Spread Spectrum Communications

I teach a course in Data Communications (aka Network Standards and Protocols). I enjoy providing a little history when the course gets to the unit covering Spread Spectrum (SS) technology, which has evolved today into Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11).

Spread Spectrum communications uses wide band, noise-like signals. It's been a favorite technology for the military, since SS signals are hard to detect, hard to intercept, hard to jam, and hard to demodulate.

Students love their Wi-Fi, and look a little puzzled when I explain how that technology was invented by a famous movie actress and an avant-garde composer.

Yeap, that's right.

The story is amazing. If you made it into a movie, nobody would believe it.

Austrian-born actress Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) and composer George Antheil are universally credited for discovering and patenting this communications technology.


Hedy Lamarr (1914 - 2000), is better known for the many movies she made at MGM Studios in Hollywood. Lamarr was born to Jewish parents in Vienna, and studied ballet and piano at an early age. She later worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, who called her the "most beautiful woman in Europe." Later Lamarr would end up marrying a controlling and wealthy Vienna arms manufacturer who was 13 years her senior. He'd lock her up in the residence, known has"Castle Schwarzenau." Lamarr objected to her husbands' support of Hitler's war machine, but both Hitler and Mussolini were frequent guests at their lavish parties in the castle. It is said that Lamaar dressed as one of her maids and fled to Paris. In 1933 Lamarr created a scandal when she appeared nude for an extended period in the movie "Ecstasy."


George Antheil (1900 - 1959) is know primarily as a daring modernist composer who's music shocked audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. His most famous piece Ballet Mécanique was originally conceived in the 1920s for 16 synchronized player pianos, two grand pianos, electronic bells, xylophones, bass drums, a siren and three airplane propellers. It's often performed today in a scaled down version for percussion, four pianos, and a recording of an airplane motor.

Well-known in both America and in Europe as being an "ultra-modern pianist/composer," Antheil influenced many avant-garde composers, including Edgard Varèse and John Cage. He held wide interests such as publishing articles and books on female endocrinology, and in his spare time wrote a mystery novel (blogs didn't exist yet).

It was Antheil's interest in female endocrinology that brought him and Lamarr together. Antheil had a theory about how men could tell the availability of women based on the glandular effects of their appearance. He consulted with Lamarr on this, and the result of this research was published in his book, "The Glandbook for the Questing Male."

Their research broadened, and after much joint discussion they devised a secret communication system that is now regarded as the predecessor of the today's Spread Specturm "frequency hopping" technology used in communications systems all around the world. Antheil had already applied this technique to control the 88 keys of player pianos in his strange musical compositions.

Lamarr and Antheil submitted their idea to the US Patent office in June of 1941 and were granted a Patent (US Patent # 2,292,387). One of the figures for the patent is show below.


It was clear that they believed their technique could be applied to radio-guided torpedoes and aid the war effort. The US Military took notice, but in 1942 it did not possess the technology to implement Spread Spectrum-based control systems to guide their torpedoes. However, in 1962 during the US blockade of Cuba during the infamous "Cuban Missile Crisis." Lamarr and Antheil's technology was deployed and proven to work (although their Patent had long expired).

Here is a very short YouTube clip about Hedy Lamarr. (Feel free to explore the others posted on YouTube)....

And here is the beginning of George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique in a recent performance by the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble (Peter Jarvis conducting)...

( Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wJjDmIwKL0 )

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Antheil

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Thoughts about Novell

There's a little M&A activity to report in the news, and I'm not talking about Music and Art.

Yesterday after the stock market ended its session, a NY-based hedge fund firm called Elliott Associates offered to buy out the software and networking company Novell for an even $2 billion dollars. It was an unsolicited bid (aka hostile takeover).

The hedge fund's modus operandi is to take "an activist approach to investing, frequently amassing significant but minority stakes in distressed or under performing companies and attempting to foment change."

Elliott Associates (and its' parent Elliott International) manage more than $16 billion of capital for large institutional investors and wealthy individuals. They clearly see an opportunity and bargain in Novell.

In after-hours trading Elliott offered to pay $5.75 a share in cash for Novell stock. That's 21 percent higher than Novell’s price at close yesterday. Predictably, there was a upward tick in Novell’s share price: it rose $1.23, or nearly 26 percent, to $5.98 in after-hours trading.

Elliott Associates - an investment firm that specializes in "distressed companies" -currently holds more than eight percent of Novell’s stock. It is offering an additional 1.8 billion to take over the company from stock holders.

Novell’s Board of Directors received a letter from Elliott Associates explaining the rationale for the firm’s bid:

Over the past several years, the company has attempted to diversify away from its legacy division with a series of acquisitions and changes in strategic focus that have largely been unsuccessful. As a result, we believe the company’s stock has meaningfully underperformed all relevant indices and peers. With over 33 years of experience in investing in public and private companies and an extensive track record of successfully structuring and executing acquisitions in the technology space, we believe that Elliott is uniquely situated to deliver maximum value to the company’s stockholders on an expedited basis.

While I do not own any Novell stock personally, I have worked with their products over a period that spans decades, and am quite familiar with the company history. Their corporate HQ is actually nearby in Waltham, MA. I've been to the tech giant's "Brain Share" conference in Salt Lake City numerous times, and know or have worked with scores of folks associated with the company.

I'd be sorry to see Novell bought and cannibalized for it's remaining cash, trademarks, patents, and software inventory (such as SUSE Linux). In this ailing economy, the vultures are having a field day.

There is some truth that Novell has made famous and grandiose mistakes in strategy and marketing over the years, but their technology has for the most part been innovative, ahead of the curve, and rock solid.

