Archive for 2010

Most of us probably wouldn’t notice if all of a sudden the GPS in our car didn’t work – what with texting and changing songs on our iPods and eating breakfast, there’s barely time to look out the window anymore. “Besides,” you say, “I’m pretty good with a map and compass from my days in the Boy/Girl Scouts. And if that fails, I’ve got an old sextant my Grandpa had in the Navy…” All true. But GPS isn’t just for finding your way to the Kwiky Mart, anymore. It’s used extensively for time and timing applications.

“But I don’t look at my GPS for the time; I look at my cell phone.” Exactly: how does your cell phone know what time it is? “There’s a little clock inside, like everything else.” Well, almost: have you ever noticed you don’t have to ever set the time on your cell phone? Cell phones get the time from cell phone towers, which also happen to handle all of the data that flies back and forth between you and your spouse when you’re trying to find out which kind of toothpaste you’re supposed to buy: the cool mint, tartar control gel or the extra whitening, vitamin-D enriched gel with flavor crystals. The digital packets carrying your highly-important oral dentifrice data must be carefully timed, lest your voice be garbled or your call be dropped. You musn’t return with the wrong toothpaste.

The reason we get such spot-on navigation from GPS, enabling us to get within several feet of our favorite accident sites, is because it measures the difference in time it takes for the highly-ordered signals from each of the GPS satellites to reach us at our current location. Each GPS satellite has a cesium clock, which is even more accurate and expensive than that nice Swatch you got last Christmas. In fact, it’s so expensive that the fine folks who build cell phone towers and networks noticed that it would be much, much, much cheaper to use a GPS receiver and the totally free GPS signals than to install a cesium clock into each cell tower to ensure that your voice sounds like what you say. (You get the time displayed on your cell phone ‘cause it’s a nice feature and it’s basically free. And because the cell phone manufacturers are out to steal the personal timepiece market from Swatch.)

“So…?” So cell phones are so completely dependent on GPS signals that they don’t work within a few minutes if GPS isn’t available. “Well, geez, nobody’s going to destroy all the GPS satellites. That would require a highly sophisticated, coordinated attack using advanced rocket technology and…” No, probably not. But consider this: the GPS satellites are 12,000 miles up and they’re not very powerful. In fact, the signal that reaches the Earth’s surface is incredibly weak and delicate, like one of those prize-winning, elaborate sugar centerpiece decorations you see on the Food Network. If it weren’t for some clever slight-of-hand that most GPS receivers perform, you’d notice that if you stand under a decent-sized tree with a lot of leaves on it you don’t get a GPS signal there. That’s how weak it is. It’s not the satellites themselves, it’s the signal. GPS signals are ridiculously easy to jam with a nine volt battery and off-the-shelf electronics; occasionally it even happens accidentally. What if someone wanted to really disrupt, say, the entire city of Chicago? Or Los Angeles? Or New York City? Unthinkable? Think again.

Cell phones are not the only things that depend so heavily on GPS for timing information: financial institutions, power utilities, and other communication networks do, too. In fact, it’s hard to list all of the things that rely on GPS, because they’re everywhere: it’s so simple and cheap to integrate GPS into other products and instruments that we don’t really even think about it anymore.

Which is why I was bummed to hear that the U.S. government shut down the only viable backup to GPS for both navigation and timing in February this year. It was called Loran-C (or just “loran” for short), and it worked quite well. It provided signals that were good enough to be a backup for pilots to get to the runway and all but the most precise timing applications. The signals were also  high-powered and very difficult to jam. Loran suffered from a problem, though, because it wasn’t GPS: it wasn’t quite as accurate, and it didn’t have worldwide coverage. The government threatened to shut down loran for years under the pretense of saving money. As a result, there were no sexy, little, modern loran receivers, either. (Go figure: which company is going to design a receiver the size of an MP3 player for a signal that the government might shut down at any moment?) So loran was under the sword of Damocles for a long, long time. Until 2008, when the government committed to keeping the loran system operational for another 20 years. Until recently when the government decided: “Well, not so much”.

So, when we consider the actual cost savings (loran can be operated and maintained for a year at a fraction of the cost to simply launch a single GPS satellite), we have an interesting situation: GPS is very accurate, global and very delicate; loran is less accurate, localized and very robust. Loran could be used as a backup to navigation and timing applications in the entire continental United States in the event of intentional jamming. The two technologies complement and enhance each other very well even under normal conditions because their signals are diverse. What’s that worth?

I know this sounds like the beginning of a bad joke but what would you be willing to do for $5???

http://www.fiverr.com/

Oh my… well if 99Designs isn’t one of the four horseman of the apocalypse (sorry… I can’t take credit for that line!) then this certainly is.  Or perhaps not.  Well probably not.  I guess for most of this stuff I’m less surprised that someone is willing to do it for $5 than the fact that someone is willing to pay $5. 

Talk about your “frictionless commerce”!  

From a historical perspective I think it’s pretty interesting that the rise of trade-unions in the country was driven by systematic abuse of labor but also the realization that within a free-market economy there is virtually no end to which people will discount their own value out of basic survival instincts.  Frankly there is almost always someone somewhere who is willing to work for cheaper.  Lacking geographic or regulatory barriers the trade unions created a bit of labor “friction” allow for some wage parity in exchange for labor stability.  I guess we can argue ad nauseum as to the relative benefits of labor unions but I (and this might surprise you as an ex auto-industry guy and business owner) generally feel that labor unions served a crucial role in establishing our middle class and giving rise to both domestic stability and a generally heightened standard of living and quality of life in this country.

