DailyDirt: Better (Bigger) Batteries

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Battery technology is getting better all the time, but unfortunately not quite at the same pace as Moore's law. While some folks lament the bottleneck of pocket-sized batteries that limit the operation of a phone or laptop to just a few hours (or a couple days on standby), some bigger batteries out there are limiting the growth of renewable energy use. Here are just a few battery projects that could solve some larger scale energy problems.

• One of the world's largest lithium manganese batteries will be tested in the UK. This 6 megawatt battery installation should be ready to produce electricity in 2016, and it'll help make renewable energy more compatible with conventional electricity infrastructure. [url]
• IBM has been working on lithium-air batteries for its Battery 500 project that aims to make an electric car battery capable of driving 500 miles. However, the researchers predict that we won't see a commercial battery based on this technology until after 2020. [url]
• Grid scale batteries are already in use, but newer battery technologies could make it much more economical to use renewable energy sources in existing power stations. Still, it will be a few more years before these new battery designs prove their safety and reliability. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: battery, battery 500 project, electrical grid, energy, energy storage, infrastructure, renewable energy
Companies: ibm

DailyDirt: Cool Advances In Atomic-Scale Imaging

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

You're thirsty. You get yourself a glass of water. But have you ever wondered how many molecules of dihydrogen monoxide are in that glass of water? (There are around 8.35 x 10²⁴ molecules in an 8-ounce glass of water, in case you're curious.) And how cool would it be if you could actually see those tiny little molecules dancing around in that glass? While that's still a challenge, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have managed to produce the first ever "action movies" showing individual water molecules moving across a palladium surface using a special scanning tunneling microscope. Here are a few more examples of some cool atomic-scale imaging breakthroughs.

• IBM researchers have created a short animated movie called A Boy and his Atom. They used a scanning tunneling microscope to move individual atoms, which act as pixels, to form pictures in each frame. According to Guinness World Records, this is the smallest movie ever made. [url]
• Researchers in Japan have devised a way to do X-ray crystallography without the need for an actual single crystal. The trick is to get the molecules in a sample to diffuse into a porous crystal structure, which then creates an ordered array of molecules that scatter X-rays like the atoms in a crystal. [url]
• Berkeley Lab researchers have imaged a single molecule with amazing resolution, showing individual carbon atoms and the bonds between them. Using non-contact atomic force microscopy, they imaged the molecule right before and right after a complex organic reaction, which clearly showed with single-bond resolution that the reactant molecule had transformed into various final products. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: afm, atomic resolution, atoms, imaging, molecules, nanotechnology, x-ray crystallograpy
Companies: ibm

DailyDirt: Evolving The Touchscreen Keyboard

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The QWERTY keyboard layout, which was created around 1875, was originally designed to prevent typewriter keys from jamming. This was done by arranging letters that were most commonly used together farther apart. While the QWERTY layout is still used today, it may not be the best layout for virtual touchscreen keyboards, so there have been many efforts to design alternative keyboard layouts. Here are just a few examples.

• The new KALQ keyboard layout enables faster thumb-typing on touchscreen devices. In the new layout, all the vowels except for "y" are placed in the area for the right thumb, while more keys are assigned to the left thumb. After a short amount of practice, users were able to type 34% faster with the KALQ keyboard than with a traditional QWERTY layout. [url]
• Minuum is a space-efficient, single-row keyboard layout that uses auto-correction algorithms to intelligently predict the words users are attempting to type. The traditional QWERTY order of letters is mostly in place to make it easier to transition from standard software keyboards, and the powerful predictive typing algorithms ensure accurate text entry.[url]
• IBM envisions a virtual keyboard that can adapt to each user's unique typing style. The keyboard would gather data on the user's typing habits and compile an "anatomical profile" of the user, which it would then use to subtly adapt the keyboard to the user. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: dvorak, input devices, kalq, keyboard, minuum, qwerty, touchscreens, ui
Companies: ibm, kickstarter

IBM Sends 200 Execs To Capitol Hill To Demand The Right To Send Your Private Info To The NSA

from the nice-one,-guys dept

We've talked about various tech companies supporting CISPA, which is really shameful and short-sighted. Yes, it protects them from liability if they trample all over your privacy and provide your private info to the government -- which is why they support it. But if they were truly customer focused companies, they would know that violating your privacy is no way to build a loyal customer base. And, apparently, the right to violate your privacy and hand that info to the government is so important to IBM that it has sent 200 executives to Capital Hill today to lobby in favor of passing CISPA. CISPA is expected to go to a floor vote in the House either this Wednesday or Thursday.

