Koby’s Kaos

I was listening to the Republican candidates’ debate in New Hampshire. The moderator asked about NASA and the closing down of the space program. The collective reply of the candidates was that if we had just let private business take over earlier we’d have had space stations ringing the earth and vacations on the moon by now—and show a profit.

I am just old enough to remember the beginning of the space race. I remember the Vanguard launchers inexplicably blowing up. I remember the “huh?” moment when Sputnik started broadcasting and the newscasters stopped denying it was really up there. And I remember when that great Texan, Werner Van Braun, successfully answered with our own satellite. I don’t recall if there were Rocket Science bubble gum cards or not.

It was not until I was way older that I realized that the successes were done with proven military hardware based on expensive, fear-stoked research by the US and USSR (and Germany if you begin with the V2). Space—the New Frontier was the warm fuzzy side of the Cold War. We gained the ability to soar with the same technologies and tests that had us digging fallout shelters.

Right now, we are told, businesses are sitting on mountains of cash that they are afraid to spend until the economy improves. And the economy won’t improve until they spend it on job expansion. And they won’t risk that until we lower business taxes to entice them to spend it. And we can’t lower taxes unless we cut spending on frills, like education, basic research, bureaucracies like NASA and the FDA, and oh, yeah, the EPA.

But what about research? No problem, American ingenuity and the market will handle it. That’s why big investors are so interested in taking over EDA and breaking them up for shareholder value. Why do you realize that some of them sponsor research that may not actually pay back this year, let alone next week? It’s really simple people! If those pointy headed morons where smart enough they would be starting up new businesses instead of groveling for grants.

So let’s cut to the chase and get back to the ranch. Let’s file an IPO for NASA, after all, like many successful new companies, it runs at a loss—a huge loss. Okay, a little speculation, a little Hard Headed Business Thinking may be in order. But programmable billboards in space will bring near immediate advertising revenue—why look down at your iPod when you can make the sky sizzle! Terraforming planets will make real estate values soar—except on earth of course, and the planets that wouldn’t work soon enough will make dandy dumping grounds for nuclear waste. Better yet, blast the trash clear out of the solar system. Why send ET “hello’s” in funny-sounding languages or gold plated Beatles songs when we can launch a steady stream of garbage and tea bags? Now that will tell Earth’s real story!

I’m lucky. When I woke up to the world around me the Beats were gone but the Existentialists were still cool. The late sixties were rushing in like an avalanche but Jimmy Hendrix and the Grateful Dead carried in yoga and meditation as well as all night guitar solos. There was still space in between to ponder what connected and why. Now thumb-powered hot media sucks away souls as we try to keep our tweets more interesting than our lives, lest our audience realizes who we really are and moves on.

As consumers we expect constant connection, as engineers we’re tied to those expectations, as if every device has to do everything, only faster better and cheaper—or else our paychecks won’t feed our own connection habit.

When technical editors meet we first pull out our personal electronics and talk about our tweets. You can find me in the corner reading a newspaper and sipping a beer, waiting until the other codgers tire of punching plastic and stagger into substance.

I am, of course, a fake myself. And hanging back with a sniper scope is a coward’s way to face the future. There is the chance that our wearable devices will become extensions of our consciousness, interconnections as complex and changing as our own neurons, enabling us to think outside and beyond our biological limitations.

Yet a sign of grey matter maturity is the paring away of connections. You snooze, you lose, and yet you gain. One physical mark of autism may be an excess of interconnection, until the wiring triumphs over content.

However, why was the internet first funded? An insurance against disaster!  Not only an interconnection of research and imagination, but one that was hubless. So that when the unthinkable occurs, what survives can go on. Able to regenerate function, like the brain enabled to recover from severe injury, radiation or gunshot wound. Though not, as Sci-Fi authors remind us, necessarily a recreation of what was.

Devices? When the Big One next comes (earthquake, eruption, storm, wave, disease, ecological disaster, asteroid and/or All), will our technology actually be able to bear us through the next flint age? Well…

Maybe it is time to turn off the classic rock and get the next genius-phone. Maybe me and my devices, we’re going places.

