used Brain scan With the popularity of virtual worlds to simulate the more mundane environ- 22 Cyberlawyer 2.0 such as Second Life and games such as ment of an o ce. PIXELearning, a British A pro le of Lawrence Lessig, a World of Warcraft and Sims Online , company based in Coventry, has de- legal guru who is changing tack companies, academics, health-care pro- veloped a simulator for a big interna- viders and the military are evaluating vir- tional accounting rm in order to train 1 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007
2 interns who are fresh out of university. are trying to play the game as it was tronova is aghast. Monopoly is not a The role-playing simulator lets them de- created to be played, says a spokesman very fun game if I have to pay a tax every velop their skills by interacting, for exam- for NCsoft, the maker of Lineage II . time I buy Boardwalk, he says. South Ko- ple, with a di cult client who is being In practice, however, preventing trade rea actually imposed such a tax in July. aggressive on pricing. This is invaluable, in virtual items is di cult, and several One way to deal with unwanted activ- says Kevin Corti, PIXELearning’s boss, dedicated trading platforms have ity, in virtual worlds as in the real one, is because it allows them to make mistakes emerged to enable players to buy and sell to decriminalise and regulate it, rather before being unleashed on a client. Simi- in-game items. One of the biggest, IGE, than trying to outlaw it altogether. That is larly, a big American bank is using based in Hong Kong, is now being sued the approach taken by Sony Online PIXELearning’s simulator for diversity by a World of Warcraft player who Entertainment (SOE), the company that and inclusion training. claims it has spoiled his online fun. Mr runs EverQuest II , a fantasy world of Cisco, an American network-equip- Kane says the value of virtual items dragons and busty blondes. It found that ment giant, is using virtual worlds to im- traded hit $1 billion in 2006. Dan Kelly, some 30-50% of customer-service calls prove internal collaboration, says the boss of Sparter, a trading platform concerned scams relating to real-world Christian Renaud, the company’s chief based in Menlo Park, California, says that trade in virtual items. So it divided the architect of networked virtual environ- gure will double this year. game world in two and made trading le- ments . Such environments are used to With such large sums at stake, it is not gal in one part but not the other; players host meetings and to create virtual work- surprising that other unpleasant aspects can choose which to play in. As a result, spaces for employees who may be part of of real life are starting to appear in virtual says Greg Short of SOE, the share of calls the same team but spread out over half a worlds too. In May two players were relating to scams is now less than 10%. dozen countries. The hope is that the use banned from Second Life for depicting Despite these problems, things are not of virtual worlds, rather than more struc- sexual activity between an adult and a really so bad, argues Dan Hunter of New tured forms of communication such as child. Eros, a company that sells sex-re- York Law School, who is writing a book e-mail or conference calls, will make lated add-ons in Second Life, led a law- about the social signi cance of virtual serendipitous meetings more likely and suit in July against an inhabitant of the worlds. If you look at the numbers, there interpersonal networking easier. Holding virtual world for selling unauthorised are so few events of fraud and proble- business meetings in a simulated envi- copies of its SexGen bed, which facili- matic activity, he says. Robin Harper of ronment is not quite as glamorous as the tates sex between in-game characters. Linden Lab, the rm behind Second Life, depictions of virtual reality found in sci- When you have a community that is an agrees. Social networks, online auctions, ence ction. But it makes a change from extension of Newark, eventually you will classi eds and even the internet itself the usual drab meeting rooms. have the ills of Newark going on, says have all encountered issues of appropri- Edward Castronova, a virtual-worlds ex- ate content, taxation and the use of intel- Here comes trouble pert at Indiana University. Some people lectual property, he says. If anything, It is not just o ce workers who are taking think the very nature of virtual worlds we are proud that against this backdrop, their rst steps into virtual worlds. So too can inspire bad behaviour. Such environ- there are relatively few disputes. are lawyers, as disputes in such environ- ments provide anonymity along with a As with any novel technology, virtual ments spill over into real-world lawsuits. lack of social recourse, notes Gus Tai, a worlds bring new opportunities and new Such disputes often concern the trade in venture capitalist at Trinity Ventures in problems. The embrace of virtual worlds virtual goods and services, which are California’s Silicon Valley. by companies for mundane uses on the bought and sold for real money. In some Bad behaviour is not the only pro- one hand, and by scam artists to get up to countries lawsuits over virtual goods are blem. The growing value of commerce in no good on the other, points not to the already common. Unggi Yoon, a judge in virtual worlds has provoked interest from shortcomings of such environments but the Suwon District Court in South Korea, the taxman, too. Governments in Amer- to their increasing maturity and poten- estimates that Korean courts have heard ica, Britain and Australia have all said tial. I don’t think this is the end to fun nearly 300 cases of fraud and more than they are considering a new tax on real- and games, says Mr Kane. I think it’s 60 relating to hacking in virtual game- world pro ts from virtual trade. Mr Cas- only the beginning. 7 worlds. Similar ghts have broken out in American courts, too. So much for escap- ism. I have heard from other players that the element of fun in the game has been diminished by thinking of all these legal issues, says Sean Kane, a virtual-worlds specialist at Drakeford & Kane, a law rm in New York. Real-world trade in virtual items is al- lowed in virtual worlds that are intended to simulate reality, such as Second Life and Entropia Universe. And it has been going on for years among players of massively multiplayer online role-play- ing games such as World of Warcraft , EVE Online and Lineage II , even though such trading is banned in many game worlds, since it upsets the competi- tive balance if some players buy weap- ons or armour rather than earning them in the game. We don’t allow real-money trades in our games because we think it creates an unfair advantage to those who Just like the real world in some respects but not others The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Monitor 3
No fridge Accelerated required progress
Medicine: A technology that mimics Medicine: Microdosing borrows nature should allow sensitive from archaeology to provide a novel biological samples to be stored at way to test the e ectiveness of new room temperature drugs without hurting anybody VEN miracles have their price. When ULTIDISCIPLINARY science is all EDNA ngerprinting was introduced in Mthe rage these days. Even so, the 1984, it was an extraordinary advance in overlap between archaeology and phar- forensic science. It was also an irresistible macology is not, at rst sight, obvious. temptation to the public authorities to But there is a connection. An analytical start building databases of their criminal technique developed for the former, used (and often not-so-criminal) citizens’ ge- to work out how old things are, is now netic pro les. Regardless of the rights and being used in the latter, to see if promis- wrongs of those decisions, these data- ing drugs are likely to fail before expen- bases have created a need for the mass Just add water sive clinical trials are undertaken. storage of biological samples. At the moment, a third of drug candi- Keeping samples in refrigerators the sis, you just add water, à la Sea Monkey. dates do not pass such trials. This may be usual way of preserving them is precari- The market for this sort of thing is po- because they fail to reach the part of the ous. Power supplies can be interrupted. tentially huge. In contrast with the im- body where they are intended to work Thermostats may be mis-set. Things can pression given by CSI , a popular crime many molecules, for example, cannot go missing because they have been put at series, DNA analysis is not something cross from the bloodstream into the the back of the fridge and forgotten that takes a glamorous technician a few brain. Or it may be that the body breaks about, rather than having been stored minutes in a moodily lit room. America’s down the active ingredients before the with other, less perishable evidence. And Federal Bureau of Investigation alone has drug has time to act. Identifying such pro- even if all of these problems are avoided, a backlog of more than 200,000 unpro- blems early in the testing process would preservation is not perfect. The average cessed DNA samples from convicted be a boon. Trials on animals can help, but sample lasts for about a decade, which is criminals (about 85% of the samples it how other species react is not always a not really long enough if the sample it- has collected during the past six years). good indication of how people will. self, rather than just a computer record of This number has almost doubled in the What is needed is a way of testing poten- its details, is needed for future reference. past year, yet it may grow even faster in tial drugs on people, but in a way that It would be far better if there was a the future since what was once a proce- cannot possibly cause any harm. That is way of keeping such samples at room dure required only for sex o enders has where the archaeologists come in. temperature. And now there is. Bioma- now become obligatory for a range of fel- For decades, archaeologists have used trica, a rm based in San Diego, Califor- ons from murderers to drug-addicts. a technique called carbon dating to work nia, has taken a leaf out of the book of the Moreover, starting next year, both the out how old their nds are. Some of the humble brine shrimp (pictured) in order federal authorities and a number of carbon dioxide absorbed by plants dur- to dry samples, rather than freeze them. states will cast an even wider net by col- ing photosynthesis is radioactive. That is Readers of a biological bent may recall lecting DNA from everyone they arrest because it contains carbon atoms which buying Sea Monkeys in their youth. (as now happens in Britain). That will are heavier than run-of-the-mill carbon, These creatures (or, rather, their eggs, swell the haul of samples by at least half and are unstable. The radioactive carbon which are sold dried in packets) magi- a million specimens a year. atoms weigh 14 atomic units, whereas cally came to life when put in water. The Nor is the market restricted to forensic run-of-the-mill ones weigh 12 units. Food eggs are able to survive desiccation (to a science. Cambridge Biostability, a British grains, scraps of cloth, bits of wood and water content of less than 1%) because rm, has developed a sugar-based stabili- so on can thus be dated by nding out their cellular structure is stabilised by sation technique to store vaccines at how much radioactive carbon is left in sugar molecules that act like a glass cas- room temperature. GenVault, a rm them: the less there is, the older they are. ing. Biomatrica is applying this principle based in Carlsbad, California, which uses To measure this, archaeologists use a to storing DNA and other biosamples. In a type of high-tech blotting paper to dry device called an accelerator mass-spec- place of the sugar molecules it uses a spe- out sample materials, has signed a deal trometer. This machine shatters tiny cial polymer that dissolves in water, with the government of Quebec to build amounts of a sample into its component wraps itself around the DNA of the sam- a biobank of samples for medical re- atoms, ionises those atoms in order to ple, and then holds on to and protects search. And Biomatrica’s approach is give them an electric charge, and then that DNA as the sample is dried out. being used by GlaxoSmithKline, a uses that charge to attract the atoms along According to Judy Muller-Cohn, Bio- pharmaceutical giant, to transport sam- a tube. As they travel, they are de ected matrica’s boss, the rm has simulated ples between its laboratories in America by a magnetic eld. Light ones are more long-term storage equivalent to 13 years and Britain. Even NASA, America’s space easily de ected than heavy ones, so the at room temperature, by applying higher agency, is in on the game. It reportedly two forms of carbon get separated, and temperatures than samples would nor- wipes down its spacecraft when they re- when each atom reaches a detector at its mally endure. Such storage costs a third turn in case they are carrying traces of expected arrival spot, it can be counted. as much as freezing the samples would. alien genetic material. Any Martian mur- The technique is so sensitive that it can And when a sample is needed for analy- derers must be quaking in their boots. 7 detect a single radioactive carbon atom 1 4 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007
2 hiding among a quadrillion (one million sist there. If they do get absorbed and & Lomb, a company based in Rochester, billion) ordinary ones. then persist, the drug is probably worth New York is that all the pieces of kit are A few years ago researchers at the developing further. If not, then it can be pulled together into a single snazzy piece Lawrence Livermore National Labora- abandoned before any more expensive of equipment. The system can extract tory, in California, realised that accelera- tests are conducted. And by using people lenses, keep the eyeball in ated, and in- tor mass spectrometers tuned to detect rather than experimental animals for the ject lenses in several di erent ways. The radioactive carbon might be adapted to tests, the researchers can be con dent Stellaris has options to use an older or a see how drugs survived in the body. This that the results are applicable to humans. newer surgical technique, depending on would involve slipping a few radioactive Regulatory authorities in America, Eu- the surgeon’s preference. carbon atoms into molecules of the drugs rope and Japan have welcomed the idea The newer form of surgery arranges in question. And it has now been done. of microdosing, as the technique is the instruments into two tools which en- Volunteers are given tiny traces of a radio- known, and are developing guidelines ter the eye through identical tiny slits. actively labelled drug too small to harm for its use. Meanwhile, a number of rms One tool provides the ultrasound waves them, and typically just one-hundredth have already been established to o er the that are used to break down the cataract, of the estimated full dose in a drink. technique to drugmakers. One of them, and also contains a vacuum to hoover Blood samples are taken every few hours Xceleron, which was formed by scientists out the pieces. The other tool provides for two or three days, and urine and fae- from the University of York, in England, uid to maintain the pressure while the ces are also collected. has already tested 40 molecules and has lens is being extracted. That prevents the By examining these samples for the recently signed contracts with several eyeball collapsing. presence of radiocarbon, the developer large drug companies. Given the di cul- In short, a useful innovation. But lens of a particular drug can see whether the ties and delays involved in developing replacement is not yet perfected, largely active ingredients are absorbed into the new drugs, microdosing could o er the because replacement lenses themselves body and, if they are, how long they per- industry a shot in the arm. 7 still have room for improvement. Stan- dard replacement lenses have no ability to focus, so the wearer is often stuck with excellent distance vision but must use glasses for reading. That can be ad- The eyes have it dressed with multifocal lenses, which have concentric rings of material that of- fer alternate bands of near and distant vi- sion. But these can cause problems of their own with the patient’s night vision Medical technology: The techniques used to replace worn-out eye lenses and sensitivity to contrast. are getting