Nanoplugs

It was a beautiful day. The Trike had been in the shop for 20,000 mile service and it was a pleasure to pick it up and go for a ride. It had been running very rough — now it purrs like a kitten. The mechanic told me the problem was that the spark plugs were badly “fouled“. The fouling was not caused by software or engineering design. It was caused by an accumulation of materials on the plug resulting from improper fuel burn or perhaps just from thousands of miles of the engine running. I don’t know much about spark plugs but I have a hunch that they will be different in the future as nanotechnology changes virtually everything — make that every thing. 

The field of materials science has been studying and applying the properties of matter for decades. The advances of nanotechnology have enabled scientists to investigate the relationship between the structure of materials at atomic or molecular scales and develop materials not previously dreamed of. For example, the Los Angeles Times posted a story about a new material that is so lightweight that a block of it can sit  on top of a fluffy dandelion without even bending the delicate little seeds (See Scientists invent lightest material on Earth). The new nanomaterial is incredibly light — styrofoam is 100 times heavier. The  November 18 issue of Science reported that the new material is the lightest material on Earth. The offical name of the material is “ultralight metallic microlattice” — it is 99.99% air. The “microlattice” cellular architecture  includes interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. So far, the new material is a solution looking for a problem, but the researchers believe it could be used for impact protection, aerospace applications, acoustic dampening, or battery applications.

Virtually all  products will be enhanced with nanotechnology. Many have already reached the consumer market including tennis balls that last longer, golf balls that fly straighter, and bowling balls that have a harder surface. Trousers and socks have been infused with nanotechnology that makes them last longer and keep bodies cooler in the summer. Whatever room you may be in, just look around and imagine how many materials there are. All of them will be transformed. While there is potential harm from nanotechnology, the potential benefits are huge. Yesterday, I was imagining spark plugs that are impervious to fouling and oil that has an additive that prevents the oil from sticking to anything it is not supposed to stick to.

Where Were You When…?

November 1995 (edited September 11, 2003 and November 23, 2011)

Most of us remember vividly where we were on September 11, 2001. In my case, I was in Danbury, Connecticut in the board room at Bristol Technology meeting with their CEO, Keith Blackwell. Remember where you were when you first heard that President Kennedy was assassinated? (or Jerry Garcia died if you are too young to remember JFK). Most of us remember major events and exactly where we were at the time — even if it was decades before. Things like that you just don’t forget. But do you remember exactly where you were? I mean the exact latitude and longitude. I didn’t remember the JFK location either; that is until I went back to Lehigh University for my 30th reunion with my handheld GPS receiver and captured the precise coordinates. A nearby building had been torn down and a new one constructed but dead reckoning got me to the right spot. This might have seemed strange in 1995 when I wrote the first version of this story. 

There are so many occasions when time and place get recorded. Auto accidents, package deliveries, construction sites, interviews, meetings and events of all kinds. We capture the time with great precision; e.g. Saturday July 4, 1998 at 2:15 PM. At times, we also record the location: e.g. IBM Corporate headquarters in Armonk, New York. We could be much more precise, however. How about N41° 06.774′, W73° 43.043′ (41 degrees, 6.774 minutes north and 73 degrees, 43.043 minutes west)?

Location (place) awareness has been an integral part of the history of mankind and the development of modern society. We don’t give it much thought, but location and navigation are inextricable parts of how us humans operate. Most of us have a built in ability to find our way around using “dead reckoning”. Since the beginning of time, man has noticed that stars provide a handy reference where landmarks are not available. Polynesians were able to travel great distances to tiny islands using only wind, waves, and the stars with nothing more significant than the width of an outstretched hand or finger. To study navigation and location is to study Columbus, Magellan, Lewis and Clark, Byrd, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins — Apollo 13′s famous “Earth limb shot”. Not to mention the scientists that made it possible. Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Huygens, Fourier, Newton, Morley, Einstein, Marrconi, Mercator, Euler, and Gauss just to name a few!

Trade, commerce and free societies are not possible without location awareness. In a sense it is the very essence of our being. Primarily because of the different availabilities of technology we were able to have time awareness long before we had location awareness even though the two are so intimately tied together. New GPS technology closes the gap. (not new now, but new in 1995).

Over time we will start to think of the precision of place as being just as important as the precision of time. Starting now and into the future there will be no uncertainty about when and where somebody meant when they refer to location information; especially with the advent of incredible GPS devices such as those coming out of Garmin and Magellan. These amazing devices are powerful handheld computers. They capture your precise location very quickly, tell you your speed and direction, store routes and hundreds of waypoints and enable you to back-track over a course to the starting point or points along the way. The advent of smaller and smaller silicon germanium chips may make embedded GPS capabilities closer than you think. After all, what exactly is the physical makeup of a GPS receiver? They have a microprocessor chip set of some kind, navigation keys, display, and an antenna. Which of these does a cell phone have? How about a camera? Could these non-GPS devices capture a conversation or a picture and supplement that data with a person’s precise lattitude and longitude?

