Babbage

IT’S a question that’s bothered cultural critics for decades: while we know more than ever, are we getting dumber as a result of the increasing amount of technology at our disposal? Reading historical debates, and hearing of the attention paid to them by a thoughtful populace, certainly makes one wonder. Speaking in the 1820s of the mechanical Difference Engine he had devised for computing polynomial functions, Charles Babbage, the father of the programmable computer and our web-log’s namesake, told the House of Commons: 

On two occasions I have been asked [by Members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Incisive eloquence—in Latin and Greek as well as their mother tongue—was common fare among Georgians and Victorians lucky enough to have had at least a dozen years of schooling. One wonders how the founders of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube might respond to similarly banal queries tossed at them during congressional testimony.

The current debate about intelligence, sparked by Nicholas Carr’s recent and eminently readable “The Shallows”, asks what is the internet doing to our brains? Like Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason” and Adam Winer’s “How Dumb Are You?” earlier in the decade, Mr Carr taps into the sense of despair among American intellectuals about the country’s poor educational showing when compared with other countries. 

In reading, mathematics and science, American 15-year-olds languish in the lower half of the OECD rankings for the 30 wealthiest countries. Other English-speaking nations such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia and even Britain are all in the upper quartile. South Korea and Japan are in the top decile.

Such indisputable facts are rightly a concern for policy-makers and parents throughout the United States. But the reasons for the abject failure of American education—especially at middle- and high-school levels—are well understood, and the corrective measures widely accepted. Implementing them, however, remains as politically intractable as ever.

But it is not just the chagrin of seeing a nation’s youth so poorly served. Even more so, an unspoken nostalgia for an age when book-learning was the noblest of pursuits has invigorated the debate about the dumbing down of America. Tellingly, the most astringent critics are invariably middle-aged or older. 

Among other things, Ms Jacoby blames a rising tide of anti-intellectualism. She notes that the reading of books, newspapers and magazines has declined across the board. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing whatsoever (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004—a period that oversaw the rise of personal computers, the internet and video games. She bemoans the way electronic media, with their demand for spectacle and brevity, have shortened our attention spans. Sound bites by presidential candidates, she points out, dropped from 42 seconds in 1968 to less than eight seconds by 2000. 

But things are rarely as they seem. For one thing, e-books barely existed a decade ago, but have exploded in popularity since Amazon introduced its Kindle a few short years back, and a host of rivals rushed in with copycat versions. For many readers, the ability to interact with e-books digitally—searching them automatically, inserting digital bookmarks and annotations, zooming in on the small type—has rendered hardcovers and paperbacks obsolete. So much so, e-books are now outselling hardcovers. Perhaps we are witnessing not a decline in book reading but a renaissance. The irony is that had computers been invented before books, we would now be wringing our hands over the loss of multi-media, multi-tasking, computer-gaming skills as our children frittered away their time by burying their noses in single-topic paper tomes.

To the specific question that Mr Carr asks about what the internet is doing to our brains, the simple answer is that it is making us think and behave differently. Of that, there is no doubt. But that does not mean we are getting dumber in the process. What makes people intelligent is their ability to learn and reason—in short, to adapt and thrive within their environment. That fundamental capacity has not changed in thousands of years, and is unlikely to do so because some new technology comes along, whether television, mobile phones or the internet. 

Adaptation to one’s changing surroundings is a different matter. Every new medium introduced since the invention of the printing press has molded our minds in different ways. It would be alarming if it didn’t. Today, confronted with the ubiquity of the internet, we need a whole new set of skills to navigate the information-laden environment we inhabit. In other words, each new set of skills we learn and memories we create builds on our existing mental capacities without changing them in any fundamental way. 

Continue reading "The Difference Engine: Rewiring the brain" >>

WHAT with the slump in DVD sales, the rise in piracy and the collapse of outside financing, Hollywood has not had much to cheer in the past couple of years. So one might expect a warm welcome for a technology that has consistently driven up revenues and profit margins. Not so. The backlash against the 3-D film is under way.

A story in the New York Times usefully collects some film-makers’ and viewers’ complaints. They charge that 3-D movies are expensive to make and to watch. The cameras are hard to use. The films are dark. Because they must be shot in video rather than film, they feel somehow unreal.

