On Microsoft acquiring GitHub

In the news today is that Microsoft is acquiring GitHub (Pocket Link to Verge). That's a big deal for a lot of big (and small) open source projects. It's definitely going to rub a lot of open-source developers the wrong way, as many are motivated to contribute to open source projects as a direct response to decades of difficulties with Microsoft.

I am not a Microsoft user, nor a fan. But I do acknowledge that there's been some apparent improvements over the past few years under CEO Satya Nadella. They have some open projects that are notable, especial VS Code, which is becoming very popular. From what I hear, Windows is still a monstrosity that should not be used, but it is clear that Windows 10 is improved over the last few versions; note, last time I really used windows was still Windows 98, I think.

My suspicion is that Microsoft wants GitHub because they want to use it internally for very large projects. Recently Microsoft has been working to make git more useful for humungous projects, specifically with the virtual file system (techcrunch). By controlling GitHub, Microsoft becomes the biggest player in git as well, which I'm sure won't please some.

It's also worth noting that GitHub developed the text editor Atom, which is pretty similar to their aforementioned VS Code. Atom is an open source project, but it will be interesting to see what happens to Atom development going forward.

Finally, I'll also mention that GitHub has adopted Markdown as it's documentation markup language of choice. There's already a GitHub flavor of Markdown, which I think is probably the dominant version. Now that Microsoft owns GitHub, I wonder if it will impact the use of Markdown, and especially if GitHub-flavored Markdown will further evolve away from the original?

Keeping perspective

MySpace is firing about half its employees, about 500 people, as it struggles to stay relevant [LINK]. Contrast with Wikipedia, which has about 50 employees total and has existed successfully for 10 years and is now one of the "most relevant" sites on the internet [LINK].

Someday BibTeX's stranglehold will be broken

But probably not by CrossTeX. I'd like to believe. Maybe if Donald Knuth starts using it...

UPDATE:
Also see biblatex and biber, if you're shopping for replacements.

Streamlining your workflow

Just watched this video showing how one guy keeps his references organized. It's included below, and worth watching. My own citation organization isn't as clean, but uses basically these same tools. (Read that as: this is how I should do it!)

I'll also note that I'm a bit conflicted about whether to use BibDesk to organize my files. The definite pros are that I'm already using it to organize my references and that it is free. I've been using Yep! to organize my documents, which don't always need to be in my bibtex library, and it is a pretty nice application. The downside is that it isn't free (I got it in one of those bundles). I think Yep! is very similar to another application called Papers that I know some people like a lot.

Watching Wave

I've been passively listening to some of the reaction to Google Wave lately. Yesterday (via Daring Fireball), I found a blog post by Daniel Tenner that explains how Google Wave will "replace" email for corporate environments [LINK]. I think Tenner is presenting a good case that the people currently testing Wave aren't really the audience that will most benefit from such a product. Where I think he's going slightly wrong is by using the "corporate" environment (which is what DF says too) as the model. Wave is collaboration software, and the way it is presented by Tenner, it really does sound like it could replace email to a large extent for projects and collaboration. It doesn't replace email for correspondence, and it doesn't replace Facebook or Twitter for "status updates" or "microblogging," and it doesn't replace your favorite IM software. But for people who use any of these tools to actually do work, and especially for people who switch between them (or want to be able to switch between them) for a project, Wave sounds like it will be amazing. The essential idea seems to be that you can start a "wave" as a virtual conversation, including having documents and files and thing, and you can add or drop people from the wave at any time (and they get to see everything, not just what is "happening" now), and Wave makes sense for seamless transitions from email to IM type communication. That is, you upload a document, and everyone has it and can read it and edit it, and everyone can see all versions of it. No more attachments. You can walk away from your computer and come back and get caught up with what is going on, or you can be sitting at your computer going back and forth with others in the wave.

Maybe my vision of Wave makes it better than it can possibly be. But I got excited by Tenner's post. I think this would be an amazing way to do collaborative science. Tenner presents things as problems with email and why Wave fixes it, and for every one I though, yes, that is a problem with email! In science there are many collaborations that could benefit by replacing the normal email with a more efficient communication stream. Examples are reports of all kinds, like when people have to report on the status of a project to the funding agency, or when a dispersed team is writing a paper about a project and different people are writing different sections. Another example might just be a grad student working on her/his thesis, their advisor could observe progress and give feedback using Wave, and postdocs, researchers, or committee members could be brought into the wave as needed for further advice and feedback. It could also work for planning projects, working on code, or even doing homework. Wave seems to be a way to clean up your communication stream, bringing different pieces all into one "wave" seems like a better way to get things done. But we'll see.