Remembering Tom Lehrer–

Part of my job is to go over technical news feeds, searching out news to feature (i.e. “one’s you actually need to know about”) on our websites and chucking the rest. Not often does one send me ricocheting down memory lane as far as NXP Semiconductors’ press release “NXP Technology Aids ‘No Sponge Left Behind’ in Surgical Procedures, RFID-Based SmartSponge System Helps Prevent Retained Foreign Objects in Surgical Patients.”

Now I think the announcement is great news, because items really can be left behind after surgery, and it’s not exactly healthy (which sparked my alternate solution, disposable dissolvable sponge structures spun out of Stuff That Is Good For You, like Pro-Biotically-Enriched Whole Grain Brewer’s Yeast Snapple, though that never got past the imbibing stage). According to the news release, the SmartSponge® System consists of RFID-enabled surgical sponges; an embedded RFID reader within an automated software system; an accompanying SmartWand to detect sponges accidently retained within the body; and a smart disposal system that tracks discarded sponges. I assume system for scalpels, clamps, gloves, and golf tees can’t be far behind.

The statistics quoted cite items left behind in 1 out of every 5,500 surgeries, higher in abdominal surgeries, and suggest that any messy, time-critical, multiple surgeries would also raise the odds. While I’ll concede this might raise your health care costs, as closer inspections of 737-300 fuselage skins would raise your travel costs, if it saves my life, it’s a good investment.

But what kicked me back was remembering the ex-poet phase of my professional life, when I fifth wheeled many a good meal from supportive friends (i.e. I wouldn’t leave until they fed me). A good month financially meant I made enough from paying gigs, like “Hanging Loose” magazine, to almost cover postage costs. One of the ways my total career can be described is Physics major turned poet turned Science Writer.

That kicked me further back, to think of other science turncoats over the years, especially Tom Lehrer, who can be described as a mathematician, turned singer-song writer, turned mathematician. Being a Renaissance Man during the Renaissance was probably easier—oh, you had to be high born, independently wealthy (or a really good sponge), fast enough with a sword to get away with being eccentric, and a host of other things that neither of us are—but there wasn’t that much to know (evil grin). Nor were there iPhones, iPads, and iAmGoingPrazies to suck up all time, along with consumer gadget debt and data plans to ever stop following high tech oxen with smartphone, mouse-enabled plows. Few of us can depart from cubicle surfing long enough to make any difference in life; Tom did.

Thomas Andrew “Tom” Lehrer will be unknown to most of you. His output of pithy, weird, happily deadpan satirical songs was recorded in the 1950’s and 1960’s. His humor has been repeated in hundreds of engineers I’ve known over the years, but few of his talents. Or perhaps more correctly, his willingness to step outside the profession use of his analytical skills to decapitate social, cultural and political dogma. That meant self-recording and peddling his albums for three bucks on campuses, since intelligence was too controversial for radio.

He had already returned to teaching math before I first heard his songs. My straight-laced world view was delightfully punctured. Later the highlight of helping to clear junk from Boneyard Creek in Champaign, Illinois, was pulling a 45 copy of his song “Pollution” from the mud. (Fifty of us spent the day playing ecologists and the only sign of aquatic life found was a tiny turtle, which had probably just escaped from a goldfish bowel.)

Perhaps the Tom Lehrer’s of any time don’t really change anything. He won’t be taught in school and didn’t build any bridges or monuments. If anything he demolished them. We probably won’t name any craters on Mercury’s dark side for him, though it has my vote. He characteristically downplayed himself saying, “I don’t think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted… I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin kabaretts of the 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.”

Nevertheless, the example of Tom and the few sciences types who however briefly applied their slide rules to compute real life, inspired me to apply the scientific method to English literature and similar stunts. I discovered a world of logical and illogical connections, even if it drove my professors to drink (not a long walk for many of them). Later it helped me see design team wizards as creative artists (and great artists as scientific geniuses) and to fall back to a career of defending them to managers, bean counters and marketeers, often translating between warring factions, like other engineers.

Tom Lehrer will be (or would be) 83 on April 9^th. You can celebrate his memory just by staying awake, actually listening to your spouse or coworkers, looking for other points of view, and enjoying how all things connect.

