THE DAMNEDEST THING

I just came across the damnedest thing. Apparently, drug-placebo experiments may not work because quantum entanglement makes the placebo the drug. Worse yet, entanglement also seems to confuse the questions of who is the patient, who is the practitioner, and can you tell them apart from the remedy.

Or so says Lionel Milgrom of the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College of
Science, Technology and Medicine, South Kensington, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom. In the April 2006 issue of the Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine, he published a paper called "Entanglement, Knowledge, and Their Possible Effects on the Outcomes of Blinded Trials of Homeopathic Provings." Here's his abstract:

In two recent studies of double-blind placebo-controlled homeopathic provings, entanglement was reported to have occurred between verum and placebo arms of the trials. This contrasts directly with the entanglement-disrupting effects of blinding, recently proposed as the reason for the failure of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to demonstrate unequivocally the efficacy of homeopathy. It is proposed here that such entanglement between remedy and placebo during these double-blind placebo controlled provings is the direct result of the blinding process.

Method: A previously developed theoretical model of entanglement in homeopathy among patient, practitioner, and remedy (called PPR entanglement) was used in this investigation.

Results: In agreement with the results from the proving studies, the model predicts that application of the double-blind RCT methodology to homeopathic provings leads to entanglement between both remedy and placebo arms of the trial.

Conclusions: These theoretical findings can be understood in terms of the act of blinding leading to loss of information because of quantum-like state superposition of the verum and placebo proving groups. This is compared to conclusions drawn from the well-known double-slit experiment of quantum physics, and quantum information processing. It leads to a suggestion for testing entanglement in homeopathic provings.

BIOMETRICS

How do you prove you are who you say you are? Once upon a time (think of all the old movies you've seen), it was enough to be able to show a letter from someone of repute. Later, various kinds of ID cards came into play, eventually with photographs (think of driver's licenses). Tattoos have been used. If you were charged with a crime, photographs again came into play (mug shots), as did fingerprints and--before that--the sizes of body parts (the Bertillion system).

The advent of computers gave the basic question a new urgency, and the standard answer so far has been the use of usernames and passwords. Even "universal authentication," on the list of Technology Review's ten emerging technologies for 2006, does not get beyond this. But people are lazy and write their passwords down (often on the backs of keyboards!). Or they choose passwords that are too easy to guess. It has long been realized that something better was needed, preferably something that was unique to the individual and could not be stolen, imitated, or faked. As Paul Bleicher, "Biometrics Comes of Age," Applied Clinical Trials (December 2005), tells us, in the 1990s a number of approaches--using the patterns in the eye's iris and retina, palm prints, fingerprint detectors (with sensors to make sure the finger hadn't been chopped off the hand), voiceprints, handwriting, and facial configurations--had reached the demonstration stage. People in the field were expecting one or more of these approaches to soon play a major role in computer technology. It didn't happen, for several reasons. The technology can be expensive, and it is not as accurate or as consistent as many people would like. That is, because of dirt on fingers or scanners, changes in lighting, noise levels, and so on, sometimes it says you aren't who you really are (false negative or FN) and sometimes it says you are when you aren't (false positive or FP, and just what a hacker would love to see).

But the technology remains promising, its use is increasing steadily if slowly, and it has continued to advance, especially after the War on Terror and the rising tide of identity theft added even more urgency to the need for secure identification. You can now buy fingerprint readers for your personal computer for less than $50. And governments are increasingly looking to use biometrics in connection with passports, airport security, and immigration. Jane Dudman, "Biometric Vision," Computer Weekly (July 19, 2005), notes that "Like other countries Great Britain is looking to introduce biometric identifiers into passports as a way of increasing control and in line with demands from the U.S., although its deadline has slipped. Already under way in Great Britain is the Iris Recognition Immigration System being run by French firm Sagem. This project is being implemented initially at Heathrow's terminals 2 and 4, where regular travellers who are not European Union passport holders will be able to bypass queues by registering their iris patterns."