I was very hopeful when ex-Sun Microsystems CTO Eric Schmidt took over as Novell's CEO in 1997. Schmidt had a clear understanding of the importance of the Internet and how cloud computing would eventually dominate the industry. At Sun he led its Java development efforts.



I recell being invited to a top-level executive briefing with Eric Schmidt at Novell's office in Wellseley, MA. Schmidt wanted to hear first-hand from Novell's customer base. The international company I worked for at the time (Zurich Scudder Kemper Investments) was a significant corporate client.

The meeting was informative and pleasant. Schmidt had just flown into town on Novell's corporate jet. I recall that he parked his plane at Hansom Field in Bedf0rd, preferring it over Logan International. Schmidt spoke to the small group about Novell's initiatives, listened to our ideas and concerns, and met with us individually. Customers were provided with lunch, and I received a nice leather notebook case and cool ball-point pen with the Novell logo inscribed on it. The future looked rosy.

In 2001 things changed. A local IT consulting company that was heavily invested in Microsoft technology - and who's core business was outsourcing software development - was "acquired" by Novell. It was called Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), and their offices were in a renovated brick factory building along Memorial Drive in Cambridge across the Charles River from BU. The street talk at the time was that the merger was a good idea, since Novell would benefit from the additional talent of CTP's programming staff. In reality, CTP assumed the upper edge, took over Novell's management team, robbed it of cash, and led the company down a confused and ultimately dire path.

Schmidt left Novell soon after the acquisition of CTP. The rumor was that he found managing the new Novell quite difficult. The remaining senior management of the company was still entrenched in their old business models, and a myriad of complications had been introduced by the merger with CTP. Lingering complications from Novell's prior mergers (such as WordPerfect) contributed to the dysfunction. The magnitude of the organizational turmoil set Novell firmly into a state of classic management gridlock - and for an IT company that is a bad state to be in.

Around this time Google founders Larry Page and Sergy Brin met secretly with Schmidt. They realized that they had a lot in common (such as flying airplanes). The trio hit if off in a way that only geeky software engineers can do, and Schmidt agreed to assist the dynamic duo in transforming Google into a real company. The rest is history.

Novell's loss was Google's gain.

I still have my spiffy black leather Novell executive case and pen. I retain my obscure Novell certifications of CNE and Master CNE. But although Novell's customers still exist, they are much harder to find. I know that from looking at the employment pages.

All of this technology (and the companies that created them) appear to be dissipating into the proverbial "cloud."

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Going Digital - Redux

One explanation for the precipitous decline in public participation in the arts (such the number of people who attend concerts) is the introduction of new media - such as the Internet.

Indeed, it may be true that pod-casts, digital downloads, streaming media, and Facebook have all replaced traditional venues of musical and interaction. It's been a while since the typical American family leisurely sat around and listened to Grandma play her favourites on the piano.

As a composer, it seems a little strange to know that there actually are people out there listening to my music (or at least downloading it). I can't see them. They're invisible, and I have only the most vague idea of who they are.

For instance, the report generator for my website indicates a steady increase in traffic over the past two calendar years. Here is a chart of the "number of requests" per month (over 24 months) from January 2008 to December 2009.

Over the past two years the monthly average for pages sent was 300. The average requests handled were 2,302. That's small by most commercial web-standards, but the rate of increase is what interests me. Monthly requests have grown to over 6,000 per month.

Closer analysis indicates that most of the hits are for free downloads of MP3 audio files and musical scores in Adobe PDF format. Of those, most requests originate from outside of the United States.

My music seems to be most popular in China, Germany, England, France, Italy, Greece, and the Netherlands.

It's stunning to see the number of times particular works of mine have been downloaded. It's often a number large enough to fill a sizable concert hall.

I'm not letting any of this get to my head, since I don't necessarily equate "number of requests" with flesh-and-blood people who actually listen. Web-based statistics can be very misleading.

Yet, the numbers indicate that something is going on. I'm just not convinced that it is real, otherwise the phone would be ringing.

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Co-opetition

...is an interesting word.

It's long been a manta of hi-tech enterprise and a risky business strategy that enables cooperative competition between forces that would otherwise be rivals. In practice, companies that might ordinarily compete in one space, opt to join forces in another area to combat (or even conquer) a mutual threat.

As a classic example, long-time rivals Microsoft and Novell have partnered to morph Open Source implementations the Linux operating system into a commercial for-profit enterprise platform that will go a long way to secure their respective corporate business models and strategic objectives. As far back as the early 1990s, Novell's CEO Ray Noorda was a champion of the co-opetition concept. Noorda was instrumental in making deals and decisions that embodied this business philosophy, and as history has shown, not all of his deals and alliances succeeded.

"Your enemy's enemy is your friend" as a concept is a universal strategy as old as time. It's been around longer than Harvard Business School. Yesterday I began to wonder how the co-opetition paradigm might be a modified variation on this idea and relate to new music and the work of composers: "Your enemy's enemy is your mutual enemy."

Concert and recording promoters, music critics, and musicologists love to create labels and invent controversy to sell books, newspapers, and tickets. They look for differences, and fuel the fire of public opinion as if art was a form of warfare, but without the bloodshed. I've seen scholarly articles with provocative titles such as "Fighting with Words: American Composers' Commentary on their Work." That evokes the image of the American composer as "Rambo."