Received a guest blog by Lauro Rizzatti  of EVE-USA that reminded me that we are always citizens of a larger reality, and that sometimes our interest in and application of practical science can serve the larger community.  (Besides, where else do MarCom managers perform heroic acts?) But I’ll let Lauro tell the story.

“This Post Could Save a Life”

By Lauro Rizzatti, GM,  EVE-USA, lauro@eve-team.com

“This blog post could save a life.  It’s a harrowing story about EVE’s beloved marketing communications manager Cindy Wilson, her husband Dave and their son.

In the early hours of December 29 –– Cindy’s birthday, as a matter of fact –– Dave sat up in bed gasping for air.  He climbed out of bed, took a few steps and collapsed.  He was in full cardiac arrest.

Cindy, who woke up when she heard Dave gasping for breath, leaped into action.  She dialed 911 and began CPR, all-the-while talking to the dispatcher.  Meanwhile, their teenage son opened the garage door and kept a lookout for the EMTs.  Twelve minutes and every CPR move imaginable later, help arrived.  The EMTs used their portable defibrillator on Dave four times, not the normal three, to get his heart going again.

Dave got to Sutter Tracy Community Hospital in record time and spent two days being stabilized before being transferred to Dameron Hospital in Stockton, Calif., an affiliate of Kaiser Permanante, California’s largest HMO.  He was there for three days before moving to Kaiser Permanante’s facility in San Francisco for another three days.  Cindy said he received excellent, top-notch care at all of these hospitals over the 10-day period.

Two months later, he is recovering nicely, after his doctors implanted in his chest a pacemaker undoubtedly designed with the help of EDA tools.

You may be wondering what caused a heart attack on a seemingly healthy 40-year old.  Well, he recently lost weight, looked and felt great.  He wanted to keep it off and, instead of snacking, fortified himself with energy drinks, something many dieters do to keep the calorie count low, but still get an energy boost.

Unfortunately, energy drinks, with high doses of caffeine, have been found to deplete potassium in a person’s system, causing heart failure and that’s exactly what happened to Dave.  When he got to the hospital, he had no potassium in his system.  It took two days to replenish it.

Cindy agreed to let me blog about this very personal and frightening story because she passionately believes that we consumers need to be educated on the health hazards of energy drinks.  According to recent articles, some of the ingredients are understudied and not regulated.  These articles have warned that energy drinks could be harmful to children, but adults need to be careful as well.

If you’re at DVCon this week, please stop by the EVE booth (#503) to meet Cindy and give her kudos for her bravery and courage.  Thanks to Cindy’s CPR skills, training she took through a program offered at the EVE U.S.A. Corporate Headquarters in San Jose, she saved her husband’s life.

And, the next time you’re tempted by an energy drink, you might consider a banana instead.  Bananas are a rich source of potassium and delicious, too.”

Okay, I used to be certified in CPR. I’m not now. You probably aren’t either. But the next time you pass around a new technology in the market place, even if it’s just an “energy” drink, you may want to sign up for a quick renewal class.  Now go out there and tell the team about that cost overrun with the confidence you can handle at least one possible reaction ….

Warning: Staying Focused Can Be Harmful to Your Results

Quick. Get a designated driver to finish reading this. It’s all spoilers from here on. Meanwhile, I’ll keep stalling.

There’s a study, first done at Harvard in 1998, where participants watch a video of two teams passing around basketballs. The viewers are asked to count the number of times one of the teams passes the ball. It is a test of visual acuity, attention to detail, and the ability to ignore distractions.

It is also a test of magic and marks, of inattentional blindness, and a reminder that Murphy never sleeps.

Time to show your friends the “Selective Attention Test”

Follow the directions.

Keep playing the video.

How did they do? Odds are 50% were watching the wrong video. In effect, it can be easier to find the needle in the haystack than the gorilla holding it.

Murphy Rules

The problem in testing this phenomenon is that once you know what’s going to happen, you see it. You also skew your results. The video is a simple test of the misdirection that most magic illusions depend on. People like me, for example, are natural marks. I have “One Born Every Minute” stamped on my forehead. I believe, basically, everyone. It’s actually not a bad survival tool—but you have to pick your jungle very carefully.

In a broad generalization, the more focused we are, the more likely we are to fall for it.

