Idle Diffractions

Science, Every Week

 

As is often the case, my inspiration for this piece arose from a short opening in the deadlines and an extended travel block: California to New York, originally planned as an overnight flight that turned into a 27-hour saga that then merged into a New York-to-Paris trip. I started this piece while soaring over London as the sun rose on my unplanned back-to-back overnight flights. I finished it on a train, hurtling across southern France.

For those that have been following this set of occasional observations and comments, mostly on optics and/or history; this one is a bit informal. Whenever I am surprised by a topic, I write about it, so that perhaps you can be surprised too.  Here is this week’s surprise.

We are perhaps a bit different in the amount of reading material that seems to flow into the house, much of which I never get past glancing at the cover as I bring it up from the mailbox. Sometimes a topic of debate, “Do we need all these magazines?”  I keep thinking every now and then that one of the teenagers in our household will spontaneously engage with Science or Nature (in some of its many flavors), or The New Yorker, Wired, The Economist, Forbes, National Geographic, Smithsonian, or even Toyota Trails, a monthly for the Land Cruiser enthusiast. So far, these never seem to flow out of the house, forming stacks wherever the floor provides an opening. 

So, as we were exiting the house, I grabbed the recent Science, Economist, and MIT Technology (Google glasses, perhaps a blog in my future, but not today). With a 6-hour layover in Chicago, and not enough sleep to be productive, I actually read this week’s issue of Science cover to cover. Although I’ve been getting Science for over five years, this was a unique experience and seemed worthy of discussion.

I’ve always marveled at Science as a weekly magazine. It somehow exists in a world removed from the optics journals. What I found striking is how it is formatted as an engaging discussion, rather than a report of results. Assuming this is a representative issue, since it was selected at random, I was struck by how far it extended into the social implications of science. As I may have mentioned in a past piece, one of the most influential books in my early reading was Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, whose premise is there are scientists/technologists, and then there is everyone else. This was one of the few cases where I went out a few months back, bought a copy (I seemed to have loaned out my original paperback from some 40+ years ago), and presented it to the older teen with an earnest pitch, but to no avail.

Returning to the main track, here is Science, pages 1477-1606, reporting directly on the influence and I might dare say the impact of science, right now, right outside the window, on the world, with emphasis on world. I am now intrigued to go back to the early stacks, down in the lower level of the house, to see if this is an evolution in the forum. The editors and those who set the vision of this journal are to be commended for their vision. How they are so successful in extracting from the deluge is a mystery to me.

Assuming you are not like me and do not have stacks of unread copies of Science scattered about your abode, let me give you a flavor of this issue to bring context and perhaps inspire you to drift into your local library and read a copy sometime this summer (I’m not sure you can buy this magazine on the newsstand).

As with most of my reading, I engaged from the back to the front. Not sure what that is about, but I thought to repeat it here for the full experience. First (or in the case of the magazine itself last), are the closing set of commercials. They are all urging me to grab my iPad/tablet and check out careers in science, opportunities for women is science (sponsored by L’Oreal, as I like to say, who knew), unusual careers in science, and the all-important (and pricey, if you have ever tried to place an ad for your services in such a place) back cover is urging me to give up on my need for paper and get with it and reset my interaction with information to be exclusively in tablet space. I admit, I haven’t gone there yet, although there appears to be a strange, flat device that I sometimes see buried amongst the latest onslaught of journals in the house. I am beginning to think that this transition, like the Internet itself, is inevitable, and becoming perhaps even a necessary evil, or asset, a point that remains to be seen.

In Science magazine, the title of every article is juxtaposed with the content, which is unusually well engineered to be clear. The title of very single article is clearly meant to impress anyone who happens to be sitting next to you on the airplane, as in, “Look at what they are reading!” An example title is, “The lac Repressor Displays Facilitated Diffusion in Living Cells.” To some extent, this is exactly why I am writing this piece. I actually read this article and felt I had some idea what the message was. How could this be? It is, I believe, the format. Much like Nature, which we are trying to submit to (again), graphics are a dominant use of real estate. Over half of most pages is not a figure I would have extracted from my last PowerPoint talk on the subject, but rather, for lack of a better word, very complete conceptual presentations. The pictures are teaching you what you need to put this information in the context of your life. The other major editorial impact on relevance is that nearly all articles in both Science and Nature are exactly three pages long. Three pages and one of those consists of graphics. It points to the fact that in today’s onslaught, our attention span is very close to three pages, something I should probably note at this point and wrap this up.