While it true that an adversarial form of discourse about music can and does exist in our culture, the fact is that composers often consciously or unconsciously employ the co-opetition paradigm. They are creatures of survival and all too aware that their entire species is gravely endangered. While some individuals strive for alpha-composer status, the collective good of the troupe outweighs the harm invoked by internal squabbles or petty competition for limited and diminishing resources. At least publicly, in the name of diversity composers tend to tolerate each other's work and support ideas other than their own.

Here is a striking example of composer co-opetition...

In the early 1970s a concert promoter programmed works by John Cage (photo left) and Charles Wuorinen (photo right). These composers have very different approaches to music and are heavily invested in their musical systems. In some way - at least in the 70s - these two composers embodied musical aesthetics that were symbolically representative of two big "isms" that were diametrically opposed: Serialism and Aleatory. To maximally contrast, highlight, and enhance the schism of theoretical approaches, the promoter scheduled a panel discussion before the concert between the two "opposing" composers.

The event had all of the trappings of a heavyweight prize fight for the world title. A critic from the New York Times was on hand to record the inevitable fireworks. The audience waited with baited breath in anticipation of the verbal battle that had been expected to ensue. After all, how could two strong-willed composers passionate about their work not lunge at each other like gladiators with swords fighting gallantly in support of their individual musical Crusade? American composers are mavericks... right?

The panel discussion turned out to be a spectacular dud. Cage and Wuorinen skillfully resisted the wholesale branding, characterization, and simplistic stereotyping posed by the discussion moderator (a prominent newspaper music reviewer). To the disappointment of the audience, the composers were not even slightly antagonistic toward one another. In fact, John and Charles acted rather friendly toward one another. Truth be it known, the two men probably have much in common. In fact, as the "odd couple" they gained control of the dialogue and firmly wrestled the topic away from the disappointed moderator.

At a meta-level, the public spectacle was a memorable example of composer co-opetition. These two talented composers strategically decided to support each other's ideas and work, although in reality they hold strongly opposing beliefs.

What's the take away here? Let me propose some helpful rules of engagement...

1) Never trust what a promoter, music critic, or musicologist says or writes about music. They distort reality and lie for notoriety and/or financial profit.

2) Never trust what a composer says or writes about their own music. They distort reality and lie in the interest of self-preservation (and more rarely notoriety and/or financial profit).

3) Never trust what a composer says or writes about another composers' music. They are probably engaging in co-opetition.

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Factoid

Here is a story comparing how things were done at the Russian Federal Space Agency verses NASA....

NASA was spending millions of dollars to solve the ball-point pen problem. Pens don't work well in space. They leak, and the need gravity to push the ink down to the tip. It was an aggravating technical problem, and the best NASA engineers couldn't figure out how to solve it. During the cold war they puzzled, "How is it that the Russian's could make it work when NASA could not?"

After the cold war ended and communication between the Soviet Union and the USA improved, there was free scientific dialog between the two space agencies. The American scientists asked their Russian counterparts, "how do you write in space?"

The answer was simple, "with pencils."

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The above story is a good one, but it is an urban myth. Currently a "Zero Gravity Pen" is available from the Fisher Space Pen Company. It uses pressurized ink cartridges. The hi-tech pen was developed independently of NASA with 11 million R&D dollars by inventor Paul C. Fisher. Today Fisher sells different models of his hi-tech zero gravity pens to both the Russian and American space agencies. The Russian Space program ordered 100 Fisher Space pens for the Soyuz mission in 1969. You can purchase a consumer version of these pens online for $25 or less.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen
http://www.spacepen.com/zerogravitypen.aspx
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_zero_gravity_pen.htm
http://space.about.com/od/spaceexplorationhistory/a/spacepen.htm

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ISS versus Hubble

Perhaps you've been wondering how Jim weighs in on NASA's expenditures. Everyone should have an opinion about this, even modernist composers such as myself.

Construction on the International Space Station (ISS) began in 1998, and is expected to be completed in 2011 when the remaining Space Shuttles will be forced into retirement. The purpose of the ISS is to serve as a long-term research laboratory in space, but the projected life-expectancy of this project is not very long. By some accounts it will be retired in 2015 by crashing it into the ocean (remember Skylab?).

Researchers on the ISS perform experiments in biology, physics, astronomy, and meteorology that require a microgravity environment. But when you think about it, many of these experiments could probably be done less expensively on the "vomit comet" or other platforms. While there are many benefits derived from building and maintaining such a major installation with international support, the tangible scientific take aways come at a steep cost. Some have estimated that the ISS will cost up to a 100 billion dollars. That's $100,000,000,000.00

In contrast, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been in orbit since April of 1990. It has performed as an amazing tool in the field of astronomy - changing what we know about the universe. Hubble was not inexpensive. It has cost around $10 billion dollars to design, build, launch, and maintain. It's most recent (and final) upgrade cost just over $1 billion.

In the end I think we will learn much more from Hubble than from the ISS. The ISS will end up costing ten times what Hubble has, but with fewer benefits.

A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon we're talking about real money.

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X Prize Competition

For those of you with a little extra time on your hands, you might want to consider competing in the Archon Genomics X PRIZE Competition. It carries a whopping 10 million dollar prize.



It's pretty simple...


All you have to do is figure out a way to make personalized human gene sequencing readily affordable. If you can do it for under $10,000 in 10 days or less, the prize money is yours. It can be done today, but cost millions.

I predict that before long each of us will be walking around with a USB flash memory storage device containing a record of our individual genetic footprint. Armed with that vital information, doctor's appointments will probably go from 5-minutes (currently) to about 25 seconds.