Such talk could be easily dismissed if it came only from fusty film-makers known for digging in their heels against new technology. But it comes from trendy folk like Jon Favreau and J. J. Abrams. And many of the complaints have been aired at Comic-Con, an annual geeks’ convention in San Diego that has become increasingly important as a marketing convention for Hollywood. If you cannot sell nerds on a new technology, what chance do you have?

Even before Comic-Con the astute media analyst Richard Greenfield was trying to interrupt Hollywood’s 3-D dreams. While some films, notably “Avatar” and “Alice in Wonderland”, have performed well in 3-D, others (like “Cats and Dogs”) have bombed. More worrying still, he points out, many people seem happy to view 3-D films in two dimensions—a preference that is becoming obvious now that there are lots of 3-D screens. If Hollywood thinks it can make ends meet by charging a $3 or $3.50 premium for 3-D films, it had better think again. Indeed, a flood of bad 3-D films will sour viewers on the whole technology. 

Nobody knows anything
Don’t pay any attention to the critics (Hollywood certainly won’t). The economics still hugely favour 3-D. It costs little more to make a 3-D film than a 2-D one. The add-on is about 10% to 15% “below the line”—that is, to the cost of production, not to the talent—and that figure may well come down as technicians become more familiar with 3-D. Cinemas could charge a lot less than $3.50 a ticket extra and everybody would still make money.

The 3-D film experience is extremely difficult to obtain illegally. Following the release of “Avatar” late last year, 2-D copies of the film quickly appeared on file-sharing networks. Such free competition didn’t seem to hurt the film’s box-office sales at all. In part because of piracy, in part because people have so many other entertainment choices, Hollywood is moving towards a business model based on must-see spectaculars—“event movies” in the jargon. And 3-D will be an important way of differentiating big films from the run-of-the-mill.

Sure, there will be some clumsily-converted 3-D films that offer no improvement over 2-D. That is why we have film critics and RottenTomatoes.com. Certainly, some 3-D films will fail at the box office and on DVD. But so will a goodly number of 2-D films. The studios can cope: failure is hardly an uncommon experience in Hollywood. The 3-D rush will continue.

Read on: Hollywood studios fight a proposed market in "box-office futures" (Apr 2010)

Our review of "The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies"

Day three

Day two

Day one

EVEN the coach is a seminar room. On the trip from the hotel to the Googleplex your correspondent sits next to Douglas Kell, chief executive of Britain’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. That is not, however, what we talk about. Instead, we discuss his thoughts on the underappreciated role of iron in disease. He thinks the release of iron ions is the common factor in a bunch of disparate illnesses of old age, including some cancers. Iron promotes the formation of hydroxyl radicals, which damage lots of biological molecules, especially DNA. Often, this is the result of the iron interacting with oxygen-rich chemicals of the sort neutralised by the antioxidant vitamins beloved of certain food-faddists. In Dr Kell’s view, though, it is the iron, not the oxygen-rich chemicals, which should be the target of those who would live longer.

Fortunately, excess iron can be mopped up using chemicals called chelating agents. If Dr Kell’s view prevails, then, expect to see such agents being deployed as drugs in the future.

Breakfast yesterday was a type of Eggs Benedict that had crab meat instead of ham. Today, it is scrambled eggs; less exotic, but still welcome. The Big White Board suggests a session on alleviating world poverty. This is led by Peter Singer, a philosopher who has migrated from Australia to New Jersey (he is at Princeton). It starts well, by posing the proposition that, although saving a child who is drowning in front of you is the moral equivalent of saving one who is dying of lack of clean water in a far-away tropical country, in practice most people would do the former without hesitation while neglecting the latter completely. It then, though, goes slightly off the rails by assuming the truth of this proposition, and therefore that blocks to the latter course of action are merely pragmatic, rather than examining the assumption itself.

Your correspondent is not a philosopher, but he was once a zoologist and he has no difficulty believing that the practical moral compass actually fitted into humans by natural selection is different from the Platonic one dreamed up by philosophers in the rarefied atmosphere of the academy. Many of the solutions Dr Singer suggests (making victims more identifiable as individuals, overcoming what he describes as “parochialism” and so on) amount to ways of tricking the evolved mind into seeing as neighbours people who are not - but they are not presented as such. Nor is the question of the psychological reward to the rescuer (the gratitude of the parents; the approbation of peers) much discussed. It is a sadly unscientific approach in what is supposed to be a scientific meeting.