Which actually makes it a major problem in focused professions, you know, the ones we depend on.

In the Widipedia article on “Inattentional blindness” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_gorilla), the tribal author refers to a NASA flight simulator experiment that tested whether commercial pilots would see distractions on a runway during landings. While untrained pilots did not know what to expect and saw the distraction, a quarter of the trained pilots landed on top of the distraction.

(My personal experience includes a United Airlines crash in December 1978 when the cockpit crew focused so completely on a landing gear problem that we ran out of fuel and crashed anyway a few miles from the Portland, Oregon, airport. And yes, the landing gear had locked correctly, it was the sensor that broke.)

Since you already know about the primate, you can try the other tests on http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html. You see, in even knowing the solution, we create another one.

But Does She Rule Wisely?

Daniel Simons, the psychologist who studies this now at the University of Illinois (my alma mater), also talks about “Satisfaction of Search.” But if I explained that now, you’d need to designate another driver.

Let’s just say that once you have spotted that gorilla holding the needle, it’s time to look for the elephant he’s standing on.

Evidence is hard. But repeatable evidence is even harder— to obtain at least. Every engineer (we’ll call her Ms. Murphy) is familiar, in fact if not in name, to the idea that you can’t step into the same river twice—that “same” river has already flowed past and you’re dealing with a new batch of river every time you try. Every manager is familiar to the phenomenon that he or she has to pin Ms. Murphy to a fact-based river forecast anyway—too much money is at stake to be cute about it. The investors won’t respond well to a genial shrug at the next board meeting.

Basing billion dollar decisions on the evidence of social science is even harder, more necessary, and more misleading. At a recent Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture (Mentor Graphics being a major sponsor and inviting me along), Dr. Nancy Cartwright of the London School of Economics and UC San Diego applauded the movement to establish evidence-based public policy, but exposed where blind faith that its tools, such as Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs), provide necessary and sufficient proof (guaranteeing results) can lead us into expensive, demoralizing failures.

Think about Rube Goldberg devices (if you’re too young, then use the web already and check them out). Basically a definable action leads to a desirable result. But if you walk away and try the same definable action somewhere else and don’t carry the exact same “in-between” with you, results will more than vary.

In between the cause and effect of a Rube Goldberg device is an incredible, and funny, chain of bizarre yet plausible principles and events. If you simply cover up that messy part, you can think you have found Nirvana—as long as you never try to repeat it.

But whether it’s health care, class size, educational reforms, or helmet laws, that’s what we keep trying. We have to do something, and it’s too expensive to try the Wrong Thing.

(I can’t do Dr. Cartwright’s talk justice in this brief look. It was very challenging and occasionally had me whimpering under my seat. Terry’s Takes, http://www.isepp.org/Pages/10-11%20Pages/TerrysTakePage2.html, is an alternative explanation video blog by the director of the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy, http://www.isepp.org/index.html, which organizes these lectures. Dr. Cartwright has written books and many articles. I’m told her first book is the most accessible.)

But back to Health Care, or Helmet Laws, or Educational Initiatives. We have to do something! Every other talk show host starts with “It’s really simple, people.” But Dr. Cartwright stressed doing our homework, and lots of it. RCT’s are a laudable attempt to provide “what’s” without resorting to “how’s” and “why’s.” But if we don’t examine how and why that particular Rube Goldberg action produced that result IN THAT CASE, we are still rushing blindly when we apply that action again.

It’s almost like we’re back to doing a “gut” feeling approach. Because we are. We always are. So own up to it, and integrate the evidence with the brain’s ability to make connections we aren’t terribly aware of. Go to the original site. Go to the target site. What’s different? What tastes the same? Get on the ground. Experience the environment. Take a bunch of people, poll for impressions and cautions.

Then go small. Bet on pilot studies. Expand the evidence base. See if there isn’t a huge chaos between the two cliffs just waiting for your blind leap. Build the bridge. Play the odds. Bet smart. Keep your mistakes manageable and learn from them.

Easy for me to say. It’s just up to you and your two buddies, Rube and Ms. Murphy to make happen. Remember, I’ll be right there behind you, second-guessing you every step of the way (grin, I hope).