Nissan Leaf

I've never really wanted a Nissan before, but this looks pretty sweet: the Nissan Leaf, an all-electric hatchback.

[News]

Should we prepare for the singularity?

The singularity is the hypothesized moment when artificial intelligence becomes as intelligent as humans. At that point, machines might have the ability to decide to make smarter machines, which will make smarter machines, ad infinitum, relegating humans to a subservient role in society. Another view of the singularity is that it will free humanity from the shackles of the material world, allowing unimaginable lifespan and freedom to think, create, and explore. A NYTimes.com article covers a meeting of computer scientists who are starting to wonder whether limits on artificial intelligence research should be imposed [LINK].

The article makes it seem as though these scientists are concerned with current, or near-future, technologies that could disrupt society. It cites a few recent advances, especially pushing this empathy simulating robot. From my reading, none of these technologies seems very threatening, and most have much more potential for good than harm.

Thinking farther into the future, to a time when the singularity is imminent, these concerns become very relevant. I suspect the scientists are more interested in dealing with ethical issues now that will help decision making then. The fact of the matter is that the singularity, in one form or another, is imminent, and so some thought about what it means is important. Regulating research seems like a wrong-headed direction to me though, because that will mean that the singularity will sneak up on us. Everyone will be pushing their science to bump around the edges of the rules, and suddenly that surface beyond which lies advanced artificial intelligence will be gone, disintegrated, and humanity won't be properly prepared because everyone promised they weren't going to go past that boundary.

Don't get me wrong, even at the moment of the singularity, I don't think it means machines will start taking over. Simply having the capacity to be more intelligent than humans doesn't mean those initial machines will be successful at autonomous thought and decision-making... i.e., they won't really be conscious. Rather, those intelligent machines will be in increment in the machine-human interaction that will, I hope, push the boundaries of the human experience. There are possibilities to extend lifespan, expand thought capacity, stimulate creativity, and boost productivity. These are the promises of intelligent machines, but so were they the promises of digital computers and nano-bots, so we can't rely on it happening. We still don't have flying cars and jet-packs, and we still don't have nanotechnology that repairs roads and buildings or constructs moon bases for us, nor do we know whether a simulation of the human brain pushes artificial intelligence to a new level, or if very advanced computing technology will be able to interact with biological systems in any interesting ways [cf. LINK]. Despite my hope for the coming singularity, it is far from certain that we'll know when it happens or what it means, and it is unlikely, with any amount of planning, that we'll know what to do when that day comes to make the most of the technology.

You too can calculate a linear trend, for just $1,800

I just saw the announcement that SPSS Inc. is releasing PASW Statistics 17 [LINK]. This is the new name for what used to be called SPSS Statistics, which was (as far as I know) ubiquitously known as SPSS. I'm not sure what prompted the name change, nor do I know what either SPSS or PASW stand for. SPSS Inc. has updated the interface, which now looks a lot like Matlab, except not as useful. Their promotional video really pushes the syntax highlighting and point and click to put in bookmarks/breakpoints or commands. These are features that other languages have had for many years. There are useful statistical features, like their nearest neighbor analysis tools, though it was hard to tell from the demo what the point of it is.

The price is $1,800. Yeah. This is an amazing price for software that is quite limited.

Especially when you compare it against the language R [news, official], which is free and more powerful, and still focuses on statistical analysis. The R language is based on an older language called S, and I think I remember learning that SPSS is also based on S. So these are two evolutionary lines from S, one free and open source and powerful and one very expensive, somewhat slick, and potentially powerful.

Both R and SPSS are limited to statistics (more or less). If you want to do something a little beyond statistical models or analysis, you'll still have to go to some other scripting language like Matlab, IDL, NCL, etc. And, in my opinion, if you have to know one of those anyway, there's really no reason to deal with R or SPSS, since all the same statistics can be calculated pretty easily in those more general languages. But, of course, there are large numbers of people who's work requires a bit of statistics but not much other computation, and I guess those are the people who use SPSS. So maybe there is a spectrum of users, some who use just SPSS, some who dabble in R, some who only use R, some who use R along with other software, and others who just use more general high-level languages. Still, at that price point, I can't believe anyone uses SPSS.