Link: http://genomics.xprize.org/

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Dante Alighieri: Superhero

Dante Alighieri (c.1265 – 1321) is known by many simply as il Poeta (the Poet). His "Divina Commedia" is considered to be one of the greatest works of world literature.

A statue of his likeness stands in the Piazza di Santa Croce in his home city of Florence (right).

Now il Poeta is set for a hi-tech makeover. On February 9th, 2010 Electronic Arts (EA) will release "Dante's Inferno" - an interactive video game for the PS3, XBox360, and PSP gaming platforms.

EA's website explains the transformation...

"Inspired by the real Dante Alighieri, but adapted for a new generation and a new medium, the hero of the game is a soldier who defies death and fights for love against impossible odds. The Italian mercenary Dante returns home from the wars to find that his beloved Beatrice has been murdered, and her soul pulled down into Hell by a dark force. He gives chase, and vows to get her back. For weapons, he wields Death's soul-reaping scythe, and commands holy powers of the cross, given to him by Beatrice."

Apparently, gamers will be able to select from a menu of Nine Rings of Hell to confront evil and fight bad guys. The nine circles are: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice (or "Greed"), Wrath and Sloth (or "Anger"), Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treason. Sounds like lots of fun.

After EA releases Inferno early next year, I wonder if Purgatorio and Paradiso video games will follow.

Having seen Gustave Doré and Salvador Dalí's powerful artistic visions inspired by Dante's masterpiece, I suspect that Electronic Arts has a hard act to follow. I wish them luck, but fear that their main character - superhero Dante - will exude more brawn than brain. Oh yeah, Virgil is a wimp.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri

http://www.dantesinferno.com/

http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/images/dore/inf.html

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Total Recall

I watch the CSPAN channel. I especially like viewing the lectures and interviews with authors on the program Book TV.

Yesterday Book TV featured Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell speaking at the Computer History Museum in California. Their book is titled Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution will Change Everything!

E-memory (in contrast to bio-memory) involves the large-scale digitization of an individuals life experience. The authors on-going project is to record and archive their personalized e-memories and maintain them in a huge database indexed with as many data points as possible. Their goal is to study the issues surrounding how this information can be stored, organized, structured, and accessed - as well as to research the tangible benefits and outcomes.

Working under the auspices of Microsoft, Bell and Gemmell have experimented with E-memories since 1998, and learned legions in the process. The technology of using computer memory to record every detail about a person's life has improved greatly in recent years. It is fair to say that in the very near future average people will be able to digitally preserve all of their experiences and easily recall them whenever they wish - at will. It's really just an iPhone upgrade away.

Gordon Bell was head of Engineering at Digital Equipment Corp, and now is a principle researcher at Microsoft. He's written several books, including High Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success and Computer Structures: Readings and Examples. His associate, Jim Gemmell, is also a senior researcher at Microsoft (fun job if you can get it).

Both men wear equipment such as BodyBuggs, GPS receivers, digital video cameras, assorted recording instrumentation, and customized portable computers to store and catalogue their every move and bodily function. This is a 7 days per week, 24 hours per day, ongoing project. Steps have been taken to insure their privacy, but data security is clearly one of the probing questions that still needs to be addressed.

On the face of it, this over abundance of self-documentation seems intimidating and rather pointless. But it turns out that many interesting events in life happen unplanned and unexpectedly. In hindsight one can never predict what will happen or what information you would want to recall in the future. Therefore, by recording everything in your life, from youth through old age, you and your ancestors will always have access to a detailed and precise permanent record of any event.

How would all of this information be organized? It turns out that most of information is unstructured data - utility bills, phone conversations, spontaneous walks in the park, and a stream of email messages and web pages visited. The researchers refer to their individual data stores as "life-bits." All of their personal data, collected in real time, can be time-stamped and cross-linked to specific locations via GPS coordinates.

By creating links between all our their daily telephone and computer-based interactions (e.g. scheduling, communications, documents, web-browsing, video records, etc), a life-story emerges. Spikes and patterns appear in histograms, such as when important life events occurred. Aside from the practical matter of having documentation of everything, interesting trends emerge.

Gordon Bell, acting as a guinea pig for this on-going human experiment, has had all of his "legacy" photos and documents scanned. He has little or no paper in his life, but stores his life-bits on a really huge hard drive at his office at Microsoft (which is fully-networked and backed up). Bell has converted his entire life-history, in all aspects, into binary numbers. He estimated that it requires only about 200 data types, much of which are self-defining and self-archiving. He looks forward to the day when he gets his utility bill electronically in XML format, so that it will not have to be scanned and into his personal data store.

Once can foresee the day when every person on the planet will be assigned an IP v6 address which will be their life-time identifying number. No more social security numbers. No more alphabetical names to fuss over, just a logical address somewhere in the ether of the digital cloud.

What's an example of how this information might be used? Well, perhaps someday you would want to view a video of Grandpa catching the big fish he often told the story about, and while you were at it, check out what he had for lunch on that day and listen to the conversation he had with his fishing pals.

It turns out that bio-memory is pretty good at indexing all of our life experiences via the dimensions of geographic location and date-time stamp.

Although structured data and tags can also be superimposed on the raw information to provide additional categories of classification, it tuns out that the human memory most often refers to these two basic and fundamental search algorithms for data retrieval.

Think of life-bits as a vast repository of your personal data, from your first dirty diaper right right up to your final breaths - and it will include all of the messy details in between. Retrieving information from it would be like "googling yourself" on steroids.

At first I was put off by the concept. Why would I, or anyone else be so interested in my boring life? But when you hear about some of the practical applications that potentially stem from implementing this technology, then you begin to see the potential.