An interesting observation about the internet is that similar to industrialization it has created a dynamic new labor market along with virtually infinite ways to both expand and exploit.  

Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not arguing for unionization of the internet labor force.  But I do think we’re witnessing a dynamic shift in the labor market.  Perhaps the difference here is the inherent intangible of “knowledge work” and the value placed on higher quality, lower risk, better results.

With a bit of magic from our talented shop staff (thanks Jason!) we converted one of our CNC mills to a CNC hot wire cutter.  This is allowing us to quickly create a range of NACA profile shapes for our wind turbine project. 

More to come as we hope to have this spinning and making electricity by the summer!

I’m really not much of a gadget person. Honest. Particularly for someone who works at a design firm I’m damn near a Luddite. That being said I recently picked up a gadget that has me thinking about the pace with which technology has infiltrated my life.   Said gadget is a Pulse Smart Pen by LiveScribe.   Looking essentially like a slightly oversized fountain pen this nifty device is able to link your written words with an audio recording so that by merely tapping anywhere in your written notes you can hear what was being said while you were writing.  Pretty cool and actually an amazing piece of technology.  I hope to use it when interviewing clients – with their permission of course! 

I was first introduced to the smart pen by a colleague who uses it for note taking and recording of research interviews – a fairly ideal application.  It occurred to me that if such a device been available during my college days I probably would have… well I probably would have spent the money on beer instead but it’s nice to think I would have used it for taking notes in class and studying harder.  

We were visited by a client the other day who I noticed was writing in the SmartPen notebook but wasn’t using the pen.  When I asked him why he commented that he wasn’t willing to record people without asking their permission (good man!) and didn’t like the dynamic of asking permission before every meeting.  I can totally relate and wonder how many people don’t have his morals.

My new gadget pen did get me thinking about monitoring ethics and how many different ways we are now being suspiciously recorded, videoed, photographed and generally monitored either with or without our explicit knowledge or permission.  The digital age combine with low cost mass storage now mean a veritable explosion in the manner and density with which our lives are now captured for posterity and otherwise.   

I remember some years ago being amazed when the Oklahoma City bomber – Timothy McVeigh was captured in part due to surveillance footage taken when he rented the truck.  More recently I was flabbergasted that a camera captured the crash landing of US Airways flight 1549 into the Hudson.   What were the odds? Well probably not so remote after all. 

Recently a group of New York Civil Liberties Union volunteers walked the streets of Manhattan in search of video surveillance cameras and found more than 2400.  And that’s just the ones they saw.  Tiger Woods is amazed his embarrassing text messages surfaced???? Hello??? What were you thinking???  We probably don’t even stop to think about – and frankly probably aren’t even remotely aware how much of our lives is being digitally archived.  Emails, text messages, video recording at the ATM or Drive through… some guy with a weird recording pen…

I suspect that arguing the relative merits or ethics of this juggernaut is academically interesting but functionally ineffectual – we’re certainly not going to stuff this particular genie back in that particular bottle.  Never the less I have found myself wondering about this a lot more lately.  Oh and if you see me you have my word I’ll ask you before turning my pen on.

Ok, so I’ll try just a bit to keep this from turning into another airline rant – I really will.  Bear with me  here, there’s a design angle in here. Somewhere.  Either that or an excuse for an airline rant.  We’ll see. 

I’ve been flying quite a bit for work lately.  And like many travelers I’ve noticed a pretty profound change in air travel ever since the major airlines began charging to check baggage. 

At first, I didn’t really think through how this was going to impact me.  I go to pretty great lengths to always carry on my luggage, so I just assumed I’d have a bit more company.  I do.  What I hadn’t counted on is how this would impact the workflow in getting passengers on and off planes. 

It seems like about 25% more luggage is being carted onto the planes.  Of course overhead luggage bins were already at about 110% capacity.   Savvy travelers now know this and are becoming increasingly attuned towards avoiding sitting further forward than the bin their luggage is in.  One quickly realizes that if your luggage ends up stored behind you, when the plane lands you become a human salmon –  trying to fight your way against deplaning traffic to get back to your bags.   Since planes are still boarded from the back – and people are loath to have their luggage behind them – the first passengers on the plane are inevitably placing their bags in bins more to the front of the plane to avoid the concern of reaching their seat and having no open bins.  As the plane begins to fill people get more and more desperate to find a bin as the last passengers on the plane (i.e. me) are generally faced with having to fight their way down the entire aisle – well past their seat – and still fear finding no place to store their bags.  As the aircraft unloads the process is reversed – just as awkwardly – as passengers in the rear migrate towards their bags in front and the ones in back try to fight against the flow.  Chaos.

Believe it or not, designers and engineers spend lots of time thinking about things like this.  How subtle changes to input conditions can create interesting downstream impacts.  So I’m left to wonder if the whole process of boarding needs to be rethought.  I used to believe that planes should consider boarding by AISLE – not row (i.e. board all left side WINDOW seats followed by right side WINDOW seats followed by left side CENTER seats, etc.)  This would have theoretically allowed people to get on without having to crawl over each other.  Of course that creates problems for couples and families with children so it’s not ideal.  I’m now wondering if planes needed to be boarded from the FRONT to the BACK.  This still allows the airlines to board their coveted first class passengers first but also theoretically solves the bin hoarding problem as people are more likely to find a bind closer to their seat.  Would it work?  What do you think? 

Under any circumstances I guess I’ll still try to pack smaller and lighter.   Well that and study some salmon and see if I can learn how they do it!