That cannot be said of the next session, though. This is science red in tooth and claw. Erik Verlinde, a Dutch theoretical physicist, describes his ideas about the origin of gravity.

Gravity is a puzzle. It is the only familiar part of fundamental physics that does not fit into the standard quantum-mechanical model of how physical phenomena work. Instead, it has its own, private theory: Einstein’s general relativity. This works perfectly as a description, but is unsatisfactory as an explanation.

Dr Verlinde would quantise gravity by making it an emergent property of the entropy of empty space. At least, that is what your correspondent thinks he understands. And that is merely the beginning. Dr Verlinde would also throw out the inflationary explanation for the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe, so carefully explained yesterday by Alan Guth and his colleagues. Instead, he thinks that what humans perceive as the universe is just a bit of an eternally existing space that has got temporarily out of equilibrium, and has thrown up matter and energy as a consequence. Hang around long enough, and it will all settle down to nothingness again.

In the meantime, humans have to deal with the consequences of the lack of nothingness. And in the last session of the morning two of those humans, Rebecca Saxe and Laurie Santos, debate with an overflowing roomful of people how to get policymakers to make their policy in the light of actual scientific data. Why, for example, are such data insisted upon in medical matters but almost wilfully ignored in educational ones?

No great epiphany emerges, though the representative of the White House who is present promises that the current administration is trying to do better (and it is true that President Obama has appointed several scientists to actual positions of power). And then it is time for lunch – and one more quick informal seminar, by Paul Sereno, a palaeontologist. Dr Sereno has brought his crocodiles with him. He dug them up in Niger and they come in all shapes and sizes. There was in the southern continents, he explains, contemporaneously with the dinosaurs, a whole crocodilian fauna, including beasts that probably ate dinosaurs for lunch.

It is a good way to end. And end the camp does, after suitable speeches of thanks and farewell. The unknown variables foo and bar have certainly had values ascribed to them. Your correspondent has met old friends and made some new ones. He has also learned a lot. And that, after all, is the point of a scientific meeting. Even one held in the Village.

(Photo of the Big White Board from dullhunk on Flickr)

THE United Arab Emirates announced on August 1st that it had failed to reach an agreement on data traffic with Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, and would suspend messenger, e-mail and web-browsing services on BlackBerrys from October 11th. There are lots of smart-phones in the world that handle e-mail and web browsing; why pick on BlackBerry? From the UAE's telecoms regulator:

BlackBerry data is immediately exported off-shore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organization. BlackBerry data services are currently the only data services operating in the UAE where this is the case.

Whenever you read about a dispute between a web-based service and a country, you need to ask yourself only one question: where is the server located? The conflict between Google and China came down to the conditions under which Google could locate servers in China. Closer servers offer a faster load-time, but servers on the Chinese mainland fall under Chinese law. WikiLeaks, as well, takes advantage of server law by routing all links through servers in countries with strong protections for whistleblowers and journalists.

Countries have two basic technical methods of controlling the flow of information over the internet. First, they claim legal jurisdiction over information stored on servers within their own borders. Second, they can read or block traffic moving through the choke-points where internet cables cross the border. Undersea cables bring the internet to the UAE at only two locations, and both of the country's internet-service providers comply enthusiastically with an internet access-management policy, which means that the country can control whatever data reside within or arrive at its border. According to the Open Net Initiative, the emirates' authorities passively read internet traffic and actively block access to sites that feature VoIP, pornography, gambling, terrorism, hacking skills, social networking, unorthodox views on Islam, posts critical to the UAE and anything under Israel's top domain. (They also, curiously, block access to hitler.org.)

The problem, from the emirates' perspective, is data that are neither stored in-country or readable as they cross the border. A virtual private network (VPN) encrypts data so they are only readable to the sender and recipient, and at no point in between. So last year the country began to monitor internet cafes for VPNs. (The sweep included checks for Skype and other VoIP services, which might explain why the country's duopoly of telecoms providers is so enthusiastic.) So: server control, border control and regular sweeps for VPNs. The only loophole left was BlackBerry service which, like a VPN, encrypts its data to make them readable only on the device and at the server.

The BlackBerry, then, offers a way to get information to a server outside a country without having anyone inside that country read it. The key here is the location of the server; a country is generally happier when it has all servers in its own warm jurisdictional embrace. Expect to see this problem again. From Bloomberg,

BlackBerry services may be banned in India unless the Canadian company agrees to resolve security concerns, a government official with direct knowledge of the matter said July 29. India told Research In Motion to set up a proxy server in the country to enable security agencies to monitor e-mail traffic, according to three government officials, who declined to be identified as the information is confidential.