The questions of accuracy and reliability have led some researchers to work on systems that exploit multiple unique body features. Robert Buderi, "Me, Myself, and Eye," Technology Review (February 2005), reports on Anil Jain of Michigan State University, who is developing three different multifactor systems. "In one of Jain's systems, a pair of cameras gauges a subject's height. A close-up is then taken of her face, and software analyzes it to determine her gender and eye color and classify her ethnicity as either Asian or non-Asian. This data is then combined with that from a primary biometric [such as voiceprint, fingerprint, or iris scan]. Most face recognition systems use 2-D images and can be foiled by changes in illumination, head position, and expression." Jain's second system uses a laser to scan a person's face and construct a 3D model that can be matched, using "information about anchor points such as the tip of the nose and corners of the eye to conduct a preliminary search of database images. ... Because it captures surface geometry, the 3-D system works independently of lighting changes and head position. Jain's third system combines hand geometry, face recognition, and fingerprint matching."

I wonder if anyone is thinking of building a fingerprint scanner that could be incorporated into the buttons of a keyboard? Then one could type username and password as usual, and the system could check to make sure they actually matched the typist. An interesting wrinkle on this is that though different touch typists will use the same finger-key combinations, those of us who are not touch typists are likely to use different finger-key combinations, which could become part of the metric. However, this would be a hardware-intensive solution to the problem. A software-intensive alternative is to use typing patterns or "keystroke biometrics."

For the very latest, visit the Biometric Consortium, which "serves as a focal point for research, development, testing, evaluation, and application of biometric-based personal identification/verification technology." Its September 2006 conference is focused on "Biometric Technologies
for Homeland Security, Identity Management, Border Crossing, Electronic Commerce, and other applications."

THE PDA AS EMERGING TECH?

Many journalists remember the 1983 Tandy 100 fondly. It had 8K of RAM (later upgraded to 24K), a 3 MHz processor, a text editor, and a 300-baud modem. That doesn't sound like much today, but it weighed only 4 pounds, could stand being dropped, had a full-size keyboard, ran for 20 hours on 4 AA batteries, and did what it did quite well. Perhaps it should be no surprise that some are still being used to write small text documents (such as a journalist's notes), transfer the documents to more modern desktops or laptops, and even send email.

It also represented a major step in the evolution of the personal computer toward the small, modern Personal Digital Assistant or PDA. When the Tandy 100 came on the market, desktop machines were about the same size as today, although much less capable. Hard drives were tiny (10-20 Megs) and expensive, and 5.25" floppy disks held at most 360K of data. Portable computers were better known as "luggables," since they were the size of small suitcases. That all changed, but so did our idea of what a portable computer should be able to do. Today we want our portables to do word processing, spreadsheets, images, contact lists, email, games, and more. We want greater storage capacity and speed. We want wireless connectivity. And thanks to advances in chip design and manufacture, we can fit it all in a tiny package. (One popular brand is called the "Palm" for good reason.)

So we do. And many are not happy with the result, for the keyboard is too small to use, writing on the screen with a stylus is chancy, the screen is tiny, and the batteries don't last nearly as long (all those added functions require more power). The PDA industry sold about 10 million PDAs in 2003 (down from 12 million in 2002). The decline is credited to the availability of cell phones with many PDA functions, which indeed seems to reflect a trend to merge the two devices--as well as to add functions such as the ability to take and email digital photos. According to PCWorld, the trend was still going strong late in 2004. Betanews says the trend continued in 2005, though other sources had more rosy statistics. Click here for a 2006 report.

Surely sales of 10 million PDAs per year must mean the PDA has emerged? But the figures are for the world market, and in the US alone, over half of all households have at least one cell phone. Globally, cell phones sell well over half a billion units every year.

What's the difference? Phones start with smaller keypads, they're voice-oriented, and they need less memory. The basic orientation is communications, not data. This remains true when a phone adds PDA and camera functions, although then the keyboard and screen issues become important again. Resolving those issues might well mean a complete merger of PDA and phone and a true emergence of "personal electronics" technology.

Folding keyboards have been available for PDAs for years, but they are an excellent example of "OMDT" (One More Darn Thing) syndrome, which Claire Tristram, in "Handhelds of Tomorrow" (Technology Review, April 2002), alludes to when describing a gearhead festooned with gizmos. The article suggests that the proliferation of different devices is a problem. What is needed is a single device that meets all the needs of its users. It would combine PDA and phone functions, have a large screen such as the flexible one described, be able to survive dropping on a floor, and have a thumb keyboard.