For example, my son is about to embark an a very expensive college education. He may end up spending up to $200,000 at a 4-year private institution. It is known that the human mind can only absorb and record a small fraction what we hear in classroom lectures. Not only that, over time the long-term retention of memory drops off significantly. Wouldn't it be nice if my son could have a permanent record of his entire college experience along with searchable and retrievable records of the people he met and spoke with at college? Not only would it be very useful information to reattain throughout life, but perhaps it could also be re-sold to another person seeking a college education - but at a hefty discount (say 50% off the brink-and-mortar price). It would create an entire new market in second-hand college educations.

Health monitoring is another interesting application. BodyBuggs and devices such as Bluetooth-enable scales are on the market already. These devices monitor our vital signs - from heart rate to blood pressure, to changes in BMI and body weight over time. Having a long-term history of our physical profile can aid medical practitioners in the diagnosis and treatment of ailments. The data can be graphed and presented to your medical team. It could aid medical research.

Looking back at my own life, I've gone to a lot of concerts in the past 40 years or so, and my bio-memory of them is beginning to fade. I have saved the concert programs from just about everyone of those concerts, and I store them in boxes located in my basement. It takes up lots of space. It would be nice to have a more permanent and easily accessible digital record of what transpired within the walls of those concert halls across the world.

Copyright issues aside, I can bring my Samson Zoom H2 digital audio recorder along to a concert today. It will allow me to make CD-quality recordings right onto flash memory. But that technology was not available in the 70s and 80s. If it had been, I would have used it. All of the concerts I've attended over the decades would have been indexed by date and geographic location. The concert programs would be scanned directly into my personalized life-bits database and cross-referenced against the corresponding audio recordings for future reference.

The future is here, but unfortunately I have to rely on my decaying bio-memory to recall most of the past. I hope that my neural-memory index doesn't get corrupted, since I don't have a bio-backup. Future generations may be more fortunate thanks to the emergence of e-memory technology and data warehousing.

Links:

http://totalrecallbook.com/

http://www.bodybugg.com/

http://www.samsontech.com/products/productpage.cfm?prodID=1916

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October 22nd

If you haven't noticed, today is the worldwide release of the retail editions of Microsoft's latest desktop operating system: Windows 7.

Formerly codenamed Blackcomb and Vienna, it has gone through more beta testing than any other Microsoft desktop OS.

Windows 7 is reported to address many of the complaints lodged against it's predecessor Windows Vista - which was almost universally disliked by consumers and businesses alike.

Microsoft is at a critical junction. Last year their revenues declined for the first time in their history while Apple Computer had record profits. Part of this shift relates to the way people use technology. Personal computers just aren't as popular they use to be. The growth of handheld devices such as iPhones currently outpaces PC sales, and this trend is projected continue - particularly in emerging markets.

Having experienced all of the Windows operating system roll outs, I'm quite familiar with the marketing blitz that Microsoft is famous for. This morning Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was a guest on Good Morning America talking up their new product (Microsoft is part owner of the MSNBC network). Ballmer explained that Windows was originally a product driven by home users, then it became a corporate-oriented product, and now it's mass market consumer driven again. Sixty-five percent of PCs this year will be purchased by home users, and of them, at least 9 out of 10 will likely be sold with a version of Windows 7 pre-installed. It is estimated that MS Windows is currently installed on a billion computers world wide.

But not everyone is jubilant in Microsoft-land. Apple has made significant inroads into the market with their signature and trendy Apple Stores. Microsoft has now reluctantly decided to adapt this direct to consumer business plan. Look for eye-catching and trendy Microsoft stores to open at a shopping mall near you. Google is pushing Android, its new OS for PDAs and smart cell phones. Ballmer has a lot on the line.

And if all of these competitive pressures were not enough, Microsoft faces major challenges in China where there 80% their products are illegally downloaded from the net by users. While China will become the biggest market for companies like Walmart and KFC, Microsoft products are easily downloaded from Baidu free of charge. So far Microsoft has been unable to stem the culture of piracy.

Anyway, Steve Ballmer seems like his job. Here is a short YouTube clip of the Microsoft chief doing his spiel....

That outburst by the boss seems a little like something we might see on the popular television program "The Office." Life imitating art, I guess.

As for myself, I'm going to wait for the first service pack to be released before I consider taking the plunge. What's the rush?

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Going Digital

I just signed up for a 2009/10 subscription to the entire concert season of the Berliner Philharmoniker.

No, I don't plan to spent a year in Berlin, but through the portal of a virtual "Digital Concert Hall" (sponsored by Deutsche Bank) I am able to attend archived and live concerts via the magic of the Internet.

Since 2002 Sir Simon Rattle has been the Principal Conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker and Artistic Director of the Berliner Philharmonie. The programming is rather good, and includes a number of contemporary works.

I'm also a fan of the "Berliner" since their sampled digital sounds were utilized just recently in the electronic realization of my Chamber Symphony composed earlier this year. Attending their concerts is almost like hearing old friends perform.

I checked out an archived performance conducted by Semyon Bychhov of Igor Stravinsky's Symphonies for Wind Instruments (1947 version) and Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1943 string orchestra version). Not only was the stereo sound superb, but the video was in high definition (if you have broadband). I have no complaints about the technology. It's simply incredible. This is not your father's YouTube.

A season pass to access the entire Berliner Philharmoniker-Philharmonie concert series (including chamber music concerts) costs 149 Euros. Individual concert tickets can be purchased for 9.90 EUR. Not bad when you think that you don't have to purchase a transcontinental airline ticket or stay at a hotel. Fortunately I received my season pass as a promotional gift.