Imagine if every camera had a GPS capability in it. Once this happens there will no longer be a question as to the legitimacy of certain pictures that depict something that was to have happened — whether it is an accident of some kind or a special event. You might even cryptographically sign the picture plus the coordinates with your digital certificate and thereby establish authentication and non-repudiation of the event. Or imagine that you find yourself lost in an unfamiliar city but since you have your portable phone with you with a digital readout, it can point you to the nearest library, ATM machine or hospital. Just this week a company announced a mobile phone for Muslims that has a built in pointer to Mecca.

Seems to me we are about to enter an age where an explosion of new data is going to be generated. All of it will find its way into databases, Web servers, new applications and be available for user access. This is part of the fast, always on, everywhere, natural, intelligent, easy, and trusted world that is upon us.

Epilogue: there are a lot of links in this story. I had fun researching them and I hope they become valuable to at least some of my readers. The accomplishments of the famous referred to are quite amazing and inspiring.

Map of precise spot at Lehigh University at time of JFK assassination

Note: This is an edited version of a story I wrote in 1995. Most of the links are no valid.

Copyright: John R. Patrick 1995 2003 2011

BioEverything – Part 3

In 1963 there were two tracks that an electrical engineering student at Lehigh University could choose from — electronics or power. Electronics was about solid state devices such as transistors. (The Intel 4-bit 4004, now four decades old, was not to come until 1971). The “power” track was mostly about electric motors and power generation. There was no computer science program, but the university had recently acquired a GE 225 which occupied a good part of the basement floor of Packard Laboratory. Nearly every department at Lehigh began to include computer programming as part of their curricula. Some departments evolved toward strong computer orientation more rapidly than others but eventually computer science and computer engineering became formal programs of their own.

Fast forward forty years and you can see a very similar evolution occurring with regard to bioengineering. Initially “bio” was a special interest area that spread roots from the biology department into various engineering disciplines. Bioengineering has already become a structured curriculum for students interested in the intersection between engineering and biological sciences. The bioengineering faculty at Lehigh is drawn from several departments in the college of engineering and applied science and the college of arts and sciences. Bioengineering combines engineering principles with the life sciences. There are three tracks available to students. Biopharmaceutical engineering encompasses biochemistry and chemical engineering. Bioelectronics/biophotonics focuses on applications of electrical engineering and physics in bioengineering such as signal processing, biosensors, and biochips. Cell and tissue engineering straddles the fields of molecular and cell biology, materials science, mechanical and electrical engineering and encompasses biomaterials and biomechanics. Studies range from cells and tissue to organs and systems. Sound a bit different than transistors and electric motors?

I think many of us have certain things in mind when we hear the word engineering. Perhaps we think of electronic circuits, chemical interactions, structural designs, or automotive and aeronautical endeavors. The first two stories in resolve leaves a different impression. The first article was “Measuring the stiffness of a single living cell”, a story about how changes in the mechanical properties of biological cells may be a major contributing factor to the development of bone, kidney, and vascular disease. The second story was “Mending a wounded heart”, a story about how heart attacks can cause extensive scarring of the cardiac muscle tissue and how inadequate structural remodeling can be supplemented with an implanted cardiac patch composed of heart muscle cells grown on a porous polymer scaffold. A third story talks about the mechanics of  proteins — how protein molecules are made from a linear chain of amino acids that fold into a 3-D globular form. The bottom line is that engineering is not what it used to be! Engineers still design bridges and circuits but now bio-engineers are working at the molecular level to improve the quality of life by by redesigning parts of the human being and designing new components to take the place of those in our body that may have worn out.

The exciting part of all this is that engineering students with “bio” in their pedigree have a much broadened career potential including healthcare, biomedical, pharmaceutical, biomaterials, and medicine. A  new professional master’s degree program in healthcare systems engineering (HSE) in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) designed to prepare graduate students for engineering and management careers in healthcare and health related products and services companies. The increasing complexity of delivering health care with high quality and positive patient outcomes requires professionals who are trained to think in terms of systems. The Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering have urged the healthcare field to embrace systems engineering as a way to deliver safe, effective, timely, patient-centered, and efficient.

Lehigh’s Healthcare Systems Engineering program has developed relationships with Mayo Clinic, Lehigh Valley Health Network, Geisinger Health System, Saint Luke’s Health System, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Merck, and Cigna Healthcare. There are already 18 graduate students enrolled in the new HSE program and many more expressing interest.