As a quick wrap-up, this is what I learned from Vol. 336 of Science:

• Fewer red foxes means more Lyme disease. We have a fox den under our library, which this year produced 5 foxlets, unfortunately, if last year’s outcome is a leading indicator, they have not yet adapted genetically to cars, hence the spread of Lyme disease.
• The collective weight of all adults in the world is 287 million tonnes. That trivia must be good for something.
• The NIH has proposed completely revamping what they fund to focus more on training graduate students in management and entrepreneurship (yet another future blog).
• NASA launched NuSTAR last week (another who knew), to study X-rays and black holes using “133 layers of glass” on a 30 foot mast – this one I do have to track down.
• A nice article on “Curiosity,” to land on Mars, in August, definitely worthy of watching live, excellent graphics, but will it work this time? On the last, failed attempt, the computer detected the landing gear snapping in place as contact with the ground and shut down the thrusters, resulting in a 40 meter free fall, which even with Martian gravity was enough to kill years of dedication. Almost as frustrating as the units conversion error of a few years ago I would expect. This was matched with what appears to be a very public debate about whether methane has been detected on Mars – a big deal if yes.
• There is a potentially cool book out there on (and called) Consciousness, C. Koch/MIT.
• Another potentially cool book, how to enhance the opportunity to create “aha” moments in your life, title: “Imagine: How creativity works” – bold title. I’ll buy it next time I drift into B&N.
• The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has created a website where educators in biology can access some excellent material for teaching biology. It does seem like this should be the future of education.
• And then, there is the science:
  • Entangling superconductivity and antiferromagnetism, - as opposed to ferromagnetism?  The younger teenager is showing interest in magnetism, seems like an interesting choice.
  • A unifying role for prions in neurodegenerative diseases – having just lost Doug Goodman to Parkinson’s, it was useful to learn more. The byline is, “A profound change in thinking about the etiologies of many neurodegenerative diseases has far reaching consequences for therapeutics.” I think what really affects the character of these, is, in the early paragraphs, the author speaks in “I” did this, “I” did that, “I’ve been working on this for 20 years and here’s what I think”. I find this very engaging, particularly when it is two pages – probably why I read backwards, I want to know how long the article is before I start.
  • A paper on unraveling cancer mechanisms.
  • OK – now a really good one – “Primed to Remember”, catchy title, byline is, “With the potential to mimic the human brain phase-change memories are operating faster, while imaging (they said imaging – special attention) provides further insight into the switching mechanism.” To me, this is a nearly perfect example of information transfer.
  • “Biotic multipliers of climate change,” an interesting perspective on how food chains collapse in the context of climate eliminating or causing the dislocation of an element of the chain – really great figure – if I wasn’t so near 3 pages at this point, I would digress, but, some other time maybe.
  • OK, you probably are either intrigued by this point, or skipping to the end, which is near.
  • Today’s quiz – what is a telomere, and why do you care?

This, by the way, is the issue where the controversial article on H5N1 is published, which, with positioning by the editors, introduction, background on the situation and the authors, and then the article itself, is found on pages 1521 – 1547.

At this point, the last third of the issue, they get serious, with the “research articles.” Here you read the details from the earlier discussions about telomeres (I think that is a noun), graphene, rotons, PCM (a new acronym for you that may be the future), those phase change memories mentioned above.

OK – I’m done, and it’s still page 3. Bottom line, if you’re interested in science, reading the second-tier news is not the best approach.

 Read the source material

 

563,921,584

Now, there is a big number. Care to guess what it represents? Time’s up. This would be “The WISE Source Catalog,” which “contains the attributes for 563,921,584 point-like and resolved objects detected on the Atlas Intensity images. Catalog sources are required to have a measured SNR>5 in at least one band, and to meet other criteria to ensure a high degree of reliability.” There were 284,000,000 other objects that were identified but failed to meet the above criterion. So, now you know what you can do to keep your mind active in retirement. Pick one, or 100, or 100,000 of these and try to help the astronomers figure out what it all means. This is one of many sky surveys, currently a focus of astronomy missions.