While I never witnessed one, “old timers” at processor design sites would tell me about ancient times when they would close the company cafeteria and spread out the charts of a new chip on the floor. Then the engineers and designers would pace along the electron paths discussing how or “if” the real thing would actually work.

These days, even if we trained our engineers as triathlon marathoners, I don’t think people alone are up to the journey. By the time they followed the logic halfway they might not remember where they started—like demanding total recall of 19^th century trekkers along the Oregon Trail. (And how many would take the Donner cutoff? No, let’s not go there.)

We have to trust our tools to be able to tell toll roads from tar pits, and recognize when they really have seen that cactus before. Even tools, however, are based on understanding and experience. Therefore they are optimized, like the sources they draw from, for specific needs and cases.

Thus each step of IP design, ASIC design, FPGA emulators, and package and board (and, in reality the whole device) designs will have specific imperatives. Each of these sub designs may be maxed out at their stage only to fizzle out when they come together.

Given infinite time and money and endurance, most anything can be fixed, but such expensive solutions are rarely practical. Hence the need to fix future faults as they go along, optimizing the end product as well as that specific stage. Some of the principles (say “low power” requirements) may be easy to agree on at the start, but others will be much more subtle.

Yet tools depend on statistics as well as theory, and as our robotic designers begin pacing an as yet infinite cafeteria floor, they are going to be faced by huge gaps requiring leaps of intuition, as well as the wisdom to unravel the Gordian knots of conflicting solutions they pull into existence behind them. (Yes, I know, the sword—which worked for Alexander at least until he got to India.)

How many dimensions of thought will future design require? 3D is now obvious (in concept at least) but what about 4D? Using time as a design dimension may make vertical functions possible in some cases while shunted off in others due to predictable parasitic effects. Master designed-in traffic cops then shuffle traffic patterns for best performance. Then what might the 5^th or 6^th dimension of design be? Can paradigm shifts come from (not in) computer intelligence? And where will the experience come from that will be necessary to make the tools to make it practical on your desktop?

Thomas Edison depended on failures to make a success. As long as we communicate, and share results whether intra-department or in broad initiatives, every serious attempt brings answers that much closer.

When fact, fiction and history weave together, the fabric supports supposition, if not exact science. I started reading Eric Flint’s 1632 series a few months back. It starts with science fantasy, smacking a West Virginian coal mining town down into the devastation of 1632 Germany and the Thirty Years War. The science fiction part begins with contemporary ideals and technology concepts trying to jump start 17^th Century technology, if only to stay alive. It’s long been my complaint that we assume anyone from olden times (and implicitly from anywhere else) to be or have been just plain stupid. The contributions of many writers to extending the series has spawned a cottage industry of examining social and technological change. (Okay, not all that deeply, but we’re talking Loony Tunes here, not Descartes.)

The fact part of my thoughts is more recent. Spawned by reading Ed Sperling’s interview with Bijal Vakil, a partner at White & Case and an expert in intellectual property, on the straining patent system and its effect on Silicon Valley innovation (Trouble in the Patent Office, http://chipdesignmag.com/lpd/blog/2011/01/13/trouble-in-the-patent-office)

The great good of the patent concept is that it encourages the flow of information, the exploitation of inventions, and promotes the creation of new technology while still protecting the rights of the originators. Thus new technology does not become a family or guild secret, which may wither and die from too small a base, if it’s not stolen to begin with.

But with the unresponsiveness and legal sniping of the present system, it seems we may be teetering away from the free flow of information that I think our civilization is based on. With effective protection, just getting the word out can be effective marketing. Developing rapid fire guns in the 17th century is very different from spinning out new chip IP in the 21st. Technology changes in IP can be very subtle and a new concept may or may not borrow from hundreds of other thoughts, each with a jealous and litigious patent holder.

Under the strain, three years is now typical for a patent process to be completed. This is an industry where three months may be the life of a new product. Getting the word out on your exploits can set you up for piracy and frivolous lawsuits rather than success. Some companies even are said to be avoiding getting patents. Are we ready for ox carts, pitchforks, and the Dark Ages—again? Bijal tracks some legal and common sense solutions. But the Inquisition will be in the details.