Day one

THERE is something of the Village about the Googleplex, except that in the dystopia which imprisoned Number Six, it was escape that was impossible. In the Googleplex, the impossibility is entrance. The bright, young people who staff Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, are very welcoming—up to the point where you accidentally cross the invisible perimeter of the part of the campus set aside for the meeting. At that moment, the chance of being smothered by a guardian balloon that has come bouncing across the lawn seems very real. The statuary, too, looks as though it has been borrowed from Portmeirion, where “The Prisoner” was filmed, or possibly from the Parco dei Mostri in Bomarzo. And some of the bright, young things have Segways. Oh dear…

We are here for Foo Camp, a scratch science meeting organised every year by Tim O’Reilly, a computing-technology publisher. “Foo” stands (or, at least, once stood) for “friends of O’Reilly”, and his coterie of friends is certainly eclectic. This year, besides your correspondent, it ranges from Andrew Marr, a latecoming worshipper at the shrine of science who was once the BBC’s political editor, via Beth Shapiro, who studies the DNA of mammoths, to Stewart Brand, the founder of the “Whole Earth Catalog” and Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway.

But “foo” is also, as hardcore geeks will be aware, the name for a dummy variable in a computer program, a bit like the unknown “x” in an algebraic equation. By luck or good judgment—the reader may take his choice—this version of “foo” describes the role of the meeting brilliantly. What will happen is unknown right up to the point where the campers meet, under the presiding genius of Mr O’Reilly, on the Friday evening when festivities start. Each camper has few seconds to introduce himself; ramblers are gonged. Even so, there being more than 300 campers, the introductions take the best part of an hour. There is then a free-for-all that sorts out the sessions. Nothing has been planned in advance. Instead, campers stake claims to rooms and time slots on the Big White Board set up for the purpose as eagerly as ’49ers claimed their patches during the Californian gold rush.

The second unknown variable in computing (the equivalent of “y”) is called “bar”, and after the filling in of the Big White Board, it is to the inevitable foo bar that the campers retire. This is located in a tent next to a statue of a fish swallowing a fish that is swallowing a fish that is swallowing a fish. Is that, we wonder, a representation of the ecological ideas of trophic levels and food chains, or just a description of life in silicon valley?

THE conversation started over lunch in a pub across the street from London’s Waterloo Station in the 1960s. The proposal, sketched out on the proverbial paper napkin, was to design a hot-air blimp—not another propane-fired hot-air balloon (several of which had recently taken to the skies) but an actual thermal airship.

The difference between balloons and blimps could not be more fundamental. While both rely on lighter-than-air buoyancy to stay aloft, balloons go where the wind tells them—like a leaf in a stream. Since the Montgolfier brothers’ experiments in the late 1700s, balloons have been steered mainly by changing altitude, with the drifting occupants seeking a wind at a different level that will blow them, hopefully, in the desired direction. By contrast, blimps—and airships in general—are powered and steerable craft that go more or less where they please.

That was the whole point of building a blimp rather than a balloon that rainy lunchtime in London. At the time, your correspondent was a freshly minted aeronautical engineer. Across the table from him was a famous author, explorer and balloonist, who had made numerous voyages across Africa in helium balloons. As a platform drifting quietly across the savannah, a balloon was a wonderfully non-invasive way of filming wildlife. Inevitably, however, the spectacular herd of wildebeest or whatever was way off on the horizon—and there was no way to get close. With a steerable blimp, by contrast, endless footage could be shot for television to pay for the expedition.

Your correspondent was soon to learn that it wasn’t a matter of starting with a blank piece of paper. The hot-air blimp’s colourful envelope of polyurethane-coated Terylene had already been sewed up—so pictures could be taken and articles written to help raise money for the planned expedition. The blimp’s long, thin cigar shape would have been fine for an original Zeppelin with its rigid internal skeleton. But it was far from ideal for a non-rigid blimp that derived its shape solely from the slightly higher pressure of the warmer air within the fabric envelope.

Nevertheless, a scale model was duly carved from polystyrene foam, its centre of pressure estimated, and the model set up in a wind-tunnel at Imperial College. A series of low-speed stability tests to measure pitch and yaw quickly determined the size of the control surfaces needed to keep the craft straight and level and pointing in the desired direction.