This one, WISE, stands for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. “WISE imaged the entire sky with multiple, independent exposures during its full cryogenic survey. All four bands were imaged simultaneously during each exposure, and the exposure times were 7.7 sec in W1 and W2 and 8.8 sec in W3 and W4. As illustrated in Figure 1, the survey scanning strategy resulted in 12 to 13 exposures of each point on the ecliptic plane. Coverage increases to over 3000 exposures at the ecliptic poles. WISE completed its first complete sky coverage on 17 July 2010 and surveyed approximately 20% of the sky a second time before the end of the full cryogenic mission phase.”

ORA’s (now Synopsys’) own Mark Kahan was a significant contributor to the review panel that monitored the design through deployment of the WISE system. I’ll keep this short so you push the button. DO GO to the link and check it out a bit. Although there are more survey telescopes to come, including the ground-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will be described in an upcoming blog, one could argue that the astronomical analysts have enough on their collective plate for awhile.

http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/

Below is my favorite from a short visit to the site (click on past images at the bottom of the page; this one is from July 8, 2009). This is a collection of the 258 nearest galaxies. Why 258, you ask? This is the number of galaxies included in the so-called Local Volume Legacy Survey, built from GALEX and Spitzer Images, and intended to include all galaxies within 3.5 Mpc and a complete sample within 11 Mpc (see http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/703/1/517/pdf/0004-637X_703_1_517.pdf). WISE's data will likely undergo similar processing in the future.

 

Galaxies in the Local Volume Legacy survey (LVL), a study of 258 of the nearest galaxies. In these three-color images, 3.6 um emission is blue, 8 um emission is green, and 24 um emission is red. Credit: Shawn Staudaher (U. Wyoming) and the LVL team.

 

Who Needs a Fireplace?

As is often the case, I get a few minutes as the weekend starts to look at all those neat articles I didn’t delete during the week, hoping I would get to all of them on the weekend.  Here is this week’s favorite because it not only nicely summarizes a looming impediment to my ability to optimize lenses (after all, what else could be important?), but it also gives some of those really great high-level numbers that give you a perspective on how real the described problem is. The title of this blog entry is inspired by the fire that I lit to enjoy the contrast between the lake effect snow falling 4 feet away to the left and cozy fire 4 feet in front of me (is glass a wonderful thing or what?).

 

The article, “Future of computers – Part 2: The Power Wall,” is from one of the more reliable places for articles of this type, EDN. It describes what has been creeping into the news more often: that computers are coming to a place where you simply cannot gang any more together for the time being, as the power and heat really does become overwhelming. 

Now, I do want you to go to the link, but to help encourage this behavior (it will only extend this experience by 3 minutes) I will give a summary of the some of the highlights. In the opening, the author, Russell Fish, compares the current state of computing speed on the big super computers with steam boat racing in the 1800s – nice touch. Digression: in 1846, Bates (of Bates and Wallace, where Wallace is the nemesis of Darwin by all accounts) is in Manaus, Brazil, many hundreds of miles up the Amazon, when he decides he needs to go to the grocery store. He states this in his book (which is GREAT if you can find a copy). What’s sad is this entry is made in December 1846 (I may be off a bit on the date, too lazy to go look), and the next entry, since he does not write about his trip to the grocery store, is in April 1848. It takes him 15 months to get down the river and back up (the second leg being the tricky one). As he pulls in from his trek, the first steam ship appears in Manaus, accomplishing the same trip in 3 weeks. 

Back to super computers. The example in the article is almost as stunning as Bates’ story: “The Swiss National Computer Center pumps water from Lake Lugano at 45 meters depth at a temperature of 6 degrees Celsius.⁶ The pump is connected by an 80 cm pipe to two 13 ton, six meter high suction baskets. Three pumps push nearly 7,000 gallons per minute to the computer center.”  The electric bill for 1 year at $0.10/KwHr is $3.7 million. 

I think we have a challenge here, which points to a dramatic change in high-end computing in the next decade. If you have a chance, read some of the comments at the end of the article. There are a couple of good ones, including the person who points out the steamship caption slightly misnames the boat in question (which apparently blew up in its attempt to win).