I like going digital... no traffic, parking, or transportation problems to contend with. No H1N1 virus to worry about. And I can watch it more or less when I feel like it. Ill never leave the house again. Let's call out for pizza delivery.

Link: http://dch.berliner-philharmoniker.de/#/en/

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Factoid

Each year the orbit of the Moon widens by one and a half inches (3.8 cm). At an approximate average distance of 385,000 km, it gradually increases it's distance from earth.

The gradually increasing earth-moon distance is related to the slowing of the Earth's rotation as a result of the conservation of angular momentum law in physics.

Above is a photo of the earth and moon taken by the Galileo spacecraft from 3.9 million miles away in space. The white line was added to indicate the path of the orbit.

But what would happen if the moon broke away from the earth's orbit and went it's own way?

I think people would be bummed. It would have a dramatic impact on the physical and psychological well-being of humans everywhere on the planet.

If this were to happen, I'd propose that NASA take on a project to construct and place into orbit an artificial moon to aid humanity. It's simpler than it sounds.

Several flat and circular geo-stationary satellites could be erected in space above each of the major continents. The lower surface of the huge satellites would house white LEDs on the earth-facing side, and solar cells would be installed on the outer sun-facing side. The substitute moons would store energy during the day, and switch on at night to create a lunar illusion for the benefit of people living below. It could be remote controlled by computer to simulate the changing lunar phases, and even be shut off where we anticipate that a lunar eclipse would normally occur. If the LEDs and solar cells were small enough and could be mounted on a grid, then during the day sunlight would be able to shine through the open spaces down to the earth. The massive project could be paid for with occasional electronic banner advertising - done tastefully of course.

True, the Moon wouldn't move around the sky like it does today, but if it were done well, it could look pretty realistic.

Think about it.

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The Geek Squad

On Sunday, after cleaning up from the cookout/party the night before, I received a somewhat distressed phone call from composer Ezra Sims.

He explained that his five-year old IBM ThinkPad computer is on its' last legs and quickly dying. No smoke yet, but the fan appeared to stop working and it was generating excessive heat.

Sounding rather despondent, Ezra explained that he needed to get the notebook repaired or to purchase a new one ASAP. Frankly, he was in a state of panic and I could immediately relate to his feeling of helplessness. These days, a composer without a computer and Internet access is like a fish out of water. I suspect that the recent heat wave we have been having was a contributing factor as well.

I hopped into my Honda and dashed over to his pad in Cambridge where we then strolled two blocks over to BestBuy at the Galleria Mall to see what they could do for him.

His mission was to discuss his repair or purchase options with a representative of the "Geek Squad" and take appropriate action. My role was to function as his 3rd-party independent computer consultant, translator, and cultural ambassador. I think I was also summoned to act as psychological proxy, since buying modern technology is a daunting task for anyone. It's a major purchase for Ezra, and it involves change and lots of stress.

As Ezra will readily admit, he is in his 80s and could benefit from assistance on some matters. He was concerned that he would have trouble relating to the 20-somethings from the Geek Squad, since the young people wearing the blue shirts on the BestBuy sales floor seem prone to ramble on in an unknown alien language. They are make assumptions about what you need, and jump to premature conclusions. Whatever the language, the Geeks talk rapidly and converse at a decibel level that is far too soft for Ezra to hear. Even in the best of circumstances it would be difficult to hear what they are saying over the blaring rock music the store pipes in through the public address system.

First we brought his terminally ill notebook to the Geek Squad ER for triage. A nice Russian fellow delivered the grim news. It didn't have much life left in it, repairs would be expensive and "not virth it."

Facing reality, Ezra decided to purchase a new PC. The Russian guy referred us to a young fellow with long dark hair who works on the sales floor wearing the requisite blue BestBuy polo shirt. We had a little trouble understanding the sales associate at first because of his tongue ring.

The technical sales guy was very patient with us, and looked at Ezra in amazement as he explained what he needed a computer for. Ezra talked to him about the early days of computing at Marvin Minsky's original MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and about the one of a kind MS DOS-based microtonal sound synthesis program he would be using on the new notebook. Ezra is also dependent on the IBM "TrackPoint" pointer, and that narrowed down his selection.

IBM ThinkPads are now manufactured in China by Lenovo, and the business division of BestBuy sells them online. The Lenovo product line is not available in the store, but the sales associate led us to a computer monitor where he looked up and displayed nearly 300 options and standard configurations. Ultimately, Ezra, the sales associate, and myself narrowed it down to a model that fits Ezra's modest budget. It comes with Windows XP and appears to have all of the features he will need. Ezra entered his customer information into the webpage at the store, and was told that the notebook will be shipped directly to his apartment.

The next phase of this story will occur later in the week when I head over to assist Ezra in transferring his old programs and data from the dying computer to the new one. It will be interesting to see how easily that goes.

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It's 10 PM...

do you know where your PII is?

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is a term used in information security. It refers to the various types of information that can be collected and stored in commercial databases about your identity and associated habits.

Something as innocuous as an email address or Facebook ID can be used to uniquely identify who you are, and by implication it can be combined with other public and private data sources for even richer information stores.

This morning I watched a number of assorted Web-Industry Executives appear as witnesses before a US House Commerce Subcommittee hearing regarding "Behavioral Online Advertising." The subcommittee is chaired by Representative Rick Boucher, a Democrat from Virgina. The industry witnesses included Christopher Kelly, the Chief Privacy Officer for Facebook and Nichole Wong, Deputy General Council for Google (which happens to be the application service provider of Blogger, host of this Blog).