The results were not encouraging. With no inner structure to brace the enormous cruciform tail-fins and rudder required to do the job, all your correspondent could suggest was to use pressurised hoops made from thin rubber tubing (like the inner tubes of bicycle tyres) attached at various points towards the rear of the envelope. Inflated to high pressure, these would form a reasonably stiff frame for holding the fabric-covered control surfaces in place.

Unfortunately, with no going back to the drawing-board allowed, the design proved much too unwieldy—and the world’s first thermal airship failed to get off the ground. A decade later, Cameron Balloons of Bristol, England, licked most of the problems and is now the most successful maker of hot-air craft in the world, with separate operations in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as Bristol.

Continue reading "The Difference Engine: Not all hot air" >>

You don't have to speak Estonian to understand the universal frustrations of picking up a parcel at a post office. Two new start-up postal services cater to the young and mobile, and promise to make the process more pleasant and efficient. Both happen to have approached me recently, in short order.

SmartPost, featured in the advertisement above, hails from Estonia. Filling a gap in the country (expensive and poor public postal service, no nationwide courier services), the firm has developed a system of lockers and tied them together with sophisticated software. Online and catalogue shoppers can have goods delivered to one of 36 locations. To open the lockers, the firm sends users a text message with a code.

Such locker systems have been around for some time. DHL, a logistics company, for instance, has been operating a network of “parcel stations” in Germany for years (using terminals from Keba, an Austrian firm). But SmartPost’s offering, says Indrek Oolup, the firm’s chief executive, has improved on the concept in several ways, notably by using smarter software and putting the terminals near where people are, meaning mostly in supermarkets. More than a third of all parcels sent from businesses to consumers in Estonia is now shipped using SmartPost. In May, CPCR Express, Russia’s largest privately funded postal company, announced that it will install at least 100 of the locker terminals.

SendSocial, a start-up in Britain, allows consumers to send packages to people even if they do not have their postal address – by showing SendSocial that they are friends on Facebook or by providing the addressee’s Twitter ID. The firm then turns around and sends a request to the addressee to get the delivery details. If she accepts, collection and payment details are confirmed, and the sender receives a label with delivery information – but without the real address, which is not divulged during the transaction.

This may sound a bit complicated, but Jonathan Grubin, SendSocial’s boss, expects that there will be much interest in such a service: “We live in a world of increasing nomadic existences and a constant lack of time. With physical addresses changing so quickly, very often a Twitter ID or email address remain the only constant.” In May, the firm signed a deal with ByBox, which maintains a network of 3,500 drop boxes in Britain (a low-tech version of SmartPost’s system).

Now, if there are two, there must be more. So any examples of innovative postal services are gratefully received. I may pull them together in a piece for the offline Economist.

Note: SmartPost informed us after publishing that it has changed its name to "Cleveron" for the export market and sold its Estonian network to Itella, an international logistics firm, to concentrate on technology development. (And that Estonia has, in fact, several nationwide courier services.)

Yesterday in Hanoi Hillary Clinton, America's secretary of state, chided her hosts on failing to keep the internet open and free. Vietnam has blocked Facebook since November of 2009. (In that year, the site had grown from 40,000 users in Vietnam to 1m.) Around the same time, someone infected computers with a programme disguised as a Vietnamese-language keyboard driver, then used those computers in denial-of-service attacks on websites that opposed bauxite mining in Vietnam, a government priority. Vietnam jails bloggers. And, according to Duy Hoang of the Vietnam Reform Party, hackers in Vietnam pulled down and then published the database of a website that served as a gathering point for the Vietnamese diaspora.

(You can read more from The Economist on bloggers in Vietnam here.)

So Mrs Clinton is doing the right thing. But she may not be doing it the right way. Reading about her appearance yesterday, I thought of a panel I watched in April that featured Mr Hoang and Adrian Hong of the Pegasus project, a foundation that focuses on communication in closed societies. Mr Hong pointed out that, for America, human rights has generally been only a rhetorical priority. He had a hard time thinking of any real international state action aimed solely at human rights; when diplomats close the doors behind them, he said, they talk about trade. He saw no reason to think the right to unhindered access to the internet would be any different.