better, making the process simpler than ever What excites ophthalmolo- gists most, and what every lens- AUL URSELL, an ophthalmic surgeon need to be stitched. The making company wants to Pwho works at St Helier hospital, just whole process is thus less achieve, is an accommo- outside London, is one of the rst people traumatic, and patients are dating lens that can change in Britain to use a new piece of equip- often able to return to work its focal length in the same ment called the Stellaris (pictured). This is the day after an operation. way that a natural lens does. an all-in-one lens removal and replace- Two technologies in par- A few such lenses are al- ment kit, looking rather like a robot, that ticular have helped to re- ready on the market. The is designed to treat people whose natural duce the size of the Crystalens from Eyeonics of lenses are going cloudy, thus making incisions needed. The rst, Aliso Viejo, California, is them blind. It is the latest development in phakoemulsi cation, uses one example. The Tetra ex the technology of replacing damaged eye a tiny ultrasound probe to re- by Lenstec of St Petersburg, lenses with arti cial substitutes. These move the lens. An ageing Florida, is another. These pro- improvements are simplifying and lens goes yellow, cloudy and ducts use the existing eye speeding up the surgery involved. hard. Mr Ursell likens its tex- muscles to change the shape The ability to remove lenses darkened ture to that of a gravy cube. of the lens and move it back- by cloudy imperfections, known as cata- Exposing such a lens to high- wards and forwards in the eye racts, and replace them with arti cial frequency sound waves during focusing. Such pro- lenses, is more than half a century old. It breaks it up into an emulsion ducts are soon likely to replace started with the chance observation dur- that can then be sucked out of multifocal lenses. ing the second world war, by Harold Rid- the eyeball. The second inno- After that, light-sensitive ley, a British eye doctor, that pilots whose vation is injectable lenses. silicone lenses may be next. eyes had been penetrated by acrylic-glass Progressive improvements in These can be customised after shrapnel from cockpit canopies did not the design and material of ar- surgery by playing a low-in- su er an immune reaction. ti cial lenses mean it is now tensity beam of light onto Perspex lenses have long since been possible to roll them up, in- their photosensitive material. replaced by acrylic ones. But now the ject them into position in the This causes it to polymerise whole process of inserting those lenses is eye through a narrow slit, and then change shape, changing too. One of the biggest innova- and then have them unfold which means the ophthal- tions has been the introduction of micro- naturally into place. mologist can tweak the lens surgery. Originally, inserting a new lens The tools to perform to alter its power. Raging meant cutting a ap in the eyeball some these tricks have been against the dying of the 11mm across. Today’s microsurgery re- available for a while. The light, in other words, now quires a cut of less than 2mm. Such small novelty of Stellaris has powerful technologi- wounds heal by themselves, and do not which is made by Bausch cal allies. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Monitor 5
Heat from the street
Energy: A clever new system uses asphalted roads, rather than solar panels, to collect solar energy in order to heat an o ce building OMETIMES the simplest ideas are the S best. To absorb heat from the sun e - ciently you need large, at, black sur- faces. One way to do that is to construct those surfaces specially, on the roofs of buildings. But why go to all that trouble when cities are full of black surfaces al- ready, in the form of asphalted roads? This was the thought that occurred ten years ago to Arian de Bondt, an engineer Shell sh desires who works for Ooms, a Dutch building company. Dr de Bondt eventually per- suaded the rm to follow it up. The result is that its headquarters in Scharwoude is now heated in winter by a system that re- Fishing and the environment: A new invention makes trawling for sh much lies on the surface of the road outside. less harmful to coral, sponges, seaweed and other denizens of the seabed The heat-collector itself is a circuit of connected water pipes. Most of them run ASTY species live at the bottom of the pulled along, the scoops direct water from one side of the street to the other, Tsea. Plucking these morsels from their downward. That creates a series of gentle just under the asphalt layer. Some, how- habitat, however, is often a violent a air jets that can shu e the scallops from ever, dive deep into the ground. In sum- that destroys other denizens of the deep. their resting places but the streams of mer, when the surface of the street gets Now researchers have developed a more water are not powerful enough to dam- hot, water pumped through the pipes benign way to sh. age the benthic zone’s long-term tenants. picks up this heat and takes it under- Trawling is the most widespread form And the scoops swivel out of the way if ground through one of the diving pipes. of shing. But bottom trawling is brutal. It they encounter anything solid, so the About 100 metres down lies a natural uses an enormous, toothed bar mounted dredge does not destroy such protuber- aquifer into which a series of heat ex- on a device called a dredge to scrape the ances. Best of all, from the sherman’s changers have been built. The hot water seabed. Dredging throws the intended point of view, it takes less e ort to oat a from the street runs through them, warm- catch up into a cloud that is captured by a dredge on water jets than it does to drag it ing the groundwater, before returning to net trailing behind. Unfortunately, the across the uneven surface of the seabed. the surface via another pipe. The aquifer cloud contains a lot of other stu . Any- That makes Dr Goudey’s new device a is thus used as a heat store. thing at or just below the surface of the more fuel-e cient way to sh than the In winter, the circuit is changed seabed the benthic zone, in shery par- traditional method. slightly. Water is pumped through the lance gets dragged up. The result is that a Having assessed a prototype both in a heat exchangers to pick up the heat that lot of other types of sh, crustaceans and laboratory tank and in the sea o the was stored during summer. This water molluscs are caught unintentionally. coast of Massachusetts, Dr Goudey was goes into the Ooms building and is used More worryingly, sponges, seaweeds recently invited by the University of to warm it up. The water is then pumped and centuries-old coral are destroyed. Wales to test his invention against a tradi- under the asphalt, and the residual heat it This is serious because such sessile crea- tional dredge. New and old designs were carries helps to keep the road free of tures are not merely part of the ecosys- dropped from the stern of a trawler and snow and ice. By now the water has been tem. In a sense, they are the ecosystem towed across the seabed o the Isle of cooled to near freezing point, and it is in the way that it is plants rather than ani- Man. They each caught the same number once again sent underground this time mals that de ne a forest. Indeed, trawling of scallops. The new dredge, though, through a di erent pipe, to a second aqui- has been compared to clear-cutting trees. damaged the catch much less than the fer. Here, another set of heat exchangers And from a practical point of view, this traditional one. is used to cool the groundwater. This destruction of habitat contributes to the Further tests will take the dredge over store of cold water is then used in sum- dwindling of sh stocks worldwide. the regulatory hurdles toward commer- mer to keep the Ooms building cool. However, in one case scallop traw- cial use. Visserijcooperatie Urk, a Dutch The result is cheap heating in winter ling Cli Goudey of the Massachusetts sheries-equipment rm, has already ex- and cheap cooling in summer. And there Institute of Technology reckons he has a pressed an interest in using the new de- is a bonus. Summer heating softens as- solution. He and his team have designed vice to catch sole, another bottom- phalt, making it easier for heavy tra c to a dredge that can dislodge scallops with- dwelling species. A humble start but it damage the road surface. Dr de Bondt’s out touching the sea oor. may yet be worth keeping an eye out for system not only saves electricity, but also The dredge has several hemispheric coral-friendly scallops next to the bird- saves the road. Expect to see more exam- scoops in place of the toothed bar. As it is friendly co ee. 7 ples of it, in other countries, soon. 7 6 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007
and beam special o ers or messages to other members as they pass by. (Already, Facebook’s advertising model allows Playing tag companies to set up pro les for their pro- ducts, which can then become friends with other members.) If mobile social networks do take o , they are likely to do so rst in Europe, Mobile technology: Crossing mobile rather than tech-happy California or mo- phones with social-networking sites bile-crazy Japan. This is, perhaps surpris- would help people nd friends, and ingly, thanks to regulators. European potential friends, nearby operators are required to keep mobile phones more open to software down- MAGINE you are a woman at a party loads, with the result that they can run Iwho spots a good-looking fellow stand- programs such as Aka-Aki’s. (Google is ing alone in a corner. Before working up pushing for more open handsets based the courage to talk to him, you whip out on its new Android platform, but the rst your mobile phone. A few clicks reveal phones will not appear until the second his age and profession, links to his latest half of 2008.) Many mobile phones in Eu- blog posts and a plethora of other per- rope also come with Bluetooth, because sonal information. To many, this sounds drivers there need it for their wireless template containing holes that were just like a nightmare. But to those building so- headsets: talking directly on a mobile tens of nanometres deep. They then called mobile social networks, it is nir- phone while driving will earn you a coated the template with ink made of vana: linking virtual communities such hefty ne in most countries. ecks of gold just 60 nanometres in diam- as Facebook or MySpace with the real Then again, Europe’s predilection for eter suspended in an aqueous solution. world. The idea is not new, but so far privacy could still emerge as a big barrier. The ink was kept deliberately thin and ex- such services have not gained much trac- Aka-Aki, for instance, has so far refrained posed to air at a precisely controlled tem- tion. They have to be able to pinpoint from adding one feature that might cause perature, which concentrated the gold people in order to work, but satellite po- quite a stir: the unique Bluetooth identi- particles at the curved upper surface of sitioning does not work indoors. More er could also be used to tag people, for the uid. As the liquid evaporated, the ink importantly, it is hard for such a service to instance, with un attering comments. became richer in gold, the uid owed gain critical mass: why join, if it does not This would even work with non-mem- over the holes, and a single nanoparticle already have many users? bers, as long as their handsets had Blue- of gold dropped into each one. A new generation of mobile social tooth switched on. Those wanting to The second stage was to transfer the networks may have found ways to over- remain incognito in this brave new world gold from the stencil to a screen, or sub- come these barriers. One is Aka-Aki, a might soon have to turn o their mobile strate, by pressing the template onto it. start-up based in Berlin. Users of its ser- phones when arriving at a party. 7 For this transfer to take place successfully, vice download a small program onto the materials have to be chosen so that their mobile phone. The software then the ink is more attracted to the substrate uses Bluetooth, the short-range radio than it is to the stencil. If so, individual technology built into many mobile nanoparticles of ink will be precisely dot- phones, to check whether any friends or The small print ted over the solid surface. other members with similar interests are The researchers used their technique within 20 metres. If so, the program pulls to create an image of the sun inspired by down the person’s picture and whatever the drawings of Robert Fludd, a 17th-cen- information he or she is willing to reveal tury alchemist (the sun is the alchemists’ from the rm’s website. symbol for gold). They used 20,000 parti- This works because each Bluetooth ra- Nanotechnology: A novel technique cles of gold, each measuring just 60 nano- dio chip has a unique identifying code borrows from screen printing to metres across. Dr Kraus thinks their that can be used to look up a person’s in- provide a way to build tiny devices technique could be used to print biosen- formation. To overcome the chicken-and- using miniature stencils sitive nanoparticles (which are often pro- egg problem, Aka-Aki has made its soft- duced as liquids) onto solid surfaces to ware work on most phones and o ers HE eld of nanotechnology making make biosensors for use in medical tests. what amounts to free text-messaging be- Twidgets just a few billionths of a me- The work was described in the Septem- tween members in order to encourage tre across has been slow to take o . One ber 2nd issue of Nature Nanotechnology. take-up. In addition, Aka-Aki is also a reason for the delay is the di culty of as- Although Dr Kraus has yet to match web-based social network with a twist: sembling useful devices from such tiny the accomplishments of his colleague to express their interests, members can building blocks. Tobias Kraus, of IBM’s Don Eigler, who used a scanning-tunnell- create virtual stickers and share them Research Laboratories in Zurich, Switzer- ing microscope to manipulate 35 xenon with others, which then makes mobile land, and his colleagues have come up atoms to spell out IBM in 1989, his tech- matching easier. with a new way to print such structures nique may ultimately prove more useful. Aka-Aki is still testing its service, which could help. It is based on screen Despite being just 60 nanometres across, which currently has only about a thou- printing, which uses a stencil and paint to each of his dots contains millions of at- sand members. How it will make money create an image. Existing ways of printing oms of gold. At such small scales, the be- is unclear. But it does not take much devices at the nanoscale tend to be com- haviour of particles varies greatly imagination to see how the Aka-Aki ap- plex and expensive, and more appropri- according to their size. It may well be that proach could lend itself to advertising. ate for making silicon chips. By contrast, a bigger blob has more useful properties Billboards or shops, for instance, could in the new technique is easy and cheap. than a smaller one. Ironically, at the na- e ect become members of the network, The researchers rst made a patterned noscale, bigger may prove to be better. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Monitor 7