Even more exciting is the possibility for those of us who started out back in the days of the transistors and motors and now have aging bodies that some day we will benefit from bio-engineered “components”. The implantable pacemaker was just the beginning. Bioengineering graduates will be developing pacemakers for the brain, cochlear implants for hearing deficiencies, artificial cartilage for our knees, devices to enable the blind to see, and cures for today’s incurable diseases. At some point a nanotechnology “cocktail” will bring nanobots to our internal systems to replace faulty cells with newly engineered ones. Just like computers have become ubiquitous, it is clear that bio-everything is on the horizon. Bioethics will become a larger concern but it is clear that the trend toward The Singularity is underway.

Tags: bio, bio-engineering, bioengineering, engineering, lehigh, singularity

kindlefire – 1

There are many reviews out there already about the new Kindle Fire (see Nook’s Specs Are Exaggerated, Again). I would not glority this posting by calling it a review — it is simply my first reaction upon receiving the kindlefire this afternoon. The fire was actually delivered to the Marriott Atlanta Century Center on Tuesday. I have been in Florida for the last few days and when I got notice of the shipping, I had the Kindle diverted to where I would be staying during the weekend for a University of Phoenix residency (more on that later).

My first reaction on taking the fire out of the classicly simple Amazon packaging was that it was heavier than I expected. It is not as heavy as the first Nook, but it is heavier than the other new Kindles. After a few hours of using it, I would say it is lighter than the iPad and not really so heavy after all. Speaking of the iPad, the obvious question from many will be “how does it compare to the iPad?” My son reminds me that the fire “is not an iPad”, and it should not be compared to something that is totally different in design and intention. I agree — the two are different animals with different purposes.

I had some difficulty setting up the fire because of the marginal WiFi signal in my room at the hotel. The fire wants you to confirm your Amazon account after getting a WiFi signal, but the Marriott wants you to confirm your room # before it activates your wireless. It took a while to figure out how to get around the Catch 22. The fire is clearly a content device — it is designed for reading books and the news, watching movies, and listening to music. There is a large selection of apps but I have not yet had time to try many. The free enhanced email program available in the Amazon app store works very well.

The fire navigation is a bit awkward but I think that is a matter of getting used to a different paradigm. The text entry mode has a nice movable cursor for use in corecting entries that is very nice. I need more time to experiment with it, but as a first impression, I think that text entry may be better than the iPad in that respect. I know — don’t compare the fire to the iPad! They are both great and I look forward to more experience with the fire and will share that as the days progress.

Tags: amazon, fire, ipad, Kindle, kindlefire

Connecticut’s Power Woes – Epilogue

We got power restored at 5:17 PM on Monday night after an eight-day outage. As of 10 AM today (Thursday) there were still 1,124 customers in Connecticut not yet restored with electricity. Although that is less than 1% of the customers in the state, it represents several thousand people who are without power for a twelth day. No doubt there are some extreme and extenuating circumstances that are making it difficult for the repair crews to get back to 100%. The power company has offered to pay for an independent consulting study to examine disaster preparedness. That seems like a good idea. I hope they look carefully at the role that technology could play in the logistics of identifying the outages with precision and planning the optimum priorities for restoration. If every transformer had a sensor that could continuously report its status could that help? There are more than 100 million Apple iOS devices out there that, if their owners chose to activate the “Fine Me” feature, can have their location be identified by Apple’s iCloud. Does the electric company have a real-time display of their entire network that shows what is up and what is not? Can they deploy repair crews in a way that maximizes the restoration of power in the shortest time? I do not know the answer to these questions, but I hope they do. It seems to me that sensors could help a lot. The sensors would be powered by the electricity at the pole. The data could be sent using BPL technology that has been around for many years. If a pole or transformer stopped reporting, that would mean it has lost power and that would be reflected in the overall map of the electricity network. Analytical models could be used to create the repair strategy that makes best use of available resources. This might work better than having the need for 196 Connecticut politicians all calling for priority to their towns.

Tags: connecticut, electricity, generator, power, storm

Connecticut’s Power Woes Nearly Over

We got power restored at 5:17 PM last night after an eight-day outage. As of 2 PM on Monday there were still 53, 103 customers not yet restored with electricity. That is 4% of the customers in the state. Someone today told me the average household is three people. If so, that means there are more than 150,000 people without power for a ninth day.