Now, click the link below. It is worthwhile reading.

http://www.edn.com/article/520499-Future_of_computers_Part_2_The_Power_Wall.php

Faster than a Speeding Bullet

This is worth pausing on – yet another event on the timeline to smaller and faster. The folks at MIT, who appear to be the US answer to the Fraunhofer Institute, report in the New York Times today yet another step in making things faster.

We all know that the eye responds at a rate such that 30 frames per second (fps) or, better yet, 60 fps is indistinguishable from continuous to us. Electronic cameras of course do not have the limits of the eye (I once developed a system to operate at 3,000 fps). MIT operates in a different space than mere mortals and they have recently completed a somewhat faster camera at -- wait for it (but not too long) --

500 fpns = 500,000,000,000 fps

Now, why that number? A useful unit to carry around these days might be the speed of light, something that is difficult to make relevant, but here is an attempt. Light does not travel at 3x10^8 m/sec (it does, but who can relate), it travels at 1 foot/nanosecond. Those feet and inches just don’t go away. We can relate to the foot, but what about the nanosecond?  Can we relate? Let’s try. When we’re in our car, we often go 60 mph, or, as you often learn in physics, 88 fps (as in feet per second). OK, now let’s think about the smallest unit of length we can visualize. Clearly we can see 1 mm on a ruler, so let’s make 0.1mm as the smallest thing we can see. Also, most of us get on a plane every now and then and go not 60 mph, but 600 mph.

So what can we almost relate to? 600 mph is 880 feet per second (about a football field’s length), about 10,000 inches per second (12X) or 250,000 mm per second (25X), or 2,500,000 of the smallest unit you can visualize (100 microns) in a second. Perhaps the main point of this little exercise is that we aren’t even close; we are only halfway there in log space and who can think in log space? If you can, you’re halfway there! We have no way to relate to the speed of a camera that is framing faster enough to “see” light travel through a scene.  So you’ll just have to watch MIT’s video and not relate.

Check out the New York Times article with link to MIT video before it goes away (sent to me by Doug Nutter):

 

SCIENCE   | December 13, 2011
Speed of Light Lingers in Face of New Camera
By JOHN MARKOFF
M.I.T. researchers have built a camera that can take images at intervals of a trillionth of a second.

 

 

This new camera is yet another pillar in the roadmap of science making light relevant. The article opens with a reference to Edgerton, whom I assume all readers know. If not, you may want to look at his images from the 1950s (or 1930s, can’t remember – there are some neat flip books at museums of his photos and you can get some of his images from the used book list).  Edgerton was the master of scientific strobe photography. Also, you must be aware of the epic perspective book, “Powers of Ten” (if not, Google “Powers of Ten” and act accordingly). This is one of the absolute best books for appreciating the spatial scale of things. Clearly we now need, and can produce, the Powers of Ten in the fourth dimension – can’t wait.

In Case You Are Consuming this Holiday Season

The latest issue of Information Display from the Society for Information Display (SID) has a couple of articles that are somewhat of a high-end Consumer Reports coverage of TVs, particularly plasma. I, for one, had formed the opinion that plasma TVs were off the map as a personal consumer. Apparently, even if that may have been right the last time I bought a TV (I don’t do this very often), it is clearly not a given now.

The takeaway from the articles (should you not be a member) is that plasmas are now less expensive than competing LCD units. The key selection criterion is whether you watch TV in an environment with high-ambient lighting – that is, a room with floor-to-ceiling windows where you are watching when the sun is not down (who has time). If that is the case, then the clear consensus is LCD. However, if you are more of an after-the-kids-go-to-bed TV watcher, then plasma is the clear winner. Also, if you happen to be one of the few that have gone 3D, plasma is a faster technology that is intrinsically better for 3D.

Another valuable item from this issue is they point to a particularly educated purveyor of TVs in Scarborough NY, with an Internet presence: Value Electronics.

There are additional articles on the status of the higher-tech stuff you may be interested in. I am not in the market this year (or am I?) but I thought this was a valuable issue that you might otherwise miss.

 

Is this a revolution, or, clutter?

Three items crossed through the ether on the weekend, one is somewhat long awaited (if you consider 5 years long), one that continues the march to making everything look inspiring, and one that even itself is not sure what it is.  The one in the middle is not even a thing, it is software.