same size as the wavelength of light a few hundred nanometres (billionths of a metre). But for the crystal to do its job, Crystal clear those elements must also be electrical in- Hafnium and sulators. That is because light is a form of electromagnetic radiation in other chips words, a wave in which electric and mag- netic elds continuously leapfrog each Materials: Photonic crystals other. Being insulators, the elements of a Semiconductors: A new recipe embedded in a sponge can be used to photonic crystal constrain this propaga- involving a hitherto obscure element make electronic paper capable of tion, permitting some wavelengths to is the latest way to make displaying images in colour pass while denying passage to others, microprocessors even faster which are thus re ected. The result, since OME new technologies appear from wavelength determines colour, is that NE consequence of the growth of S nowhere. Others are heralded by such photonic crystals re ect coloured light. Omicroelectronics has been an ex- long fanfares that it seems they will never Exactly what colour is re ected de- ploration of the periodic table reminis- arrive. Electronic paper is surely in the pends on the spacing between the ele- cent of European navigators’ search for second category. The idea of a digital dis- ments. Alter the spacing and you alter the the spice islands half a millennium ago. play that has the clarity and exibility of colour. And that is how Opalux’s pro- Then, as now, the objective was material paper has been around for at least a de- duct, dubbed P-Ink, works. In P-Ink, the of great rarity and value, which was cade. It has found a few niche, black-and- elements of the crystals are tiny beads of needed in only small quantities but white applications in mobile phones and silica, 200 nanometres in diameter. These which did jobs that nothing else could electronic books such as Sony’s Reader are embedded in a spongy electro- manage. In the case of spices, such as nut- and Amazon’s Kindle. As a mass-market, active polymer. A pixel is built by sand- meg, cloves and mace, this job was to en- full-colour product, however, it has con- wiching a layer of P-Ink, along with a hance the taste of food and demonstrate spicuously failed to show up. small amount of electrolytic uid, be- wealth and sophistication. They were so Nil desperandum. Sooner or later tween two transparent electrodes. The valuable that wars were fought to control someone will create the winning for- pixels are then built into displays by em- their supply in some cases. mula. The latest e ort, by a Canadian bedding them and their electrical connec- In the case of indium, gallium and tan- rm called Opalux, uses objects called tions in a sheet of another polymer, this talum it is their unique electrical proper- photonic crystals to produce electronic time a transparent and exible one. ties that are of interest. Indium-tin oxide, paper with bright, sharp colours. Previ- By applying a voltage across the elec- for example, is both transparent and elec- ous attempts to make electronic paper trodes of a pixel, the polymer can be trically conductive. Without it, liquid- colourful have used the traditional ap- made to absorb or expel some of the elec- crystal display screens would be much proach employed in liquid-crystal trolyte and thus expand or contract. That harder to make. Meanwhile tantalum screens and cathode-ray tubes. This relies alters the spacing between the elements (used as an insulator in mobile-phone on picture elements, or pixels, with three of the crystal. The whole pixel can thus chips) once became so valuable that it, subunits, each responsible for one of the be tuned to re ect any desired colour. too, helped drive a war the civil war in primary colours. Varying the intensity of That alone would make Opalux’s eastern Congo, where its ore has been these primaries creates the illusion, from technology worth considering for dis- dusted over the countryside like icing a distance, of the intended hue. plays in general. But the third characteris- sugar by ancient volcanic eruptions. Doing things this way, however, ex- tic required of electronic paper, besides The latest element to be dragged out of acts two prices: brightness and resolu- high resolution and exibility, is that the obscurity by the chemist-descendants of tion. With only one-third of the screen image should remain xed when the Prince Henry the Navigator is hafnium. occupied by each primary, two-thirds of power is switched o and that, too, is This metal (or, rather, its oxide) is the the potential output is wasted. For the the case for P-Ink. Once in the polymer, magic ingredient that computer-chip de- same reason, the illumi- the electrolyte stays there signers hope will enable them to carry on nated parts of the pixels until a newly applied vol- shrinking the transistors inside their pro- are smaller and further tage coaxes it out. ducts in accordance with Gordon apart than they could be, One thing that may Moore’s famous law that the number of so the image is fuzzier. hold P-Ink back, however, such transistors on a given area of chip What is needed is a pixel is what is known as the re- doubles every 18 months or so. Indeed, it that can change colour en- fresh rate. This is the speed is the most signi cant change of recipe tirely. That is what pho- at which a pixel can since Dr Moore and his colleagues in- tonic crystals allow. change colour. For video, vented the microprocessor back in the The de ning charac- that needs to happen at 1960s. Intel, the rm that Dr Moore teristic of a crystal any least 25 times a second if helped to found on the back of the inven- crystal is that it is com- the eye is to be fooled into tion, introduced its new hafnium-based posed of regularly ar- seeing continuous motion. chip, called Penryn, on November 12th. ranged components. In The refresh rate for P-Ink at Its competitors are expected to follow suit familiar crystals, such as the moment is only about as soon as they can. salt, sugar and diamonds, once a second, so the her- At bottom, transistors are electronic these elements are atoms alds of electronic paper are valves that use a small voltage at a place or molecules. But the ele- not quite ready to put their called a gate to regulate the ow of cur- ments of a crystal can be trumpets to their lips. But rent through the rest of the device. This larger than that, as long as Opalux’s scientists are switching of current is what produces the they are regular. working on it. If they can zeros and ones of binary arithmetic, and In a photonic crystal speed things up, expect an- is the basic process of computing. Gates, the elements are about the other fanfare soon. 7 which are made of silicon, must be elec- 1 8 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007
which evolutionary-design principles are being applied is growing. Among those revealed at the Genetic and Evolutionary Don’t invent, Computation Conference held in London this summer were long-life USB memory sticks, superfast racing-yacht keels, ultra- evolve high bandwidth optical bres, improved cochlear implants and a cancer-biopsy Innovation: The inventor’s analyser that matches a human patholo- traditional trial-and-error approach gist’s tumour-spotting skills. can be automated by software that How can evolution help improve a mimics natural selection USB stick? It turns out that transistors in these ash-memory devices are prone to HAVE not failed. I have just found being gummed up with electrostatic I10,000 ways that won’t work. That charge that they cannot dissipate. That is how Thomas Edison described his la- prevents data from being erased, limiting borious attempts to perfect the incandes- the stick’s life. So a team at the University cent light bulb. Yet an emerging of Limerick in Ireland evolved new sig- technique for developing inventions nal-timing patterns that minimise the knocks even Edison’s exhaustive ap- build-up of the disabling charge. The re- proach into a cocked hat. Evolutionary sult: USB sticks that last up to 30 times design, as it is known, enables a com- longer than their predecessors. 2 trically isolated. Until now, that has been puter to run through tens of millions of At the University of Sydney, in Austra- done using silicon dioxide in other variations on an invention until it hits on lia, Steve Manos used an evolutionary al- words, quartz. The insulating layer is the best solution to a problem. gorithm to come up with novel patterns made by exposing the silicon of the gates As its name suggests, evolutionary de- in a type of optical bre that has air holes to pure oxygen, which is a well-honed sign borrows its ideas from biology. It shot through its length. Normally, these manufacturing process. takes a basic blueprint and mutates it. As holes are arranged in a hexagonal pat- As transistors have got smaller, in biology, most mutations are worse tern, but the algorithm generated a bi- though, the silicon-dioxide layer has than the original. But a few are better, and zarre ower-like pattern of holes that no been made thinner and thinner. It is now these are used to create the next genera- human would have thought of trying. It a mere ve atoms thick, which is already tion. Evolutionary design uses a com- doubled the bre’s bandwidth. too thin to be a perfect insulator. As a re- puter program called an evolutionary Meanwhile, Pierrick Legrand of the sult, modern transistors have to accom- algorithm, which takes the initial param- University of Bordeaux has used the modate some current leakage. This has eters of the design (things such as lengths, method to optimise cochlear implants, been regarded as a price worth paying to areas, volumes, currents and voltages) which help people to hear better. One of avoid having to reorganise the manufac- and treats each like one gene in an organ- the hardest tasks facing those who t turing process to accommodate new ma- ism. Collectively, these genes comprise these devices is working out the precise terials. Any thinner, however, and the the product’s genome. By randomly mu- choreography of the voltages and timings insulation would break down altogether. tating these genes and then breeding that need to be applied to the 20 or so Researchers at Intel and elsewhere them with other, similarly mutated ge- electrodes embedded in the auditory have seen this problem coming for some nomes, new o spring designs are nerve, in order to make them work prop- time. In the late 1990s they started to look created. These are subjected to simulated erly. The signals required vary from pa- for a material that could serve as silicon use by a second program. If one particu- tient to patient and some people wait dioxide’s replacement. They rejected ox- lar o spring is shown not to be up to the many years before an audiologist gets it ides of aluminium (which is abundant) task, it is discarded. If it is promising, it is right. Dr Legrand, however, has de- and lanthanum (which isn’t) and eventu- selectively bred with other t o spring to veloped an evolution-based system that ally lighted upon hafnium. Hafnium ox- see if the results, when subject to further co-evolves several channels at a time, al- ide is a very good insulator indeed. mutation, can do even better. lowing a patient to tell his doctor how Unfortunately, using it requires com- The idea of evolutionary algorithms is each pattern of electrode stimulation is pletely rebuilding the gate, by including a not new. Until recently, however, their faring. Dr Legrand says that one patient, metal connection between the insulator use has been con ned to projects such as who had experienced a decade of trouble and the underlying silicon. (Exactly re ning the aerodynamic pro les of car with his implant, had it xed in a couple which metal, all of the companies in- bodies, aircraft fuselages and wings. That of days using the evolutionary method. volved are being cagey about.) This is a is because only large rms have been Perhaps the most cunning use of an lot harder than just baking the chip in able to a ord the supercomputers evolutionary algorithm, though, is by Dr oxygen at the appropriate point in its needed to mutate and crossbreed large Koza himself. His team at Stanford de- manufacture, which is why engineers virtual genomes and then simulate the veloped a Wi-Fi antenna for a client who have held out until the last possible mo- behaviour of their o spring for perhaps did not want to pay a patent-licence fee to ment before making the change. 20m generations before the perfect de- Cisco Systems. The team fed the algo- The new combination of materials is, sign emerges. What has changed, in this rithm as much data as they could from however, just what Dr Moore ordered. eld as in so many others, is the availabil- the Cisco patent and told the software to Penryn chips have twice as many transis- ity and cheapness of computing power. design around it. It succeeded in doing so. tors as their predecessors (about a bil- According to John Koza of Stanford Uni- The result is a design that does not in- lion). Just as important, they waste only versity, who is one of the pioneers of the fringe Cisco’s patent and is more e - one- fth the amount of power in the gate. eld, evolutionary designs that would cient to boot. A century and a half after With luck, though, unlike spices or tanta- have taken many months to run on PCs Darwin suggested natural selection as lum, the quantities needed for microelec- are now feasible in days. the mechanism of evolution, engineers tronics will not be worth ghting over. 7 As a result, the range of products to have proved him right once again. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Innovation awards 9
motion of mobile phones in Africa. winners, and our thanks to the judges: Founded in 1998, CelTel grew to become Robin Bew, editorial director, the Econo- Africa’s second-largest mobile operator mist Intelligence Unit; Jordi Canals, dean And the winners and was sold in 2005 to MTC of Kuwait and professor of economics, IESE Busi- for $3.4 billion. As well as boosting econ- ness School; Marvin H. Caruthers, profes- are omic activity via mobile phones, CelTel sor of chemistry and biochemistry, showed that it is possible to build a multi- University of Colorado; Martin Cooper, billion dollar African company in an in- chairman and chief executive, Array- Innovation awards: Our annual dustry other than oil or mining. Comm; Rodney Ferguson, managing di- prizes recognise successful Business-process innovation: N.R. rector, Panorama Capital; Janus Friis, innovators in eight categories. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Info- co-founder, Skype; Lisa Gansky, director, Here are this year’s winners sys, for pioneering India’s information- Dos Margaritas, co-founder, Ofoto; Fran- technology services industry. Under Mr çois Grey, head of IT communications, HIS newspaper was established in Narayana Murthy’s leadership, Infosys CERN; Georges Haour, professor of tech- T1843 to take part in a severe contest developed the idea of providing comput- nology and innovation management, between intelligence, which presses for- ing services from India to clients around IMD; Vic Hayes, former chair, IEEE 802.11 ward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance the world, often at much lower cost, pav- working group; Paul Jackson, principal obstructing our progress . One of the ing the way for a $40 billion industry. analyst, Forrester Research; Yoichiro Ma- chief ways in which intelligence presses Consumer products: Shigeru tsumoto, professor and dean of engineer- forward is through innovation, which is Miyamoto of Nintendo for his leading ing, University of Tokyo; Edward now recognised as one of the most im- role in shaping the video-game indus- McBride, energy and environment corre- portant contributors to economic growth. try. From the creation of Donkey Kong spondent, The Economist; Louis Monier, Innovation, in turn, depends on the cre- in 1981 to the establishment of the Ma- research scientist, Google; Andrew ative individuals who dream up new rio and Zelda franchises in the 1980s Odlyzko, professor of mathematics and ideas and turn them into reality. and the current success of DS hand-held director, Digital Technology Centre, Uni- The Economist recognises these tal- and Wii motion-sensing games consoles, versity of Minnesota; Jagdish Parikh, ented people through its annual Innova- Mr Miyamoto helped to bring into being, chairman, Allied Lemuir; Andrea Pfeifer, tion Awards, presented in eight elds: and then rede ned, a new industry. chief executive, AC Immune; Sam Pi- bioscience, computing and communica- No boundaries: Stuart Parkin, Peter troda, chairman, National Knowledge tions, energy and environment, social Grünberg and Albert Fert for the discov- Commission, India; Navi Radjou, vice- and economic innovation, business-pro- ery and development of the giant-mag- president, enterprise applications, Forres- cess innovation, consumer products, a netoresistive (GMR) e ect. Discovered ter Research; Rinaldo Rinol , executive exible no boundaries category, and independently by Dr Grünberg and Dr vice-president, Fiat Research; Paul Romer, an award for the corporate use of innova- Fert in 1988, the GMR e ect was subse- professor of economics, Graduate School tion. The awards were presented at a cere- quently developed for commercial use of Business, Stanford University; Paul mony in London on October 18th by John by Dr Parkin of IBM. By increasing the Sa o, director, Institute for the Future; Micklethwait, The Economist’s editor-in- sensitivity of the sensors used to read Jerry Simmons, deputy director for en- chief. And the winners were: data for magnetic disks, the GMR e ect ergy sciences at the Centre for Physical, Bioscience: Hermes Chan of MedMira boosted hard-disk capacity, cutting the Chemical, and Nano-Sciences, Sandia and Abdullah Kirumira of BioMedica cost of storage and eventually making National Laboratories; Hernando de Diagnostics for the development of fa st possible the rst iPod. Soto, chairman, Institute for Liberty and HIV diagnostic testing. It is estimated Corporate use of innovation: Procter & Democracy; Tom Standage, business edi- that one-third of people tested for HIV do Gamble, for its pioneering use of the tor and Technology Quarterly editor, The not return for the results. Dr Chan and Dr open-innovation model in its Connect Economist; Vijay Vaitheeswaran, health- Kirumira developed a test that produces a + Develop programme to nd ideas for care correspondent, The Economist. The result in three minutes, rather than days new products outside the company. judging process was managed by Charles or weeks. Both men are now developing We extend our congratulations to the Pelton of Modern Media. 7 tests for other diseases. Computing and communications: Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research in Motion, for the development of the BlackBerry mobile e-mail device. Mr Lazaridis had the original idea for the BlackBerry in his basement, and the rst device, with its distinctive miniature key- board, launched in 1999. There are now over 11m BlackBerry devices in use around the world. Energy and environment: George Craford of Philips Lumileds and Roland Haitz of Hewlett-Packard for the develop- ment of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for use in new areas. Dr Craford and Dr Haitz have helped to move LEDs, which are far more energy e cient than conventional bulbs, into new markets such as tra c lights and domestic illumination. Social and economic innovation: Mo Ibrahim, founder of CelTel, for the pro- Innovation personi ed 10 Augmented reality The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007