But neither Mr Hong or Mr Hoang, the Vietnamese reformer, wanted to discount America's role entirely. Mr Hoang said that international support is of tremendous value inside of Vietnam, and that America happens to be the country with the most leverage. I asked him for one single effective thing that Hillary Clinton could do for him on her next trip to Vietnam. He said that access to the internet doesn't have to be a question of human rights; it can be one of trade and development, too. Ms Clinton might, he said, behind closed doors point out to her counterparts how important the internet is for jobs and education, and that a closed internet creates fewer innovations than an open one.

Babbage hopes, then, that she did that as well.

REMEMBER those wailing banshee motorcycles with plumes of acrid blue smoke billowing behind them? Your correspondent came of age astride one. But few two-stroke engines survived the draconian pollution measures of the latter part of the 20th century. Today, the little two-stroke smoker lives on largely in lawnmowers, chainsaws, hedge-trimmers and the like—where its cheapness, lightness and willingness to run in any orientation has won it a loyal following among gardeners everywhere. From the road, though, it has all but vanished.

Yet, the traditional two-stroke petrol engine—so-called because it had two strokes per cycle instead of the more usual four—had a lot going for it. With no complicated poppet valves and cam shafts, no oil reservoir and far fewer parts all round, it cost less than half as much to make as a comparable four-stroke engine, and was far lighter into the bargain. Also, because it fired once every revolution instead of once every other revolution, it put out considerably more power than four-strokes of similar size. 

Simplicity remains the two-stroke’s greatest virtue. The engine still has to perform the same four separate processes (“suck”, “squeeze”, “bang”, “blow”) as a four-stroke. But it does so by making the exhaust stroke (“blow”) at the end of one cycle and the induction stroke (“suck”) at the start of the next cycle happen simultaneously while the piston is travelling through the bottom half of the cylinder. The other two strokes—compression (“squeeze”) and combustion (“bang”)—are carried out sequentially while the piston is in the cylinder’s upper half. 

In its basic form, a two-stroke consists of a specially shaped piston rising and falling in a cylinder that has an exhaust port on one side and an inlet port lower down on the other. As the piston falls, it first uncovers the exhaust port, which allows most of the spent gases from the previous cycle to be expelled. It then uncovers the inlet port, where fresh air-fuel mixture is admitted. The compression stroke occurs as the piston rises back up the cylinder, with the mixture being ignited by a spark plug as the piston nears the top of its stroke and both ports are covered. 

Sadly, such simplicity comes at a price. The fact that the inlet and exhaust ports are, for part of the stroke, open simultaneously means that the engine’s scavenging (getting rid of the burned gases before fresh fuel is admitted) is less than ideal. Inadequate scavenging was one of the reasons for the two-stroke’s poor economy. Over the years, various attempts have been made to improve matters. The method most widely used today—loop scavenging—was invented in Germany during the 1920s. A carefully shaped inlet port causes the incoming mixture to swirl around the cylinder rather than make a bee-line for the open exhaust port. Not only does this permit better scavenging, the turbulence also promotes combustion. The result is greater power and better fuel economy.

The two-stroke’s downfall is usually attributed to its “total loss” lubrication system. Instead of being contained in the engine’s sump, the lubricant was pre-mixed with the fuel (traditionally as one part of oil to 16 of petrol, though up to 50 parts of petrol later became possible). Because oil is less combustible than petrol, as much as a third of it can survive the process—escaping into the atmosphere as unburned hydrocarbons and soot.

In truth, this was not the only reason for the two-stroke’s disappearance. Most of the leading motorcycle makers of the day stopped building two-strokes not because of concerns about pollution, but because they wanted to focus on their pricier and more profitable four-stroke models. A rule change finagled by the manufacturers, which forced 250cc two-strokes to compete on the track against 450cc four-strokes, did the trick. The two-stroke’s demise—at least on the road and the track, if not in the dirt, the snow and the forest—followed swiftly. 

And there the technology rests. Or it did so until recently. Two-strokes are back in the news, thanks to the success of pilotless planes like the Predator and Reaper in Iraq and Afghanistan. A new generation of air-cooled two-strokes that look like grown up versions of the baby diesel engines aeromodellers have used for decades are being hurried into production for military duty by firms such as Cosworth, Desert Air, Evolution, Graupner, OS Engines and Zenoah. They range in size from 10cc to over 200cc, and can run on a variety of fuels, including avgas and jet-fuel as well as petrol and diesel.

Surprisingly, however, it is on the road that two-strokes look set to make their most dramatic comeback. Two new, and radically different, designs are causing the biggest stir.