Today, just two years later, the basic needs have not changed, though the specific form of the solution has. The screen, for instance, may be realized as electronic paper in the near future. Another possibility is the head-mounted display. Still another is the "fog screen" demonstrated in 2003 and already the basis of a new business, FogScreen,com. The keyboard may take the form of the "virtual keyboard" described by Tomasi et al. in "Full-Size Projection Keyboard for Handheld Devices," Communications of the ACM, July 2003). The latter two both minimize OMDT syndrome and promise a simple device that, in a sense, expands as needed. If they work as their fans expect, the PDA may emerge to the point of replacing cell phones, laptops, and even desktops with a single "personal electronics" package. The only way to improve on it might be to give the package a direct brain interface--which is actually being worked on; we'll get to it later on.

BUT... It just may not be fair to call the PDA an "emerging" technology. The sales figures cited above indicate that "failing" or "declining" or "outmoded" technology might be more like it. On March 2, 2006, CNET.com.au published "HP: Pen-Based PDA Market on Death Bed," by Asher Moses, which begins with: "The traditional pen-based PDA market will evaporate within the next four years without significant product innovation, according to Hewlett-Packard (HP)[HP's Vice-President for Consumer Products and Mobile Business Group in the Asia-Pacific region, Chin-Teik See, interviewed in Hong Kong]. The company will therefore continue to focus the majority of its handheld efforts on converged smart phone devices, relegating its traditional PDAs to the entry-level consumer and SMB [small-medium business] markets." The remaining market is small, and it is shrinking 30% per year.

So the PDA is dead, or nearly so. Smart phones, on the other hand, are going strong and adding new functions almost every month. HP's own iPAQ rw6800 and hw6900 do email and "the former is being marketed as a portable entertainment device... Some of the standout multimedia features on the rw6800 include a built-in 2.0 mega-pixel camera, FM tuner, MP3 playback software and dual stereo speakers."

HISTORY'S LONGEST CAST

Fly fishermen, eat your hearts out!

I have got such a daughter! When she heard the first private spacelaunch was coming up, and accepting cargo (see http://www.zerog-space.com) for $50 a gram (a business card weighs about a gram), she called to ask me what I had. That was just before Father's Day. I thought a moment and recalled having, years ago, tied a few size 22 dry flies. I found them, and I figured that if I made a small enough fly rod…

In due time, I will get the cargo back with a certificate assuring everyone that my fly did in fact reach orbit. And I will be the proud possessor of the longest cast in all of history!

I will post a picture when I can.

WHAT IS AN "EMERGING TECHNOLOGY"?

It's that time of year again. My classes start August 28, and I am now preparing the lectures for the Emerging Technologies course, which I teach in "hybrid" mode, meaning I post the lectures and discussion questions and assign papers. Attendance is optional (click here for the syllabus), meaning that I am in the classroom and students who wish to discuss the material can show up. It seems to work! And I get to post the lectures here in my blog too. In due time, they will even be available as a cheap e-book.

So what is an "emerging technology"?

One might think that an emerging technology is just a brand-new technology. Someone has just emerged from a lab with a new invention. The next step is to turn it into a product, start to sell it, and garner great wealth. Surely that must have been the dream of Charles Babbage, who in 1821 invented the first genuine computer, the "Difference Engine."

But it is hardly that simple. A great many inventions never reach the product stage; they may, like Babbage's machine, require the invention of additional technologies (such as electronics) before they can become practical. In addition, many have been turned into products that failed to sell (or failed to sell well) or to continue to sell. Who now remembers eight-track audio tape? (Click here for the eight-track story.) The failures to succeed--or to emerge--can happen for many reasons. Among those reasons are:

• The public doesn't think the product is as nifty as the inventor does.
  
• A competing product has features the public prefers.
  
• The public likes the new product but not enough to pay the price or to discard what they are used to.
  
• The public likes it, but it has awkward features or is not quite reliable enough.
  