duced the need for anaesthesia. AR can also be used in surgery. A big Reality, only better bene t is that surgeons do not need to keep looking up and down, switching their gaze between the patient and dis- plays on nearby equipment; instead, the information can be directly overlaid, in ef- fect giving the surgeon X-ray vision and other superhuman powers. Even so, there are very few AR operating rooms, says Computing: Superimposing computer graphics on the real world, Henry Fuchs, an expert in AR medicine at instead of displaying them on screens, has many potential uses the University of North Carolina at Cha- pel Hill. Dr Fuchs says that although early IRST, catch your cockroach. The clini- virtual text or graphics. Much AR technol- (and sparse) evidence suggests that AR Fcal psychology department at Univer- ogy remains in labs, but research funding surgery is more accurate, uptake is slow sitat Jaume I in Castelló, Spain, paid its in both the private and public sectors is in- for several reasons. The equipment is ex- cleaners to capture live specimens. A creasing, and all kinds of eclectic and in- pensive, training is time-consuming and team of computer-imaging specialists genious applications are emerging in involves ditching some skills surgeons lmed the creatures, digitised images of elds as diverse as medicine, warfare, have worked hard to attain, and new sur- their scurrying and teeming, and dis- manufacturing and entertainment. gical techniques are more vulnerable to played the images not on a computer Consider the task of locating veins, a malpractice lawsuits. monitor, but on see-through goggles. To crucial step in procedures such as insert- the wearer, the virtual roaches then look ing intravenous drips, injecting medi- Augmented enjoyment as though they are really in the room. cines and drawing blood. Last year The technology also has less serious uses, Next, university psychologists set about Luminetx, a medical-equipment rm in however. YDreams, a marketing and digi- therapeutically frightening patients who Memphis, Tennessee, began selling an AR tal-media rm in Lisbon, Portugal, has de- have a fear of insects. They put a foot on machine called the VeinViewer. It shines veloped an AR sightseeing viewer called the ground and the cockroaches start near-infra-red light at the patient’s skin, VSS. The rst such machine, bolted atop a climbing over it, says Cristina Botella, and because blood vessels absorb such battlement on the 12th-century Pinhel who led the researchers. The computer light, a digital video camera that captures Castle in north-eastern Portugal, delights just pumps them out. In November Ms the re ected light can work out the precise tourists who tilt it up, down and around Botella presented her team’s ndings at location of veins to a depth of almost 1cm. for an augmented view of the castle and the Association for Behavioural and Cog- A projector then shines a map of the vein its surroundings. Place names and nitive Therapies conference in Philadel- network directly on the skin. The process explanatory text are superimposed over phia. The treatment worked very well. takes place in real time, so the luminous objects seen through the viewer’s screen, For some things, it turns out, computer map changes as the patient moves. It’s and animated graphics show how some graphics can be much more e ective like Superman vision you can see under structures were built or destroyed. The when viewed not on screens, but super- the skin, says Kasuo Miyake of Clínica number of visitors has doubled since the imposed on the real world. The technique Miyake, a clinic that performs vein-re- viewer was installed in July 2006, says Is- is known as augmented reality (AR) or, lated procedures in São Paulo, Brazil. Dr abel Almeida, who manages the castle. less frequently, as augmented vision , Miyake says his VeinViewer boosted re- In France the Parc du Futuroscope, an because the real world is augmented with ferrals by 20%, cut costs by 30% and re- amusement park near Poitiers, is building1 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Augmented reality 11 Head-mounted displays could show soldiers the locations of friendly forces, as in a video game.
2 a 7m ($10m) safari attraction that will be displays could also show the locations of need to be updated, or which parts of the devoid of animals. Instead, passengers friendly forces and levels of ammunition building need to be rebuilt. The process is riding on a small train will look through and other supplies, as in a video game. less complicated than laser scanning, so hand-held AR binoculars that will super- Mark Livingston, head AR researcher discrepancy checks can be more frequent, impose frolicking 3-D virtual animals at the Naval Research Laboratory in making rebuilding less expensive. Mirko over the real decor. It’s pretty close to be- Washington, DC, says his team is develop- Appel, an engineer and senior project ing a magic show, says Bruno Uzzan, the ing 3-D ink writing methods that will al- manager at Siemens, estimates that the boss of Total Immersion, the company low soldiers to paint virtual symbols or software will reduce the cost of construct- that is developing the attraction. Video text onto the real world, so that other sol- ing a typical medium-sized coal- red games would also seem a perfect t for AR diers who arrive at the same spot later can power plant by more than $1m. Areva, a technology, and many game studios are see them. He remarks, only half jokingly, French nuclear giant, used the system to investing in development. But very little that young soldiers who are used to video check a European plant for discrepancies AR gaming technology has hit the market. games are better equipped to handle this in September. And OMV, an Austrian en- Gamers demand extremely fast and rich visual information overload . ergy company, has tested a similar system graphics, and so far the hardware is too ex- developed by the Upper Austria Univer- pensive to make AR a mass-market propo- Augmenting productivity sity of Applied Sciences. sition. If the future is any guide, however, Industrial engineers call them discrepan- Volkswagen (VW) uses AR discrep- prices will fall once AR is adopted by more cies, deviations, clashes or con icts. Va- ancy-checking software to verify the con- serious users such as the armed forces. riations between a structure’s digital formity of components supplied by Virtual reality has proved to be im- architectural models the virtual render- subcontractors. Christoph Kohnen, a mensely useful in military training. But ings produced by computer-assisted de- spokesman, says the technique is tre- virtual worlds those created entirely by sign (CAD) software and the structure mendously faster and cheaper than pre- computer, and viewed on screens can- itself are common. Finding and mapping vious measuring methods. The carmaker, not be used to improve live- re training, them is important, because accurate CAD which has teamed up with Kuka, a robot- long a priority of America’s Marine models are needed to operate, maintain, maker, to improve the system, is introduc- Corps, says Bob Armstrong, until recently repair and insure buildings. And some ing the technology in some 40 factories deputy director of the Marine Corps’ discrepancies require rebuilding, so the worldwide. And it has devised other uses Training and Education Technology Divi- sooner they are found the better. But cur- for AR. To study crash tests, VW superim- sion. We end up shooting at piles of tyres rent checking methods, generally involv- poses an image of an intact car over the or old vehicles, he says. We wanted to ing laser scanning, are expensive and wreckage of a crashed vehicle. To speed inject a thinking, moving target into the require lengthy set-up. A new method, us- up prototype construction, it uses AR to live- re environment. His team, working ing AR, is on the way. superimpose luminous instructions di- closely with organisations including the Siemens, working with the Technical rectly on the tools and prototype compo- O ce of Naval Research and various de- University of Munich, has prototyped AR nents in front of workers. ARcan also help fence contractors, managed to do just that discrepancy-checking software for indus- to design production lines. Metaio, an AR using AR technology. trial plants. Engineers superimpose the developer based in Munich, does brisk During battle, forward observers iden- original CAD models over actual build- business applying AR to interfering-edge tify targets and direct artillery, mortar and ings to determine which bits of the model analysis . Its systems move virtual mod- aviation re. With the Marine Corps train- els of prototype machinery and products ing system, forward observers wear a around manufacturing plants to deter- head-mounted display with a see- mine how existing equipment would through visor; objects displayed on the vi- have to be moved or modi ed. sor appear to be part of the real world. Mr AR is still an immature eld compared Armstrong, now director of technology at with virtual reality, which has now en- the Virginia Modelling, Analysis and tered the mainstream in the form of video Simulation Centre at Old Dominion Uni- games, online virtual worlds and com- versity in Norfolk, Virginia, says the Ma- puter-animated lms and special e ects. rine Corps’ AR live- re training system The additional technologies required to works exceptionally well. Instructors use take virtual images and integrate them tablet PCs to move the virtual targets into the real world still have a long way to while trainees shoot at them, and the vir- go: most AR technology is still expensive, tual targets can even hide behind real ter- fragile and unwieldy, though researchers rain or buildings. are doing their best to change that. But On the battle eld, AR could have an given a few more years, it is not hard to important role in disseminating tactical imagine where all this might lead: imag- intelligence. Soldiers with head-mounted ine satellite-navigation systems that ap- displays might, for example, read street pear to paint the road yellow to show a names superimposed on the ground, fol- driver which way to go, mirrors that let low colour-coded arrows for patrols or re- you try on di erent out ts or haircuts, or treats, and see symbols indicating known glasses that turn the whole world into a or potential sniper nests, weapons caches backdrop for a video game. Why settle for and hiding places for booby-traps. The reality when you can augment it? 7 12 Computing The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007
soles and the powerful processors they contain (see box on next page). This has Spreading the load been demonstrated most spectacularly by a project called Folding@home, run by Vijay Pande and his team at Stanford Uni- versity, which simulates protein folding and mis-folding a cause of diseases such as Alzheimer’s. In September the com- Computing: A new wave of science projects on the web is harnessing bined computing capacity of the project volunteers’ computers in novel ways and their brains, too passed one peta op a quadrillion math- ematical operations per second some- AY back in 1999, a badge of geek 800,000 volunteer computers, is switch- thing supercomputer designers have Wpride was to run a new screensaver ing all the humanitarian projects that it dreamed of for several years. With just program called SETI@home. This used supports to run on BOINC. These include over 40,000 PlayStation 3 volunteers, spare processing capacity on ordinary Help Conquer Cancer, Discovering Den- Folding@home entered the record books PCs to sift through radio-telescope data gue Drugs and AfricanClimate@home, as the most powerful distributed-com- for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. which the computer giant runs on behalf puting network on Earth. The bad news is that so far, not a peep has of university research groups that need Along with a rapid increase in the been heard from any little green men. The lots of computer power for their research. number and diversity of research projects good news is that SETI@home is still go- But numbers are not all that matters. to which they contribute, there has been a ing strong, with over 3m contributors, and BOINC also makes it easier for anyone marked improvement in the software that is being joined by a rapidly growing le- with a research idea to gain access to dis- binds the volunteers together into groups. gion of other volunteer computing pro- tributed-computing power. Two years They can share information and opinions jects supporting worthy scienti c causes. ago, at the age of 18, Rytis Slatkevicius about the science behind the projects The choice is bewildering. Your PC can launched a project called PrimeGrid, they are supporting, and perhaps make help design drugs against AIDS, model which has since assembled possibly the new friends in the process. Matt Blum- the future climate of the planet, search for largest database of prime numbers in the berg, a BOINC expert based in New York, new prime numbers or simulate micro- world, and has broken several records: has made a click-and-play portal called devices for handling satellite propellant, last August, for example, it found the big- GridRepublic for a host of projects, to en- to cite just a few examples. Part of the gest known example of a special kind of courage more non-techies to get involved. boom in volunteer computing is due to an prime number called a Woodall prime. In BOINC even has a volunteer help desk open-source platform for running such his native Lithuania, Mr Slatkevicius is a where experienced users can advise new- projects, called BOINC (Berkeley Open In- soft-spoken business student by day, but comers via Skype, a free internet-tele- frastructure for Network Computing), in the evenings he manages servers for his phony service. launched in 2002 by David Anderson, the project, eking out enough to cover his As well as collaboration, there is also a director of SETI@home. Today over 40 costs from Google Ads, sales of mugs and strong element of competition among BOINC projects are in operation, with 15 T-shirts, and donations from supporters. computing volunteers. Like online gam- in the life sciences alone. IBM, which runs Another development that is boosting ers, they can compete individually or in a philanthropic initiative called World volunteer computing is the use of devices teams to rack up the most processing time Community Grid and has signed up over other than PCs, in particular games con- for a given project. Some enthusiasts ll1 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Computing 13 Volunteer computing is a huge untapped resource, not just a clever publicity stunt.