Munich Re -- the new sun god?

An exciting development in the development of large scale solar power is an upcoming meeting initiated by reinsurance company Munich Re [LINK]. The giant company is pulling interested parties together to, apparently seriously, discuss possibilities of building a series of large solar thermal plants in northern Africa and the Arabian peninsula and transmitting the power via high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) cables.

This isn't a new idea, but the fact that such a gigantic company is getting serious about it is a positive direction. It's an expensive proposition, especially because of the HVDC cables, which would run all the way to Europe (at least). But if these companies can actually put up some capital and show that the system works, then I'm sure the idea would spread and governments in North America and Asia would get involved. (Is it all too late? Maybe, but let's try to be a little optimistic today.)

(Okay, the normal spelling of the Egyptian sun god is Ra, but Re is an acceptable alternate spelling [LINK].)

CoolIris

Holy moly... http://www.cooliris.com

Having just installed this "simple browser plugin" a mere 10 minutes ago, I am wholeheartedly endorsing it and pleading with you to go and install it.

http://www.cooliris.com

I can't even try to describe it, except to say that it is paradigm changing for me.

ClimateWizard.org: A web resource?

Having just ready this brief article [LINK] about a new web site called ClimateWizard.org, I was skeptical of its usefulness. Essentially, this is a web application that just makes reasonably nice map representations of some climate model runs (from the last IPCC report) guided by user input. The input is limited to what geographic region to map, which admittedly is the only way most people think to look at these kinds of simulations. The user can choose the USA and zoom in on specific states, or can choose "global" and choose individual countries and territories. Not everything seems to work (e.g., Guam doesn't show any data), but most of the buttons I clicked generated maps. The user also gets to choose a specific month, or annual average, and can plot the average or change in surface temperature or precipitation either for the past 50 years, the projections at 2050, or (for the USA) projections for 2100. As of writing this, the choices also including picking one of three models or the model average. It is unclear what exactly is being plotted for the past 50 years, the documentation indicates it is a combined observational data set, but there are two curves in a small timeseries plot that are not obviously explained(figure). All in all, it is a fun little application, though not the grandiose life-altering tool that the news article seems to suggest.

Now, a little criticism to go along with the overview. There are definitely really good things about this application, including using Google Maps as the underlying mapping framework. This is nice because it works well, looks good, and people know how to deal with it. That is a definite win. There are some limited download options, too, which is good so that people (especially students??) can just grab the image and put it into a document. They can also get the data in GIS format, which is good for some small set of people who know what to do with that. It would be nice to expand that to include some other common data formats, like HDF or netCDF. Of course, that would be mostly helpful to more experienced users, which gets to another point. This application, as a framework for quickly looking at data and downloading a small subset of it, seems like it could be really useful for all kinds of people, from policy makers to serious scientists, and back to students (and grad students) and teachers (and college profs). In its current state, it's a toy though. The limitation to these three models is curious, since the data from 20+ models should be readily available, and the limitation to surface temperature and precipitation are arbitrary. Yes, that is what most people will be interested in, but having an advanced tab and then having a lot more variables would be great. For example, maybe a high school or college student is doing a report on climate feedbacks, and wants to see how cloud fraction changes in the models. It's a trivial thing to add to this app, but its absence means the student will have to rely on secondhand information or be much more industrious. My other criticism is that the color choices for the contour maps are not that good. It's the standard blue-to-green-to-yellow-to-red rainbow. It works reasonably well for surface temperature and less well for precipitation. The real problem is that they apply it to the changes, which for most places are small making them light yellow or greenish. It's especially apparent in the precipitation, where it is often difficult to even discern the sign of the change.