It's clear that many Internet companies provide a service that aims to gather as much information as they can about individuals, including their browsing and spending habits. Online data is often matched with off-line data, and this data is routinely marketed to third-party advertisers.

While the "pie in the sky" upside to all of this data collection is that we will be more empowered as consumers, I have many reservations about the potential downside implications of this rapidly advancing technology.

Perhaps Google and Facebook are more cognizant than most companies of the issues surrounding personal rights, but already we have a plethora of unscrupulous SpyWare vendors that indiscriminately gather vital information about us everyday. Privacy laws are not keeping pace with the technology.

Since my blog is primarily about events and ideas in the area of new music, let me provide one example of how PII was recently used in a disturbing case that relates to the arts.

In America we are all aware of the "American Idol" contest where fans select a winner by texting their votes to the program. In Europe, the televised song contest is known as Eurovison, and it's been around since the 1950s. It so happens that 43 Azerbaijani music fans texted their votes in support of this years' Armenian Eurovision entrants: a duo known as Inga and Anush. The musical duo sang the tune "Jan Jan."

Here is the evil part. Using the built-in capabilities of the communications technology, the Azerbaijan national security ministry located and called those 43 fans into headquarters for what was described as a "robust interrogation."

The intersection between music and politics is nothing new, but the introduction of advanced technology into the equation provides certain elements of society with powerful tools to monitor and record our listening habits.

While I have no interest whatsoever in the kitschy songs of Eurovision, the potential monitoring, control, and consequential loss of artistic freedom and musical expression is of great concern. Artistic censoring has happened in the past. It happened easily enough in a time when the capabilities of technology were not available as a tool of repression. Today, we are but a few mouse clicks away from being monitoring and categorized in terms of the kind of music we choose to listen to. In fact, this process is already happening. The databases are growing.

Just beware that someday our musical preferences could come back to haunt us. For those of you that have a controversial or minority point of view in the world of music (or anything else), you have justification to be afraid.

Stand up for your rights.

Link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personally_identifiable_information

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Gettone Telefonico

Remember telephone booths?

Before cellphones became so ubiquitous, keeping a pocket full of change was a good idea, just in case you needed to call home to ask for a ride.

Communications while traveling internationally was also an adventure, especially in Italy where the telecommunications infrastructure was at one time pretty horrendous. It was operated by the PTT, a state-run Italian government service.

I've heard that the wait for Italians to get a telephone installed in their home could take years.

It was also primitive beyond belief. For example, every time I called a friend in Rome from the US in the early 1980s, the line was "busy." As a result, I just kept calling him over and over again with the same result for days. When I finally got through, he explained that he had been away, but that his phone system was a "party line" which usually results in a busy signal for incoming calls. It was also expensive. Making international phone calls of any kind was a real luxury.

It is said that even into the early 1990s (according to Corriere della Sera), only 52 percent of all telephone calls originating in Italy would reach their intended destination. The NY Times reported that, "Many calls that do get through are suddenly cut off, or, more commonly, the connection sounds as though the person on the other end is crinkling an empty potato-chips bag against the mouthpiece." You would often hear other people's conversations, which was often entertaining until you realize that others may have been listening in to your conversation as well.

Later, when I lived in Italy as a student for a few months, I was virtually out of telephone communication with my family back in America. I only made a few calls, and there were only two ways to do it:

The first option was to locate an available public phone booth. They were hard to come by, and ususuly occupied by long-winded and animated rambling Italians. This method also require that you pre-purchase a large supply of Gettone Telefonico tokens needed to insert in the telephone, and have all the appropriate country codes and numbers ready to dial. Phone cards weren't invented yet.




The Gettone was a copper token, and it was used in Italy from about 1959 to 2001 (I was in Italy in 1984). The price changed over time, but it was roughly equivalent to about 200 Lire (or 18 cents) at one time. Some people used Gettone as legal currency - small change.

There is actually a way to read the number at the bottom of the token (#7805 in the photo above). This Gettone was minted in May (05) of 1978.

The payphone option never worked well for me, since I could barely feed the phone fast enough with Gettone to keep from being disconnected. The service was very unreliable and intermittent.

The other option for making a call was to go down to the Central Office of the PTT. This was always a dreaded encounter of the worst sort with an indifferent Italian government bureaucracy. Only the Italian Post Office could come close to rivaling the poor-customer service your would get at the PTT (in fact a division of the Post Office).

In Florence in 1984 the Central Office of the PTT was grey, dark, and dreary. As you entered the room you were greeted by a long line of 100 or so people who were all waiting like cattle for their turn at one of the dozen or so individual phone booths. A fat balding man wearing a fascistic uniform and a big hat sat at a central console and collected money from people who had just made their telephone calls. He looked at a meter hidden from public view in his tall desk, and then demanded a fee from you in Italian. It had to be paid.

Other fascistic-looking PTT personnel stood idly by doing nothing other than made occasional cryptic comments among themselves while doing their best to look menacing. Boredom was the order of the day. No one ever smiled. People stood in line, grim faced, waiting for their opportunity to call a dear friend, ill family member, or lover. A customer could make only one call at a time, but often appeared monopolize the "cabina telefonica" for extended periods of time. The Central Office was open day and night, around the clock. In some ways it resembled a busy train station with lots of tired poor people in search of something. Occasionally folks would leave their phone booth in tears after speaking to their loved ones.