Nearly 200 senior IBM executives are flying into Washington to press for the passage of a controversial cybersecurity bill that will come up for a vote in the House this week.

The IBM executives will pound the pavement on Capitol Hill Monday and Tuesday, holding nearly 300 meetings with lawmakers and staff. Over the course of those two days, their mission is to convince lawmakers to back a bill that’s intended to make it easier for industry and government to share information about cyber threats with each other in real time.

What they still can't explain is what laws currently get in the way of this information sharing? We've been asking for years and no one has answered. Everyone agrees that information sharing around an attack can be useful in stopping it, but no one has explained why that information sharing (a) requires a new law or (b) can't be done without wiping out all basic privacy protections for personal info currently provided under existing law.

Even more ridiculous is that IBM flat out admits that they want to be able to send your info to the NSA. We've pointed out for a while that one of the major concerns with CISPA is that the NSA -- a military agency -- would get access to your info, despite the general prohibition on spying on Americans. Of course, the NSA has twisted that mandate ridiculously, such that it believes it can now spy on anything so long as they claim it may help them in finding a foreign threat. Technically, the law is about the "target" of the information, and the NSA (and potentially the secret ruling from the FISA Court) has interpreted this to mean that as long as the target of the investigation is as foreign threat, then the NSA can snoop through anything in pursuit of that target.

Of course, most folks have been trying to play down the fact that the NSA would get the info. But not IBM. Nope, they're thrilled to send your private info right to the NSA:

[IBM VP of government affairs Chris] Padilla, however, says companies need to be able to share threat data directly with the NSA “because that’s where the expertise is.”

“It really is a simple matter. The expertise in the U.S. government on cybersecurity largely rests in one place, and that's the National Security Agency,” he said. “They tend to know the most, the soonest about cyber threats and I think, frankly, there is a certain amount of feeling in the business community that you should be able to work directly and share information directly with the agency that has the most expertise.”

While the NSA does have some knowledge on cybersecurity, it's an exaggeration to suggest that they have "the expertise" on the subject. It also does nothing to explain why your private info should be included.

Filed Under: chris padilla, cispa, congress, cyberattacks, cybersecurity, lobbying, nsa, privacy, private info
Companies: ibm

Facebook Backs Away Quietly From Its CISPA Support

from the good-for-them dept

Many in the internet community were disappointed a year ago when Facebook came out in favor of CISPA. Facebook made its case publicly, agreeing that there were some privacy and civil liberties concerns with the bill, but that on the whole the bill was good. Of course, more cynical people might point out that since the general immunity provisions of CISPA would protect Facebook from liability in sharing info with the government, that of course they'd like it. However, it appears that Facebook is reconsidering that position, perhaps aware of how much public opposition there is to CISPA. Facebook is no longer listed as a CISPA supporter, though it also has not come out directly against the bill. Instead, it issued a statement that says basically nothing:

We are encouraged by the continued attention of Congress to this important issue and we look forward to working with both the House and the Senate to find a legislative balance that promotes government sharing of cyberthreat information with the private sector while also ensuring the privacy of our users.

Still, it's encouraging that a company, like Facebook, which really does rely on the support of their userbase, appears to at least recognize that something like CISPA might not be good for its users. In fact, this seems similar to when Microsoft backed away from its CISPA support last year as well. The article linked above notes that Microsoft still feels the same way, citing the concerns about user privacy with the current draft of CISPA.

So, who is supporting CISPA? The telcos are still there, not surprisingly, as well as mostly infrastructure providers, rather than any company that has a bunch of its own internet users. So, you see IBM, Intel and Juniper Networks. But there is not a single real "internet" company in the bunch any more. Perhaps that should be a loud hint for CISPA's sponsors that the bill is not a good thing for the internet world.

Filed Under: cispa, internet, privacy, telcos
Companies: at&t, comcast, facebook, ibm, intel, juniper networks, microsoft, time warner cable, verizon

IBM Researcher Feeds Watson Supercomputer The 'Urban Dictionary'; Very Quickly Regrets It

from the hateful-day-when-I-received-life-you-only-live-once-smh-and-etc. dept

As a parent, some of your proudest moments occur when your children begin to talk. After several months of ear-shredding cries and indistinguishable babble, they finally begin to communicate in a language you can understand. A first word is an indescribable joy, whether it's "mama," "dada" or "roku." The future now seems to be an amazing place where you and your child will strive towards excellence together, culminating in a comfortable retirement in which you live off their immense earnings as a person of brilliance.

Shortly thereafter, you begin to rue the day they ever learned the (now) cursed language of their ancestors.