Continue reading "The Difference Engine: Twice the bang for the buck" >>

IT IS not only unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are changing the nature of warfare by becoming increasingly sophisticated and able to take over more of the roles of manned flight. Also coming are unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). Like UAVs, the ground versions will first be employed on triple “Ds”; that is dirty, dangerous and dull work. Robots that help to detect and defuse mines are already doing service, although these are operated by remote control. The UGVs being talked about at the Farnborough Air Show near London this week are autonomous machines which do their own thing.

BAE Systems, a British defence contractor, reckons that with soldiers now carrying around 75kg (165 pounds) of kit, they could do with the equivalent of a mechanical mule following behind them. The company is experimenting with small four-wheel-drive vehicles, about the size of a quad-bike, and fitting them with automatic systems and navigational capabilities.

Often these systems can be found on the shelf, so to speak. For instance, the ability to avoid bumping into something comes from small anti-collision sensors used in Mercedes-Benz cars. “There’s no point reinventing the wheel,” says James Baker of BAE’s Advanced Technology Centre; an attitude which Babbage finds refreshing because when defence firms make things they usually end up costing an awful lot more than when people like carmakers churn them out.

These automated vehicles could be sent off to find a military unit and deliver supplies. They would also have a “follow me” function, which instructs them to tag along behind an individual soldier or unit, carrying kit and supplies. And if under fire, the UGV could be called over with a “come to me” command to deliver more ammunition. They would also be able to go off to peer over a hilltop on a spotter mission, for instance, or if in a hurry jumped on and driven away like a normal vehicle.

There are, of course, lots of details still to be dealt with. UGVs could, for instance, be operated with a PDA-type device, although it would have to be secure. They might also recognise and respond to tags carried by individual soldiers, so would be able to go from one to the other.

Of course, the car makers just might get there first. Systems that will automatically park cars and make sure they remain within the lanes of a motorway are already available. So it may not be too long before you can pull out your key fob, press a button and instead of someone from valet parking delivering your vehicle to you, it will arrive on its own.

SIR PAUL NURSE boasts a long list of academic accolades, among them a Nobel Prize, but his chummy manner and oodles of scientific star power have earned him the nickname "David Beckham of science". Given his penchant for fast motorbikes (he owns a Kawasaki), Valentino Rossi may have been more apt. Either way, the bike is doubtless efficient for Sir Paul, a busy man with no time for traffic jams. Recently elected as the next president of the Royal Society, Britain's most venerable scientific institution, he shuttles between London and New York's Rockefeller University, of which he is currently president, all the while continuing to run his own research lab. If that were not enough, next year Sir Paul will become the first director and chief executive of the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation (UKCMRI). Last week your correspondent spoke to Sir Paul about his plan for the centre: to create one of the world's preeminent biomedical research centres.

A joint effort by the government-run Medical Research Council (MRC) and three private institutions (Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and University College London), UKCMRI will occupy premises next to London's St Pancras International train station. Construction of the swanky £600 million ($920 million) complex will begin early next year and, if all goes to plan, finish in late 2014.

The previous Labour government pledged to cover half of the capital expenditure. David Cameron's coalition cabinet has reaffirmed this pledge, conditional on being presented with "a satisfactory business case" before the end of the year. When I asked him whether he feared faltering government commitment in the era of austerity, his response was typically candid: "I'd be stupid if I said I don't have concerns." He immediately added that he has no doubts the case is compelling.

First, the public money will be supplemented by funds from the other founding partners, who will also cover most of the operational costs once the centre is up and running. Second, Sir Paul believes, other research and industrial facilities will coalesce around UKCMRI, creating a biomedical cluster to rival similar ventures in other parts of the world.

The new institution is billed as an entirely fresh look at biomedical research. Its core aim is "to understand how living things work" and to use this understanding to further clinical outcomes. This is to be facilitated by forging strong interdisciplinary links with university faculties specialised in biology and chemistry, but also physics, maths, engineering and computing; as well as by making the centre "permeable" to for-profit organisations, by enabling free exchange of ideas with industry.