On one day, I had walked a long distance to get to the Firenze Central PTT Office. It was cold and raining. The line was rather long, so I had to wait (standing up) for at least an hour and a half. I finally got my turn in a phone booth, and dialed my parents who were almost always at home. It rang once, and then the circuit disconnected. I heard a loud click that resounded as if someone was picking up a phone on another line.

Angry, I stomped out of the phone booth and began to walk for the door. I had assumed, no connection, no payment. That's they way it works in America. Same thing here in Italy, right?

Wrong.

The fascistic-looking bureaucrat at the PTT desk yelled out at me and waved his arms around in anger. He realized that I was a tourist, but was all too willing to call his guard dogs on me for avoidance of payment. I walked up to his high podium and tried to plead my case in my terrible Italian, which had the impact of sending him and his cronies into a state of uncontrollable sadistic laughter. It must have been the most entertaining thing to happen to them all day. But I realized that the only way I was going to leave that building without getting arrested was to pay thousands of Lire, whatever fee the big man deemed appropriate. He looked and acted like "Il Duce."

Basta!

I paid my fee, left the mausoleumish PTT building, and lived to tell this story.

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Factoid

Yahoo!

is an acronym for...

Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle

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The Fauxharmonic Orchestra

Under the direction of conductor Paul Henry Smith, the Fauxharmonic Orchestra produces concerts and recordings of orchestral music. The digital orchestra consists of the world's finest sample-based instruments (such as the Berlin Philharmonic) and can be heard in concert halls and recording studios.





Boston-based conductor Paul Henry Smith (who studied at Tanglewood under Leonard Bernstein in 1981) will be performing live with his virtual orchestra at Brandeis University on October 4th, 2009 at the Slosberg Music Center. The concert will feature contemporary works by Brandeis composers as well as some orchestral classics.

The orchestra just released a recording of Anton Webern's classic Chamber Symphonie Op. 21, and it can be found on YouTube. This is an amazing piece by a fascinating composer, and the performance is excellent. Webern's Symphonie was composed 80 years ago, and today it still sounds to our ears like mysterious music from a distant planet. Enjoy...

Links:

http://www.fauxharmonic.com/

http://www.paulhenrysmith.com/

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Mozart's webstream

For those of us who can't make it to the Salzburg Festival this summer, there is a hi-tech alternative.

Siemens AG is offering access to Mozart´s Così fan tutte (directed by Claus Guth) via webstream on the Internet. I checked it out. The sound is good and the video is HD (although a bit jerky). My Verizon FiOS was pumping out a whopping 6135 kbits per second riding over rtmp on port 1935. Mozart would have been pleased.

The full broadcast of "Così" is today at 3 PM (EDT) and can be accessed at:

www.siemens.com/festivalnight

You will have to purchase a ticket online for € 7.90, but the opera can be viewed once again on-demand for up to 7 days after the actual performance. Once you purchase your e-ticket, you will be receive a username and password so you can login to the virtual Opera House.

If Wagner is more your cup of tea, Siemens AG will webstream Tristan und Isolde (Christoph Marthaler's production) on Sunday August 9th, 2009 at 3 PM from the Bayreuth Festival Theatre. Online tickets cost €14.90.

You don't have to leave the comfort of your home to experience high "culcha" as long as you have broadband and a credit card.

Pass the Budweiser and chicken wings.

Links:

http://live.bfmedien.de/live.html?lang=en

http://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/language/en-us/dasprogramm/homepage/

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Goodbye Barcode, Hello Bokode

Goodbye Barcode...

Hello Bokode...

This little reflective red dot is in your future.

Just when we have grown accustomed to the ubiquitous beeping sound at supermarket checkout lines as our items are magically scanned at checkout, a new technology is about to emerge.

Standard Barcodes have been around for some time. They use a 2-Dimensional technique of optical encoding to store information information digitally.

Now researchers at MIT's Media Lab Camera Culture Group have hit upon a new way of storing information that has several clear advantages over standard Barcodes:

1) It requires much less space. It's about the size of the "@" symbol.
2) It can be read from a distance, up to several meters away.
3) It can store more information: thousands of bits.
4) It can be read by standard digital cameras, which are now common in cellphones, etc.

Bokode uses a brand new system of encoding visual data. It utilizes the angular dimension where light rays vary in brightness depending on the angle at which they emerge. The digital camera has to go into an "unfocused" mode to receive the digitized Bokode image.

It will do more than replace the archaic Barcode. It will find new applications that we can't even imagine.


Links:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~ankit/bokode/
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/barcodes-0724.html

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Schoenberg's Op. 11 performed by cats

I would like to credit fellow music blogger "Soho the Dog" (a.k.a. Matthew Guerrieri) for bringing this one to my attention.




This is about a software assisted audio-video collage derived from multiple YouTube videos of assorted cats playing the piano and reassembled in such a way as to recreate all three movements of Schoenberg's historic Three Pieces for Piano Op. 11.




The video creator - Cory Arcangel - describes himself as "a 30 year old computer programmer, cyber sculptor, comedian, web designer, and artist living and working in Brooklyn."


He used Comparisioncs software to compare pianist Glenn Gould's recording of the original Schoenberg work against a large file YouTubes collected of "random" cat-generated notes and chords. The Comparisioncs software then suggested sections that were similar on a note-by-note basis. From that Arcangel made final choices and wrote a script that reassembled fragments from 170 YouTube videos into something that vaguely resembles the Schoenberg composition as played by Glenn Gould.

Here is a link to Cory Arcangel's website:

http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made/DreiKlavierstucke

It seems like a fitting way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Schoenberg's historic piano work, which dates from 1909. Too bad that the cat's pianos were out of tune.

Meow.

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