It starts with the incessant barrage of questions in a meandering quest for knowledge, followed by the barrage of questions (mainly, "Why?") that greet every suggestion, criticism or direct order. Shortly thereafter, it's followed by questions directed at your parenting skills, cultural tastes, archaic slang use, rhetorical devices and sense of direction. At the point where you're wishing their language development had followed Charlie Gordon's "learning curve," you're asked to make a surprise appearance at the school administrator's office to explain a sudden outburst of particularly inventive cursing from your former "pride and joy."

So it is also with artificial life.

Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-contestant supercomputer, showed the world that, with the right programming, any puny human could be bested in a mildly snooty game show that handed out answers and asked for questions. However, the quest for true artificial intelligence is still ongoing.

So, in the interest of science, the whole of human knowledge (Internet Edition™) was dropped into Watson's brain and then... the problems began.

Two years ago, Brown attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary. The popular website contains definitions for terms ranging from Internet abbreviations like OMG, short for "Oh, my God," to slang such as "hot mess."

But Watson couldn't distinguish between polite language and profanity -- which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word "bullshit" in an answer to a researcher's query.

Well, it appears that every teacher's distrust of the internet in general is well-earned. It's nothing but quasi-facts dressed up in four-letter words, like a World Book Encyclopedia annotated by 4chan's /b/ board. (I'm not going to link to it. I won't have your misclicks weighing on my soul.) Still, it's disheartening to know that the use of the word "bullshit" (even correctly) is not considered a sign of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Sure, the word itself may be inappropriate, but under certain circumstances, it is by far the most appropriate answer.

Fortunately for Watson's team, they had the option to remove all this useful knowledge before it offended other researchers who weren't as used to being coldly called on their bullshit.

Ultimately, Brown's 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory. But the trial proves just how thorny it will be to get artificial intelligence to communicate naturally.

It also shows that artificial intelligence has one huge advantage over regular intelligence: the ability to permanently forget. We lowly humans are stuck with a brain that constantly reminds us (especially if we spend much time at places like the aforementioned /b/ board) that what is seen, cannot be unseen.

Watson, having been de-swearified and brainwashed, is now headed to a better place.

Brown is now training Watson as a diagnostic tool for hospitals.

There it will be able to use its acquired knowledge to battle health issues like cancer, AIDS, diabetes and Dissociative Facebook Identity Disorder. 

Filed Under: artificial intelligence, curses, profanity, urban dictionary, watson
Companies: ibm

IBM Patent Lawyer Says The Patent System Works Fine Because... Hey Look Over There!

from the what's-that-got-to-do-with-patents? dept

IBM's Chief Patent Counsel, Manny Schecter, has one of the most ridiculous defenses of the patent system you'll ever see over at Wired, entitled With All Due Respect: The Patent System's Not Broken. Having debated the patent system for years, I've noticed a pattern among patent system defenders who are big time patent lawyers. Their argument tends to amount to: see this wonderful thing? It exists because we have patents. Period. The fact that whatever it is they're pointing to probably has nothing to do with patents will never be acknowledged. Schecter's argument is a perfect example of this.

Why would a company spend billions of dollars to build a microprocessor-manufacturing plant employing thousands of skilled workers in the U.S., if it could only protect its technology by obtaining patents in other countries?

I love idiotic rhetorical speculative questions like this that assume it's impossible to answer in any way other than the one the questioner wants... especially when the actual evidence tells a completely different story. It turns out that we have examples of countries with weak or no patent systems -- and they did invest tons in manufacturing plants, employing thousands of skilled workers. As covered in Eric Schiff's research decades ago, both the Netherlands and Switzerland had extremely weak or non-existent patent systems at the time they industrialized -- and both built up industries that involved huge capital expenditure, without the ability to protect the patents at home. Similarly, research by David Levine and Michele Boldrin highlighted how the Italian pharmaceutical industry developed to be quite impressive at a time when pharmaceuticals could not be patented in that country.

The reason for this is not difficult to assess if you're not a patent lawyer. It's that companies don't sell "patents," they sell products. And you can sell products whether or not they're patented. If you build something people want, you can figure out a way to sell it -- even if someone copies you. In fact, what plenty of other research has shown is that (again, contrary to what many lawyers believe) copying market leaders is often a hell of a lot more difficult than people believe. And, of course, even if you have a direct copy, it doesn't mean you can really compete. The first mover advantage is important, but so is knowing how to market and sell products, and copiers often don't do a good job on that front. So, yes, there are plenty of reasons companies would spend a lot of money without patents. And we know that already because the evidence says so.