Okay, one more important criticism. These global models do a poor job in representing regional climate, and there is little evidence that they accurately predict changes in regional climate to the level that this application implies. You can, for example, zoom in on Haiti and see that the model average temperature change at 2050 is about 1C (except for some whitish points that don't make sense on the color scale). But these are about 15 grid points, which are not the native grid points from the model, which have fraction amounts of land and almost no representation of the topography of Haiti. What I'm saying is that you can't trust a few points from one (or three) models to give an accurate portrayal of climate change unless you can verify the fidelity of the models at those points using observations and have an understanding of the limitations of the modeling framework. Looking at the past 50 years is helpful to ascertain some sense of the models' ability in the region, but as mentioned above, it isn't even clear what is being plotted for that in the application. If the blue line is the models and the black line is the observations, then the correlation is generally pretty poor for Haiti, right, but the trend is pretty decent, it's just that the average of the models doesn't have much variability (unless it is the other way around, or if the blue line is one of the models instead of the ensemble... but these are not explained).

So, overall, I like ClimateWizard.org, but I think there is a lot of room for improvement, both for the present purposes and for future expansions to more serious data exploration.

Flutter, taking the nanoblogging world by storm!

A really nice video explaining flutter. It'll change your life:



source: SlateV.com

Is this the ultimate greenwash?

A recent study finds that manufacturing processes used to make a lot of stuff, apparently especially tech stuff, is incredibly inefficient when it comes to energy consumption. [LINK] A particularly painful example is the manufacture of solar panels, which is so inefficient that it diminishes the long-term payoff of using renewable energy.

Code development in the cloud

Well, perhaps this diversion into the world of cloud-computing and "Web 2.0" and emerging technology is more than just a diversion. Maybe it is a full-fledged series. Today, I have just learned about a Mozilla Labs project called Bespin, which fits so neatly into my overall picture of how computational science should be done that I felt compelled to throw it up here to make a record of it.

First of all, Bespin is a Star Wars reference. It's the moon where Cloud City is, which you can see in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Remember? Lando is in charge of Cloud City. Anyway....

The software Bespin is a code editing environment implemented in java and within a modern web browser. The idea is that you open your browser, presumably from any computer you are sitting in front of, and navigate to your code. I'm not sure of the details of where the code resides, if you have a Bespin-related repository, or if you have to provide your own storage that is web-accessible (I'll check), but in any case, you have some code somewhere in the cloud. Bespin provides a unified front end to access and edit the code, including a file browser that they are calling a dashboard. Select your file, and it opens within the Bespin environment, and you have an actual text editor, where you can modify or write code and save. They're also working on collaboration tools, wherein you'd be editing a file and your friend could be editing the same file and you can see what each other are doing. Combined with Skype or other chat client, this could be a really useful way for people to work on code together without constant e-mails and attachments, or the possibility of getting divergent forks in a small project.

The editor is supposed to be very flexible. What this means in reality is yet to be seen. I'm not sure if you can just click a button to use Emacs encodings versus Vi, say, or if you are stuck learning a new editor and figuring out how to customize it. This could be the downfall of Bespin. People are so hung up on their editors (yes, I use emacs and don't want to learn another set of keyboard commands) that they will forego a new useful tool in favor of their comfortable, customized, "efficient" (really, probably not) system. But we shall see.

How does this fit into my vision of science? Well, first let's establish that in several branches of science there are very large computational projects that are used and modified by a fairly large number of people. Let's also put out there now that, at least in atmospheric science, these projects are climate models or the components thereof, and that the people modifying the code are usually NOT developers. At least in the sense that they don't have backgrounds in computer science, they don't keep up with trends in software development, and they don't necessarily know a lot about proper coding. They are, instead, scientists who want the model to do something differently than some other scientist designed it to do. Some equation is changed, or a new process is introduced, or some grad student just wants to run a sensitivity study by changing some parameter. So, each of these uses is going to be working with their own collection of the code, with their modifications. Maybe a group at some university wants to take an established model, and tinker with it collectively, so they'd want their own centralized repository of code that they can all access, but isn't accessible to the general community working with that model. There are lots of permutations and combinations that need to be transparently established by something like Bespin. And more importantly, these people (and I'm definitely throwing myself into this group) need to be able to get into Bespin and forget that they are using it. They need to log in, find their code and start working, with minimal investment in modifying and customizing and tweaking and generally fiddling. It needs to "just work."