• A still newer technology displaces the product before it can become established.
  
• The inventor does not have sufficient funds for marketing, or for fighting legal battles.
  
• Additional technologies are needed to make the product more functional or appealing.
  
• The technology is fine, but the right product has not yet been found.
  

The Segway Human Transporter is a product built on the underlying technology of computer-controlled gyroscopic stabilization. Will it succeed or emerge? As a product, it's nifty enough, but it has problems, for legal authorities are banning it from both roadways and sidewalks! On the other hand, legal authorities (police and security forces) are also finding uses for it. The underlying technology is also being used for a stair-climbing wheelchair, and Bombardier is thinking about a one-wheeled motorcycle called the Embrio. So even if the Segway itself (or its consumer version) does not emerge, the technology may.

What kinds of technologies are we going to look at here? Some are fresh from the lab. Some have been around for awhile, perhaps waiting for the development of other "enabling" technologies. Most have appeared on one or more of the several lists of up-and-coming technologies that appear each year.

Some of those lists are shorter than others. In May 2003, David Pescovitz wrote "Six Technologies that Will Change the World" for Business 2.0. One of his six, "God's Ink-Jet," is essentially an ink-jet printer that uses instead of ink a mix of cells, growth factors, and gel and can lay down multiple layers to generate a three-dimensional organ-type structure. If it works as described, it could be very valuable in medicine. But it is not entirely new, for it is a variation on existing devices, 3D printers, used for "rapid prototyping." These devices are already successful in industrial settings. They are too expensive for home use, but prices are dropping. Once they are cheap enough, new uses will be developed, which invites us to imagine what we might do with one if we had one at home. 3D printers will be considered later on.

Pescovitz also mentions "Robots you can relate to," meaning robots with facial expressions such as Kismet, faster airplanes, tiny fuel cells for PDAs and cell phones, electronic paper for thin, flexible computer displays, and swarms of tiny sensors for tracking both goods and people.

A second list comes out every year from Technology Review. The latest is "10 Emerging Technologies" (March/April 2006):

• Comparative interactomics (analyzing metabolic interactions in the body to find new drugs)
  
• Nanomedicine (using tiny particles to guide drugs to cancer cells)
  
• Epigenetics (finding cancer by looking for changes in DNA)
  
• Cognitive radio (wireless that shifts frequencies to find the best signal)
  
• Nuclear reprogramming (making stem cells without embryos)
  
• Diffusion tensor imaging (a new way to see what's going on in the brain)
  
• Universal authentication (a privacy-protecting ID system)
  
• Nanobiomechanics (studying changes in the mechanical properties of cells to understand disease)
  
• Pervasive wireless (standards and protocols so multiple wireless devices can communicate without problems)
  
• Stretchable silicon (flexible chips, which may soon make wearable computers a reality)
  

Where the Pescovitz list is product-oriented, this one is less specific, focusing on the technologies that make products possible. For our purposes here, we will pay more attention to products and we will not get into the biological areas.

Intriguingly, neither list includes a technology that most of us use every day and that might be considered very well established. As discussed by Wade Roush in "Search Beyond Google" (Technology Review, March 2004), this is the technology of the computer search engine, which lies behind Google, Yahoo Search, and other search "products." The basic idea is fairly simple: A list of everything to be found on the Internet, suitably sorted and indexed. Someone types "search technology" into the Google box, and they promptly get a list of web sites that contain both the words, "search" and "technology," including Google's own PigeonRank spoof of its PageRank technology. However, the amount of material available on the Internet grows with such extraordinary speed that several generations of search technology have already proven inadequate to the task and been replaced. The current reigning technology is Google's PageRank, but it does fail to find everything one might want in a search, and it very often fails to return the most desirable results first. Many researchers--including Google's own--are therefore struggling to develop new methods. See Charles Ferguson's "Google and the Coming Search Wars, Revisited," Technology Review, April 2005, and Javed Mostafa's "Seeking Better Web Searches," Scientific American, February 2005. Most recently, Microsoft has proposed to field its own search engine, with claims that it will outdo Google and increase Microsoft's ad revenue.