Why would a venture capital firm fund a social-networking service provider if the company could not obtain patents on its innovative software backbone, preventing others from easily copying it?

Uh, again, because they're not selling the patents, but the service. And plenty of smart VCs fund social networking companies without patents. Let's take a look at one of the most popular social networking sites out there today: Tumblr. The company has zero patents. Zero. And it raised money. From whom? From one of the most respected venture capitalists around: Fred Wilson, who has spoken out directly about how much harm patents do to innovation, and why it makes no sense to invest in a company because of their patents, as opposed to their actual product or service.

So we're now two for two on completely ignorant "rhetorical" questions from Schecter, showing that the true answers to his questions disprove his point. And that's just in the first paragraph. Let's jump forward a bit.

But here’s the thing: Patent disputes like this are a natural characteristic of a vigorously competitive industry.

And they’re nothing new: Similar skirmishes have historically occurred in areas as diverse as sewing machines, winged flight, agriculture, and telegraph technology. Each marked the emergence of incredible technological advances, and each generated similar outcries about the patent system.

So because we've made this mistake before, it's okay to make it again and again? What kind of logic is that? Seriously.

We are actually witnessing fewer patent suits per patent issued today than the historical average, according to economic historian Zorina Kahn. The rate of patent litigation was twice what it is today compared to some decades in the mid-19th century.

This is a completely moronic and meaningless measure. Why? Because the number of patents being granted today far, far, far exceeds the number granted in the past. The percentage of patents that are litigated over doesn't matter. We're talking about the impact of the lawsuits. The fact that the patent office grants a ridiculous number of patents today that never are used in litigation has no impact on that whatsoever. This is what's known as throwing out bullshit statistics when the actual data goes against you.

Economists also tell us that 75 percent of a company’s value is attributable to its intellectual property (IP) -- and that IP-intensive industries contribute $5 trillion per year to the U.S. economy. These industries account for about 35 percent of gross domestic product and 40 million jobs, including 28 percent of the jobs in the United States.

Where to start? First off, which economists? Second, having your value attributed to your "intellectual property" (loosely defined) is not the same thing as saying that it's because of intellectual property laws. This is a common and ridiculous mistake that many make -- assuming that because the things currently covered by IP laws are important, the laws themselves must be important. Ideas, content, innovation etc. all exist absent IP laws. This is something that patent lawyers seem to conveniently forget or ignore. Next, the $5 trillion number and the 40 million jobs claim -- well, that's equally bogus, as we've discussed before. It's based on the ridiculous and obviously faulty belief that these jobs and "contribution" to the economy are due to "IP laws" and not other economic activity such as people actually selling stuff. And those jobs? Yeah, anyone who claims that has lost all credibility, because, remember, it's actually mostly about trademark, and that means that 2.5 million of those jobs are actually people working at grocery stores. Sorry, dude, you don't get to claim the checkout bagger as a reason why we need stronger patent laws. But that's exactly what he does.

Six of the 10 companies globally with the highest software revenues are U.S. companies, including the top three. In other words: The success of the U.S. software industry correlates with its use of software patents to protect its innovations. If patent litigation caused by the U.S. patent system stifled innovation, U.S. software companies would not be the most successful in the world.

Well, let's start with the basic point that correlation does not equal causation. In fact, let's dig deeper and point out that in nearly every case, the patents came after the success. That is, these companies have used patents to restrict competition, not as a way to get big. Of course, Boldrin and Levine's research has shown that to be the case historically as well. Strong IP laws and enforcement tends to trail innovation, rather than the other way around. I don't know which "list" Schecter is using here, but we'll go with the software top 100 -- and it confirms that theory. Top of the list? Microsoft. The same Microsoft whose founder once said:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.

Not exactly the ringing endorsement Schecter believes it is. Yes, lots of big companies have patents, but that's because they need to have patents these days or they get sued by others who have patents. Schecter knows this because he lives this daily (sometimes in helping IBM sue other companies for innovating). Need we remind Schecter of the famous story of IBM showing up at Sun with a patent lawsuit, and after being told that Sun didn't infringe on any of the patents, telling Sun:

"OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

That's not innovation. That's extortion. And Schecter is defending it.

Ever since U.S. courts made it clear that copyright is unavailable to protect their ideas, developers have sought to protect inventions embodied in their software via patents. Denying patent protection for software will cause these developers to look for other ways to protect their IP investment — resulting in code that is less open, less accessible, and less interoperable.