Now, back to the point. It would be terrific to have the code accessible from anywhere for all users (or a subset of users, or your own code just for you). This could be especially useful for code that is going to be run on powerful remote computers (just downstairs maybe, but maybe in another state, or across the globe) because it would reduce the overhead of just getting to the code. Many of us have a multistep process to log in to these computers, and then we are stuck with the environment that is set up on the computer (which varies from computer to computer even within the same institution). Having a secure log-in to a website, where all our files would be sitting immediately, always in the same format with the same permissions and color scheme and shortcuts/aliases/keyboard macros/etc would increase productivity overnight. The possibility that one could use a computer in San Diego or Illinois or Virginia and the only difference be the URL that you navigate to would blow people's minds. Sure, there are some technical details I'm glazing over, like how do you compile and run the code from Bespin (that's not what it does, as far as I know), but just getting things set up in the code from a uniform environment would be life altering.

The impediments to this vision are several-fold. The first is inertia. We've had thirty years of using nearly the same simple environment, and for half that time almost exactly the same methods (from an end-user perspective) for accessing computers, setting up our user accounts, customizing our editors and other software tools, and learning how to move things around and get code to run. Change comes slowly to people set in their ways. Second, I think this needs to be adopted by large institutions, such as the supercomputing centers, and promoted very strongly as the "right way" to edit files on those machines. Similarly, the big science codes, like the community climate system model, should adopt this as a preferred method of modifying code within the development process, and that will spread to the research community. Third, these centers/projects/etc have to address security concerns in a reasonable way, with users in mind. This might be a separate thread from promoting a more efficient way of editing and sharing code, but there needs to be some sensical security procedures for getting into the big computers without a bevy of passwords and a pocket full of devices for accessing different computers.

Note that in the impediments, I never use the word Bespin, because it does not have to be Bespin. The scientific community is in need of new tools, that are powerful, flexible, and easy to use. It does not matter what they are, as long as they can be used across platforms and computing environments. Walls need to be broken down, code needs to be cleaned up, and resources need to be better used. Something like Bespin might provide one more piece of the puzzle to getting some of these things done.

For more about Bespin, check out their web site, and/or watch this screencast:

Introducing Bespin from Dion Almaer on Vimeo.

Files flying around the cloud

Related to my previous post about cloud computing and such, I've been trolling the interwebs and trying to learn something. In doing so, I have come across various "Web 2.0" technologies, some of which seem neat, others not so much. No, I haven't made any progress toward finding the massive storage and high-performance, massively-parallel computing solutions that I want for climate science purposes, but I'd like to share two (and a half) software+service technologies that I'm now using daily.

First and foremost, I have adopted full-hearted the use of Dropbox (getdropbox.com), which is a simple, elegant, and multifaceted tool for syncing files across multiple computers. The idea is that you install a little software package, which makes a folder called Dropbox in some obvious place (your home directory in OS X). Now whatever file you put into that folder gets silently sent to the dropbox servers -- out in the cloud. That alone, plus a simple (maybe too simple) web interface on the dropbox site, provides a very useful form of backup/archiving for these files. But for me the most amazing, wonderful, life-changing thing about dropbox is that when I go to another computer (with dropbox similarly installed), those files are there in the dropbox folder. They aren't available for download from the dropbox site, they are local copies of the files, right there in a folder. This provides another backup for the files, as they now exist on the first computer, the dropbox servers, and the second computer. It also allows me to simply navigate to that folder to continue working on whatever I put there, and when I press "save" the file is then sent back to the dropbox server, and sent on to the first computer. Amazing. For those who don't move files around between computers, it might seem silly, but it is so, SO much better than e-mail files to myself, or putting files on some server, or using (s)ftp to move the files around, or carrying a thumb drive around, etc. For those who are intrigued, go check out the screencast. Oh, and it's 2 GB of storage for free, $99 for 50GB for a year, and I think they will introduce a more flexible pricing system in the future. And yes, you can share a folder between users! Amazing.

Second, and less new and impressive, is simply delicious.com, which we used to know as del.icio.us. It's a "social bookmarking" system. For me this just means that when I want to bookmark something at work, like a paper I want to read later, I do it using a different browser button, and then I can add a description and/or tags to the bookmark. Then I go somewhere else, home or anywhere else with an internet connnection, and I can go to my delicious home page and find the link to that paper. The social part is that you can share bookmarks and whatnot. It is not as life-altering as dropbox, but it is actually quite convenient. You've probably seen on blogs and news sites little delicious symbols (there might be one right below this post). That provides a way to promote a blog or web page using your delicious account, essentially advertising it to other delicious users, and possibly making a list of things you've been reading for your friends. The firefox plugin for delicious is great, and I hope they bring such a simple interface to Safari.