As competition for talent goes, he is unfazed by rivals like Singapore's A*Star programme (its $2b cash pile, Zaha Hadid-designed Biopolis and lax bioethical regulations notwithstanding). "Britain does science very well," he avers, and its rational regulatory regime has much to be said for it. He plans to focus on youth: two thirds of the 1,500-odd staff are to be in their 30s and early 40s, a period when researchers tend to be at their most creative, but also at their most vulnerable. UKCMRI will provide them with generous financial support for up to two six-year stints. Unlike many other outfits, where money is ploughed into promising research, here it will follow promising researchers, giving them a free hand to "self-assemble and rearrange" into research teams, in a process akin to Google's creative culture. Indeed, the St Pancras complex has been designed precisely with such intermingling in mind.

The bottom-up innovation strategies that emerge as a result will of course be complemented with some degree of light-touch control. One element of this will no doubt be the top-down recruitment process. Sir Paul dismisses the comparison with governments' picking of industrial winners, assuring that the outcome will depend solely on researchers' individual merit. 

It remains to be seen whether all these perky assumptions are borne out. If so, UKCMRI could herald a whole new model of biomedical innovation. In this respect, Sir Paul's institutional experiment is probably no less important than the scientific work to be conducted within it.

PS In the text I called Cancer Research UK a private institution, as opposed to the government-run MRC. I would just like to clarify that it is a charity funded by donations from the public.

We're at the point where people clearly know they need to wear a seatbelt. I'm not sure if they've gotten to the side airbags yet.

LOU HUGHES is the chief executive of InZero, a startup that's built a little black box to put between your computer and the internet. The box opens incoming files and programmes before your computer does, leaving hackers stuck in the black box and not in your computer, where they want to be. InZero has launched an open invitation to hackers, who have thus far failed to breach the box. And Mr Hughes is taking it on tour to corporate and government information officers.

"Cyber-security" and "cyberwar" are broad words. Like "weapons of mass destruction", they describe several different distinct threats, and are often used with imprecision. Insurance companies speak of risks in terms of severity and frequency: a death from a car crash is a high-severity, low-frequency event. A fender-bender is a low-severity, high-frequency event. All efforts to reduce and insure against risk weigh severity against frequency. We buy life-insurance policies and demand side air-bags to manage the risk of a fatal accident; states enforce speed limits in part to keep first-responder costs down. (And in part to raise revenue. I'm looking at you, Delaware.)

But we also make rational choices to accept certain low-severity, high-frequency risks. Financial managers advise, unless you have money to throw around, that you keep car insurance deductibles high. It's very difficult to guarantee that you won't ding your fender in a minor accident, and cheaper to pay for the event than to hedge against it. Hedges, insurance and risk mitigation, remember, are inconvenient and expensive. Absolute security, even were such a thing possible, would mean unacceptable operating costs.

I'm thinking about car accidents because when I spoke to him yesterday Mr Hughes, a former auto executive, pointed to car safety to help me understand corporate choices about cyber security. Cars, he said, had offered unprecedented mobility, but new risks. The auto industry, recognising the risks, eventually added seat belts and made structural changes to car frames (after, he neglected to say, several decades of vigorous prodding by consumer groups). States developed driver-education programmes. Consumers demanded new features to lessen their own risk.

We are at a point, according to Mr Hughes, where corporations are beginning to see cyber-espionage as an existential risk: one of severity so high that it is unacceptable at any frequency. And he is seeing, since intrusions in 2008 at America's Central Command (and, allegedly, at Lockheed Martin) new co-operation among companies to come up with better solutions. Before 2008 corporations had been reluctant to admit weaknesses; now they're desperate to fix them any way they can. The risk profile of cyber-espionage has changed: Frequency has risen, as has the perception of severity.

Companies have long seen their greatest vulnerabilities in telecommuters and travellers, which brings us back to the problem of pitting security against operating costs. It might be possible to lock down systems to guarantee data security for travelling executives. But the more you lock a system down, the less convenient you make it. (Note how cumbersome air travel has become in the last decade.) Mr Hughes claims that InZero's technology will make it possible to connect to the internet without a loss in flexibility. It's an extraordinary claim. If it proves to be true on at least most devices from most locations, it will change the calculation that companies make. Until then, avoiding the existential risk of cyber-espionage it will make companies less nimble.

It's important, then, to approach cyber-security as you would car safety. We can no more completely avoid cyber threats than we can car accidents; it would be too expensive, and too burdensome to the economy. And it's important to distinguish among risks. A rolling bump is not the same thing as a high-speed brake failure, just as the theft of a credit card is not the same as the theft of corporate data, or a catastrophic grid failure.