The American Physical Society recently posted an article that resonated with my theme on technology persuasion.  It turns out that the seductive actress Hedy Lamarr once applied for and received a patent for a Secret Communication System that used an early type of spread spectrum mixing.  She subsequently took on the role of a technologist trying to persuade decision makers to fund her idea.  She encountered the usual suspects. If your first question is, “Who is Hedy Lamarr?” then permit a brief introduction.  Hedy Kiesler was born in Vienna  in 1914.  At the age of 20 she married Friedrich Mandl, an arms merchant whose lavish parties were graced by no less than Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler.  She participated in her husband’s business meetings and learned a great deal about guided torpedoes and radio-controlled weapons.  She had a love for […]

Facial-recognition software has taken years to mature: I investigated the technology almost 10-years ago and it was not new then.  Now, it appears that about 40 law enforcement agencies across the country will be taking delivery of some 1,000 systems from B12 Technologies, to potentially screen persons they have reason otherwise to detain.  The Wall Street Journal took the expected tack of questioning the purported violation of civil rights and coined the term facial profiling. Facial recognition, fingerprinting, iris scans, body odors, thermal mapping, and similar technologies come under the general heading of biometric identifiers. The Department of Defense created its own Biometric Identity Management Agency (BIMA).  Apparently, they took delivery of 7,000 facial recognition devices from L-1 Identity Solutions to use in Afghanistan and Iraq.  At today’s estimated cost of $3,000 – $5,000 per unit, this would put the entire

I depart from my usual theme of technology persuasion to wish a happy 98th birthday to a great woman, Willie Lee (Scales) Darter.  I assure you that when Ms. Darter enters your life, warmth, grace, and spirit accompany.  She is a rare individual and it is no exaggeration to say that having known her, you are noticeably the better for it. Born in 1913, the oldest of six children, she cradled life in the oil town that is Electra, Texas.  That region possesses some of the finest farm dirt and receives some of the least rain.  Her father struggled with sharecropper farming and then moved the family in a covered wagon to Pueblo, Colorado to “live out a claim.”  Willie Lee was four years old.  They “made do” in a dugout he shoveled out of the dirt side of a

Over half of the almost seven billion people living today were not even born in 1977.  In that year, NASA launched Voyager I and sent her out to explore our solar system.  She weighed about as much as the Volkswagen Bug of that year.  Today, at 34 years of age, she has lost some weight (burned up the hydrazine fuel), and is moving along at a steady 38,000 mph.  On this, our 4th of July, she, and her sister ship, Voyager II, mark a freedom never before encountered in the history of mankind.  They are leaving our solar system. The original plan was to take advantage of a rare arrangement of the outer planets during the 1980’s and send these satellites to tour Jupiter (1979) and Saturn (1980).  They happened to visit Jupiter’s moon, Io, just as a volcano was

“Take me out to the ball game.  take me out with the crowd.  Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks, I don’t care …  for it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out at the ol’ ball game.” Baseball gets criticized as being too slow: none of hard-hitting dynamics of football, little of the athleticism of basketball, and a shadow of the endurance of soccer.  Those critics do not understand baseball.  Baseball is a game of nuances: the rotation, the distribution of the outfield, the depth of the infield, the double-play, lefty-lefty, righty-righty, the breaking ball, the fast ball, the change up, the distraction of the man on base, the steal, the sacrifice, the bunt, the bullpen, the closer, and so on.  You don’t watch baseball like you watch football.  Baseball is more akin to a poker game. In baseball, the home

For reasons that are obscure to me, I invested some of the last 18 months learning ancient Greek.  That exercise had no practical value (not a criterion for physicists) as anything I would ever want to read was already translated by multiple authors.  The importance of learning a language, as all polyglots know, is that no translation carries the cognition, the impact, or the nuances of the original.  Translations can be poor, controversial, vague, ambiguous, and even misleading.  (There are how many English translations of the Bible?) Shakespeare, of course, wrote in English.  Consider his rendering of Hamlet’s soliloquy, as the young prince contemplates the uncertainty of death: Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprise of great pitch and moment With

Lipitor (atorvastatin) is a well-known drug for lowering blood cholesterol.  It happens to be the biggest selling (legal) drug of all times.  The Lipitor patent expires on November 30, 2011.  That expiration will open the generic-drug flood gates and nourish profusely an already thorny patent patch. Pfizer Inc., the owner of the Lipitor patent, is the largest pharmaceutical company in the world.  Headquartered in New York City with research facilities in Groton, Connecticut, its annual sales are $68B.  Lipitor, alone, accounts for $10B of those sales.  How would you like to be the CEO and have that problem facing you? For sales comparison, the annual consumption of aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) amounts to about 16 tons, 80 million of those little pills consumed in some form or another each year.  Total annual sales for aspirin are about $2B.  However, that 2B$

I love physics.  Why?  No one says it better than the stimulating Paul Davies. Physics is the most pretentious of the sciences, for it purports to address all of physical reality.  The physicist may confess ignorance about a particular system – a snowflake, a living organism, a weather pattern – but he will never concede that is lies outside the domain of physics in principle. (The New Physics). I would cite three underlying reasons for my devotion: 1.  The domain of interest is indeed universal. 2. Many principles are yet undiscovered, some of them fundamental. 3.  Physics is quantifiable, objective, and exact, certainly not to the logical precision of mathematics, but overwhelmingly objective as opposed to subjective.  (Physics is objective, art is subjective.) The quote by Paul Davies applies not just to all physicists, but to many technologists as well.

Last week another politician signed up to take “full responsibility” for his actions.  This time it was Anthony Weiner, the Democratic Representative from New York whose puerile obsession with his middle-aged hormones gave him no time to enact worthy legislation, but left plenty of time to distribute lewd photos to his cell phone harem.  But, of course, “taking full responsibility” doesn’t mean he will resign, pay back, recompense, correct, or compensate in any way.  It means he will take full responsibility to continue his bilking of the voters who put him there  and anyone else he can find.  It has the all the usefulness of Janet Reno’s “taking full responsibility” for the Branch Dividian debacle, or Jimmy Carter’s “taking full responsibility” for the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw.  Words are vacuous and stagnant.  “Taking full responsibility” can only be accomplished by deeds. Ignoring

My book, The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-technical Decision Makers, is scheduled for publication in late August.  This book was written specifically for technologists who must present their ideas and recommendations to decision makers – men and women who have the power and wherewithal to determine your fate.  Maybe your presentation is for increased funding, a new project, maybe a plea for sustained staffing, or maybe just a petition for a better job.  In watching the NBA playoffs last night, I was struck by how forcefully that game emphasized a key point that I bring out in my book – stay laser-focused on the desired end result. Here’s how the NBA game went down. The Dallas Mavericks were clearly the underdogs in this game and in the entire series.  Last night they were down two