Similarly, Digg.com is a bookmarking tool. I use this to try to promote news stories that I've read and like. I am not in love with digg, but I have kept using it for months. My main complaint is that when I hit a digg button from a page, like NYTimes.com or LATimes.com, it then makes me log in, looks for that article, suggests it might be a duplicate, asks me to write a summary and pick a category if no one else has dugg it, etc. It can be an ordeal. I want to digg something and not have to interact with the digg machine at all, and that hasn't happened very often.

Cloud computing and computing clouds

More and more I'm frustrated with the cyber-infrastructure of climate science. It seems to be on the verge of crisis, in a Kuhnian sense. Everyone has individual solutions for how to do large computations, manage very large data sets, and collaborate between institutions. For example, due to limited resources, I just had to move some simulation output from a remote server to a local, external hard drive. One simulation (not a big one) generated some 50GB of output that I don't really want to throw away. Retrieving this data took hours, and then several more hours to send it from the remote site to my desk. It's crazy, inefficient, and isolating.

There needs to be a better way. We need to harness the power inherent in "cloud computing" and the latest technology for using simple, intuitive web interfaces for accessing remote data (e.g., MobileMe, Google applications, etc.) and apply them to scientific computation, data storage, and data analysis.

We have seen small steps in these directions from projects like SETI@home and climateprediction.net, among others. I have also just read an article from Nature [LINK] saying that Amazon (see update below) and Google have both started down these roads, as has the NSF with something called DataNet. However, as the article notes, there are serious challenges, not just in terms of technology but also dealing with access, cost, and fairness. These can be touchy issues, especially in fields where the rate of work can vary greatly among different research groups.

I'll also just complain that even besides dealing with sharing and storing data, the ever-growing size of data sets in Earth Sciences, and particularly in the climate sciences, demands new tools for analyzing and visualizing the data. I've seen some projects that seek to deal with the emerging issues, but the progress of these new tools seems to be lagging significantly behind the growing data sets. As a concrete example, take the analysis of output from the NICAM, a global cloud-system resolving model. This is a model that has points every 7km over the entire surface of the earth. A good deal of variable are on vertical levels, say about 50 of them. It is conceivable that you'd be interested in examining global fields every hour for several years. On a typical desktop, loading a single 3-dimensional field for ONE hour would require all (or more) of the available memory, making operating on the field pretty slow, and doing serious number crunching is basically impossible. This isn't going to be a special case for long, either. A new generation of cutting-edge models will have similar resolution, and as they start producing actual simulations (i.e., ones from which scientific results are desired), analysis tools need to be available to do the job. Right now, I don't have any such tools. Those that do exist need to be made available and useable, and soon.

UPDATE:
I have been looking into these vague notions a bit more. Amazon has a side company called Amazon Web Services that sells cloud computing (computation, storage, database query, etc). The service seems to leverage the fact that Amazon has a ton of computational power and storage just sitting around, so they try to sell their downtime to companies that need more cyberinfrastructure than they can afford. It's a pay as you go system, and you only pay for the compute power/time that you actually use. It seems very interesting. Of course, the problem is transferring this kind of system to a more science community system. It would be nice, for example, if the same kind of system were available from an NSF computing center, and you could access data interactively using a web browser, or submit large simulations from a web browser that then run in the cloud with results going to the online storage facility. Of course, the problem is that "science" doesn't have a giant existing distributed computing environment with plenty of downtime, and there's not a lot of incentive to set one up (i.e., the NSF isn't that altruistic). These are just thoughts to chew on.