Starting with what could either be revolutionizing digital photography (again) or go into the laser disc category (I actually acquired a laser disc player with my most recent house, although I don’t have a laser disc) – the gadget being name the Lytro.  Since these guys are probably copyright sensitive at this point, simply typing the code name, “Lytro” into Google will give you an onslaught of sites.  For those who have not been following this, this is the first implementation of what has come to be called “Lightfield Imaging”, discover, invented, or recognized by Prof. McVoy at Stanford and his student Ng.  It was first presented to the science audience at IODC in 2006, of all places.  Even then, the answers to questions were, “you’ll have to talk to my lawyer”.  This technology records not just a projected spatial intensity maps (what we call a photograph) but this device also records the intensity as a function of direction.  Conceptually, the net results being you’ve stored all the data in 3D so that you can decide what is in focus in your photo whenever you want.  Now, one might say – then why bother me, just put everything in focus.  But, the developers seem to think there are photographers out there that feel fuzzy is artistic and therefore have allowed you to make whatever you want fuzzy, or sharp.  On the Google list, it was noted that until Oct. 12, you couldn’t buy one without a “reservation code”. 

Also, on the list, was something I started to hear about earlier in the week, but, it showed up as a specific link from John Tamkin.  The new thing is, in my mind, Super Photoshop.  Apparently there are many who want to add things to their photos, that aren’t there (I don’t get it, but, I’m becoming old school I can see).  In any case, the site below guides you through how you can now add furniture to rooms that are lacking (actually in my house it would be to add floor where there are currently piles of books). 

http://kevinkarsch.com/publications/sa11.html

And, to complete the weekend there is the somewhat older news of Looxcie.  This is a tri focal length web cam you can wear on your ear – something I always wanted to do?  Available today through SkyMall (I’ve been on a lot of airplanes this month). 

 

 The catch phrases are “see what you see”, hmmm, and “catch those unexpected moments” – that can go few places.  So, now you’re caught up.  I’m not sure, yet, if you missed anything, we’ll see.

PS:  Even before we could launch this out the door, yet another “photo toy” appeared on the web that many have enjoyed.  Spotted by our web-watcher, Mark Kahan, this is the “ball camera” Quite fun too.  1 minute and 41 seconds – you can do it J

http://freshome.com/2011/10/21/ball-camera-that-captures-panoramic-views-by-jonas-pfeil-video/

Reconsider the world, without mice

I am continuing an interaction with a research group that works in virtual reality and augmented reality this week. Some 5 years ago, I was working with Jim McGuire to make the world’s first pair of seethrough augmented reality displays, seen below. They were quite nice, I thought. Clearly, after peddling them around the world for 3 years, what do I know? They are now on a shelf with a long line of nice prototypes, at the ODALab at the University of Rochester. But, we digress. 

 

A very nice ophthalmic quality seethrough display – very nice, on the shelf awaiting the next generation to displace it.

On the positive side, I saw a very inspiring research project this week in France at the University of Bordeaux 3, (or was it 4) aimed at our work environment in optical design, which led to the following. Prof. Rolland, who is traveling with me, pointed out that there are people who think about fundamental things like, what would the world be like if the mouse/touch pad technology had failed, for whatever reason. In her case, they were thinking about this at the University of North Carolina in the 90s, and here in France, they are still thinking about it.

I have noticed, off and on, that the environment for interaction seems to be shrinking. Ever since we replaced our continuous roll Calcomp plotter (who remembers those), I have been bothered. We still use the Calcomp plot driver as the basis for plotting. But, why would we abandon an interface that is limited in 1-dimension for one that is limited in 2-dimensions (single sheet printers). I’m the guy who in the dying days of Calcomp bought a 48”x continuous plotter – how cool was that (no one would walk down the hall to get the output)? I was told it was so much more convenient with a 2-D constraint, it fit on your desktop. This is a reason? So, continuing the trends, now I spend my day staring at a 10-14” space interacting with a key board and a touch pad. Now, touch pads are pretty amazing things, but, why is the space shrinking like this? Whoever stood around a drafting board developing new concepts? If you’re under 40, you probably have never seen a drafting table.

So, at least some people seem to have noticed this problem and they are bringing back the large format environment. In fact, I think I’ll go invest in drafting board companies, if any are left. I’m definitely looking for a drafting board when I get back – I think the last time I saw one was 10 years ago as it was wheeled out of the office, took too much space in the assigned 88 sq. ft. This whole push to lean and mean has left us just that lean on input and cranky (or is that from a different source).