Tags: connecticut, electricity, generator, power, storm

Connecticut’s Power Woes – Update

This eveining marks the end of the eighth day without power for a large number of people in Connecticut. As of 5 PM on Sunday there were 89,629 customers not yet restored with electricity. That is 7% of the customers in the state. If there are just two people per customer account, that is nearly 200,000 people. In the town where I live, there are 2,063 customers (19%) still without power. The electric company had projected 99% restoration by tonight. They have now revised that estimate to noon tomorrow for most towns. That will be nine days. One thing for sure is that there will be a lot of finger pointing about why it has taken so long. When two feet of wet snow falls in eight hours on trees that still have their leaves, it is no surprise that thousands of trees were damaged. We estimate 15 on our property. Many of the thousands of trees that came down were sharing narrow New England roads with 20,000 miles of electric lines. There are many questions to be answered. What is a reasonable expectation to clear the roads and repair the thousands of wires, transformers, and other equipment? Was the state adequately prepared? Is there anything that could have been done to minimize the damage from such a storm? If we had known two weeks in advance, what would have been done? It seems to me the issue may be logistics. How do you organize the crews, set the priorities, and execute the work in the fastest possible way? Europe invested in putting electric utilities underground decades ago. To do that now in this economy and with the regulatory approvals that would be needed seems impossible. If that is the case, then it comes down to logistical planning for the next storm.

Tags: connecticut, electricity, generator, power, storm

Connecticut’s Power Woes Outshine Rest

Hurricane Irene was devastating to Connecticut, but the storm this past weekend is said to be five times worse. That has been the case for me and my family. I feel very fortunate to have a propane generator and I empathize with the one million people in Connecticut who were without electricity painfully long. Now in the sixth day since the storm, more than half of the people in the town where I live are still without power. It was no consolation to see a story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday saying no state had gone dark like Connecticut (See Connecticut’s Power Woes Outshine Rest – WSJ.com) The article said there were three factors contributing to the extreme situation. First is that the electric company has cut their staff and outsourced their line crews. Second is that there is no county level coordination, leaving all 196 towns hounding the governor and the electric company for priority. The biggest factor is that Connecticut has 20,000 miles of electrical lines attached to poles that share space with a state densely populated with trees. Priority went toward providing access to the hundreds of roads that lost access with fallen trees.

Since the generator was installed ten years ago, it has served us at least a half-dozen times. I got some more education about generators this time. The generator went into action late Saturday night. Around 10 AM on Sunday it stopped. When I got through the 15 inches of snow to the generator, I found the Fault Indicator light on. What was the fault? The newer generators have a wireless option so you can connect them to a local area network and see what is going on. After an hour or so, I got to our service provider who suggested I check the oil. It never occurred to me that oil might be the problem, but sure enough, the oil was low, and of course I did not have any oil available. My son and his family were on the way to stay with us–their town nearby was 95% without power–and he brought some oil. We added two quarts plus some antifreeze and the generator roared back to life. Things returned to semi-normal. Four days later the generator stopped again. Two more quarts of oil brought it back to life.

I thought I had planned the emergency power distribution well, but not so. The refrigerator and freezer, heat, well pump, home automation, network infrastructure, office lighting and TV, were all covered. Somehow, I overlooked kitchen receptacles. A few extension cords here and there enables all the essentials. The only problem remaining would be AT&T.

AT&T is consistently ranked as having the worst customer service. I always thought Comcast was the worst (many stories about them here in the blog), but AT&T has taken over as my favorite worst! The iPhone and iPad have had weak signal for some time and today it deteriorated to barely useable. Tech support said the tower closest to us has been failing for 15 days! They expect to have a status update in 48 hours. That is the wireless story. The wired story is worse. At 10 AM Tuesday morning, the TV in my office abruptly changed from CNBC to “Television signal has been lost”. The telephone dial-tone and Internet service went dead at the same time. The advantage of AT&T U-Verse providing all three services through one connection turned in to a disadvantage. I suspect the problem was that in the process of dealing with the thousands of downed trees and electrical wires that some collateral damage occurred during the repairs.

I am sure there were some very smart hard-working crews on the case, away from their families, and without all the resources they needed to get the network back up and running. My disappointment with AT&T is that their support structure does not gather status information nor projected repair times. The electric company website shows a map by town with how many customers there are and how many are out of service. The status by town is updated every 15 minutes. They also post a projected time when electricity will be restored. Not AT&T.

I think AT&T is trying hard but they are a long way from getting it right. They answer quickly and then ask you the usual questions about account #, name, address, and security code. After telling them the problem is that you have been without service for 8 hours, they transfer you to tech support who then asks you for your account #, name, address, and security code. Then after waiting for a half-hour they tell you that service is out in your area, people are working on it, and when they have fixed it, your service will be restored. That is the deepest insight you can get. No estimates, no causes, no explanations. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” One rep said the problem may be that I am using a generator! They all end with “Thanks for using AT&T”, even though you are not using it! Urerse was restored after 32 hours.

Connecticut Light & Power said that their target for restoring service is 11 PM Sunday night. That will make the outage eight days. We are thankful that the town is able to provide water and shelter to those who need it. We are also blessed with a great hospital and dedicated staff that provided care to record numbers of patients in the emergency room.

Tags: connecticut, electricity, generator, power, storm