It may be impossible to develop a technology that can find everything out there, for there is just too much. The new methods differ chiefly in how they prioritize what they find (how often key words appear on a page, how many other pages link to a page, which other pages link to a page) or arrange the results on the screen (lists or clusters) or let users pose questions (key words or sentences).

Google is not only trying to improve search technology to stay on top of the heap. In terms of our list of why technologies fail to emerge, it is addressing the second item by adding features. It is looking for new kinds of information to search: Look at Google's Options page for Google Scholar. Or Maps, News, Froogle (shopping), and more. Try Book Search to see how Google has been scanning millions of library books to make their contents available for searching and printing; it has signed partnerships with several major university libraries (Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Michigan) and the New York Public Library. The potential benefits are huge, for the project promises to make available to all materials which have in the past required visits to distant repositories. But there are problems as well, including potential copyright infringement, finding a way to make the process pay, and the process's impact on the nature of libraries. See Wade Roush's "The Infinite Library," Technology Review (May 2005).

So far everything mentioned has dealt with words, and there are a great many images that people want to be able to search for. One solution to the problem is attaching descriptive tags, but another involves image-recognition software. According to Gary Stix, "A Farewell to Keywords," Scientific American (July 2006), researchers are developing software that will let one take a picture with a cell phone, send the image file to a server via the Internet, and get back web pages with information on what is in the picture. Walk down the street, snap a pic of a restaurant, and a moment later be looking at the menu or a review of the food and service. Go to a museum, snap a pic of a statue or painting, and read all about it. Look at the fifth item on the list of reasons why technologies may not emerge and consider that this is the sort of technology that might make some applications of "augmented reality" (see Nov 7 lecture) non-starters.

The following list will take you to several of today's competing search engines. Will Google's PageRank stay on top? Or will a new technology emerge to replace it? When you examine the results so far, what do you think? Is there an obvious choice? Or is something more needed?

• Google
  
• Vivisimo
  
• Mooter
  
• Ask.Com
  
• Yahoo Search
  
• Windows Live
  

Now: Where is it all going? Everything mentioned above is pretty short-term stuff. But technology does not stand still. Every time I teach my Emerging Technologies course, new technologies demand to be covered. And over the years they add up to a lot more than a better search engine or cell phone.

Many people welcome progress, for it brings exciting new products, toys, and abilities. But many people worry about progress too. It destroys jobs, puts companies and industries out of business, threatens morality, and even threatens to destroy "human nature." This is the topic of Joel Garreau's Radical Evolution (Doubleday, 2005). He notes that nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, brain chips that let people control prosthetic limbs and machinery, mental uploads, memory boosters, life extension, genetic engineering, and more offer to change human life drastically. He calls genetic, robotic, information and nano technologies the GRIN technologies and says that they are about to enable engineered humans with such startlingly new capabilities that they may no longer be "human" in any traditional sense. The consequences may be quite utopian or quite catastrophic; Bill Joy ("Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," Wired, April 2000) has written that robotics, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering threaten to make humanity extinct and that research into these areas should therefore be cut short immediately.

People fear potential catastrophes. But the idea of transcending human nature really gives them the willies. The idea that humans might turn themselves into something that isn't really human anymore is frightening. So is the idea of people becoming somehow unnatural, which has driven protests against vaccines, antibiotics, organ transplants, and assisted reproduction, among other technological developments that go against the traditional "natural order." It provides the rhetoric being used against the idea of changing the body with such things as computer implants and genetic engineering. Yet, says Garreau, human nature is not just a matter of doing things the same way we always have. It is human nature to search for meaning, to better ourselves, to be creative, and to devise rituals to validate our actions. Given this, whatever we do with the GRIN (and other) technologies is human nature.

We might also note that in the search for whatever it is that makes humans uniquely human in a world full of our animal cousins, people have suggested communication, speech, tool-using, laughter, and several other things, all of which soon turned out to have parallels in animal behavior. The differences are of degree, not kind. But there is one thing we do that other animals don't: If we have a tool, a language, a religion, a costume, a recipe, a political system, we tinker with it. We change it. We do not leave it alone. Thus, if we wind up changing human nature, well, that's human nature.