So, what is new is Kinect; a device that can sit on a drafting board or other substantial work space (think 36” x 48” replacing 10” x 14”) and track your hands and your fingers for $100. It can learn (OK, be taught, hence the research project) how you want to interact with the workspace. You are no longer continuing to be squeezed into a more efficient space. You are moving back to higher bandwidth of visual data input, but, this I consider good. Why compute all this information and never even see it? When combined with a projector above the table ($1,000 and a camera $100), now you have a new space, with space. We have all this computing power creating data and we continue to shrink the space that the output is being reported to so that our office can be smaller, it’s madness. Remember the 10”x14” space? I decided to measure, it’s actually 8”x13”. What is it after the icons and tool bars and navigators that are hiding all the screens I would like to be seeing real-time? I just measured my CODE V command mode active area, 6”x10”. And I want at least 8 graphics windows in that space to make sure I am always trying to see the text underneath (now, to the credit of Dave Hasenauer, at least we have the TOW options that tabs the windows). It is out of control. Time for a reset.

So, watch for updates – this could get interesting again, I hope. Or, it could follow the glasses, to the prototype history shelf.

A Look at Vulnerability

The latest issue of the online e-news letter, Electronic Design News

EDN.com link to article

has an outstanding article on how one individual contributor can compromise a complex operation; a topic that is rising in visibility.  This was a topic for the recent panel discussion at DV-CON and will be a topic at the upcoming DAC conference in San Diego, where I am speaking at a Monday evening event, sponsored by Synopsys.

I have not followed or had an interest in hacking, or security, or the Sony problem, but, it has had enough press that I did click on the link when it appeared this morning.  The article is interesting as a look inside of the science of hacking, but, it elevated to a Blog topic when I came to the “lessons learned” paragraph, which is an excellent statement of the theme of some of my own latest talks.

To pique you interest enough to go to the article by Mike Borza, I have extracted the lessons learned.  If you go to the article via the link, you will find the rest of the story, which I recommend if you have an addition 3-4 minutes (it’s worth it, really). 

The following is extracted from the link above, written by

Author Information

Mike Borza is founder and chief technology officer of embedded security specialist Elliptic Technologies Inc. He was also a founder and chief technology officer of network security appliances company Startle Networks. At Chrysalis-ITS (now Safenet), he worked with customers of the Luna series of network security processors as director of applications engineering. Earlier in his career, he was involved in biometric identity management systems design, safety-critical systems engineering, and optoelectronics design and manufacturing. Borza was a founding director of business networking forum The Ottawa Network. He has been an active contributor to the Security Task Group of IEEE 802.1 and was an editor of the 802.1AR Secure Device Identifier standard

“Lessons learned”

“What teachings can come from the PS3 hack? Certainly, many detailed issues allowed the attackers to peel successive layers off the PS3 security onion; these are important in their own right. But the bigger issue is that systems' security architecture and design are frequently undertaken at the very end of development, sometimes as an afterthought and sometimes simply resulting from scheduling issues, as the development of primary system functionality moves toward the product release date. This reality leaves security system development insufficiently resourced and reviewed, in the context of the value it is intended to protect for the whole system. This decision is a mistake. If a system is worth protecting, it is worth protecting well. Some ideas to consider:

• Protect those things that need protection. This statement is not meant to be trite; identification of the assets to be protected is an important first step in developing a plan to protect them. From the outset, the PS3 was marketed as much more than a game console; part of what was sold to people was the ability to run another operating system. This decision required a security subsystem that met the needs of the gaming and media ecosystems, restricting access to content and services when the PS3 was running its factory OS. Limiting protection to this objective likely would have been much easier to achieve than retroactively trying to limit what versions of system code could run on the platform. In effect, the security objectives were changed after the fact to protect against what in reality was a non-threat. The result was an attack that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations.
• Be realistic in assessing the threats you face. The more interesting or valuable your platform or the market for it, the greater the interest will be in trying to compromise it. This reality may translate into large-scale efforts to break the security system. Ensure that security analysis and subsequent design receive a level of attention in proportion to the value of the information you are trying to protect. And don't underestimate the level of effort that an eventual attack may bring.
• Plan for failure. This statement sounds defeatist, but it's not. If your system is valuable enough to attract a serious attack, your adversary may discover a vulnerability that enables a break for a period of time. Allowing for the possibility that you may need to repair and upgrade the security system over time is prudent planning. Designing in controlled amounts of flexibility to allow for changes that may need to be made later is a good future-proofing strategy, provided that it is carefully implemented. In retrospect, the misuse of a shallow signing key hierarchy that divulged the root signing key on the PS3 was a bad idea. Using it in a way that it could not be replaced was an even worse idea.
• Know what you know, and know what you don't know. Many products use their security systems to protect valuable assets, which are generally unrelated to security. The PS3 is fundamentally a special-purpose multimedia entertainment system (and a very good one at that), which has been at the center of a much larger ecosystem of content and programming suppliers. The security system was supposed to protect that ecosystem, but an apparent lack of competence in its design and implementation left it vulnerable and ultimately surmounted. Designing security systems is a specialized undertaking, and many companies do not have the necessary in-house expertise. In such situations, it is well worth engaging a security specialist to help with this particular task. If the same care and thought had gone into the PS3's security system as went into the consumer features, the console likely would not have been breached so completely. Independent scrutiny and review by experts may have helped avoid this outcome. “

It is important, better yet essential; to take these bullet headers and apply them to any project you are involved in.  From my experience my message has been bullet point #3, “plan for failure”.  If you make it to the Synopsys session at DAC, you can hear more on this philosophy and strategy, in the context of the Hubble Space Telescope, along with some inspiring pictures from the universe.

Report from the OFC/NFOEC 2010 Plenary Session

(OK, today I’m distracted; see the origins of K-I-S-S at the bottom of this post.)

I attended the plenary session at OSA’s OFC/NFOEC conference in sunny San Diego this morning – I’m overlooking the harbor now.  It has been at least five and perhaps even seven years since I was last here at OFC.  As with most good plenary sessions, I came away with all sorts of trivia and even some perspective – where to begin?

I will save the distraction for a moment and see if I can fill out this post with facts of the past, present, and future as it relates to the rise of global and personal communications.  Some of the numbers are staggering.  I expect many readers were caught up in the frenzy of telecom and that many have not looked back since the crash.  My recollections are that we designed our first WDM (wavelength division multiplexer) for a government research center in 1997, based on a large glass prism.  Shortly thereafter, I found myself writing an 80-page proposal to the ATP program for a few million dollars to advance free-space optics modeling.  In spite of having nearly no idea what I was writing about, as this was the early days, and the fact that I wrote the proposal alone in a hotel over a 60-hour sleepless stretch (haven’t done that again), we won.  Following this, I had the clever idea that many people would be interested in glass prototype micro-optics, and so we bought an optics shop in the U.S. that made endoscopes.  With that, we were on the train.  I spent the next three years on the road (40 weeks a year) and yes, we even exhibited at OFC in 2001, I believe. Our engineering group saw our telecom design business grow from that first job in 1997 to 30% of our business at the time of the crash, in June 2001 as I recall.  Well, that was then.

In touring the remains of the industry at the show today, I was telling my colleague that it’s like the telecom giants woke up one morning, looked around, and stepped on all the ants that were swarming around them.  Today I heard three names consistently: Verizon, ATT (yes, they seem to be back), and Alcatel.  And apparently JDSU is hiring.  The displays are old and tired, there are a lot of empty spaces, and in general, I’d say the status quo prevailed into the end.

But here are some of the plenary numbers.  When ARPAnet was invented in 1963, it connected UCLA, UCSB, Stanford, and the University of Utah.  In 1969, as I’m entering high school, the first DNS was assigned.  Today there are 500,000,000 of those (assuming DNS is a noun, I didn’t look up what it means). If that doesn’t work, that number is also attributed to the number of Internet nodes.  In 1980, as I exited graduate school, there were 0 mobile phones.  Today, there are 2,500,000,000 of those.  I heard in the hall today, or was it yesterday, FLICKR (a photo upload site?, don’t know, haven’t been there, yet) had its 1,000,000,000th transfer, at the same time the current run rate is 1,000,000,000/year. Now that’s a growth rate. I don’t think they get $0.01, but, if they did…. 