“Design for Yield” is more than a manufacturing mantra. It’s a philosophy we can gain from continually. It’s an invitation to check whether we’re actually achieving something beyond keeping our heads down—whether the cosmic hammer is being wielded by work, family or self-loathing.

Back in my student days, when I was working for college money, whether in an office or at the starch mill (Argo Corn Starch uber alles), I dreaded the evil eggheads with stopwatches and T&M surveys. Didn’t matter if I was stacking bags on a pallet or filling in a train log, I thought I was already doing my best, and I didn’t like having the spiffy clean guys in white suits and clipboards treating me like another stamped part. The “work harder, longer, faster” results may have briefly improved throughput, but it made life worse and dragged other measures down.

What I did appreciate was actually learning how to be more effective—like when the forklift driver or Archie Green, the graveyard shift foreman, came over and showed the (once) skinny college kid a better way to work. Many little improvements, such as pushing the 100 lbs. sacks into position as they were still falling weightlessly from the chute, became positive habits that made me a better clerk, loader, cleaner or writer. We got the product out faster and got injured less. (Besides just getting a breather, the person-to-person respect they showed helped me want to do better for them.) Dallas Cox, my work partner’s exasperated comment, “You throw the bag; you don’t let the bag throw you” became a life mantra.

So I’m seriously biased every time I see a Design for Yield initiative. (A warm glow in my chest teetering between heart-warming and heartburn.) They need to be enablements to excel, not snide fountains of criticism. Well-designed DFY habits will take more thought and a more thorough examination of materials and procedures, but they CAN save time and cost each time you do it NOW and every link down the chain (and if not well thought out and investigated, change for change’s sake will Murphy’s Law backfire the life of the chip).

Real DFY needs to gather wisdom from the “factory floor” and the support from the CEO down. Not an easy combination. Just like DFY for life takes a self-examination of where you are going, why, and who is counting on you. Good luck for 2011! (grin)

While it is always fun to pontificate at the end of the year, correctly foreseeing what’s already been done, this year I’m more concerned about what hasn’t happened.

I don’t just mean the slow, painful economic recovery. I do mean the way the whole year didn’t gyrate wildly out of control and pull everything down—yet. Nor am I referring to the stark election turnaround or the always short memory span of voters and their inability to see an analog world in anything but digital terms—Human Nature 101.

But mostly, I am referring to the semiconductor industry. Yes, there were very interesting research developments (one reason I try to track IBM labs and Intel and imec and any i’s I’ve forgotten is the original research that emerges from them). Nothing, however, blow one’s iSocks off. In business news there has been a speedup in mergers and acquisitions, though that seems more the result of cash-heavy companies playing on the tradition of snapping up new technologies or broadening themselves into more growth-friendly markets (IP and EDA, hardware and software). Nope, the earth has not stood still.

The biggest change may have been bridging whole generations of product diversification into tidy three-month marketing windows (which still exceed the attention span of consumers). Today the effective way to introduce technology is to pay popular kids to use it, twitter it and blog it, and hype it into a cultural revolution. As a society we devote much of our genius to building the concept that if you don’t have WHATEVER, you might as well be DEAD (aka, an individual).

As a result, many of our technology paychecks stem from status fads and their monthly access fees. I’m not objecting to getting paid, but I always wanted to do it building a better, safer, cleaner, healthier, nicer planet—not simply yanking the fins on or off the newest fashion mobiles.

Is Progress our only Progress?

In our new, Steamed Pudding Economy, there have been amazing advances in technology, but we really haven’t pulled out a Plum yet. What I’m hoping for is a compelling rational for the future. I am afraid the most insightful of industry seers, Dogbert, may have gotten it right in last Saturday’s strip, “The only things that matter are social networks, games and phones.”

The Mactini Future

<still from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noe3kR8KqJc>

To refute critics that I am not giving new personal technology its due, I’d like to point to a new product review from The Peter Serafinowicz Show Xmas Special on BBC2. It’s lonely on the breaking wave of the future.

The Rugged Past

<still from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEqUyNaSdvg>

It’s not that innovation was not absent, even when I was a kid. The black and white TV tube was plenty colorful back then, and almost as big as the Mactini-Nano. Okay, maybe there is something to look forward to.

Does writing count as a social network?