2 their garages with PCs just to get a shot at tal Sky Survey, an international collab- 100,000 volunteers classi ed over 1m gal- being user of the week. And a new gen- oration which is mapping a large section axies in a few months a task which eration of projects takes the concept of of the visible universe in unprecedented would have taken a lone astronomer volunteer computing to a higher level of digital detail. Thanks to the exquisite pat- years of unbearably tedious e ort. Galax- user interaction by allowing volunteers to tern-recognition capabilities of the hu- ies are traditionally divided into spiral get involved in analysing data in e ect, man brain, amateurs with just a little and elliptical categories, but how one donating spare brain capacity, too. training can distinguish between di er- evolves into the other remains controver- Take, for example, the Galaxy Zoo pro- ent types of galaxy far more e ciently sial. Better statistics might help to shed ject, where volunteers have been helping than computers can. The project started in light on the nature of galactic evolution. astronomers to classify the shapes of gal- July to little fanfare, but news of it spread The researchers behind Galaxy Zoo, a axies from images taken by the Sloan Digi- rapidly on the web, and more than collaboration between research groups at1
has achieved with these alternative pro- Playing or processing? cessors, Dr Pande admits. Parallel pro- cessing is not suitable in all situations. If The distinction between gaming and useful processing is one calculation relies on the results of a beginning to blur, for both people and machines previous one, then much of the chip will sit idle until that result is ready and the NTIL recently there were only two speed advantage will be lost. Uways to speed up a volunteer-com- Although Folding@home bene ts puting project: persuade more people to parasitically from the gaming habits of take part, or wait for users to upgrade young people, other projects are plug- their PCs to faster models. But in October ging into this passion in a more direct 2006 the creators of Folding@home, a way, using players’ brains to do things popular volunteer-computing project that even fast processors would nd run by Stanford University that analyses hard. One example is The ESP Game, protein folding, gave its users another op- created by Luis von Ahn of Carnegie tion. It released a version of its software Mellon University, in which two players designed to run not on a computer’s cen- on the internet try to label the same pic- tral processing unit (CPU), but on the ture, and score points whenever they use graphics chips (GPUs) found in modern ESP turns image-labelling into a game the same word to describe it. Besides be- PCs. The results were impressive. Precise ing addictive, the game serves a useful comparisons are di cult, says Vijay cided that GPU computing could be a big function: helping to index images on the Pande, Folding@home’s director, but a opportunity. Nvidia has released a pro- web more accurately. Dr von Ahn and ten-fold speed increase is easy, a 50-fold duct line designed speci cally for non- his team have generated several games to one is possible, and you might even graphics applications, and a specialised harvest human computation , as he reach 100 if your application was par- programming language for use with it. calls it, some of which are just as cap- ticularly suitable. The next logical step for the Stanford tivating as The ESP Game. That is because GPUs are well suited team was to adapt their software for the Of course, it is also possible to use to the types of calculations involved hugely powerful Cell processor used in money to motivate people to do comput- when simulating protein folding. Graph- Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console. This ing tasks, as in Amazon’s Mechanical ics chips make heavy use of so-called chip, developed jointly by Sony, Toshiba Turk project, which pays participants a parallel processing, where a big task and IBM, also turns out to work well for few cents to complete simple tasks such (such as rendering a scene from a video the Stanford protein-folding program. as categorising websites for potential ad- game) is broken into many smaller ones, With Sony solidly behind this project vertisers. But Dr von Ahn argues that each of which is worked on indepen- even preloading Folding@home on to play may be a more powerful incentive. dently by a di erent part of the chip some PlayStations adoption has taken People play billions of hours of solitaire before being combined. Volunteer- o fast. Sony’s motivation is not just phil- each year, he says, but it took only 20m computing projects, in which work must anthropic: for some young gamers, the man-hours to build the Panama Canal. be broken up into stand-alone units to be fact that their machine will do serious Labelling images may be an enjoyable sent out to participants, are another can- science in its spare time is a useful argu- pastime and serve a useful purpose, but didate for this approach. ment to convince reluctant parents. Such it is hardly an intellectual challenge un- The idea of using graphics chips for is the power of the Cell chip that in less like the puzzles that online gamers regu- more general-purpose computing has than a year the PlayStation has become larly solve, often through team e ort that been around for years, but only recently the dominant source of processing requires strategic thinking. Clearly the have the chips become sophisticated power for the project, despite much potential of games to solve tough scien- enough for it to work in practice. Both larger numbers of contributing PCs. ti c problems has barely been tapped. Nvidia and AMD, the world’s largest Not all software will see the sort of The challenge is to create games that graphics-card manufacturers, have de- dramatic speed-ups that Folding@home make solving such problems fun. 14 Computing The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007
Searching for aliens with SETI@home; modelling the climate with climateprediction.net; sorting galaxies with Galaxy Zoo
2 Oxford University and Portsmouth Uni- on independent validation of a result by ium specimens have been documented versity in Britain, and Johns Hopkins Uni- several volunteers. In the case of Galaxy by volunteers. This typically involves versity in America, are already writing up Zoo, for example, each image was viewed downloading an image of a specimen, de- the rst papers based on the galaxies clas- by over 30 volunteers, who proved just as ciphering the various comments that ex- si ed so far. They have also submitted re- accurate as checking by a professional perts have written next to it in longhand, quests for viewing time on big telescopes astronomer. Indeed, scientists often nd and entering this information in an organ- in order to follow up on some of the more the tables are turned, with some of the ised fashion on a website. The project unusual discoveries made by volunteers. more technically minded volunteers started with specimens from the Shrews- Plans are in the works for a second phase spotting bugs in their computer programs bury School herbarium, but has ambi- requiring more detailed analysis and and even helping to x them. tious plans to expand to collections at drawing on other image banks too. Perhaps the biggest hurdle, though, is universities and museums at home and getting fellow scientists to accept that vol- abroad. Although this may not seem Citizen science meets Moore’s law unteer computing is a huge and still high-tech, the project relies on very high- Of course, there is nothing new about net- largely untapped resource, not just a resolution digital images, and ordinary in- works of amateurs helping scientists do clever publicity stunt. When Andrew ternet users’ ability to download and dis- their jobs. Ornithologists rely on bird- Westphal of the University of California play them something that would have watchers to keep track of changing pat- at Berkeley rst talked to colleagues about been unfeasible just a few years ago. terns of migration, astronomers have using volunteer computing to spot the long pro ted from enthusiasts scanning tell-tale tracks left by microscopic inter- Bossa nova the skies to spot new comets, and ar- stellar dust grains in tiles of porous aero- To lower the barrier to entry for projects chaeologists bene t from amateurs’ nds. gel, he met with considerable scepticism. like this, Dr Anderson recently launched a But the potential for such citizen science is Yet this was the problem facing him when new open-source platform called BOSSA expanding rapidly because of Moore’s a capsule returned to earth in 2006 from a (Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggrega- law the doubling of processor power ev- probe called Stardust. tion), which aims to do for distributed ery 18 months or so and a similarly Starting in August 2006, the Stardust- thinking what BOINC has done for dis- speedy growth of the bandwidth avail- @home project enlisted some 24,000 vol- tributed computing. One of Dr Ander- able to ordinary internet users. People unteers to search images of the aerogel via son’s rst customers for BOSSA is Peter with no special tools other than a PC and a web-based virtual microscope . In less Amoako-Yirenkyi of the Kwame Nkru- a broadband internet connection can take than a year they performed more than mah University of Science and Technol- part in complex scienti c projects from 40m searches and found 50 candidate ogy in Kumasi, Ghana, who is working the comfort of their own homes. dust particles, which scientists now plan with other African researchers and a re- The easiest part is getting the public in- to extract. When Dr Westphal presented search group called UNOSAT, which pro- volved. Most volunteer-computing pro- the results at a conference in March, the cesses digital-satellite data for various jects can draw on tens of thousands of impressive level of agreement for even United Nations agencies. people with practically no advertising, re- the faintest tracks, each of which was The project, which is part of an initia- lying on word of mouth. The problem is spotted by several hundred independent tive called Africa@home co-ordinated by usually keeping these eager amateurs volunteers, won over the sceptics. the University of Geneva, will enlist vol- busy. The Galaxy Zoo project was ini- Projects searching for cosmic dust or unteers to extract useful cartographic in- tially overwhelmed by the public re- classifying galaxies clearly appeal to formation the positions of roads, sponse, and had to upgrade its servers young cybernauts, but what of other, villages, elds and so on from satellite and computer network to cope with the more mundane-sounding tasks? Fortu- images of regions in Africa where maps demand for images, which reached peaks nately the number of internet users is so either do not exist or are hopelessly out of of 70,000 per hour. Chris Lintott of Ox- large that some people, somewhere, are date. This will help regional planning au- ford University, lead researcher on the likely to nd a particular volunteer pro- thorities, aid workers and scientists docu- project, says he was thrilled by the pub- ject interesting. Getting enough volun- menting the e ects of climate change. Dr lic’s reaction. We’ve had complaints that teers to document plant specimens from Amoako-Yirenkyi is excited by the pros- the site is addictive, as you never quite the dusty 19th-century archives of British pects such projects open up for African re- know what the next image is going to re- collections, for example, might seem like searchers. We can leapfrog expensive veal, he says. a hopeless task yet that is exactly what data centres, and plug directly into a Then there is the question of ensuring Herbaria@home is doing. global computer, he says. Rather than that what the volunteers do is scienti - The project was launched last year by fretting about a digital divide, researchers cally valid. Most of the projects, whether Tom Humphrey of the Manchester Mu- in developing countries stand to bene t powered by processors or by brains, rely seum, and already some 12,000 herbar- from this digital multiplication e ect. 7 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Case history 15 Unmanned and dangerous
Aviation: Unmanned aerial vehicles are a vital tool of modern there is a growing community of hobby- warfare. Once-harmless drones are now deadly attack aircraft. ists who attach satellite-positioning units, cameras and other sensors to remote-con- Where did the technology come from, and where is it going? trolled aircraft, turning them into UAVs. Not everyone approves. Civil regula- USK falls over Baghdad and Kabul, troops on the ground to watch the footage, tors are worried about unmanned aircraft Dand the Predators take their places in and will soon let them mark out targets. sharing the sky with the usual manned the skies overhead, ready for action. West- First own in 1995, the Predator is a variety, since UAVs have previously been ern soldiers prefer to ght in the dark, imsy drone that ies as slowly as a limited to war zones or remote areas. And when their night-vision gear gives them Cessna and can carry far less weight. Yet it air forces may be reluctant to lose the mys- the advantage over insurgents. They has become one of the most prized assets tique of the combat pilot. There’s going know that with drone aircraft scanning in today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. to be resistance, says Colonel John Mont- the ground, with unblinking eyes able to Initially a surveillance drone, the Preda- gomery, vice-commander of the 432nd see by day or night and radars that can see tor was given a laser designator to enable Wing. When I rst saw a brie ng on the through cloud, they own the night . it to guide precision-guided weapons Predator three years ago, I saw one of my For the Predators’ pilots, however, it is from other aircraft, and then acquired its mission sets disappear. I miss the thrill of still bright daylight. Sitting in cramped own weapons in the form of Hell re mis- ying. But hanging around for hours in a metal containers in bases across America, siles. It has thus shortened the process of plane is a waste of manpower. they y their machines by remote control nding, identifying and destroying a tar- from thousands of miles away, via satel- get known in military jargon as the kill Mad as a kite lite links. The video from the drones is chain or the sensor-to-shooter cy- Unmanned ying machines go back a gathered in a makeshift operations centre cle to a matter of seconds if necessary. long way. Kites were used in the late 19th in the Nevada desert and distributed to The 432nd Wing, which ies the Preda- century to carry cameras aloft to take pic- leaders in the Pentagon and commanders tors, is one of the fastest-growing units of tures of battle elds. And even before the on the ground. In the Predator operations the American air force. In 2006 it ew Wright brothers succeeded in building a centre, one screen monitors the weather more than 50,000 hours, and red Hell- heavier-than-air ying machine, the around the Arabian Sea (Predators do not res roughly every other day. physicist and inventor Nikola Tesla specu- like rain or high winds), another shows The Predator is far from being the only lated that it would be possible to build a the location of each aircraft on a map, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in use to- remote-controlled ying bomb a premo- a third projects a mosaic of video images day, though it is probably the best known. nition perhaps of German V-1 ying from each plane. One image shows a The success of military UAVs is helping to bombs and modern cruise missiles. Yet house under close observation in a palm push them into mainstream civil uses all aviation history is littered with the grove in Iraq; another shows a road being over the world, in applications including wrecks of unmanned-aircraft projects scanned for hidden bombs. A laptop com- border patrol, police surveillance, scien- some of them barmy, others simply too puter system known as Rover allows ti c research and disaster response. And far ahead of their time that were given a1 16 Case history The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 UAVs’ success is not due to a single breakthrough, but a combination of innovations in several areas.