An interesting plot showed that in the early 60’s the world had 2.3 billion people, and if I understood the plot, a significant percentage of them lived in “developed” countries.  In 2013, there will still be about 2 billion people in the developed countries, and 6 billion in the developing countries.  The growth rate for the developed countries is flat. 

You’ve seen hockey stick growth projections.  But have you ever seen it actually occur? I may get the units wrong here – in 1993, the Internet appears to the average techie, defining the start of data flow.  By 2000, 6,200,000,000 GB of data is transferring per year, or per day/hour/minute/sec, not sure which.  (Note: GB already has 9 zeroes).  In 2011, we’re going to see a data rate of 1,800,000,000,000 GB.  Now that is a hockey stick.  Based on conservative projections, the data rate in 2020 will be in units of Petabits/sec (those come after Terabits, which come after Gigabits, or GB).  According to the third speaker in the plenary session, if we don’t rethink the architecture before 2020 (that’s in 10 years), it will require the entire output of a nuclear power plant (a really big number of Kw) to drive the routers needed, based on current technology. No wonder the word energy efficiency comes up.

I do recall when I last paid attention, the Holy Grail was 100Gbit data rates.  Many predicted it could not happen.  But the big announcement (OK, maybe just a big announcement) was that a 100Gbit routing would be brought online this year.  Apparently “coherent technology” has solved the challenge of transferring at these data rates without starting over.  So now they’re talking of 100Gbit routing to small companies before I retire, and to my home shortly thereafter.  So, what I think will be fun is reflected in a talk I heard in early 2000 by a telecom executive. He was having fun putting an early webcam on his dog, with a wireless unit, and then during the day turning it on to see where the doggie was.  His thinking was, eventually (which appears to be soon), you enter a GPS coordinate somewhere in the world, and you are routed to the nearest webcam from which you can view life, live – sounds neat.  I can imagine the end of travel, or will it be the beginning of armchair travel.  Once you have your immersive, full surround 3-D TV, you sign up for the trip down the Amazon consisting of a live feed to a surround of cameras on a boat outfitted for the purpose – could be interesting.

OK, before exceeding the space here on this blog post, the distraction I referred to earlier.  A speaker attributed the term Keep It Simple Stupid to one David S. Isenberg.  So, who could resist, I Googled (a term still not in my spell checker).  The answer is no, it was not him, but if you’re into telecom, you should check him out at www.isen.com.  You will find there, at least today, the following interesting graphic.

It turns out the right answer is Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, 40 years with the Lockheed Skunk Works – courtesy of Wikipedia.  Also worth a short visit if you’re a Skunk Works fan. 

Yet Again – Something “New” from Google: Search Images

I started noticing a few weeks ago that when you enter a search, a link shows up with images related to the topic of your search.  I was busy at the time and didn’t really stop to realize how significant this is.  So today, it really took effect.  In preparing to attempt to explain Polarization to a class of students, I happened to type in the fundamental way to look at polarization, the “Poincare Sphere”.  Now typically I would have also gone to Google scholar at this point to see what original Poincare material is on-line, but, I am on vacation today (skiing in Powder Basin, Utah – very nice, 18” of new snow, sunny day, 30 degrees, are you jealous yet??).  Anyway, below is the collection of images that appears in the 4th or so link.  Is this great, or what?

I also learned a few things (I probably should have said relearned, but, I can’t remember).  There are 8 descriptors for a polarized E&M field; average intensity, average phase (these two also applied to an unpolarized field) and diattenuation and retardance with each of the latter two have three characteristics; magnitude, orientation, and ellipticity.  I always struggled with concept of more than 3-dimensions, but, here it is, an 8-dimensional space.  I also picked up that these map to the 16 Mueller matrix values, with the added concept of depolarization.  The depolarization created by a material occupy 9 of the Mueller spaces, the diattenuation and retardance get 6, and intensity gets the remaining slot. 

While the preceding paragraph is courtesy of Jim McGuire, Ph.D., the Director of Optical Engineering at ORA, and someone with a Ph.D. in polarization, even more can be found by visiting ww.axometrics.com, a company formed by his advisor, Prof. Russell Chipman of the University of Arizona. 

I’m sure I’ll come back to polarization, but, like I said, it is a vacation day (or evening at this point), so some other time.