Uh... copyright has never been about protecting "ideas," only expression, so I'm not sure what he's getting at here. Furthermore, part of the big problem with software patents today is how they're broadly claiming way too much. If I understand his argument here, it's that if we fix that, and stop them from using monopolies too broadly, they'll just try to lock up their software. Except we already know that fails in the marketplace in the long term. Over the long run, customers demand more open, accessible and interoperable solutions. Why do you think IBM bet so strongly on Linux backed up with a giant service business? Because it knew that there was money in providing services around open, accessible and interoperable systems. If a company is stupid enough to go in the other direction, it will fail in the marketplace. No problem there.

In the end, none of the arguments he makes even come close to making sense. At best, he argues some sort of bizarre correlation to make his point, but most of the time he's just pointing elsewhere and pretending it has something to do with patents. We could just as easily argue that patents have caused population growth in the US. I mean, look, the population has grown... and we have patents! And it would be just as meaningless as every single argument he makes.

Filed Under: manny schecter, patent system, patent trolls, patents
Companies: ibm

Two Years Later, Lobbying By Microsoft & IBM Creates Loophole In New Zealand To Allow Software Patents

from the tried-to-wait-it-out? dept

You may remember a few years ago there was some controversy down in New Zealand over software patents. There was a plan to explicitly outlaw software patents, but then someone accidentally leaked the fact that big tech companies (mainly US ones, like Microsoft and IBM) had lobbied hard against outlawing software patents, leading to a change in plans. After that leak resulted in more public outcry it was claimed that the proposal would go back to outlawing most, but not all software patents. Well, it seems that the supporters of the big US software firms were just biding their time. As various reports are noting, more than two years after all of this, proposed amendments have finally been made to the bill, and they appear to create a massive loophole for software patents, which certainly seems to reflect the desires of Microsoft and IBM's lobbying efforts in the country. One hopes that further public outcry will finally make Kiwi politicians realize that they don't have to do what American companies demand...

Filed Under: lobbying, new zealand, patents, software patents
Companies: ibm, microsoft

Spotify In A Box: Why Sharing Will Never Be Stopped

from the jukebox-of-alexandria dept

Most people will be familiar with Moore's Law, usually stated in the form that processing power doubles every two years (or 18 months in some versions.) But just as important are the equivalent compound gains for storage and connectivity speeds, sometimes known as Kryder's Law and Nielsen's Law respectively.

To see why, consider that the IBM PC XT had a 10 Mbyte hard drive when it was launched in 1983, which meant you couldn't even fit a single song on it. Similarly, the first widely-used modem, the 1981 Hayes Smartmodem, had a maximum speed of 300 baud: to transfer a digitized song using a dial-up connection would have taken around 500 hours.

With those kind of figures, it's easy to see why the recording industry underestimated the threat that file sharing would become once the Internet arrived: based on the past, it was almost inconceivable that people would ever swap music between computers. Of course, once that did start to happen, and the shape of the future became obvious to many, the industry nonetheless wilfully ignored the facts and the trends at every turn, when instead it should have taken the lead in re-inventing media for the Internet age.

That woeful history of refusing to accept the implications of rapidly-advancing technologies makes this prediction, found via Slashdot, even more fateful:

Technologies that will make it possible to expand disk density include heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), which Seagate patented in 2006. Seagate has already said it will be able to produce a 60TB 3.5-in. hard drive by 2016.

Assuming Seagate or someone else delivers, that 60 terabyte hard disk could store around 10 million typical MP3 files. A year ago, Spotify was said to have 15 million tracks, which means that you could store most of today's Spotify on that future Seagate drive. Spotify is likely to grow even larger by 2016, but it probably won't grow as fast as the storage capacity of hard disks, so there will be some point in the not-too-distant future when you can place all of its holdings on a single hard disk: Spotify in a box.

Obviously, few people will choose to do that, but storing your favorite million songs will not only be realistic, it will be cheap -- and even portable. Provided the transfer rate to and from such disks also keeps up with the growth in capacities -- an indispensable technological requirement, otherwise they become impossible to use -- this means that people will be able to move around huge collections of music, without ever touching an Internet connection. That makes all those three-strikes plans moot, since you won't actually need your broadband line in order to swap files with friends. You'll just plug in your portable hard drives to a common computer and exchange stuff directly (as probably already happens with today's terabyte-sized portable disks.)

In an ideal world, we would also see a kind of constant scaling of the intelligence of the recording industry, such that by 2016 it would finally accept that trying to stop sharing -- whether online or off -- is simply pointless. Somehow, though, I think we'll just have to make do with the other variants of Moore's Law.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: kryder's law, moore's law, nielsen's law, storage
Companies: hayes, ibm, seagate, spotify