2 variety of names, including aerial tor- nese used suicide kamikaze pilots to direct invulnerable to jamming or interception. pedo and remotely piloted vehicle . ying bombs with deadly e ect against Drones sometimes found a useful role Occasionally UAVs found a valuable American ships, proving the superior in reconnaissance, especially as improve- niche, for instance as targets for anti-air- guiding ability of the human brain, and ments in surface-to-air missiles made craft gunnery. The rst such machine, a ra- the Germans successfully used the V-1 y- manned spy ights risky. The loss of a U2 dio-controlled Fairey Queen biplane, ing bomb as a weapon of terror against spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was catapulted into the air in 1933 and sur- London a large target a short distance over the Soviet Union in 1960 led to the vived two hours of live re from a British away that was hard to miss. search for alternatives. A reconnaissance warship. The following year the Air Min- At the end of the war General Henry UAV known as Red Wagon did not fare istry ordered 420 such aircraft, known as Hap Arnold, the chief of America’s well, and funding went instead into a fast, the Queen Bee. This gave rise to the word army air forces declared: We have just high-altitude plane that later became drone , which is still used to describe un- won a war with a lot of heroes ying known as the SR-71 Blackbird, and the rst manned planes. But this was a rare suc- around in planes. The next war may be Corona surveillance satellites. cess. More often, UAVs were defeated by fought by airplanes with no men in them But America’s air force continued to the immaturity of the available technol- at all. It was not to be. The advent of nu- experiment, converting a small jet- ogy, changing needs, soaring costs and, clear weapons relaxed the need for pin- powered target drone, the Firebee, into an above all, the successful development of point accuracy, but early American cruise unmanned spy plane called the Lightning rival technologies. missiles designed to carry them such as Bug. This was launched from another the navy’s Regulus and air force’s Mata- plane, took photographs of its target, and Pilots wanted dor su ered from the perennial problem released a parachute upon its return so it For decades a human pilot’s eyes, sense of of guidance. The initial launch using rock- could be picked up by a helicopter. It was balance and hands were simply the best ets upset the gyroscopes, and radio guid- own over China in 1964 and then used in way to guide a ying machine, stay on ance was unreliable because vacuum the Vietnam war. It was also used as bait course and cope with problems. Orbiting tubes su ered under high acceleration. to activate North Vietnamese anti-aircraft satellites were better at spying on ene- Radar mapping was attempted on missile defences and transmit the result- mies than wayward reconnaissance Matador, but su ered from the limita- ing signals to a manned aircraft before be- drones, and rockets destroyed targets tions of 1950s computers. Another UAV, ing destroyed. Navigation progressively more reliably than temperamental ying the Snark, was supposed to have intercon- improved, from inertial systems to a cam- bombs did. The success of modern UAVs tinental range and used a stellar guidance era with a video link, but by 1973 the such as the Predator is not due to a single system that weighed one ton. It is possi- drone still missed about half its targets. technological breakthrough, but to the ble to build a transoceanic missile right The development of integrated circuits combination of innovations in several ar- now, said one o cial at the time, but we and better data links promised a bright fu- eas faster computers, y-by-wire con- don’t know whether it will land in Spain, ture for UAVs in the 1970s. But the shift of trols, satellite navigation, miniaturisation Portugal or France. One test shot ended military attention to the Soviet Union, the of sensors and fast data-transmission up in the Amazon. As nuclear bombs be- refusal of European civil authorities to al- into a workable and a ordable whole. came smaller, ballistic missiles won the low unmanned planes in their airspace, Early attempts at unmanned guidance day. Rockets ew much faster and re- arms-control agreements and the peren- involved gyroscopes. During the rst quired inertial guidance for just a few nial problem of accurate navigation over world war a ying bomb known as the minutes to put the weapon on a predict- long distances conspired against UAVs. Kettering Bug was developed. It was an able ballistic path. And unlike radio-con- Once again, rival technology for manned unmanned biplane with player-piano trolled aircraft, rockets were all but aircraft stole the thunder: stealthy designs1 bellows to power its gyroscope and a cash-register mechanism that calculated distance own by counting the rotations of a propeller-like rotor. But it proved un- reliable and inaccurate, not least because the catapult launches upset the sensitive gyroscopes, and it never saw action. The development of radio (for remote control), radar (to gauge height from the ground) and television (to provide nal aim when nearing a target) revived the idea of ying bombs. In the second world war the American navy experimented with TV-guided drones controlled from another aircraft, but these were little more than sideshows in the Paci c, where air power came mainly from aircraft carriers. In Europe attempts to y old American bombers packed with explosives were a failure. If anything it was the Axis powers that made the breakthrough. The Japa- The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Case history 17
2 to reduce the radar signature, precision weapons such as cruise missiles and la- ser-guided munitions and new sensors such as synthetic-aperture radar that could look through clouds. Ultimately it was Israel, not America, that revived the use of drones in warfare. It had seen at rst hand in the 1973 Arab- Israeli war the damage that modern air defences can cause. In the 1982 Lebanon war, the clever use of small Israeli-built UAVs (incorporating technology de- veloped in America’s disappointing pro- The shape of planes to come? grammes) helped win a startling air campaign in which Syria’s anti-aircraft video back from UAVs. Against the Tali- take o , cross oceans and land without batteries in the Bekaa valley were de- ban and Iraqi insurgents, these problems guidance. More processing power on stroyed and up to 100 Syrian jets shot are manageable. But against a more so- board UAVs will make them more auton- down against no losses for Israel. In care- phisticated state foe, particularly one able omous and reduce the demand for band- fully choreographed moves, drones were to wage electronic warfare, the bene ts of width. Surveillance drones could, for used to spy on the Syrian defences, fool such UAVs could quickly fade. example, alert operators only when an their radars and gather the electronic The technology of UAVs has already area under observation has changed. But intelligence needed to destroy them. moved beyond the Predator, however. UAVs’ growing complexity could make Unlike America, which sought to oper- There are now hundreds of models under them as expensive as manned planes. ate large UAVs at long distances through development, from vast ying wings in- On the ground, control systems are be- hostile air space, Israel’s drones operated tended to stay aloft for ve years using so- coming more sophisticated. As UAVs be- from its own defended territory, and real- lar power (acting more like a satellite than come more autonomous, pilots will be time video was transmitted through short a plane) to tiny bug-like ying machines able to control more aircraft at once, by line-of-sight data links. Israeli UAV tech- that could swarm and interact wirelessly. giving each one occasional instructions. nology became all the rage in the Penta- New displays will fuse video from UAVs gon, especially after the American navy Beyond the Predator seamlessly with computer-generated lost three aircraft over Lebanon in 1983. The cost of building UAVs is falling, mak- synthetic scenery (generated from Predator is in fact derived from a design ing them more attractive for civilian use. It maps and surveillance imagery), to create devised by a former Israel Aircraft Indus- may be a long time, though, before they the feeling of being in a real cockpit, rather tries engineer. It also bene ted from the become as safe and reliable as civil air- than looking through a soda-straw , as advent of the satellite-based Global Po- craft. Allowing UAVs to y alongside air- pilots describe today’s experience. sitioning System in the 1990s, which - liners will require them to develop the Might UAVs eventually replace nally resolved the problem of accurate means to sense and avoid other planes; manned combat aircraft altogether? The navigation. And the Predator’s ability to new air-tra c control systems, based on Centre for Strategic and Budgetary As- stay aloft for a whole day helped to over- electronic rather than voice communica- sessments, an in uential American think- come the main shortcoming of satellites tions, will also be needed. Even in war tank, advocates cutting back the next gen- and jets: they can only glimpse a target, zones, the American air force is starting to eration of manned jets the Joint Strike rather than watch it over time. worry about the danger of aircraft collid- Fighter in favour of unmanned stealth But the Predator is slow and vulner- ing with smaller UAVs. Predator pilots bombers that would operate from aircraft able, requiring full mastery of the air so it say it is not unusual to abort a Hell re mis- carriers. Much of the work of modern air- can loiter without being shot down. Like sile strike when an army helicopter unex- defence involves long-distance missile Israeli machines, it was designed for be- pectedly comes into view. shots rather than acrobatic dog- ghts. nign weather conditions. In the Balkans, Military UAVs are evolving quickly. In And when extreme agility is required, the where Predators were rst deployed, their recent months Predator’s big brother, limiting factor on an aircraft’s perfor- wings tended to ice over. Pilots still say it called Reaper, went into service in Af- mance is often the need to keep the pilot is skittish to y, and UAVs of all kinds ghanistan; it recorded its rst kill in Oc- alive and conscious under high G-forces. are much more prone to crashing. tober. Reaper can y twice as fast as If manned combat aircraft do vanish, Removing the pilot from the cockpit Predator and can carry about ten times however, human pilots will still be means the UAV has to be wirelessly con- the payload, including 500lb precision needed. Even people developing UAVs nected to its controllers by vulnerable bombs. Future UAVs will carry other doubt that computers will entirely re- data links, whether via satellites or weapons, such as air-to-air or anti-radar place the brain in as dynamic, unpredict- ground-based receivers. The Pentagon missiles. Support aircraft such as un- able and horribly human an activity as buys as much as four- fths of its band- manned air-to-air refuelling tankers are war. Can you still win a medal ying a width from commercial satellite oper- already being considered; so too are un- UAV? asks Colonel Montgomery, him- ators, and the launch of a new generation manned wingmen to accompany, and self a jet pilot. You may not have the fear of military-communications satellites is be directed from, manned ghters. of death, but all the other fears are still unlikely to satisfy the demand for capac- Global Hawk, a large reconnaissance there: the fear of the unknown and the ity, given the need to pipe full-motion drone, has demonstrated the ability to fear of failure. 7 18 Electric ships The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007