Another example of what should have been done already

Today I read an article posted on Science Daily (Aerodynamic Truck Trailer Cuts Fuel And Emissions By Up To 15 Percent) that made me kind of upset. The story is about a new, more aerodynamic sideskirt design for truck trailers. The design reduces drag, and increases fuel efficiency by about 10%. That is great, right, so why am I so mad about it? Well, because this very small improvement could have been made years ago with little effort, but corporate inertia has kept this kind of innovation from being properly implemented. EVEN MORE EGREGIOUS though, is that there have been radically different designs for trucks for decades that could improve fuel efficiency by 25% WITHOUT CHANGING THE ENGINE. The design that I'm aware of is by Luigi Colani, who I've only become aware of recently by watching "Future Car" on the Discovery Channel. In the 1970s, Colani came up with a radically more aerodynamic truck design, which apparently sat on his shelf unimplemented for a couple decads. In 2001, he introduced a new design, this one 50% more efficient than conventional trucks, but still no one is building it or even stealing some of his ideas. Why? It doesn't make sense.

While I was trying to remember Colani's name, I found two examples of a "more efficient truck." First was just from a couple months ago. Navistar has introduced a new model called LoneStar, which is supposed to be 5-15% more fuel efficient than traditional trucks. The second was from 1995, when the US DOT gave an award to Kenworth for their T600A, which had been produced since 1985. The award was described by Barry Langridge, Kenworth's general manager, "It literally changed the face of the trucking industry forever by creating a new generation of fuel efficient trucks which have saved billions of gallons of fuel. The 70,000 T600s built since '85, when compared to non-aerodynamic conventional models, will save an estimated 1.25 billion gallons during their useful lives." As far as I can tell, these trucks still are getting 6-8 miles per gallon.

Also read a similar post at the "Our Futrure" blog, which sent me to the Colani site and echoes my lack of enthusiasm for current truck design.

Science Debate 2008 - May in Oregon!?!

Obama has backed out of the debate scheduled for next week, and McCain and Clinton were non-committal. So organizers are trying to schedule the Science Debate for May in Oregon. [LINK].

Please visit the official Science Debate 2008 web site and find a way to support this important cause. Basic research funding, ethical stands on scientific/technological issues, and policy decisions that should be informed by scientific findings all need to be discussed in an open and fair forum, and the candidates must be expected to be knowledgeable, thoughtful, and articulate about how they will deal with science and technology in the next 4-8 years.

update: If you happen to be reading this and have any doubt that we need a president who cares deeply about science and technology, go read ScienceNOW's April Fool's day joke: Bush to Science: "Let's be friends". This is an official website under the American Association for the Advancement of Science! Can you imagine this kind of attitude from the mainstream scientific organizations with ANY OTHER ADMINISTRATION?

Leveraging the Amazon Kindle, some ideas

This is off-topic, but I just struck myself with a couple of simple ideas related to the Amazon Kindle. I'm sure you know, but just in case, go look at the Kindle, it's an interesting device that uses "E-Ink" to make it's display look a lot like an actual printed page. It connects wirelessly to a cell phone network to download books from Amazon, or I think it can be connected and synced with a library on a computer, or something like that. The important thing is that it's a small, lightweight device that can (apparently) successfully mimic the experience of reading a page from a physical book, magazine, or newspaper. People have responded pretty well to it, and today I noticed that Amazon has had supply issues because of the large demand. Great, but I'm not trying to advertise this device, which I've never even held in my hands, but really I'm trying to make the case that there is such a device and that it isn't horrible. Many people complain about reading text from monitors of any kind, TVs, computers, iPods/iPhones, etc, and that is why they always print things and carry around books and papers and such. The early success of Kindle shows there's a chance these people could be satisfied with a similar device, at least to some extent. This leads me to some obvious observations about the potential for such devices.

Go to a high school, or better yet, just go across the street from a high school when classes let out and students start pouring out from the school. Yes, you will probably be put on some kind of list with the local law enforcement, but do it anyway. You will see that kids are loaded with gigantic backpacks, hanging improperly from their shoulders. This was an issue when I was in school, and I've seen it recently enough that I know it still is. It isn't just teenage garbage that fills those packs, there are a bunch of heavy textbooks. In my days, I know that I often had to leave some books at school or home because I couldn't fit all my books in my bag every day; there are injuries due to heavy bags, which is just stupid. Many times, students take home textbooks just for a few pages, either of reading or homework assignments. Wouldn't it be convenient if they carried one "book" with them that had all their course material at the ready? A Kindle-like device would be perfect for this.