shipboard power, electricity from multi- ple sources can simply be routed to wher- Making waves ever it is needed at the time. And that is why advanced navies such as Britain’s and America’s are now among the most enthusiastic and earliest adopt- ers of electric-drive ships. As warfare has become more digital, the demand for elec- which proved capable workhorses dur- tricity on board warships has increased. ing the second world war. Some electric- Radar, computers and combat systems Transport: Maritime engineers drive warships used 20% less fuel than now account for as much as 30% of the are already embracing electric conventional geared-turbine vessels. But fuel burned on modern warships. And propulsion for ships and these early examples were large and un- the demand for power could be about to wieldy, and the idea was abandoned. jump dramatically. Some navies are al- electric planes could be next Its recent rebirth has been almost as ready testing rail guns, which use huge rapid as its fall, helped by two related amounts of electricity to produce a mag- CROSS the road from a golf course and developments: power electronics capable netic eld which then accelerates projec- Anext to a verdant, cow- lled eld in of handling huge ows of current, and tiles to many times the speed of sound. Whetstone, a village about as far from the smaller, more powerful electric motors. Even more futuristic and power-hun- sea as it is possible to get in England, there These advances have allowed shipbuild- gry applications are within sight, such as is a ship’s engine-room in a barn. The area ers to reduce the size and weight penalties direct energy weapons that zap enemy is dripping with history Frank Whittle, associated with electric drives. They have ships and electric armour that vapor- one of the inventors of the jet engine, also made possible the development of ises incoming missiles. With such de- used a neighbouring shed for his project totally integrated power systems, which mands for power, some of it only for a but this is not some clanking historical cu- make energy fungible: instead of having fraction of a second, warship designers riosity, such as a steam engine rebuilt by one engine dedicated to driving the ship are keen to have a single system doing all an amateur enthusiast. The whirring gas and another one devoted to generating manner of things. Think of the Enterprise 1 turbine and whining motor being put through their paces in bucolic Leicester- shire are at the cutting edge of maritime engineering. The electric drive being tested there could represent the next leap forward in ship design, as signi cant a technological shift as the one from sail to steam power in the 19th century. Even since the rst intrepid boatman thought to pick up a piece of wood to pad- dle against the current, boat propulsion has been a terribly mechanical a air. Gal- ley slaves pulled on oars; river-boat steam engines turned paddles; and nuclear reac- tors boiled water to drive turbines con- nected to propellers on aircraft carriers and submarines. What makes the experi- mental engine room in Leicestershire so special is that it leaves out the bit that usu- ally links the engine and propeller. In- stead of a propulsion shaft connecting the two, the all-electric drive being tested uses the ship’s engines (turbine or diesel) to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity, which is then routed down thick cables to an electric motor that drives its propellers. The idea of using electricity to drive ships is not new. Almost a century ago, around the time of the emergence of modern ship propulsion, electric drives were seen as viable contenders to com- pete with the then-rising mechanical drives. In 1912 America’s navy built an electrically powered collier, followed a few years later by a string of battleships The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Electric ships 19
draw power as needed from non-essen- tial systems such as in- ight entertain- ment. Military jets, meanwhile, need ever more power for their radar systems or to jam and dazzle those of their enemies. And airborne lasers are on the way. Electrical propulsion is much more dif- cult. But some small experimental air- craft are already ying with electric motors driving their propellers. They are generally powered by high-discharge lith- ium-polymer batteries, which are also be- ing used in some electric cars. Fuel cells 2 in Star Trek , where power is diverted to of Defence. The savings can be huge. are another option. Boeing is testing an the shields, weapons or warp drive as America’s Congressional Research Ser- electrically powered light aircraft which needed. We’re going with electric drive vice reckons that installing electric drives uses both batteries and a fuel cell as because of war ghting need, says Rear- on naval ships can cut fuel use by 10-25%. power sources. Some gliders also have Admiral Kevin McCoy of the American The American navy, which already has a small electric motors as auxiliary propul- navy. We are almost at the limits of tech- handful of electric-drive support ships, sion systems. Just a small amount of elec- nology and a ordability in making im- expects savings of close to 20% for future trical propulsion, carefully applied, can provements in mechanical drives. warships using the technology. dramatically increase the amount of time Electric drives o er other advantages, a glider can stay in the air. And many un- too. By distributing engines and genera- Divert all power to the disco manned aerial vehicles, not to mention tors around a ship, designers can make it Perhaps surprisingly, many of these ad- remote-control aircraft own by hobby- more resistant to damage. Maintenance is vantages also apply to cruise liners, which ists, are electrically powered. easier if some of the engines can be present designers with many of the same Yet all these electrical aircraft are small stopped without halting the ship. And problems as warships. Cruise ships need and have limited range. What of larger air- electric drives can help to cut costs. Al- huge amounts of power. Stephen Payne, craft? Retro tting a large airliner with though they are more expensive, bigger, the chief designer of the Queen Mary 2, electric motors instead of engines would heavier and in theory less e cient than reckons the ship the world’s biggest pas- not be feasible because the power-to- mechanical drives, they use much less senger liner when it was launched in weight ratio of an electric motor cannot fuel. This is because the diesel engines 2003, and tted with an electric-drive sys- compete with that of a jet engine, and and gas turbines commonly used to tem could supply enough electricity for storing and generating the energy needed power ships are most e cient when buzz- a town of 700,000 people. for a long-haul ight would not be possi- ing away constantly at close to their maxi- Much of this power is used to keep pas- ble given the shape and size constraints of mum output. Throttle them back even a sengers happy, running air conditioners existing aircraft. But a blended little, and the amount of energy obtained during hot Caribbean days, for instance, wing an aircraft in which the fuselage is for each barrel of fuel burned falls and powering discos and cinemas in the a at, tail-less structure resembling a giant sharply. That does not matter for ships evenings. Then, once all the passengers wing could provide huge e ciency that potter along all day and night at the have gone to bed, the power can be routed gains and may form the basis of future air- same speed from one port to another; down to the propellers for a high-speed liners. Coincidentally, this shape would their engines can be run at their most e - dash to the next port. The technology is also lend itself to centrally placed genera- cient setting all the time. But in the navy, also being applied in cargo shipping. tors, which could be gas turbines or fuel few ships have that luxury. Makhlouf Benatmane of Converteam, cells, driving electric fans or pusher-pro- By some estimates, American navy one of the leading designers of electric pellers distributed along the back edge of ships spend 80% of their time travelling at drives for ships, reckons that almost two- the wing, or blended into the body. half speed, which requires barely one- thirds of lique ed natural-gas carriers These propellers could be driven by eighth of the power needed to propel a now being built have electric drives. superconducting motors, which can gen- ship at top speed. But this requires them to These cost about 4% more than the steam erate three times the torque of a conven- burn almost as much fuel as they would turbines that are traditionally used, but tional motor of the same weight and when going much faster. By using an elec- o er fuel savings of 10% or more, he says. power input, according to a paper pub- tric drive of the sort that is purring away Now that electrical propulsion is being lished in August in the journal Supercon- in Leicestershire, ships can re up their en- taken seriously in ships, not to mention ductor Science and Technology by Philippe gines one at a time and run each at its trains and cars, can electric drives defy Masson and his colleagues at Florida State most economical throttle setting. gravity and remake air travel? In some University. American researchers are Take Britain’s newest warships, the ways they are already doing so. Manufac- working on superconducting technology Type 45 destroyers, which will be turers of civil and military jets are collabo- for maritime propulsion, which would powered by the system now being tested rating on projects to add more electrically leapfrog the British electric-drive system. in Whetstone. Each one will have four en- powered devices to aircraft, such as land- Just as the earliest aircraft owed much to gines, half as many as the ships they are ing gear and aps. These are lighter and boat-building techniques at the start of replacing, and usually only one will be more reliable than the hydraulic and me- the 20th century, the same might be true running, says Paul Norton of the Ministry chanical systems now in use and could of electric-drive aircraft in the 21st. 7 20 Retail surveillance The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007
store’s transaction log to determine the ef- fectiveness of store layout, product x- Watching as you shop tures and other variables. In-store designs and marketing campaigns that work can be identi ed and improved upon, and those that do not can be replaced with something more pro table. Retailers, it seems, are buying the idea that by watch- that tracks the trajectory and behaviour ing customers while they shop what of hot blobs when they enter its eld of might be called retail surveillance and Retailing: Big shops are using vision; this approach is 95% accurate, says redesigning their shops accordingly, they elaborate technology to monitor Chris Precious of Irisys.) All this informa- can get people to spend more. tion can then be used to predict how and in uence the behaviour of many tills will be needed up to an hour in On the shop oor their customers advance and monitor average waiting One of the largest customer-monitoring times and queue lengths. In Tesco’s case, a projects undertaken so far is PRISM (or N A recent British television commer- line longer than one shopping unit trig- Pioneering Research for an In-Store Met- Icial, John McEnroe, a veteran tennis star, gers the opening of another till. Sir Terry ric ), a collaboration between Nielsen is seen racing his long-time rival Bjorn Leahy, Tesco’s boss, said last year that the Media, a market-research rm, the In- Borg around a Tesco supermarket. After monitoring system had reduced waiting store Marketing Institute, based in Chi- arriving in the checkout queue just ahead time for customers and helped to boost cago, and a consortium of consumer- of his opponent, Mr McEnroe is dis- the rm’s pro ts. goods manufacturers and retailers includ- traught to see an employee appear and Tesco is not the only retailer using tech- ing Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and open another till, giving Mr Borg the up- nology to keep tabs on people in its stores. Wal-Mart. The project, which completed per hand. The advertisment ends with a Mr Precious says Price Chopper, an Amer- its rst big trial in September, involved the reference to Tesco’s one in front initia- ican grocery chain, is in the process of in- use of sensors at the entrance and exits tive, which aims to reduce waiting times troducing Smartlane; and Marks & and in some of the aisles of 160 stores by opening additional tills whenever Spencer, a British shopping chain, uses Iri- across America. These sensors recorded there is more than one customer waiting sys’s infra-red sensors, as does Abercrom- data on customer-tra c patterns, to at a checkout. This scheme has been run- bie & Fitch, an American fashion chain. which was added further information re- ning for many years, but Tesco recently Brickstream, a supplier of customer-mon- corded by human observers. By compar- updated it by investing in customer-mon- itoring systems based on dual-lens cam- ing the resulting data with sales itoring technology supplied by Irisys, a eras, which are more accurate than information, it was then possible to gain British company. single-lens cameras in tracking and count- insight into shoppers’ behaviour. The system, called Smartlane, has two ing applications, counts big retail chains Preliminary results from the PRISM elements: sensors by the doors count the including Toys R Us, O ce Depot and programme included the nding that number of people entering and leaving Walgreens among its clients. two-thirds of shoppers who made a visit the shop, and sensors by the tills work out Rather than monitoring queue to the salty-snacks aisle made a purchase, how fast the queues are moving and how lengths, however, Brickstream’s system, but the people visiting the dairy aisle many shopping units groups of peo- called BehaviorIQ, is used by retailers to were far less likely to buy something. ple, such as families or couples, who will gather data on where their customers go, When observational data on the number make one transaction between them are where and how long they stop, and how of children present during a shopping trip standing in each queue. (Shopping units they react to di erent products. This in- was taken into account, the results were are identi ed using an infra-red sensor formation can then be compared with the even more detailed: the PRISM results 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Retail surveillance 21 Shoppers are not just being monitored by cameras and sensors sometimes speech is recorded, too.
2 showed that although children took part at Northwestern University, customers of promotions. They can even collect in only 13% of food-shopping trips, shop- are generally willing to give up some per- competitive intelligence by program- pers bought more when children were sonal information if they feel they are get- ming the system to search for the names with them. Purchase of seasonal items ting some bene t in return. Rather than of rival retailers, says Chris Etter, the chief was two and a half times more likely with seeing customer monitoring as an inva- executive of Recordant. children in tow, but surprisingly there sion of privacy, he considers it a means of Unlike systems based on video cam- was no correlation found between the making shopping a more pleasant experi- eras or sensors, Recordant’s technology is presence of children on a shopping trip ence for time-compressed (ie, busy) required to notify customers explicitly and higher spending on sweets. consumers. These systems, he says, are that their conversations are being re- With this kind of ne-grained data, not a matter of Big Brother , but rather a corded. To this end, the recording devices says George Wishart, the head of Niel- means of gaining insight and under- include a small video screen which dis- sen’s in-store division, retailers can adjust standing motives . plays a message informing shoppers store layouts and sta ng levels accord- what is going on. Mr Etter admits that ingly. Although retailers think they know Listening in both employees and customers have ex- how to position products in a way that Shoppers are not just being monitored by pressed worries about privacy and have will maximise sales, says Peter Hoyt of cameras and heat sensors, however; shown some resistance to the devices. But the In-store Marketing Institute, the sci- sometimes their speech is being recorded, he likens this to the initial disquiet over ence of adjacency is not a science. With too. Recordant, an in-store monitoring the recording of customer-service tele- PRISM, he says, the gut feeling that peanut company based in Atlanta, provides shop phone calls, something that is now butter should be placed on a shelf next to assistants with digital-audio recorders, to widely accepted. Besides, he says, the sys- jam in order to increase the likelihood of a be worn around their necks, which record tem can provide protection for employees combination purchase can be tested di- all their conversations with shoppers. At who get involved in disputes with frac- rectly against sales data. the end of each day the recording devices tious customers. Best Buy, a big American consumer- are plugged into special docking stations As useful as customer-tracking sys- electronics chain, takes this a step further. and the recordings are uploaded to Recor- tems may be for exonerating harassed It uses Brickstream’s BehaviorIQ cameras dant’s headquarters for analysis. Its soft- sta or minimising shoplifting, however, to collect data on its customers’ behaviour ware trawls the recorded dialogue for their primary objectives are clear. In an patterns and has used this information to particular words or phrases without the age when traditional bricks and mortar divide them into ve customer types need for any human input in order to pro- retailers face sti competition from online young technology enthusiasts, suburban vide accurate information on employee merchants, any means they can use to get mothers, a uent early adopters, family performance and customer behaviour. customers into their shops and buying as men and small-business owners who Recordant says that trials in 40 loca- much as possible is seen as a worthwhile want di erent things. Each group is then tions have proved the value of the tech- investment. Long before the advent of e- provided with an area of the shop de- nology: one retailer was able to show that commerce, Wal-Mart’s founder Sam Wal- signed to meet their needs. there was a 300% increase in sales of pro- ton set out his vision for a successful retail As the technology improves, it is get- ducts recommended by shop assistants to operation: We let folks know we’re inter- ting easier for other retailers to do the customers. By providing precise measure- ested in them and that they’re vital to us same sort of thing. VideoMining, for ex- ments of this kind, the technology allows cause they are, he said. Customer-moni- ample, a spin-out from Pennsylvania State retailers to re ne their training pro- toring systems are underlining just how University, uses a combination of video grammes and evaluate the e ectiveness interested, and just how vital. 7 cameras and software to capture and ana- lyse thousands of hours of footage of cus- tomer behaviour. As well as providing information about customer behaviour, the rm’s software can also determine each shopper’s sex, age range and ethnic group with an accuracy of around 80%, says Je Hershey of VideoMining. The re- sult is an activity map which can help retailers to identify the factors that drive higher sales. The system can even be pro- grammed to detect the characteristic be- haviour of shoplifters. Inevitably, all this raises concerns about privacy. Counting customers with motion sensors as they enter a supermar- ket is one thing, but sorting them into so- cial or racial groups using video analysis is another. Mr Hershey responds that none of the footage or information about individual shoppers is stored. Besides, says John Greening of the Medill School Brickstream maps a supermarket’s hot spots 22 Brain scan The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Cyberlawyer 2.0
the importance of copyright limits to be a no brainer , Mr Lessig says legislators Lawrence Lessig is known for his are clueless about an issue that any ra- work at the interface between tional policymaker has no problem un- technology and law. Why is he derstanding. Swayed by campaign contributions from vested interests such shifting his focus to corruption? as lm studios, music companies and book publishers America’s Congress HEN working as a clerk in the early has lengthened copyright terms 11 times W1990s for Antonin Scalia, a Supreme in the past four decades, he observes. Court Justice, a twenty-something law And Mr Lessig sees the same sorts of graduate became frustrated by the limita- interference in other domains, such as tions of the creaking mainframe technol- the in uence of sugar lobbies on govern- ogy used by the court to publish its ment nutrition boards and that of rulings a system called Atex that is well pharmaceutical lobbies on doctors. I felt known to veteran journalists. So he and I was spending too much time on the sub- another clerk made a presentation about stance of copyright, as if that was the is- the virtues of personal computers to the sue, he says with palpable frustration. Supreme Court’s technology committee. I’m really getting tired of telling this The verdict from its chairman, Justice story. It’s not rocket science. But govern- Sandra Day O’Connor, was swift. I want ments always get it wrong. What links PCs on everyone’s desk on Monday, she these issues is that there is so much ruled. This was more than a one-time ju- money involved in protecting them. dicial victory. The incident also hinted at a legal career in which Lawrence Lessig Technically legal today one of America’s leading cyberlaw To use an analogy from the world of com- experts would always argue on the side puting, having failed to get a piece of soft- of technological progress. ware (copyright law) to run properly, Mr Today the 46-year-old is a professor at Lessig believes that the problem is caused Stanford Law School and founder of its by aws in the underlying operating sys- Centre for Internet and Society. He is also tem (the political process). He has yet to a board member of the Electronic Fron- reveal exactly how he hopes to expose tier Foundation, a internet lobby group, and reduce the inappropriate in uence of an avid blogger and a proli c columnist. money on important matters such as He is the driving force behind Creative copyright law and health something Commons, a non-pro t organisation that that, it must be said, he is hardly the rst promotes the use of copyright licences to attempt. But it is sure to involve a big that encourage the sharing of creative dose of technology. Mr Lessig’s work has works, extending the principles of open- always been inextricably linked with it, source software into other elds. But ulti- whether teaching law students, writing mately Mr Lessig’s real skill is bridging books or promoting innovation. It all be- the gap between law and technology, en- gan when he learned to program on a capsulated in his dictum code is law . mainframe computer as a high-school Mr Lessig has concentrated for a de- student in Pennsylvania. After that, he re- cade on copyright law and its interaction calls, I started buying things at Radio with the internet. So he left some people Shack and began tinkering. feeling confused earlier this year when There was no question, however, of he announced a new focus for his cam- this hobby becoming a full-time career. paigning e orts: tackling corruption. Not Years before, during the Watergate scan- everyone understood that this change in dal, Mr Lessig’s uncle had inspired him to academic and activist emphasis is more pursue law. Richard Cates, the associate of a shift in strategy than in substance. special general counsel to the House Judi- For years Mr Lessig has presented legal ciary Committee during Richard Nixon’s arguments against excessive copyright impeachment hearings, told his nephew extensions. But he says lawmakers are so that law was the only place where reason in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they controls power. Though Mr Lessig’s later do not even realise that counter-argu- battle to reverse copyright extensions ments to copyright extensions exist. Even suggested otherwise, the young man de- though Britain’s Gowers Review, pub- cided that law was the career for him. lished in 2005, argues against such exten- He remained wedded to this choice sions, and eminent economists such as even as his views in other areas changed. the late Milton Friedman have declared A church-going Protestant who belonged 1 The Economist Technology Quarterly December 8th 2007 Brain scan 23 Copyrights will not expire so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.
2 to the National Teen Age Republicans, Mr which makes them, in e ect, perpetual. into the premise unless he thinks that Lessig was the youngest member of the The constitution gives Congress the Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Je erson Pennsylvania delegation to the 1980 Re- power to promote the progress of sci- started the corruption, she says. publican Convention. After studying eco- ence and useful arts, by securing for lim- As he prepares to embark upon his nomics and management at the ited times to authors and inventors the new campaign, Mr Lessig whose con- University of Pennsylvania in Philadel- exclusive right to their respective writings versation frequently sounds footnoted, phia, Mr Lessig entered Cambridge Uni- and discoveries. Having started as a re- so often does he credit the book or person versity in England as an economics newable 14-year term in the 18th century, who inspired the point he is making is scholar his strongest chance at gaining American copyright terms now endure already examining the model used by admission, he calculated but with no in- for the life of the artist plus 70 years. And organisations such as MAPLight.org and tention of taking a degree in economics. where copyright once concerned only an the Sunlight Foundation, both of which It was a total bait and switch, he says, elite class of authors and publishers, the provide databases that enable American with a rare grin of mischievousness. In- internet now makes it a daily issue for voters to see which groups fund particu- stead Mr Lessig ended up taking a degree millions around the globe. For people cre- lar politicians, what their voting records in philosophy. ating videos, digitising books and mash- are, which companies they own shares While in Europe he travelled several ing up online content of all kinds, it’s in, and so on. These are good examples of times to the Soviet Union, at times smug- impossible not to bump up against copy- how technology can promote transpa- gling in heart-valves for Jewish refuse- right, says Mr Lessig. rency. Technology will be a crucial part niks. Today Mr Lessig may complain that So in 2001 he founded Creative Com- of solving this problem, he says, because the Democratic Party excessively listens mons, o ering everyone an alternative to it challenges the balance of power . to Hollywood on copyright issues, but standard copyrights through various gra- he is no longer the fervent Republican of dations of permission for use (right down Mr Lessig goes to Washington his teenage years. He is a card-carrying to no rights reserved ). Before Creative He is also arguing his case in speeches member of the American Civil Liberties Commons, there was no easy way to do and on his blog, with the hopes of inspir- Union, quotes Al Gore and bemoans all that, says Jonathan Zittrain, professor ing and encouraging others to participate how far George Bush has strayed from the of internet governance and regulation at in his campaign, in a manner akin to constitutional powers granted to him. Oxford University in England. Today Wikipedia. If you can architect the pro- After returning to America and attend- more than 100m online documents sport blem into bite-sized chunks and then ing law school at Yale, Mr Lessig began Creative Commons licences in place of motivate volunteers, the results can be his legal career. He worked as a clerk for the standard copyright symbol. impressive, he says, noting that Wikipe- Judge Richard Posner in the Seventh Cir- But in spite of this and three copyright dia has grown to be one of the internet’s cuit Court of Appeals and later for Justice cases Mr Lessig has brought to court in- ten most popular sites. If we mobilise Scalia. He went on to teach at the Univer- cluding arguing the Eldred case before the people to think of [corruption] as a track- sity of Chicago before moving to Yale and Supreme Court copyright terms have able problem, we can use this technology then Harvard, teaching what was then a not been rolled back. The Supreme Court to change Washington, he declares. His relatively obscure subject cyberlaw at ruled that copyright extensions do not vi- supporters reckon that if anyone can do all three law schools. In 1997 this led olate the spirit of the constitution, pro- it, Mr Lessig can. Whether speaking to a Judge Thomas Pen eld Jackson to ap- vided they are still for limited terms , legal, policy or technology crowd, says point Mr Lessig as the special master in and rejected Mr Lessig’s argument that Mr Zittrain, Larry can take the incom- the antitrust case against Microsoft. He such extensions can have the e ect of prehensible debates from academia and was later removed from the case after an limiting freedom of speech. put them on a bumper sticker. 7 appeals court ruled that the powers he Although some see his shift from had been granted were broader than copyright to corruption as a sudden O er to readers those allowed by the rules governing spe- change of heart, Mr Lessig’s writings Reprints of this special report are available at a cial masters, and he was asked instead to have long drawn a connection between price of £3.50 plus postage and packing. le a brief as a friend of the court . The the two. In a 2004 article about the Eldred A minimum order of ve copies is required. case established Mr Lessig as one of case called How I Lost the Big One , Mr America’s experts in technology law. Lessig bemoaned that copyrights have Corporate o er In 2000 he switched coasts and not expired, and will not expire, so long Customisation options on corporate orders of 500 or more are available. Please contact us to moved to Stanford Law School, in the as Congress is free to be bought to extend discuss your requirements. heart of Silicon Valley, where he teaches them again, adding that congressmen today. By this time he had become in- are, indirectly, defending their gravy Send all orders to: volved in the case launched by Eric train of contributions . The Rights and Syndication department Eldred, a literacy advocate known for Not everyone agrees with Mr Lessig’s 26 Red Lion Square making out-of-copyright books available view that industry money has had an un- London WC1R 4HQ free online, who was contesting the 20- due in uence on copyright. A few wins in Tel +44 (0)20 7576 8000 year copyright extension granted in the the legislature do not constitute massive Fax +44 (0)20 7576 8492 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Exten- corruption , says Hilary Rosen, who for e-mail: [email protected] sion Act. Mr Lessig has no beef with years locked horns with Mr Lessig when copyrights per se, but he objects on con- she was head of the Recording Industry stitutional, educational and creative Association of America, a body that rep- grounds to their continual extension, resents the music industry. I don’t buy