An added bonus is that if publishers work with the content provider (e.g., Amazon), then new editions of books, or supplements, or any number of extras could be provided to under-funded schools and students at minimal costs. Once the burden of putting ink to paper (incurring costs related to ink, paper, layout of presses, binding, packing, shipping, etc) is removed, the cost of materials drops dramatically. At higher education levels, this is even better, since small, esoteric books are really expensive, and authors don't make any money from them anyway, this could take the cost of such books to the floor, and college students, grad students, and professional researchers could actually afford to buy the books that are most useful to them (do you hear the frustration?). If you don't know what I'm writing about, go look at technical books in just about any field, for example, Cloud Dynamics by Houze costs $80+ on Amazon, which is a graduate/researcher level book that is really useful to a relatively small number of people. If we could just download it to our digital library, the cost SHOULD be dramatically reduced while still preserving the publisher's profit and the royalties that Houze gets (which I bet isn't much).

It would also be possible to self-publish under this model, so instructors could upload their class notes to some service which would make the download available to students. This might hurt copy stores, who make a lot of money by selling over-priced readers to students, but would be great for instructors and students.

Similarly, scholarly journals could use this distribution model very easily. They already have online subscription models, by which most people now go to a web site, find the article of interest and download the pdf of the article, which is then read on-screen or printed. This would be a natural extension of that model, and would reduce printing costs and wasted paper.

What needs to be done to make a Kindle-like device actually work for these educational and scholarly purposes? Very little. One potential gotcha is that the current E-Ink technology used in the Kindle does not allow color. This presents serious limitations compared to having a regular pdf or a printed book. This is especially true for high school and lower-level textbooks, which regularly rely on "creative" layout and color to "draw the student in." There is electronic paper with color already developed, however, so this might not be a deal-breaker (example).

The other technology-related speed bump is speed. One of the criticisms of the Kindle, and E-Ink in general, is that it is slow to render pages. I imagine the problem would be worse with graphics-heavy, color-intensive pages, so quick flipping back and forth would be a problem. And as we know, when doing homework or research, there are often periods of intense page flipping, searching for some specific passage or re-reading something that didn't register the first time. There are myriad potential solutions, from having a little screen-space for "saving" passages or efficient built-in searching, to more dramatic changes in E-Ink.

Other problems are design of the device, which would probably require different models catering to grade-school, high school, college, and professionals. No problem. Then there's the potential problem of getting publishers to embrace this model. They're apparently onboard with Kindle, Amazon offered 80,000+ titles when the Kindle was released, but it might be more difficult for the small publishing houses to deal with such a dramatic change in distribution. I don't know enough about publishing to really have a good guess, but we know the music and movie industries have basically freaked out and tried to avoid moving into a digital distribution framework. And then there is the cost of these devices, and how to widely distribute them to schools already strapped for cash. You can imagine the nightmare scenarios.

So at the end, I don't think any of this is new, and I'm sure it has all been discussed much more elsewhere, but I'm suddenly enamored with the idea of carrying a single "book" wherever I go, having all the books I need, and being able to buy technical books for a fraction of the current cost. Maybe this is an idea that a company like Amazon could actually pursue, too, since they probably have enough sway to get a school district to do a test program by providing Kindles and the textbooks needed (except it doesn't address the color problem yet). It would also help to raise a generation of people who don't "need" to have paper in front of them to read.

UPDATES:

Here's some ideas to improve the Kindle, though I think there's a conflict with some of these suggestions and the E-Ink interface. That E-Ink technology is not as versatile as a lot of bloggers think it is.

Ouch! Here's Scoble on the Kindle, and he's pretty unhappy about the lack of design. Watch the video, I think these are good points that need to be addressed in this commercial form of the product, but also for some future educational applications.

Another overview of the Kindle, with some of the same criticisms. Down in the comments, someone suggests Kindle Textbooks as a good option for this technology, so at least someone else has thought of this.

Here's a post that thinks Kindle has a chance at textbooks.

There's a thread on the Amazon site about college texts on Kindle. There seems to be support for this, but the publishers aren't yet on board. I really don't think it'll work unless you can buy a textbook for, say $25, as opposed to the paper versions for $50-150. The idea of automatic updates to new editions (maybe with some sanity limits) is so sweet for the consumer that it'd sell Kindles alone. The publishers lose out though, except I bet they could increase their profit margins to make up the difference.